The Real Amen

The [Hebrew] root ’mn [that is the normal word for ‘to believe’] embraces… the meanings loyalty, to trust, entrust oneself, take one’s stand on something, believe in something; thus faith in God appears as a holding on to God through which man gains a firm hold for his life. Faith is thereby defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God.”

Introduction to Christianity, 39

Reflection – Well, another year of faith post! The Hebrew root which yields words like faith, faithfulness, belief, to believe, is also the root that yields the word ‘truth’ – emet. And, oh yes, the word 'Amen'. It is fundamentally a matter of something being solid, sound, firm.

The Hebrew language, and the people who created it and were created by it, is a deeply non-abstract, concrete, practical language. All Hebrew words are rooted in intensely concrete physical realities; paradoxically (unless you’re a poet and know how these things work) this also makes Hebrew a deeply poetic language, as the concrete words are stretched and extended into all manner of symbolic and metaphorical senses.

So faith is about deciding that something is solid, firm. Truth is not some up in the air abstraction about the world that has no bearing on action; if something is true, you can base your course of action on it. And faith is a decision that something is true, based on the solidity, the firmness, the reliability of the one telling you that thing.

‘Taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God’ – yep, that’s it, basically. But this word of God calls us into direct action. ‘If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn and offer them the other cheek.’ Good solid advice for life, right? Right? Anyone? ‘Give to whoever asks, and lend without hope of repayment.’ Now that’s how to be a success in life, eh?

Faith says yes to that. Faith decides that God, speaking through Jesus the Christ, knows better than we do what a good life is, what it means to be a success. And so faith says, ‘Well, Lord, I will try… but I think you’re going to need to help me here, because this sounds a bit hard!’ And the Word assures us, ‘I will be will you always, yes to the end of time.’

And so we go through life. Constantly choosing, or at any rate invited to choose, to put our trust in the word of God and act on it. To do what the Gospel says. Hey – here’s an idea for the Year of Faith! Go through the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) and just take the little individual bits of it, maybe a new one every two weeks, to specifically put into practice (turn the other cheek… let your yes be yes… go the extra mile… love your enemies and pray or those who persecute you). Do it as a simple exercise of the obedience of faith. This is what Jesus tells us is a solid, firm, trustworthy way to live, and we choose to believe that Jesus is telling us the truth.

That’s what faith is; that is the real Amen to God and to Jesus.

Truth and Contemplation

In the ancient and medieval view all being is what had been thought, the thought of the absolute spirit…human thinking is the re-thinking of the thought which is being itself…in contrast, the work of man seems contingent and transitory.

Introduction to Christianity, 31-2

Reflection – This short passage is from a truly glorious section of this book by a young Fr. Ratzinger, that bright Bavarian lad, in which he lays out over the course of a few pages the entire history of the notion of ‘truth’, from the ancient Greeks through the medieval scholastics to Descartes, Vico, Hegel and Marx.

The progression is from truth as being, our mind’s access to the divinely sourced being of things, to truth as merely applying to our own understanding of our own products and creations, to truth as a revolutionary idea—something we are in the process of making and that emerges from the rubble of historical conflict and revolutionary violence.

We have gone from having a true philosophy of communion, of the intellect of man having a genuine access to the mind of God, to the severing of this communion in reason’s self-limitation to its own creations, to a self-divinized man creating a world in his own image, creating truth by force of will and exercise of power.

In the ancient and medieval world the different exercises of the mind were ranked hierarchically, with (if memory serves) intellectus or understanding at the top and ars or (in Greek) techne—artistry, skill—at the botton. This is because of that sense Ratzinger mentions above of human works being contingent and transitory. It is good to know how to make things, but far better is the intellectual capacity to understand and contemplate what God has made.

In the modern world the hierarchy has been reversed. Indeed, all that matters is techne, and everything is subordinated to it. If we cannot produce some device or product from our understanding, and preferably one with market value, then our understanding is of no value. The only point of the mind, in the modern understanding, is to exert control over the world and shape it according to our wishes and devices and desires.

Intellect becomes, in this understanding, something devoid of any great dignity or sublime purpose. It is a weapon, pure and simple, or at best a tool. Bears have claws, crocodiles have jaws, deer have antlers, and human beings have intellect. Each creature simply uses the tools it has been given to get its share of the world’s goods and carve out its space on the planet.

What is lost here is the anthropology of communion. We are made, as human beings, to be in communion with God and with one another. Our minds can attain truth, not merely to force the world into our shape, but so that our humanity can be conformed to God’s shape by a genuine apprehension and a sincere love of the truth.

It seems to me that this is why contemplation is so important in our world today. I think if there is one glaring thing missing from our culture, both secular and ecclesiastical, it is contemplation. We are a people of programs, of projects, with agendae and time lines and budgets and deadlines… busy, busy, busy. We approach our secular life this way, and we approach the new evangelization and the mission of the Church this way.

There is precious little prayer and contemplation going on. Well, at least it seems that way to me. Certainly there is precious little talking about prayer, encouragement of contemplation, calling people to put down their Blackberries and smart phones to simply be in the presence of God and listen to Him. Maybe it’s all going on and there’s some kind of conspiracy of silence to never mention it. Maybe the call to Christian prayer and silence is being text-messaged to people, and that’s why I never hear about it.

Yeah, I doubt it. Dear readers, we are made for communion with God, and without some presence of prayer, silence, receptivity, contemplation in our life, we simply are not doing what we are made for, and all the things we are doing go awry somehow, bear little fruit. We’ve got to turn this around, and the only way to do this is for you and me to start praying more and listening, beholding, receiving truth from Truth Itself, which is a Person who is God.

By Their Fruits

[Credo] means that man does not regard seeing, hearing, touching, as the totality of what concerns him, that he does not see the area of his world as marked off by what he can see and touch, but seeks a second mode of access to reality, a mode which he calls in fact belief, and in such a way that he finds in it the decisive enlargement of his whole view of the world.

Introduction to Christianity, 24

Reflection – Year of Faith, coming right up! Less than a month away! Here we see Ratzinger reflecting on the central meaning of this word ‘belief’. I believe—what does that mean?

The liberation of the world from the senses, or rather from the limitations of the senses, for one thing. That there is something beyond the visible, the tangible, the sensible, and that we have a sort of access to it, a mode of contact with it. To believe means we are not limited by that which we share with all animals—sensory knowledge and the immediate data it delivers to us.

Human beings have always, at all times, and everywhere sought to expand their horizons beyond this. It is the most human of things, this urge to the spiritual, the religious, the super-natural. We see it in every culture, every civilization, and in the vast overwhelming majority of individuals.

Yes, there are individuals who seem to have little to none of this urge. But they are a vanishingly small minority in the vast sweep of human history. There have always been individuals who are blind and deaf, too.

Now, the atheist will counter that it’s not the same, and I agree. The very fact that the vast majority of human beings have an interest in a world bigger than the sensible world, and some sense that such a world surrounds us and is deeply connected to us, does not prove that this world exists.

Someone came to me recently agonizing over the question of faith and how one can know that any of it is true. Now there are intellectual arguments for God that are fairly strong, and I pointed those out. But of course, at most these ‘prove’ (and I think that’s stretching the word) that ‘something’ is behind everything that is. It doesn’t prove that the God of the Bible is true, or the God of Catholicism.

To be honest, the only counsel I could give this person was to see where atheism leads and see where Christianity leads. When someone really lives out their atheist convictions of an ultimately random, meaningless and hence amoral universe, and when someone really lives out the Christian faith in a loving, merciful God who comes to us to call us into fullness of love and life—what does that look like?

By their fruits you shall know them. We cannot know the truth of faith directly from the senses—if we could, it would not be faith, but direct knowledge. When we get to heaven and see God, there will be no faith. But we can surmise the truth of faith by seeing its fruits in the lives of those who believe.

It’s tricky, because all sorts of believers, of course, do all sorts of terrible things all the time. But you can trace those terrible things to a failure of faith, one way or another. I know I will offend here, and I’m sorry to do so, but if an atheist does something terrible, it does not flow from some failure to apply atheism to their life.

Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov that “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” (Pedant alert! It’s really a paraphrase, but it accurately represents the thought of Ivan in the novel.) I don’t really see a credible argument to the contrary. An individual may choose to adopt a personal moral code; a society may choose to have laws for the common good; in an atheistic view of reality there is no underlying truth or validity to any of those codes or laws.

By their fruits you shall know them. Christianity yields a coherent vision of the universe that calls us to live in love and generosity, and assures us of a God who secures our life and our future in his goodness and mercy. Atheism does none of those things.

Truth is a Child

Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like that child that knows all its questions answered in the ‘You’ of its mother.

Introduction to Christianity, 48

Reflection – As Christmas draws near we can all easily contemplate the image of ‘mother and child’ Ratzinger references here. It is indeed the feast of Christmas when we see most clearly that not only is God real, not only is there an Ultimate Reality that is behind everything, but that this reality ‘knows me and loves me’.

‘Truth is a child,’ wrote Catherine Doherty in one of her Christmas-centered poems. Truth is a child; God made himself a baby, a child, a helpless creature, for love of us. God put himself into our hands so that we could do with him what we will. Herod tried to kill him; Pontius Pilate succeeded a few years later.

‘Truth is a child, bread and wine,’ is the full first line of the poem. This ‘helpless God’ we behold in the manger in our crèche scenes and carols comes to us in fleshly reality at every Mass.

“Truth is a child, bread and wine/Truth is fed by the breasts of Mary/Truth is cradled by the hands of Mary/Truth is helpless as only a child can be/Truth is helpless only as bread and wine can helpless be/The keynote of Truth is helplessness.”

So runs the first stanza of this remarkable poem. It is an unfathomable mystery of God that He makes Himself so for us. For God is not helpless – He plays with the stars and the galaxies, and holds every quark and quanta in its place – but this God perpetually presents Himself to us as a beggar, as a poor man, as a helpless baby, as bread and wine. We can receive Him in faith and love, or cast Him on the ground and tread Him underfoot.

There’s something very deep going on here about the mystery of love, the mystery of generosity, of mercy. And because it is about those things, all this ‘helplessness’ business has to be reflected in our own lives somehow.

“Unless [truth] becomes as helpless as a child/Or piece of bread that is lifted up, or cup of wine/It will not be the perfect love that I am./When you have become as utterly helpless/As I became for love’s sake/Then you will be like I Myself.”

It all comes back to this child entrusting himself to his mother. To knowing that objective reality, ultimate reality ‘knows me and loves me.’ So I can abandon myself to Him who so abandoned Himself to me, allow myself to be borne along by His will in my life, gobbled up by the demands of love, cast aside by the heedless or loveless, disregarded and forgotten, or drowned in a sea of obligations and hard labor.

Bread and wine. A child. A Christian. Such is the truth of our faith. Such is the quality of perfect love. And in Christmas, beholding the beauty of the manger, the mother, the child, such is the renewal of our hope that in this faith and love, we enter a realm of light and joy, smelling of straw and animals, but filled with the sound of angels’ wings and song.

See you there.

Are We Living in the Past?

[In the modern world] belief no longer appears as the bold but challenging leap out of the ‘apparent all’ of our visible world and into the apparent void of the invisible and intangible; it looks much more like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday and accept it as eternally valid. And who wants to do that?

Introduction to Christianity, 26

Reflection – The chronological snobbery of modernity is a well known and well commented on phenomenon. The blithe assumption that we are smarter, better, more educated, than people of past ages goes without saying in many quarters. “Medieval” is a synonym for backwards, superstitious, intolerant, violent, misogynist, racist—and so forth. All bad things happened in that vague period known as the Middle Ages or Dark Ages—although most who hold that would be hard pressed to define exactly what centuries specifically they mean by those phrases, what they were in the middle of, and what the darkness consisted of.

People who hold that view would also be hard pressed to describe the origin of the university system, the theory of universal human rights, the distinction between Platonism, neo-Platonism, and Artistotelianism, who Avicenna, Averroes, and Aquinas were and what difference they made, the varied contributions of the Vincentians, the Franciscans, and the monastic schools of the 12^th century, and the significance to philosophy of such names as Boethius, Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius.
In other words, people who sneer at the ignorance of the Middle Ages tend to be pretty ignorant; people who despise the prejudices of their ancestors tend to be prejudiced; those who scoff at the illiteracy and poor education of the benighted souls of the 13^th century show themselves to be fundamentally illiterate and badly educated.
That being said, Ratzinger touches upon a fairly common attitude here in this short passage, and not one that can only be dismissed as the usual modern prejudice against pre-modernism. Why should the past have veto power over the present? Why are we bound to dogmatic formulations of the 4^th, 5^th, or 13^th century? The substance of the bread and wine change to the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, while the accidents (i.e. appearances, sensible qualities) remain the same. This is the dogma defined at the 4^th Lateran Council of the 13^th century. But to a people who no longer think of reality in terms of substance and accident, matter and form, how can this be maintained? Are we living in the past?
This, and similar concerns, are serious questions, perhaps somewhat beyond what can be addressed in a blog post. The essential point, though, in this question of belief and the seeming tyranny of the past over the present in Christianity is that we insist that there has been a definitive action of God in the course of human history. Belief, this leap from the ‘apparent all’ of the visible into the ‘apparent nothing’ of the invisible, is also belief that this apparent nothing made its own leap in our direction, that it became a visible, tangible reality, walked among us, acted in ways that were utterly human, though the action was divine.
If we do not have something like this, something like what Christians claim to be the case, then ‘belief’ becomes rather amorphous. “I believe in an invisible world”… but what is this world. “Oh, I don’t know…” And it all tends to become something I have constructed, projected into the void of the world. Something that suits me, that reflects what I want it all to be about. In other words, it becomes one more extension of my ego into the world.
Unless God has done something, unless there has been an objective and concrete imposition of the divine into the mundane, belief fails, becomes yet one more ego project. And so we stand (or kneel, perhaps) before this concrete, tangible God who did this Thing 2000 years ago, this Thing which is a living concrete tangible reality in the tabernacle and on the altar today. Only this kind of belief carries us truly from the visible and the immediate into the truly invisible and eternal, which remains so present to us that it can bear our weight and bear us into the realm of the divine, the realm of faith, the kingdom of God.

To Live Without a Soul

Belief in the sense intended by the Creed is not an incomplete kind of knowledge, an opinion that subsequently can or should be converted into practical knowledge. It is much rather an essentially different kind of intellectual attitude, which stands alongside practical knowledge as something independent and particular, and cannot be traced back to it or deduced from it… Every man must adopt some kind of attitude to the basic questions, and no man can do this in any other way but that of entertaining belief. There is a realm which allows no other answer but that of entertaining a belief, and no man can completely avoid this realm.

Introduction to Christianity, 40-1

Reflection - We all know what practical knowledge is, right? I know how to: write a blog post, drive a car, bake a cake, play the guitar, read Greek, celebrate Mass according to the Church's rubrics, and so forth. And we all walk through our days doing stuff that we know to do by our practical knowledge.

Ratzinger has often returned in his career to this early insight of his (this book is from the 1960s), that belief is something of a totally different order than practical knowledge. Practically speaking, we know things that are less than us, things we can master (caveat: I don't master the Mass, of course, but I do master the book containing the rubrical instructions and prayers for the Mass!).

But we all live in a world where we rub up against reality we cannot master, reality which is above us, beyond us, bigger than us. Not simply more practical stuff that we just haven't gotten around to learning yet, like quantum physics, but reality 'as a whole' - the underlying and overarching reality behind reality, the purpose, meaning, nature-in-itself of all that is. And individual realities that are by their nature not master-able - love and communion and other people and incidental stuff like that.

This is stuff we can know by practical knowledge, by knowing how to do this or that. This is something we can only engage by an act of faith, whether that is an explicitly religious, Christian faith, or some other kind of faith.

In other words, these immense realities, and reality as such are received by us, not mastered or made by us. To try to live without faith is to condemn ourselves to living in a world in which we are the biggest reality we know. And what a lamentable state of affairs that is.

This is to become less than human. To cut ourselves off from a world we cannot master is to cut ourselves off from every other human being and ultimately from ourselves. As Leonard Cohen sang many years ago, "You lose everything that cannot control/It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul."

To live without faith, without belief, without opening yourself to the world as mystery, the world as gift, the world as awesome marvel, is to live without a soul. And this is to live a sub-human life, ultimately.

Without faith, we are less than human, because without faith we are alone in a technological world, a world in which all there is to do is make stuff and master stuff and make more stuff.
We are made to know and to love, to delight and rejoice, to contemplate and to receive. But only faith opens us up to this fullness of life.

Can We Talk?

[By the 19^th century] in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable, what he could put before his eyes at any time in an experiment… he might have resignedly noticed that so far as his past was concerned he was just earth, a mere chance development… he does not need to be disturbed by this any longer, for now, wherever he comes from, he can look his future in the eye with the determination to make himself into whatever he wishes… the reduction of man to a ‘fact’ is the precondition for recognizing him as a faciendum [something to be made], which is to be led out of its own resources into a new future.

Introduction to Christianity, 36-7

Reflection – This passage is from a long analysis by then-Fr. Ratzinger of the devolution of truth from the classical-medieval definition of the mind corresponding to the reality of the perceived object, through truth as only being about our knowledge of our own artifacts, to the movement he describes here: truth as limited to the outcomes of the positive sciences, to what could be proved in laboratory tests, measured and manipulated for some end of our own.

The critique of this reduction of truth to positive science has been a major theme in Ratzinger’s entire career. He has often pointed out that this notion of truth, besides excluding God and the moral law (which many see as a feature, not a bug, and indeed as one of the primary goals of logical positivism!), also excludes the goodness and worth of the human person, the primacy of love, the question of justice, and a host of other human goods that few would want to see removed from this world.
And indeed this is what he is getting at in this passage (which I acknowledge is a bit abstruse). If truth only applies to lab results and technological outcomes, then the way is open for the human person to be manipulated, refashioned, shaped and twisted in whatever way those holding the levers of power deem appropriate today.
We see this in the current aggressive push to the deconstruction of human sexuality. The prior norm of sexuality, heterosexual marriage, has been rejected, and the only norm operative now is consent and autonomy. All forms of sexual expression—the whole LGBTQQI2SLMNOP schemozzle—are equal, and anyone who suggests otherwise is increasingly liable to civil or even criminal prosecution (is this blog post a crime?).
The dangers of this to everyone are obvious. The aggressive push to normalize all forms of human sexual expression and to punish those who (like myself) assert that only human sexual intercourse can only licitly occur within a heterosexual marriage now reflects the ascendancy of relativism and the sexual revolution.
But the one thing we have to say about society is that it’s always changing, and the changes are anything but predictable. What if some other group with some other ideology of sex (say, for example, radical Islam?) seizes the reins of power 50 years from now? By the reasoning of the current wielders of power, anyone who dissents from the socially advanced good of humanity is to be punished and ostracized; will they be content to be punished and ostracized in turn when the balance of power shifts away from them, and some other vision of the social good holds sway?
Underlying this specific controversial matter is the attitude towards truth and the human person that emerged from 19^th century positivism and associated philosophies. Is there a truth about human life that is accessible to our minds? Could it include both a norm of human sexuality, and an irreducible commitment to human dignity and goodness? Can we take our stand on the call to radical freedom at the heart of humanity, and can this create a space in society for open speech, fearless debate, a true sincere quest for the real and the life-giving in all areas of life? In short, can we talk about this? Or are we just mute matter to be shaped and formed, bullied and scorned into a rigid pattern of social conformity? A great deal depends on what we mean by the word ‘truth’ and how we understand our relationship and commitment to it.

The Persistent 'Perhaps'

The penetrating ‘perhaps’ which belief whispers in man’s ear in every place and in very age does not point to any uncertainty within the realm of practical knowledge; it simply queries the absoluteness of this realm and relativizes it, reminding man that it is only one plane of human existence and of existence in general, a plane that can only have the character of something less than final… there are two basic forms of human attitude or reaction to reality, one of which cannot be traced back to the other because both operate on completely different planes.

Introduction to Christianity, 40

Reflection – What a lovely phrase it is: the ‘penetrating perhaps of belief.’ We live, always, in a world of certainties: the various facts of science, geography, history, and the practical know-how one accumulates one the path through life. As one progresses in life, these certainties pile up: we know how things work, we know the way the world goes. And these certainties can become a prison surrounding us if we’re not careful. We are so sure of the way things are that there is little room in our lives for surprise, for delight, for something new and different to happen. The jaded cynic (and we all stand in danger of becoming that terrible creature) lives in a cramped prison cell of his own making.

So faith comes to us in this with its penetrating ‘perhaps’. Maybe, just maybe, there’s another reality beyond, above, around the ‘way things are’. There is something, or rather Someone, who holds all our known realities in being, and Who is ever-new, ever-young, ever-free in His holding.

The way things are is relative, then, in the light of faith. The way of the world, the unshakeable certainties about life and its operations is always being broken into by that Other reality, which is the grace of God. ‘Expect a miracle’, Catherine Doherty loved to say. Expect things to not be ‘the way they are’. It is faith that there is Something Else which opens us up to this perpetual freedom, this hope that God’s mercy and love can (perhaps) make things so much better.

Neglecting Our Own Interests

Man’s natural center of gravity draws him towards the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own. He has to turn round inwardly to see how badly he is neglecting his own interests by letting himself be drawn along in this way by his natural center of gravity.

Introduction to Christianity,  25

Reflection – ‘Eve saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasing to the eye, and much to be desired for the wisdom it offered.’ (Gen 3:6). And she grabbed it, ate it, and gave it to Adam, and he did the same. And ever since, we have been a tribe of ‘grabbers’. As Fr. Ratzinger wrote in this, one of his earliest books, our center of gravity goes that way.

The story of the tree and the fall of Adam and Eve helps us understand this, though. Eve had the tree and its enticing fruit before her – the visible, the immediate, the ‘grab-able’. The invisible reality was her inner knowledge, her memory of God’s command. ‘Do not eat this fruit, for you will surely die.’ The visible is always the sense-object, the concrete piece of reality before us. It seems to me that the invisible reality we need to ‘turn round inwardly’ to behold is wisdom.

I want to grab that extra food, that next drink (one more round!). I want to get more money, a bigger house, car, TV. I want to go to bed with this one or that one. These are all the immediate, the visible, the obvious good things to grab at and consume. It is only the acquisition of wisdom, that interior invisible insight into the whole of reality, that tells us what we should or should not do. Eat this much, and no more; live with this much material goods and no more; do not commit adultery or fornication…

But this heeding of invisible wisdom requires an inner life, a commit to interiority, a certain quietness of mind and heart. The technological revolution of the last 20 years, whatever else one might say about it, seems to be at war with precisely this interiority. The constant presence of information technology and all its noise is driving people, especially young people, towards a way of life almost entirely geared to the visible, the immediate, the sensible. This is a serious challenge; leaving all questions of religion and spirituality aside, a capacity to think deeply, searchingly, critically about life has always been understood as fundamental to authentic human flourishing. A life reduced to the sensory level is an animal life, a reversion to barbarism.

In Madonna House, we ask our guests to turn off their gadgets and phones and be silent. We send them to poustinia for 24 hours with God, only a Bible to read, and bread and water for food. We all have to find some way to do this; we have to learn to ‘turn around inwardly’ towards the deeper truths, the Wisdom that awaits us. As Catherine put it, we have to journey inward to meet God who is dwelling in our hearts.

An Authentic Relationship with Being

The Christian act of faith intrinsically includes the conviction that the meaningful ground, the logos, on which we take our stand, precisely because it is meaning, is also truth. Meaning or sense that was not truth would be non-sense… the indivisibility of meaning, ground and truth throws into relief the whole network of co-ordinates by which Christian faith surveys the world and takes up its position in relation to it.

Introduction to Christianity, 45

Reflection – The other day I was talking to someone, happened to use the word ‘truth’ in relation to a certain situation, and was quite surprised at the negative reaction I got. There is something about the word ‘truth’ that is hard for people today, I guess.

It seems that people are OK with the word ‘meaning’ – one can find meaning in any kind of subjective way; a poem, a picture, a song, a sunset can be ‘meaningful’ to you, and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a meaning for others.

But truth seems to draw us into a world where there are objective norms, objective realities, objective facts that apply to everyone regardless of how we feel about it or whether those facts are ‘meaningful’ to us.

This seems coercive or burdensome to many, I guess. I have to say ‘I guess’ because I don’t have that particular modern struggle. I have been fatally infected by Dominicans who taught me the Meanings of Words, so that I know that truth is simply our mind conforming (or, in technical language, adequating) itself to whatever object it is in the act of knowing. To speak of truth means that our minds are able to actually know what things are, and what they are not, that the universe and everything in it is intelligible – in other words, is telling us the truth about itself.

Far from being coercive, ‘truth’ invites us into an authentic relationship with being, in which we really take in what this or that thing is, really know it.

As in small things, so in big things. Truth in general refers to the intelligibility of this or that being; truth in its absolute is the Truth of Being Itself, that which undergirds and grounds and embraces all that is. Our meaning is true; far from being ‘what I feel’ life is about, Christian meaning is True meaning. Not a subjective impression, we believe that in grounding our truth in Christ, we are grounding ourselves in the Truth behind the Cosmos. That basing our life on the Gospel, on the person of Jesus, on his saving work, means basing our life on the love, the energy, the will that sets the stars in motion and knows the number of cells in our body and fills the world with its presence. This God has come down to us, and by giving us the way of Christ has made it possible for us to found our personal lives on the very life of the Trinity, of God, the life that binds the whole cosmos together. This is how, as Ratzinger writes, we are able in our faith to survey the whole world and take up our position within it with confidence and peace.