Truth and Community

To the extent that men allow themselves to be guided and cleansed by the truth, they find the way not only to their true selves, but also to the human ‘thou’. Truth, in fact, is the medium where men make contact, whereas it is the absence of truth which closes them off from one another.

The Nature and Mission of Theology, 39

Reflection – I’m in Toronto this week, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned on this blog yet. We have a Madonna House here in the big city, in the west end on Parkside Drive, and I’m giving a retreat and offering my priestly services to the seven valiant souls preaching the Gospel with their lives here in Canada’s biggest city.

So, being in Toronto this week I’m much aware of the five million human ‘thous’ surrounding me on all sides for miles around. It’s… very different from Combermere! And the challenges of peaceful co-existence in a big city are very real. Ratzinger’s reflections about this are penetrating and profound, worth a careful reading and reflection.

The general tendency of modernity is to say that, for purposes of peaceful co-existence, we have to set aside questions of truth. After all, in a big city like Toronto, people of all religions and no religion are all jostling up together in the subways and on the sidewalk. Surely we must adopt a sort of ‘practical relativism’ at least, just to be able to live together. It’s common sense, right?

Ratzinger challenges this ‘common sense’ approach. He observes that unless there is some common ground, some shared medium of reality, no communication is even possible at all. There has to be some shared truth for two people to even exchange a greeting or meet on the same field of reality. Suppose I say ‘hello’ to you, but for you ‘hello’ means something grievously insulting. You haul off and punch me in the face, and I say something appropriate to that situation (and inappropriate for a G-rated blog!), but that pithy sentiment to you means ‘thank you! Do that again!’ Well… what we have here is a failure to communicate, as the old movie line said.

This is pure logic, that any communication requires a commonality of meaning, of truth. But we have to take this logic and run with it as far as we can. Because what is shown here is that it is not truth which divides and isolates, but a lack of truth. If we simple leave things at the level of ‘you think what you think, and I think what I think, and that’s the end of the matter,’ then it truly is the end of the matter. It is certainly the end of the conversation. If the matter is important enough, it may be the end of the relationship. When there is no way of seeking the truth together, when there is no chance of at least coming together in a mutual desire to know the truth, we are deeply isolated.

De gustibus non disputandem—there is no discussion in matters of taste. I like hot foods and you like sweet and there is no right or wrong, truth or falsehood in that. But in our post-modern world, all statements are reduced to matters of taste. I like the taste of Catholicism and you like the taste of radical atheism… and so there is nothing to discuss.

Taste is about what we want. When all truth claims are reduced to this, then it becomes a matter of appetite and desire and wanting to believe what we want to believe. It all gets very dark and sub-rational and somehow less than human. And in this, communication fails; community fails.

Truth, then, stands as the great safeguard and guarantor of human community and communication.

Unless we have a commitment to seek the truth and accept its demands, unless we accept a certain asceticism of the truth, we cannot be together with one another. Ultimately, we are just concerned with our own wants, likes, dislikes, and everything and everyone else is subordinated to those. Truth, and the humility and discipline it demands of us, is the precondition of genuine love and communion.

The Truth Will Make You Free

[Truth] purifies man from egotism and from the illusion of absolute autonomy… makes him obedient and gives him the courage to be humble… teaches him to see through producibility as a parody of freedom and to unmask undisciplined chatter as a parody of dialogue. It is victorious over the tendency to mistake the absence of all ties for freedom.

Nature and Mission of Theology, 39

Reflection – Well, this is a mouthful, isn’t it! A bit dense perhaps. What is Ratzinger saying here? Let’s unpack it a bit. ‘Producibility’ is the mentality or ideology that the goal of human life is to… well, produce something! To be an effective economic unit, to achieve so many ergs of work each day and have something external to show for one’s life.

Ratzinger says that truth liberates us from this. By saying this, he is not simply saying ‘it ain’t so!’ What he means is something a bit deeper. It is the reality that there is something called ‘truth’ – that truth is a meaningful word in itself, in other words that there is a real reality that presents itself to us and that our minds can receive and grasp and make it our own. This is the reality that frees us from the terrible slavery of having to justify our existence by producing something.
How so? Because in the knowledge of the truth, we see or begin to see that the primary movement of our humanity is receptivity. We receive reality… and then we shape it and do things with it. But reception comes first, and it is ‘truth’ as a concept that communicates that to us.
We’re talking about an intensely Godly reality here. God is the author of all creation, and the author of all truth. And the first movement of God’s creation is to say ‘it is good’… and to rest in that goodness. Before we are to move as his co-creators by the work of our hands, we must receive what he has done, see it, and call it ‘good’ with Him. And this is prior, both in time and in importance, to our own shaping of reality.
The same dynamic holds true with true dialogue as opposed to empty chatter, and the rejection of autonomy as a pallid parody of freedom. It’s all about the fact of creation, that God has made something (everything, actually) and that our words are to be held by his creative Word, our freedom a movement held in his free creative act.
This is deep stuff, and I can’t make it un-deep. But we see here why relativism is so destructive of our humanity. When there is no truth, no overarching reality holding our frail individual humanity, then we are trapped in a world where the only stability we have is our projection of our egos into the ether, whether by work or words, and any tie that binds us to any other reality is a threat to our freedom, since all other realities are themselves forcing their own being onto us.
It is truth that sets us free from this terrible competition of being, that makes us free and secure, and able to meet the other in a true exchange of hearts and minds.

Paddling Into Deep Waters

In reference to Galatians 2:20, where Paul says “I live no longer, Christ lives in me:

Conversion in the Pauline sense… is a death-event. In other words, it is an exchange of the old subject for another. The ‘I’ ceases to be an autonomous subject standing in itself. It is snatched away from itself and fitted into a new subject. The ‘I’ is not simply submerged, but it must really release its grip on itself in order then to receive itself anew in and together with a greater ‘I’… No one can undertake on his own the exchange of subjects spoken of by Paul… indeed the exchange would still be the ‘work’ of the individual subject, thus confirming his hopeless self-imprisonment. The exchange of subjects includes a passive element, which Paul rightly characterizes as death, in the sense of receiving a share in the event of the Cross. It can come to someone only from the outside, from another person. Christian conversion can never be achieved solely in the interiority of one’s personal decision. It has a sacramental structure.”

The Nature and Mission of Theology, 51-2

Reflection – This is deep stuff. We’re paddling into very deep waters here. The central issue of our humanity lies in these words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger. Who are we? What are we made to be? We find ourselves in our current condition grappling with this whole idea of personal identity and autonomy. To be a person seems bound up with being a self-enclosed ego. To have an identity seems bound to the reality of self-assertion, competition, aggression, even. We have to establish ourselves, put ourselves out there, carve out our own space and defend it against all comers.

And there is something deeper in us that experiences this reality as death. Egoism, even in its more innocuous forms, is not the fullest expression of our humanity. Something is lost in this unending project of the self.

We cannot get out of this project by our own efforts. As Ratzinger puts it so well, our efforts to do so just become one more self-project. There is something that has to come to us from what is not us, to liberate us from ourselves. Something has to change in us that is so radical that we cannot do it ourselves, and the change feels to us like death.

This is baptism, in its deepest realization. What happens in baptism is not a nice ritual with a cute baby. It is not mere incorporation into the Church. It is not even merely the forgiveness of sins. Baptism is the making of a new creature. At the conference I was at last week, one of the presenters put it beautifully: “Into the waters goes a baby. Out of the waters comes a living icon!”

And this baptismal grace, the essential sacramental movement coming utterly from outside of us working this total and radical change of our inner subjectivity, is played out again and again in the life of the Christian. We are perpetually closing off into our egoism; the grace of God continually comes to us in the sacraments, in prayer, in a million hidden ways, to open us up again to the life of God filling us from what is not us.

This is deep stuff. But this is what Christians mean, really, when they talk about ‘spiritual life.’