My dear parishioners,
Peace! In other bulletins (4 December, 2016-11 June, 2017) we have considered the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “conscience.” We then turned to Saint John Paul II’s encyclical letter Veritatis splendor (6 August, 1993) which addresses fundamental moral issues, including “conscience” more than one hundred times. These reflections were begun earlier (6 April, 2018-30 May, 2018). Here we now consider a passage from Veritatis splendor, 32.
Saint John Paul II (+2005) reminds us quite starkly that “Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes” (VS, 32.2).
This affords us an opportunity to consider what a “universal truth” is. Are only the laws of physics (e.g. three laws of motion in Principia Mathematica of Isaac Newton (+31 March, 1727): an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted on by an external force; force is equal to the change in momentum over time; for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction) “universal truths”? The Commandments of God (cf. Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21) have been considered as a revealed expression of the Natural Law (cf. CCC §§ 1952, 1960-1962, 1965, 1980-1981) or universal truths. Saint Thomas Aquinas, OP (+1274) famously wrote, among other things, a two volume work on Truth. More recently Simon Blackburn (b. 1944) has his own trilogy: Truth, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford, 1999); Truth: a guide (Oxford, 2005); On TruthOxford, 2017).
One bedrock of “human reason” whereby we are able to know naturally is the law of non-contradiction (or principle of non-contradiction): something cannot both be and not be of the same subject at the same time in the same sense. The Eighth Commandment “You shall not bear false witness” here is bedrock for a correct “notion of conscience.” The truth about God and the truth about ourselves, made in the Divine image, redeemed by the blood of the God-man Christ Jesus is part and parcel of divine revelation, our faith.
Pontius Pilate was not the first or the last skeptic to ask “What is truth?” (John 18:38). The Latin here is veritas while the Greek is aletheia. The Hebrew emeth is sometimes translated as “truth.” William James (+1910), GWF Hegel (+1831), Immanuel Kant (+1804) while not all skeptics each has a different approach (pragmatic, contextual, nominal respectively) to truth.
Believers know the Sacred Scriptures present the inspired truth of God, who alone is Good (Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19). There are nearly three hundred verses in Sacred Scripture which mention “truth” specifically. There are nearly eight hundred verses mentioning “good.” Three specific passages from Sacred Scripture which inform the Holy Father’s thought here: “The truth will set you free” (John 8:31); “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6); “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
God bless you!
Father John Arthur Orr