"Everyone who is from the truth hears my word" (John 18:37) - Part One (1/3)
Preserved by Grace from Impending Harm
Having reached the age of eighty-four, I have come to see that my life has been wholly shaped by the longing to know the truth—and to live by it. When I was in high school, back in 1957, I remember that my Italian teacher, a certain Franco Mollia, solemnly declared one day in class that “truth does not exist”, and that there are no definitive truths, but only the true, by the teaching of Giambattista Vico: verum ipsum factum—the true is that which man has made, what we do. There are no supra-historical truths, but only the truth of historical facts.
I remember how deeply these theses disturbed me; I felt a visceral repugnance at the thought of accepting them. I was disoriented and scandalised—above all because I was haunted by the terrible suspicion that Mollia might be right. I would later come to learn that these were also the theses of Benedetto Croce, who at the time was widely revered as a great teacher and philosopher.
Yet these ideas stood in stark contradiction to the way of thinking that had shaped me, formed within my family, my parish, and the school I had previously attended. That truth existed was, for us, beyond question. The only problem was to know it, to put it into practice, not to lie, not to fall into error, to be modest in judgement, to know who was right in a discussion.
I immediately realised, however, that Mollia was contradicting himself: if he maintained that truth does not exist, he was necessarily obliged to take it as true that truth does not exist. He thereby refuted himself, for he was compelled to deny truth in the very name of truth. I appreciated, nonetheless, that he at least acknowledged the existence of a concrete truth.
Still, I asked myself: how can one say this is true if not in the name of truth? I reasoned as Socrates and Plato would: if there is truth, it is because there is truth. If truth did not exist, the true would not exist either, since it is but a participation in, or application of, truth. Truth abstracts from all individual truths and at the same time encompasses them. Were they not within the horizon of truth, they would not exist as truths at all. Hence, Mollia was incapable of accounting for his admission of the existence of the true, insofar as he denied the very principle by which his thesis could be recognised as true.
Moreover, if something is true, it is true forever. It cannot be that what was judged true yesterday is judged false today. Either we were mistaken yesterday, or we are mistaken today. But the truth in itself remains unchanged. Truth transcends time, becoming, and mutability. There is no doubt that mutable things exist. Precisely for this reason, our judgment must change to remain true, reflecting the change in the object of judgment. Yet even this judgment, if true, is true forever.
My interior drama deepened when I came across Descartes, presented as the founder of modern philosophy, only to discover in him a string of absurdities: doubting the veracity of the senses and the existence of external reality; confusing the self with the act of thinking; doubting the indubitable; asserting I think without specifying what is thought; identifying thinking with being; resolving doubt not through the intellect but through the will; supplanting the intellect with the will; taking self-consciousness rather than being as the object of metaphysics; making knowledge of the self precede knowledge of things, instead of the reverse; claiming that knowledge of God precedes knowledge of things, instead of deriving knowledge of God from things; affirming an innate idea of God instead of demonstrating the existence of God from created reality; and lastly, grounding truth not in the conformity of the intellect to reality, but in the decision of the will.
God willed that, in that very same high school where the devil had placed me on the rack, I should receive light, clarity, comfort, consolation, and immense strength from a holy priest—whose memory is in benediction—namely, our religion teacher, Don Giovanni Buzzoni, a Maritainian Thomist. What a relief! What consolation! What certainty! What awareness of my fallibility, what modesty in my opinions, and what courage in spreading and defending the truth! It was the seed of the Dominican vocation, which I would realise fifteen years later, in 1971, upon entering the Dominican convent in Bologna.
I might describe my encounter with Don Buzzoni as a kind of baptismal experience: from the darkness and deceit of Mollia and Descartes to the light of Saint Thomas, Maritain, and the Gospel; from the temptation to pride and hypocrisy to the call to humility and honesty; from withdrawal into my ego to the encounter with God; from nihilism to the joy of existence; from closure upon myself to openness to reality; from despair to hope; from the loss of my very self to the awareness of my dignity; from subjection to Satan to the freedom of the sons of God.
Pilate’s question
Jesus explains to Pilate in what sense he is king: king of a kingdom not of this world, thus he has not come to incite his own to rise in opposition, though he clarifies that his authority is given to him from above. But what king or sovereign ever declares that his mission is to bear witness to the truth (cf. Jn 18:37)?
What does Pilate make of this? Upon hearing these words of Jesus, he is no doubt taken aback and responds with the question: What is truth? But in what tone does he ask this? Likely not with sincere intent, for otherwise Jesus, despite the dramatic tension of the moment, would have paused to explain.
Yet Jesus’ silence is a lesson for us: it reveals that Pilate’s question, while supremely important in itself, was not posed by one who genuinely sought to know, but was rather the cynical quip of a skeptic, one who believed there was no answer—something akin to saying: truth does not exist.
Such a manner of questioning does not merit a reply, for the one who asks already has his answer prepared. Pilate’s question thus bears the tone of a reproach to Jesus, as though to say: are you so naïve as still to believe in truth? Pilate is a forerunner of Professor Mollia. Such a question comes from one who is in bad faith—one who does not love the truth, or who has fallen into despair of ever attaining it. To such a man, it is not fitting to reply; even if one were to place him with his back to the wall, his pride would reject the evidence. It would keep him from acknowledging his error, and from listening to, or accepting, the answer.
Yet Pilate’s remark startles us: “I find no fault in him” (ibid.). What does he mean by this? Pilate is unlikely to be expressing admiration for Jesus’ innocence—otherwise, he would not have posed that ironic question. Rather, he probably sees Jesus as a harmless fool, a man perhaps mentally impaired, or else a visionary, an exalted soul of no real threat to Roman authority. At most, he may regard him as a poor innocent, a bunòm, as they say in Piedmontese—a “harmless good man”—but certainly not as a mediator of the divine, as many others indeed considered him. In that moment, Jesus performs no miracle to compel belief or wonder.
What is the truth?
When we turn to certain biblical dictionaries under the entry Truth, we are met with a rather dismaying observation: this vast and foundational biblical theme is often treated with surprising brevity, rarely exceeding two or three pages. Around the question of truth turns the entire arc of divine Revelation, the destiny of the Jewish people, the religions of the world, and the fate of all humanity. It is the axis upon which the meaning and purpose of Sacred Scripture turns—the history of salvation, the history of the Church, the entire structure of Christian preaching, catechesis, ethics, philosophy, theology, literature, art, human life, sanctity, and mysticism.
Let us take as an example the otherwise authoritative Encyclopedia of the Bible, published in six substantial volumes by Elle Di Ci and Torino-Leumann in 1971: a highly learned work, brimming with historical, geographical, toponymic, sociological, religious, ethnic, cosmological, archaeological, biographical, artistic, philological, and legal data. Yet when it comes to the anthropological, psychological, moral, sapiential, and theological dimensions—especially about truth—it is markedly lacking.
Under the entry TRUTH, one reads the following:
“According to the Greeks—whose conception we share—truth consists in the conformity of thought or word with reality; and also being itself, insofar as it reveals itself to the spirit (a-lethès, ‘not hidden’); for this reason the supreme Being is the supreme truth. The Jewish conception of truth, on the other hand, is very different; it is existential, insofar as it is fundamentally based on experience.”
Let us pause and observe: the notion of truth is a spontaneous operation of the intellect. Thus, this universal concept is already present—implicitly and explicitly—in Sacred Scripture. There is no specifically “biblical” concept of truth in opposition to the philosophical one. Scripture presupposes the notion as proper to natural reason, whether in its Greek, Hebrew, or Semitic forms.
Certainly, the Hebrew term ’emet carries with it an etymological weight of firmness, solidity, stability, and fidelity, whereas the Greek alétheia evokes the sense of non-hiddenness, of that which is manifest, revealed, and unconcealed. Nonetheless, Scripture itself also conceives truth in the sense of revelation, of apokálypsis, from which we derive the word apocalypse. At the same time, however, truth can also refer to what is hidden, to the mystery, to the secret.
The Hebrew etymology of truth suggests the idea of truth as that which gives security, that which one can trust, that which does not deceive, that which stabilises, that upon which one may lean, that which neither collapses nor corrupts, but endures forever. We might evoke here the image of the rock, of light, or the starry sky. This is an idea of truth closely linked to being, to reality, to the person, rather than to the Greek conception of unveiling, which refers more directly to its relation to the knower. The Hebrew conception emphasises divine attributes, though it also includes our legitimate human interest, albeit a noble one, in seeing and knowing.
As for the assertion that the “Jewish conception of truth is existential and fundamentally based on experience,” we may acknowledge that while correct, it is also incomplete. For truth is not only concerned with experience, but also with essence; not only with that which is perceived, but also with that which is understood through reasoning.
We must therefore say that the author of the encyclopedia entry appears to be engaging more in imaginative reconstruction than in fidelity to the texts. One need only open the pages of Scripture to recognise how partial his thesis is. The mind of the hagiographer functions like the mind of any reasonable person—Jewish or not—for whom truth pertains not only to existence, but also to essence; not only to experience, but also to reason; not only to human affairs, but also to divine reality.
The fundamental error of these dictionaries lies in their failure to recognise the universality of the notion of truth. They treat this primordial notion of the intellect as though it were a cultural or linguistic particularity. But it must be clearly stated: there is no distinctively Greek, Hebrew, or Semitic mode of conceiving the essence of truth, as though each were isolated from the others any more than there are distinctively Greek or Hebrew ways of doing the grocery shopping or calculating the height of a mountain.
End of Part One (1/3)
P. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, 21 April 2025
source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/chiunque-e-dalla-verita-ascolta-la-mia.html