Everyone who is from the truth hears my word (John 18:37) - Third Part
Biblical Epistemology Is Realistic, Not Idealistic
The biblical conception of knowledge is unabashedly realistic. The object of knowledge is reality, not the subject’s idea. It does not reject an ideal of perfection, but only because, in this context, the ideal is understood as the highest reality. The idea is merely a means by which one comes to know; though it is indeed useful and even necessary to know it in itself, insofar as it enables us to verify the state of our inner relationship with God and with our neighbor.
The biblical understanding of truth is not subjectivist, in the sense of referring primarily to the self; rather, it is objectivist. It is directed toward the object, toward that which is placed before us (ob-jectum), toward the Thou. Before I can look within myself, I must look outside myself. Indeed, I find nothing within my conscience that I have not first received from the external world, both material and spiritual, up to and including God himself, whose concept I derive per ea quae facta sunt (Rom 1:20).
Scriptural truth presupposes a distinction between thought and being, which is manifest in the creation of man, whose mind is made in the image and likeness of God, the supreme Being. The truth of the human being consists in his conformity to God. This harmonious duality of thought and being is by no means a dualism—that is, an irreconcilable opposition between the two—nor does it imply an estrangement of being, as certain idealist systems absurdly maintain. Rather, it implies the transcendence of being over thought, and thought’s ordered orientation toward being. This distinction forestalls the danger of pantheism or monism, into which idealism tends to fall. For thought can be traced back to the creature, while being belongs to God the Creator, in whom alone thought and being coincide, because He is subsistent Being itself.
According to the Bible, the truth of knowledge, at least for us as creatures, is grounded in the truth of being, that is, in the truth of reality or things, which it is not for me to establish, but for God, who created them. I find reality already constituted; my task is simply to know it as it is, to ask who made or created it, to discover the reality of God, and to worship Him in divine adoration by obeying His commandments. For I also discover that I did not make myself; I am not my cause or creator, but find myself already pre-existent to the very knowledge I have of myself. Though it is true that in thinking, I realize that I exist—thus deducing my existence from my consciousness of thought, my existence precedes my thinking, and I could exist even without thinking.
The truth of the self is given by the discovery that I exist and by the reflective awareness of what I am. Here too, I encounter a reality—myself—that is not a product of my thought, but rather is created by God. Hence arises my duty to know and to fulfil the divine will for my life.
The Bible draws clear distinctions between human thought and divine thought, between human truth and divine truth, between natural truth and supernatural truth, between the truth of reason and revealed truth, that is, faith. Divine thought posits the being of things in their totality through its will, by creating ex nihilo. Human thought, by contrast, can bring about being only in a restricted domain of reality—namely, that which lies within its operative reach—through the realization of intentions and projects. This is true in the domains of artistic production and moral action, but even here, human action always presupposes a material substratum upon which it operates and which is directed by the will.
There is, to be sure, an entire sphere of reality which I am capable of informing, ordering, structuring, organizing, and orienting toward an end using my thought and will, through my ideas, projects, and inventiveness. Yet, the being of this reality is always before my intervention; it is presupposed by my thought, and by my attempt to transform it. What I can do is to alter only the accidental or contingent form or configuration, in both moral and artistic endeavors, of a substantial reality that I find already existing, before me and independent of me.
According to the Bible, to shut oneself up within one’s comforting ideas—as the Pharisees are said to do—is to refuse both to learn and to listen, and therefore to obey and convert. It is a manifestation of pride and constitutes a refusal of salvation.
Unlike idealism, the Bible in no way suggests that thought thinks only itself¹, or that the object of thought is thought itself rather than the reality of external things, up to and including God Himself. Nor does it imply that thought is transcendent, or that there is nothing beyond thought or the unthought, or that thought does not depend on being, or that it does not presuppose being, or that being is to be identified with thinking or with being thought. On the contrary, Scripture affirms that only divine thought possesses total knowledge, full understanding, and absolute comprehension, because it is the thought of the Creator, who is the cause of all that exists.
(¹ Translator’s note: The phrase “thought thinks only itself” recalls a classic expression from idealist philosophy, particularly in Hegelian and post-Kantian traditions, where thought becomes reflexive and self-enclosed—its object being thought itself. The Author contrasts this with the biblical conception of truth as oriented toward the objective, created reality.)
Human thought, according to the Bible, does not constitute or posit the being of things; rather, it encounters an already existing and fully constituted reality, which it must presuppose to think at all. Human thought’s task, then, is to recognize that reality, to interrogate its foundation, its reason for being, its ultimate cause—until it arrives at the acknowledgment of the existence of God.
Only in the case of divine thought is thought logically before being: it precedes being, it governs being, it is the measure and law of being—because God is the Creator of all being. Concerning human thought, the inverse is true: being is before thought; it is given to thought, it transcends thought, it is the measure and criterion of thought, and it functions as a standard of judgment for it. Human beings can certainly posit their thoughts, but they do not posit being in the way divine thought does. Instead, they find being already existing, and their task is to recognize it, and, where it concerns a moral precept, to carry it out; or, if it is an end, to pursue and attain it.
The epistemological notion that we cannot transcend phenomena—that we cannot know things as they are, but only as they appear to us; or that each person sees things not as they are, but only as they seem to him—is entirely foreign to the biblical worldview.
The Bible certainly does not ignore the phenomenon of appearance, but resolutely affirms the possibility of transcending it to attain knowledge of things as they truly are. Scripture bears no relation to subjectivism; on the contrary, it emphatically upholds objectivity—that is, the truth of knowledge grounded in reality.
If by the "Greek conception of knowledge" one means skepticism or sophistry, then it is certainly true that the Bible stands in opposition to such a conception. But to lump together all Greek understandings of truth without making necessary distinctions—and then to claim that the biblical conception is simply opposed to "the Greek one"—is not only a serious falsehood, but a sign of profound ignorance regarding the diversity and depth of Greek philosophical thought.
The Johannine Jesus
Among all the Evangelists, it is John who most clearly underscores the importance Jesus assigns to the themes of truth and knowledge, without, however, neglecting the centrality of love, which is prominently featured throughout both the Gospel and the Epistles. The unifying foundation for these themes is found in John’s definition of the divine nature: God is light and God is love.
For this reason, in Johannine theology, God is subsistent truth. Jesus promises a knowledge of the truth that sets us free. Knowledge gives rise to love, but love in turn is ordered toward knowledge. This latter movement is distinctive of the Johannine Jesus. It is what leads St. Gregory the Great to say: ipse amor notitia est—"love itself is knowledge"—without, however, confusing intellect and will, being and acting, truth and goodness.
Thus, when Christ says, I am the truth, it is tantamount to saying, I am God. The Encyclopedia alludes to this but in a misguided manner: “Frequently in the theology of St. John, aletheia is given an erroneous interpretation in a Greek or Gnostic sense, as if it referred to a divine reality that manifests and communicates itself to man.” This, however, is inaccurate. For John, Christ is the subsistent truth—God understood as subsistent truth. The Greek conception and Gnosticism are entirely foreign to this idea. Such exegetes have no clear understanding of what Gnosticism is.[¹]
Is it better to see, or to love? St. Thomas Aquinas observes that here below, it is better to love, while in the life to come, it is better to see: “We shall see Him,” writes John (1 John 3:2), “just as He is.” Here we find a clear refutation of Kantian epistemology: were it true, as Kant claims, that we cannot know the essence of things as they are in themselves, then John would be gravely mistaken, a mere dreamer.
According to Thomas, following John, the essence of beatitude lies in vision, in an act of the intellect. St. Bonaventure, drawing from Johannine doctrine but emphasizing love, maintains that the fullness of beatitude pertains more to the good than to the true, and thus depends on the will, on an act of love. It is not only a matter of seeing, but of possessing; not merely of an intentional union with God, but a real one—of both intellect and will. Thomas does not deny this, but insists on assigning primacy to the intellect, because it is the intellect, not the will, that constitutes the essence of beatitude; love and union are its consequence, not its foundation.
Thus emerge two distinct yet complementary emphases concerning the essence of beatitude—foundational to two great currents in Christian spirituality: the intellectualist tradition, under the sign of the verum, paradigmatically embodied by the Dominicans; and the voluntarist tradition, under the sign of the bonum, epitomized by the Franciscans. As St. Bonaventure beautifully expresses it, these correspond respectively to the cherubic spirit of the Dominicans and the seraphic spirit of the Franciscans.[²]
On the other hand, if, as many Orthodox theologians maintain, we shall in heaven see only the divine energies and not the divine essence "face to face," how are we to take seriously the unambiguous words of John? The Orthodox tradition likely confuses the possession of grace, that is, divine energy, with the intellectual act of vision, whose object is the very essence of what is seen.
The core of the problem, according to the Orthodox, is that only God can see God, so that the doctrine of the immediate vision of the divine essence would necessarily entail pantheism. But they fail to grasp that the intellect’s capacity to see infinite Being does not imply that it thereby transcends its finitude, since this limitation pertains to the nature of the knower, not to the object known. The object of knowledge does not change the knowing subject, nor does it require the knower to be on the same ontological level as the known; otherwise, the intellect would be capable of knowing only itself.
The connection between the Logos and truth is also evident in John. Christ, Logos of the Father, is the truth of the Father, Image of the Father, thought of the Father, just as the concept is the image of reality. As thought proceeds from being, so the Son proceeds from the Father. The Logos is the concept of the Father. And as in the concept we have the truth of being, so in the Logos we have the truth of the Father.
When John in the Prologue (1:3 and 10) says that the Father made the world "through the Logos," it is clear that here the expression "through" (dià) does not refer to an entity inferior to the agent who uses it, just as I say that I cut wood using a saw, but the means—that is, the Logos—has the same dignity as the Father who uses it, just as the concept through which I know or do something enjoys the same dignity as my mind that produces and uses it. The Logos is the truth conceived by the Father, on the model of which to create the world; it is the thought that produces being, which idealists would like to attribute to man, while it is valid only for God.
Furthermore, when John says in the Prologue of his Gospel that while the Law was given to us by Moses, the truth came from Christ, what does he mean? Is that the truth not known before? Not at all! Here, by "Truth," John means the truth made person, Christ Truth, the Person of the incarnate Logos[3].
John means to say that while in the Old Testament we have the knowledge of God’s will for us, in the New Testament we have the possibility of knowing and seeing God himself, the Author of the Law himself. Therefore, already with Moses we know the divine truth, but it is clear that the fullness of this knowledge is given to us by the possibility, allowed to us by Christ, of seeing and meeting in love the Author himself of that moral law, inserted in our nature and written in our conscience, as Saint Paul says, whose implementation constitutes our happiness. It is this knowledge that makes the Psalmist sing: "Your word is a lamp to my feet" (Ps 119:105). The law of God for the Psalmist is a light for the path and a joy for the eyes, therefore, truth, but only practical.
Already in the Old Testament, as in Plato and Aristotle and Indian wisdom, the appreciation and need for speculative truth is expressed, the desire to see God, but only Christ satisfies it.
John presupposes a realistic epistemology. In an idealist framework where everything is thought, the distinction between the Father and the Son would vanish. Indeed, Hegel, to distinguish the Son from the Father, resorts to conceiving the Son as a negation of the Father, thereby breaking the identity of God and reducing it to an identity of being and non-being.
For Scripture, it is evident that simply knowing the truth is not enough unless it is put into practice. For St. John, walking in the truth means moral virtue and holiness, while conversely, doing the truth leads one to the truth. There is, therefore, a beautiful interplay—a marvelous design and cooperation—between intellect and will, each exercising its proper function without confusion or opposition.
In St. John, true love is the love of truth, and the acquisition of truth is the fruit of love. The practice of love leads to the truth, and true love is the practice of truth: “Whoever loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).
In John, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of truth, who leads us into the fullness of truth and enables us to understand what Christ has taught. Saint Paul affirms that it is only in the Holy Spirit that one can truly confess and know that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The final perspective of human life that Christ in the Gospel of John proposes to us is that of the knowledge of the truth, knowing the Father and the one He has sent. It is the beatific vision of God in heaven.
In this regard, some have spoken of a Gnostic perspective. In reality, Gnosticism has nothing to do with it, because it involves the achievement through self-transcendence of a supreme knowledge of God[4] above the contents of the revealed mysteries, equal to the divine one itself, something completely alien to the perspective of the Johannine Christ, who, without at all confusing the finiteness of human knowledge with the infinity of divine knowledge, promises us the full knowledge of the truths revealed by him, known now in faith, and seen directly in heaven in the beatific vision.
P. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, April 21, 2025
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/chiunque-e-dalla-verita-ascolta-la-mia_24.html
Notes:
[1] An interesting and authoritative description is given by Pope Francis in the Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (2018), nn. 36–46.
[2] Cf. Gilson, La philosophie de Saint Bonaventure, Vrin, Paris 1953, p. 73. To make a comparison with Greek philosophy, we could say that while intellectualism refers to Aristotle, voluntarism refers to Plato. Dominican intellectualism finds its deviation in Eckhart; Franciscan voluntarism, in Ockham.
[3] See my articles La verità eterna in S. Agostino, I, Sacra Doctrina, 1986, 5, pp. 590–611; La verità eterna in Sant’Agostino, II, Sacra Doctrina, 1986, 6, pp. 665–687.
[4] Cf. Giovanni Filoramo, Il risveglio della gnosi ovvero diventare dio, Edizioni Laterza, Bari 1990.