In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him.
At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Fort Worth, I had the honor of responding to a talk on the contemporary university by Prof. Pano Kanelos, former president of St. John’s College. He emphasized that the proper question for higher education is why. His analysis of the dual commitments of the modern university with its materialist assumptions struck me as particularly illuminating. He showed that, on the one hand, “the will to power is celebrated, and the end of humanity is to transcend any and all limitations. The answer to why is ‘because that is what I desire.’” On the other hand, the university embraces “the cultic meaning of history.” Since everything in the past has involved some people using power to dominate other people, power is “innately immoral,” and the pursuit of justice “is defined as the levelling of all hierarchies in the quest for universal material well-being. The answer to why is ‘because that is what is just’”—that is, if justice is understood as a forced equality.
These commitments contradict each other. They are opposite answers to the question, “Who should rule?” One answer is “I should,” and the other is “No one.” The pretense that these answers can happily coexist explains the incoherence of much of public life today. Is contradiction a problem? Apparently not—unless you think that there is a powerfully clarifying and healing phenomenon called “the truth.”
Remember “the truth”? No one has ever said that discovering it was simple, but belief in its intrinsic power has before now seemed self-evident, the pursuit of it worth the effort, like reaching a proper medical diagnosis. These days, the idea that people of differing opinions can work together toward the discovery of the truth feels remote. Just mentioning “the truth” might bring on accusations of various kinds. Whose truth? one will be asked in the tones of high righteousness. The prevailing assumption is that there is no “truth” per se and that the term is always deployed as a mode of discrimination in the interests of power. Admittedly, the truth does discriminate—against deliberate lies and vagueness, “piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit” (Hebrews 4:12).
On the Sunday morning after the Philadelphia Society conference ended, I had breakfast with a friend who had been reading Plato’s Republic with a group of recent college graduates. He told me that what alarmed him was that none of these young people balked at the idea of a “noble lie” as the basis of the “city-in-speech” that Socrates founds during the dialogue. For my friend, the foundational lie about the common origins of the citizens undercut everything that followed. We differed on how to interpret the lie (to my mind, it provides the crucial irony of the dialogue), but my friend’s point was that his young interlocutors did not see anything wrong with founding a civil society on a fiction. They had imbibed the implicit teaching of the modern university. I suspect that they did not believe that it would be beneficial to know the truth.
Why? Because of the teaching of materialism that we inhabit a godless, indifferent, pointless material universe where consciousness itself is an accident. Why not promulgate a lie? What must be banished from the modern university, as Prof. Kanelos pointed out, is any understanding of transcendence. “Committed only to what is material and immanent, the modern university is at war with the very notion of truth.”
Ultimately, of course, God is the issue. The proud pretenders of this cultural moment have decided the question of His existence: The prevailing lie is that He does not exist. But the truth will out, as the old saying has it. Reading the Prophets helps in times like these. “I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself,/that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23). So does reading St. Paul: “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7).
In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach is to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. Far from being steeped in mistrust and suspicion, our students at Wyoming Catholic College “begin their college education by experiencing nature not as an abstraction, but as the givenness both outside them and within.” They grow in confidence “that real questioning is possible and that the gauge of truth might be the experience of beauty and grandeur” that they encounter on the 21-day backpacking expedition that begins their freshman year and that continues in the great books of the curriculum.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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