The Truth about Truth
The human mind is made for truth. And truth is the natural conformity between the mind and that which is. Saint Thomas Aquinas expressed it both accurately and in his accustomed serene manner: “The human intellect is measured by things so that man’s thought is not true on its own account but is called true in virtue of its conformity with things.”
Nonetheless human beings often insist that truth belongs to the mind alone, severed from anything outside of itself. “Men are most anxious to find truth,” wrote the esteemed philosophical historian Etienne Gilson, “but very reluctant to accept it. We do not like to be cornered by rational evidence . . . even though truth is there in its commanding objectivity. . . Finding the truth is not so hard; what is hard is not to run away from it once we have found it.”
Winston Churchill, though not of the same temperament as Gilson, but of the same mind on this point, remarked that “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.” The truth about truth, therefore, is that its acceptance requires a host of virtues, not the least of which are courage and humility, qualities that are not often possessed by the same individual. We need courage, because truth can be unpopular, difficult, and run contrary to the party line. It requires humility to acknowledge that the truth is sourced in something other than myself, and ultimately in God.
Thus, in 1933, the Bavarian minister of education, a certain Hans Schemm, could deliver the following message to an assemblage of university professors: “From this day on, you will no longer have to examine whether something is true of not, but exclusively whether or not it corresponds to the Nazi ideology.”
The courage to speak the truth, even when it is most urgently needed, is often derided. This is why we celebrate the legacy of a courageous truth-seeker such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn precisely because, despite being derided, he remained faithful to the truth. In his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech he quoted a Russian proverb: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” This adage was consistently embodied throughout Solzhenitsyn’s life. But it was in his Harvard commencement address that his courage to speak the truth reached a dramatic climax. He reminded his audience of 20,000 attendees that Harvard’s motto is Veritas and prefaced his message by stating “truth is seldom sweet; it is invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.”
His listeners did not exactly reciprocate his friendship. In fact, many booed when they heard him say the following: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature in the West in our day. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.”
Solzhenitsyn’s celebrity status was demolished virtually overnight, but his stature as a human being has remained undiminished. Quid est Harvard?, one might ask in response to the question posed by Pontius Pilate, Quid est veritas?. Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom is of perennial significance. As a friend, his audience now reaches far more than those who attended his commencement address forty years ago. He implores us to honor the truth while advising us that “the simple step of a courageous individual is not to partake in the lie.” There is never a time in which this message could be out-of-date.
