WE’VE to avoid a situation in which everyone proclaims their rights, but barely mention their responsibilities; in which politics is seen to be serving the individual at minimum cost in terms of tax and government expenditure, in all of which the concept of the common good or a just society is secondary.
All this amounts to a negation of the concept of virtue and reason.
From Lord Brennan, QC:
It is a frequently misunderstood view of the law that it involves, or should involve, a search for the truth in the course of legal process. This is not the reality. The investigation of fact and opinion in a criminal or civil trial is directed at testing the evidence presented to the court. To the extent that that is objectively analysed and conclusions reached the process involves establishing the truth but only in relation to the evidence presented. This is the product of the adversarial process. In the continental civil law the investigative process is more likely to come nearer to the truth provided the enquiry is sufficiently determined and wide-ranging.
The more profound questions of truth and conscience, arise in relation to what I called ethical jurisprudence in my original definition of the law.
The enforcement of morals:
Lord Devlin, a famous Catholic Law Lord, wrote a monograph on the very subject of the law enforcing morals. The topic presents both tensions and dilemmas. Devlin wrote his work at the time of the debate on whether homosexual acts between consenting adults should continue to be criminal. In modern times we have had much debate on section 28 and the role of local authorities in sex education. Gay partnerships are to be legislated under the Civil Registration Bill presently before parliament. Although the government denies that the Bill will legalise “marriages’ in this context its very purpose is to ensure that there is no legal distinction between the rights of a civilly registered couple of the same sex and a heterosexual married couple. The Doctrinal Notes from the Vatican in 2003 and 2004 deal with the morality of issues such as this and the role of Catholic politicians in dealing with them. How is the political conscience here to be exercised? Is a politician entirely bound by his religious beliefs as a Catholic in relation to abortion laws? Or is the exercise required that of reason exercised in the pursuit of virtue and taking into account religious beliefs but remembering that society may not in the main share such beliefs? These are profound questions. They are presently occupying voters and politicians and churchmen in the United States in the presidential and congressional elections. My own view is that there are certain basic moral issues such as abortion and euthanasia on which the Catholic conscience must accord with religious belief because that belief accords with reason and virtue.
The era of human rights and responsibilities
In the encyclicals Pacem in Terris of John XXIII and in Centesimus Annus from John Paul II it is clear that the church teaching endorses rights and responsibilities of every human being. In modern times, Leo XIII in 1891 with Rerum Novarum said, “Rights by whomsoever possessed must be protected’. And then came one of the great encyclicals of the Catholic Church, Pacem in Terris by John XXIII. Firstly, it was an encyclical that was unique because it was written to all the world not just the Catholic Church. Secondly, it endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But rights carry responsibilities.I have rights. But what do I owe to you? John XXIII gives powerful examples.
The right to live involves the duty to preserve life. The right to a decent standard of living involves the duty to live in a becoming way. The right to be free and seek the truth involves accepting and upholding the same right for everyone else. Each right has its corresponding duty and unless both are observed neither will have real value. In a brilliant passage he put it this way: “To claim one’s rights and ignore one’s duties or only half fulfil them, is like building a house with one hand and tearing it down with the other.’
These rights and duties, he said, are “universal, inalienable and inviolable’. I add that the consequent duties are of equal importance.
The acceptance of the law:
How does conscience operate in fulfilling, or in certain circumstances rejecting the force of law?
In the personal circumstances of doctors and nurses the so-called “conscience clause’ of the Abortion Act has been generally regarded as a disaster. Those practitioners who relied on their religious objection to participate in abortion were criticised, ostracised, and their right to exercise their conscience not respected. Great cause for concern must be entertained about any similar “conscience clause’ in the Assisted Dying Bill presently before the House of Lords.
Political circumstances and conscientious objection have been frequent in modern times. Greenham Common, the Iraq war, and animal rights are well known examples. Is there a basis for refusing to obey the law of the land in all conscience? If so , how can it be rationalised? What is the moral conclusion to be drawn about deliberate disobedience to a ban on hunting foxes with hounds? In what circumstances may a minority dispute the right of a majority to legislate against activities by the minority which the minority consider to be part of their way of life or indeed religion?
There is no ready answer. These are vexed questions. Each issue should be regarded on its own merits. The merits involve detailed examination and reasoned analysis. I consider that only in extreme circumstances where a law is an affront to democracy or represents totalitarian action by government could a refusal to obey the law be justified.
Conclusion
In the words of Father Timothy Radcliffe “True words build community and lies dissolve it’. The virtues of truth and conscience must be nurtured in modern society. With them standards will be achieved in public life that will benefit the common good. More gave us the right example. We should follow it. Truth and conscience have their place in politics and the law. The first is a fundamental virtue of the human community, and the second exemplifies moral behaviour based on right reason.
*
I love this piece by (surprise, surprise) Timothy Radcliffe:
This is the html version of the file http://www.domlife.org/dlc/Resources/CrisisInTruthRadcliffe.doc.
Note: Father Timothy Radcliffe, the former master general of Order of Preachers, received an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum. This is his presentation.
Crisis of truth in our society
The Angelicum
November 15th, 2004
I wish to look at the crisis of truthfulness in our society and what might be our response as Christians, with an occasional glance at the role of a Dominican University.
A few weeks ago, a report was published on the standards of truthfulness in public life in Britain. It emerged that 67% of those questioned did not expect Members of Parliament to tell the truth. The figure for government ministers was even higher, at 70%. Only journalists and estate agents fared worse. Fortunately people’s assessment of the truthfulness of the clergy was not included in the survey.
Until recently in the West, telling the truth has been seen as simply part of human dignity. Aristotle wrote that ‘falsehood is itself mean and culpable, and truth noble and full of praise.’ Raymond Gaita, an Australian philosopher, wrote a wonderful account of his father, Romulus, my father. His father was a blacksmith who emigrated from Romania to Australia. And he shows that the roots of his love of philosophy lie in this simple man’s utter truthfulness. Gaita says of his father and his friend Hora, ‘They valued [truthfulness] because, to adapt the words of a fine English philosopher, they were men for whom not to falsify had become a spiritual demeanour1.’ This was nothing to do with any utilitarian calculation, that truthfulness pays in the long run, or that if you start telling lies then you get into a mess. It was a simple requirement of honour. Such a cherishing of truth for its own sake has largely been lost.
Onora O’Neill, the Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge has written of a crisis of suspicion. We do not trust that we are being told the truth by politicians, our doctors, business executives, even the clergy and above all by the media. We are drowning in information, but we do not know whom to believe. We suspect that not only do people lie to us, but that they do not even think that it awfully matters, as long as they are not detected. And if they are, they put it down to ‘an error of judgment.’
It is often assumed that the answer must be as much transparency as possible. If only everything were revealed, then we would know if we were being told the truth or not. And so the government increasingly checks up on us and we check up on the government. And so every memo, every email, telephone call and conversation in the corridors of power must be recorded for inspection. In Britain, endless Commissions, questionnaires and surveys are established to discover what is happening, to allay suspicion and establish trust.
This hunger for transparency is evident in the culture of self-disclosure or, even more fun, the exposure of others. We live in the society of ‘kiss and tell’, or what has been called ‘the bare all society.’ Amazon, the on line book sellers, list over a thousand books whose titles include ‘The Naked…’, from ‘The Naked Chef’ to ‘The Naked Parish Priest.’ Who knows, there may be one called ‘The Naked Dominican’ on the way! On Television shows like Oprah Winfrey, people are heroes for a brief moment by telling their most personal secrets. The newspapers, especially in England, think it a public duty to reveal every little peccadillo of the famous. according Zygmunt Bauman, of the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw, ‘public interest’ means “the private problems of public figures.”2’ Yet, this passion for exposure never allays our suspicion that something nasty is being hidden from us, which we have a right to know.
O’Neill argues that total transparency is anyway neither possible nor desirable. She writes that ‘demands for universal transparency are likely to encourage the evasions, hypocrisies and half-truths that we usually refer to as “political correctness”. But which might more forthrightly be called either “self-censorship” or “deception”3 Suspicion can never be allayed. There might always be some missing bit of evidence, if only one searches hard enough, like for the elusive WMD in Iraq. The fact that we cannot find the evidence only proves that our enemies are fiendishly cunning and so untrustworthy.
A culture of complete transparency also might actively discourage one from being truthful. One would never know when one’s words might be used as evidence against one. And how can we ever think about anything if we cannot try out crazy ideas, float hypotheses, and make mistakes? Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth century Dominican, wrote that no one may attain the truth without a hundred errors on the way. We need the freedom for words for which we are not going to be held eternally responsible. Seeking the truth requires times of protected irresponsibility, for tentative exploration.
What then does the Church have to offer, faced with this thirst for truth? I must confess it was such a question that drew me to the Order in the first place. I knew that there was an Order which had the motto Veritas, Truth. But I did not know which it was. I had to ring the Benedictines to find out. When I met the Provincial and asked to enter, I wished to talk about the truth, and he just assumed that I would prefer to talk about football! Still, they let me in and here I am. A story is told of a man floating over the countryside in a hot air balloon. He became lost and finally came down in a tree. He saw two people walking by and so he shouted out to them, ‘Where am I?’ One of them replied, ‘In a tree.’ ‘Oh, you must be a Dominican!’ ‘How did you know?’ ‘Because what you say is true, but entirely unhelpful.’
Faced with this crisis of truth, the Church cannot claim just to be a place of more truth and transparency. It would be wonderful if we followed the advice of Mark Twain, who said ‘When in doubt, tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.4’ But Christians are not usually much better than other people. Jesus came to call sinners and not the just, and in this he continues to be highly successful. Besides, I believe that there is a profound crisis of truthfulness within the Church. Bishops, priests and theologians are often afraid to say what we truly believe. So the Church cannot claim to be a beacon of honesty in a world of lies.
I wish to suggest this evening that the role of the Church and the Order must be to cherish a particular understanding of truthfulness, which carries us beyond the suspicion and mistrust of our society. Western society understands truth almost exclusively in terms of the tradition of the Enlightenment. This is a wonderful and fertile tradition, to which we are deeply indebted. It has given us modern science and much freedom. But if it becomes the predominant paradigm of seeking the truth, then inevitably we shall create a society which is filled with suspicion and mutual accusation, and in which the bonds of communion will be weak. We look back to an older understanding of the truth, which heals and builds communion.
Please forgive me for a very over-simplified presentation of what the Enlightenment meant by truth seeking. A more sophisticated account would take too much time, and I am not a philosopher and not qualified to give it. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, ‘From the seventeenth century onwards it was a commonplace that whereas the scholastics had allowed themselves to be deceived about the character of the facts of the natural and social world by imposing an Aristotelian interpretation between themselves and experienced reality, we moderns, that is we seventeenth and eighteenth century moderns – had stripped away interpretation and theory and confronted fact and experience just as they are. It was precisely in virtue of this that those moderns proclaimed themselves the Enlightenment, and understood the Medieval past by contrast as the Dark Ages. What Aristotle obscured, they see.5’ So the Enlightenment sought the truth first of all by rejecting tradition, especially the dogmas of Christianity. This attitude is still widespread. For example, the proposed preamble to the European Constitution passes directly from the Greeks and Romans to the Enlightenment, as if most of the history of Christian Europe were an aberration in the advance towards rationality.
The truthful eye is that of the detached scientific observer, who observes coldly, rationally, questioning the inherited assumptions and prejudices of the crowd. But it turned out not to be as simple as that. How could one be sure that one was seeing things as they are? How could one bridge the gap between the mind and the world? How could one be sure that what was out there was in fact anything like my perception of it? In its search for certainty, the mind must doubt everything. One must be sceptical, suspicious and distrustful. It is characterized by an English philosopher, Bernard Williams, in this way: ‘There is an intense commitment to truthfulness, or, at any rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness against being fooled, an eagerness to see through appearances to the real structures and motives that lie behind them.6’ Voltaire remarked that we have language to conceal our thoughts. I do not wish simply to reject this tradition. We are all the children of the Enlightenment and we are profoundly indebted to it. But if it becomes the primary way that we understanding seeking the truth then we shall inevitably create a society that is mistrustful, suspicious and insecure.
A Christian spirituality of truthfulness must scandalize a child of the Enlightenment, because it grounded in doctrine. For the Enlightenment, truthfulness began with liberation from doctrine. Of course it was not noticed that the Enlightenment soon acquired its own doctrines. As G.K. Chesterton once remarked, ‘‘There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.’
Let us begin with the doctrine of creation. In fact you will be relieved to know that we shall also end there! For St Thomas Aquinas, the doctrine of creation does not tell us about what happened a long time ago, before the Big Bang. It is the belief that everything now receives its existence from God. And this is why we are able to understand creation and grasp the truth. The one who made the world made our minds too. It is God’s world and we are at home in it as God’s creatures, made for the truth. It is not an alien and incomprehensible place. The central intuition of Aquinas was that, in the words of Cornelius Ernst OP, my first tutor, the world ‘effortlessly shows itself for what it is, flowers into the light.7’ Of course sometimes we make mistakes and misunderstand. We may tell lies and wear masks. But the truth is prior to error and deceit. As fish were made to swim in water, human beings were made to thrive in the truth. It is our home.
This is utterly different from the vision of Descartes, where the mind is ‘the ghost in the machine’, struggling to get in contact with reality. For the Enlightenment the big challenge was how we can be sure of anything. How can we get from our minds to the world? How can we know that reality is not entirely different from what we think we see? Can we even be sure that it really exists? So we start with doubt and mistrust.
Seeing things as they are is more than just a matter of opening one’s eyes and observing. It requires of us a way of life, which one might call contemplative. We need to be able to open ourselves to what is before us. It is a calm presence to what is other than ourselves, resisting the temptation to take it over, use it or absorb. It means letting the other person be. We must let our minds and hearts be stretched open, enlarged by what we see. Aquinas loved the phrase of Aristotle, that ‘the soul in some way is all things.8’ Understanding what is other than ourselves expands our very being. Contemplation is being nakedly and humbly present to the other. Simone Weil, who came from a very different tradition, wrote that ‘Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.9’
This demands of us quietness of mind and time. One source of our crisis of truth, is that our lives are so hectic and frenetic that we do not have the time to see each other or anything properly. Our preoccupation for truth as accountability, means that we spend so much time filling in forms, making reports, compiling statistics, that we have no time to open our eyes and see. When Wittgenstein was asked how philosophers should greet each other, he replied ‘Take your time.’ So a spirituality of truth would invite us to slow down, be quiet, and let our hearts and minds be stretched open. Simone Weil writes that ‘we do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them…This way of looking is, in the first place, attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive the human being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth10.’
This quiet, calm and leisurely presence is the foundation of any friendship, which is so central to the Dominican understanding of our relationship with God and each other. And indeed, thanks be to God, the Angelicum is famous for its friendliness. This may be mistaken for being easygoing, lacking in exigency. But that is incorrect. It is the starting point for learning.
You cannot see another’s face if you are caught up in a frenetic and hectic life, rushing from one engagement to another. According to Thomas, no society is civilized which does not sustain some people in the contemplative life. At the beginning of his Spiritual Friendship Aelred of Rivaulx wrote, ‘Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our midst. There is no one now to disturb us. There is no one to break in upon our friendly chat, no one’s prattle or noise of any kind will creep into this pleasant solitude. Come now, beloved, open your heart, and pour into these friendly ears whatsoever you will, and let us accept gratefully the boon of this place, time and leisure.’
So, if the Angelicum is to be a place which sustains people in the pursuit of truth, then it should help us to be contemplative, to take our time, to have leisure, to be humbly present to each other. I know only too well how hard this is, and the thousand pressures to which each of us is subjected: professional, economic, and fraternal. And yet such a contemplative leisure should be an intrinsic part of a way of life that is studious.
Truthfulness, then, is not just the reporting of facts. Alasdair MacIntyre maintains that facts, like gentlemen’s wigs and telescopes, were not invented until the seventeenth century11. Truth is the basis of human community. It is the medium in which we encounter and belong to each other. St Augustine talked of humanity as ‘the community of truth.’ He was virulently opposed to a heresy called Pricillianism, which maintained that one was under no obligation to tell the truth to strangers. There is a lot of it about today! If you want to wrong foot an opponent, just accuse them of being a filthy Priscillian. It never fails!
For Augustine telling the truth to strangers is part of building the human community, constructing the Kingdom. And this explains why many theologians were extremely intolerant of even white lies. To lie was not just to fail to be accurate. It is destructive of language, the basis of human solidarity. When Athanasius was rowing down the river to escape his persecutors, they met him, going in the opposite direction. ‘Where is the traitor Athanasius?’ they asked. ‘Not far away’, he replied, and happily rowed on. That was alright, because he did not tell a lie!
I must confess that I do often tell white lies. I am not always rigorously truthful when I complement my brethren on their sermons or their cooking. This is necessary, as the Talmud says, for the peace of the household. And I encourage you all to tell lots of white lies when you tell me how much you enjoyed my lecture! For us, there might not appear to be much of a difference between a true remark that misleads and a lie. That is because we do not have that profound sense of the sacredness of true words as the foundation of human community. Lies pollute our natural environment. We die spiritually, like fish in a polluted river.
People often say that the Church is hung up on sex. For most of the Christian tradition the Church has been far more preoccupied with lying. In Dante’s Inferno, the top circles of Hell, where people get off lightest, are reserved for people who got carried away by their passions. They desired the good, but got themselves into a mess by desiring it wrongly. The middle regions of Hell were reserved for people who desired what was bad, above all for the violent. But the absolute pits where kept for those who undermined the human community of truth: the liars, the fraudulent, the flatterers, the forgers, and worst of all the traitors.
It is often said that the first casualty of war is the truth. In this perilous moment in the history of humanity, when our world is threatened with spreading violence, there is no possibility of peace unless we speak the truth to strangers and so build up humanity as the ‘community of truth.’ This means learning to speak truthfully to those who hate the West and to listen humbly to what they have to say. Otherwise we shall spin ourselves into ever deeper mistrust and mutual destruction.
So, to see the world truthfully, we need to a humble, serene attentiveness. Then, according to Aquinas, we shall see the goodness of the world. When God finished creation then he saw that it was very good. Fergus Kerr wrote, ‘‘The world, for Thomas, much against what was quite widely taught in his time, is simply the expression of divine bounty, freely shared, entirely unforced, “ unnecessary”, simply an expression of love.12’ The truthful eye of the Enlightenment is that of the detached observer, who dispassionately judges what is before his eyes. It is the scientific eye that looks down a microscope. That is a useful way of looking at the world. We would be immensely the poorer if it had not developed in the seventeenth century. But if we try to look at each other only through microscopes, like insects to be dissected, then we will not see each other’s goodness, which is the deepest truth of our being. St Augustine wrote at the end of the Confessions: ‘‘All these works of yours we see. We see that together they are very good, because it is you who see them in us and it was you who gave us the Spirit by which we see them and love you in them.13”
This is a goodness that we show forth not just in what we say but in how we are with people. It should be visible even to those who do not share our beliefs. Raimund Gaita once worked in a mental hospital in Australia. Most of the psychiatrists who worked there were compassionate and conscientious people. He wrote, ‘One day a nun came to the ward. In her middle years, only her vivacity made an impression on me until she talked to the patients. Then everything in her demeanour towards them – the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body – contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.14’ She made the humanity of the mental patients visible. ‘The purity of her love proved the reality of what it revealed.’ Gaita argues that often we come to see people as lovable because we see other people loving them. ‘Children come to love their brothers and sisters because they see them in the light of their parents’ love.’ Prison guards may learn to see their prisoners differently if they see them in the light of the love of those who visit them. This is not a matter of being kind, seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. It is seeing things as they are, truthfully.
This time last year I was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I visited an Aids clinic run by the Church. Each day the staff bring back people whom they have found dying of Aids on the streets. Most die soon. I saw a young man who was skeletal. He had not long to go. His hair was being washed and cut. He looked profoundly at peace and happy. Those who looked after him were being more than kind. It was a revelation of who this young man was, his hidden dignity and goodness.
The opponent of God’s truth in the Bible is Satan, the father of lies. And his lies do not consist in being economical with the truth, or making errors of judgment like modern politicians. It is not even just that he says things that are untrue. His untruthfulness is in sowing doubt and mistrust between God and Adam and Eve. He makes them suspicious of God. His name, ‘Satan’, means ‘The accuser’, and the Bible concludes with the saints singing that ‘the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down.’ For Christians the great lie is to see other people unmercifully, to shut our eyes to the goodness of their humanity and to weigh them down with the burden of their sins.
We do not see people aright unless we see them mercifully. Iris Murdoch wrote, ‘The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from the self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.15’ This implies that the pursuit of truth is rooted in the life of charity, in breaking the hold of egoism, which stamps ‘me’ and ‘mine’ on everything that it sees. A Christian university devoted to the pursuit of truth must therefore be a school of charity. As Simone Weil said, ‘love sees what is invisible.’
So the conflict between truth and falsity within the Bible is not just about accuracy, about describing what is the case, though that matters. More profoundly it is the conflict between God’s word, which gives being, and makes us flourish and vital, and the Word of the accuser, which undermines, and denigrates and belittles.
The media are the typical eighteenth century fruit of the Enlightenment pursuit of truth, unmasking hypocrisy and denouncing failure. To a large extent it is through their eyes that we see each other today. Thanks be to God we have media which are free. Thanks be to God for Watergate. The media exposure of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in many Western countries and the failure of the authorities to deal with it responsibly was profoundly painful and humiliating. But thanks be to God that the media did show up our failings, otherwise the Church might never have been forced to confront its sin. Thanks be to God for the media’s revelation of the appalling abuse of Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison. Without the media’s revelations, then it could never be stopped. But if denunciation and accusation become the main way in which human beings view each other, then we shall indeed sucked into untruthfulness. Sometimes we must accuse, but we cannot do that until we have first seen the goodness of the other person. It is good people who come to do bad things.
Many journalists do valiantly resist the pressures of the medium, renouncing easy headlines and cheap caricatures, in the struggle to be honest. This is a tremendous service, in helping to bring to birth a journalism which can evolve beyond the limitations of its roots in the Enlightenment. How can the Church support them and other people in public life who strive for truthfulness? We need to build places in which they may clean their eyes, oases of lucidity. I cannot say what it means for a journalist, or a politicians or a business executive or taxi driver to be honest. Each profession has its own criteria. But as a Church we must ensure that there are these oases of truthfulness in which people can come to discover what is required of them. These may be monasteries or lay groups. A Christian University ought to be one such place. This means that at the heart of a Dominican University should be a mutual mercy. When we enter the Order we are asked, ‘What do you seek?’ And we reply, ‘God’s mercy and yours.’ This is the necessary context for a life that is devoted to Veritas.
The doctrine of creation teaches us to see the world as created, which is to say as gift. Our eyes are opened to the pure gratuitousness of being. Nothing need exist. In 1944 Karl Polanyi wrote a book called The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our times. It plotted the evolution of another way of seeing the world, again beginning in the seventeenth century, the birth of ‘the commodity fiction.16’ This is fiction that everything can be bought and sold: land, labour, water, all of God’s creation. The market economy provides the filter through which we look at the world. The ownership of property becomes the foundation of human dignity. The rights of property are absolute and everything becomes property.
Sixty years after the publication of Polanyi’s book, we can see that commodification of creation is proceeding apace. He plotted the transformation of land into a commodity. He could never have dreamed that by the end of the century, multinational companies would seek ownership of even the fertility of the earth in the name of ‘intellectual property rights.’ A few companies are buying up control of seed plasma. According to Jeremy Rifkin, they ‘then slightly modify the seeds or strip out individual genetic traits, or recombine new genes into the seeds and secure patent protection over their “inventions”. The goal is to control, in the form of intellectual property, the entire seed stock of the planet.17’ We are rightly indignant at the President of Zimbabwe for appropriating the land of the white farmers. It is a sin against justice. Far more disturbing is the appropriation of the fertility of the planet. It is a sin against the truth of creation.
In a society that is a market place, and in which we are first of all consumers and owners, how we can sustain a more truthful vision? One way is by saying our prayers. For Thomas Aquinas, praying was above all a matter of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ We ask God for what we desire and we thank God if we receive it. This may seem a rather infantile way of living. Shouldn’t we be grown up enough to look after ourselves? I am reminded of the preacher he said that in the morning he had not had time to prepare his sermon and so he had had to pray to the Holy Spirit for inspiration, but this afternoon he had worked out his homily by himself and hoped to do better! But for Thomas, prayer is simply the recognition of what things are. Everything is a gift. To ask God for what I desire and to thank God when I receive it is merely to live in the real world. It is to open our eyes to the pure gratuity of being. The word ‘thank’ derives from ‘think.18’ Thanking is thinking truly.
So it should belong to the pursuit of truth in a Dominican University that we pray together. We come together as to ask for what we desire and to give thanks for what we receive. We acknowledge the Creator as the giver of good gifts. We learn the art of gratitude. We may even eventually discover our brethren as gifts. Perhaps we are sometimes so well wrapped up and disguised, like elaborate Christmas boxes, that it may take a time to peal away the wrappings and discover in what unexpected way our brother is a gift from God! Resisting the impulse to own and control, to become consumers of the world and each other, also implies a certain asceticism, to reigning in of our libido dominandi. And we should ask, in the words of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘What kinds of asceticism are appropriate in our age, to liberate our hearing and seeing?19’ I say no more, since I must confess that asceticism is not yet my greatest strength!
One final brief point: For Aquinas, to see well is not just to see what is before your eyes. It is see what things are potentially, what God made them to be. To quote Fergus Kerr OP again, ‘[Thomas] does not look at the world and see it as simply all that is the case, in itself; rather he sees the world, and things in it, as destined to a certain fulfilment, with appointed ends, modes and opportunities. It is perhaps not too much to say that Thomas sees the way that things are in terms of the way that they ought to be.20’ To see an acorn is to see an oak tree in potentia. If you have a good eye for a horse, then you can see what sort of horse this foal may grow to be. Of course, if you see the world in this way, then it does not awfully matter at what stage a foetus can be defined as having attained humanity. To see it truthfully is to see that it is made to become human.
This means that when we look at each other with clear eyes, then we see those who are made for the Kingdom, destined for more than we can say. Our fellow human beings transcend all that we know and say, because even now we are future citizens of the Kingdom. Talking truthfully about each other, whether in refectory or the lecture room, implies a certain reticence, a humility in the face of truth beyond our words. As St John says, ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3.2).
Two years ago I was in Cairo, and Jean Jacques Pérènnes took me to visit part of the city that is not often seen by tourists, Mukatam, the town of the rubbish collectors. It is the dirtiest, smelliest place I have ever seen, and 500,000 people live here, mostly Christians. They go out each morning on their little donkey carts to collect the rubbish and bring it back to their quarter, and sort through it to see if anything can be recycled. On the cliffs behind the city, a Polish artist has painted vast images of Christ in glory: transfigured, resurrected and ascended into heaven. When they come back home with their rubbish they face these images of glory on the cliffs. Then they remember that they are not just the citizens of Mukatam. They are even now the future citizens of the Kingdom.
The truth to which our eyes are opened must therefore drive us in the end to the limits of language, even to poetry. This will be in contradiction to the scientific fundamentalism by which our culture is tempted, what Yann Martel, in ‘The Life of Pi’ calls a ‘dry yeastless factuality21’. It is perhaps this scientific fundamentalism which is the mother of all the fundamentalisms, secular and religious, which threat our world with violence.
I must conclude. Western society is suffering from a crisis of trust. We are suspicious that we are not being told the truth. No amount of accusation, denunciation or exposure allays our fears. Total transparency seems neither possible nor the solution. I have suggested the roots of this crisis lie in a particular conception of what it means to seek for the truth, which dates back to the Enlightenment. It is in many ways a fine and fruitful tradition, to which we are all indebted, but by becoming the dominant paradigm then it leads to the sort of mistrustful and fragmented society which we inhabit.
Bernard Williams wrote well of what he called ‘the two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity.’22 These are necessary but not sufficient. Christianity invites us to find our home in an alternative and older tradition of truth seeking. Scandalously for the children of the Enlightenment, this is founded on doctrine, but a doctrine which should be neither divisive nor intolerant, but which opens up the vast spaciousness of God, in whom we may be at home. I have had time to look only at the doctrine of creation, but other doctrines may prove to be equally enlightening.
A Christian University should therefore be a place in which we are initiated not just into a way of thinking but a way of living. Seeking the truth is for us inseparable from seeking holiness. As Paul Murray OP, of the Angelicum, wrote, ‘For, as disciples of the Word, we may discover at the end if not at the beginning of our studies that, whereas goodness may indeed be the holiness of the heart, truth is the holiness of the mind.’ Our University should be a place in which we enjoy at least occasional moments of quiet, and even leisure, to open our hearts and minds to other people and their thoughts. It should be a place in which we learn friendship and to see each other mercifully. And all these studies should occur within the context of shared singing of the Office, in which we learn the art of gratitude, asking God for what we need and thanking him for its reception.
All this may seem a little utopian, given the immense pressures that fall on modern academics, to teach and research and administer, not to mention the economic pressures and the demands of community life. It might sound a little ‘pie in the sky.’ But if this is our shared vision of what a Dominican University might be, then we may gradually evolve such an ecosystem, in which we support may each other in seeking the truth and tasting its joy.
