Pope Benedict at Bojangles

Reflecting on Truth

Back in high school, I was part of a book club, a small group of friends who would meet at a local Bojangles. It was the perfect spot for the club since it not only served sweet tea, but also played classical music. Such, then, were the circumstances in which we discussed the book Introduction to Christianity, written by the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI, of happy memory. Seeing as today marks the thirteenth anniversary of his farewell address to the cardinals in Rome, it seems fitting to share a reflection from that first contact of mine with the great pastor’s thought.

I still vividly remember my interest being piqued at the very outset of the book, where Ratzinger presents a few main lines of thought that Westerners of the last thousand years or so have adopted in approaching truth. To get an answer to the question “What is true?” you can’t simply start with a list of statements a person knows to be facts. Rather, you need to begin with what a person takes the truth to mean.

For the medieval scholastics, truth was identical to being: “verum est ens,” as Ratzinger put it. The truth is what is real, even if that reality is unseen or inconsequential to your day-to-day life. It’s this focus on reality that drove scholastics to disputations parodied today by the question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

Ratzinger notes a shift that took place from this outlook. The focus in this next phase wasn’t so much on what reality is, but on what actually had been done. Something is true because it has actually been accomplished: “verum quia factum,” in Ratzinger’s phrasing. Such is the inspiration behind historical studies, trying to establish the facts of the world. The real isn’t just anything, but only that which touches upon our experience of artifacts left in the world.

Yet there took place another shift, where the outlook, in Ratzinger’s formulation, was “verum quia faciendum”—the true, or the real, is that which is to be done. We thus have the outlook of the technical age, where experiments are to be repeatable, products are to be fashioned, and the world is what you make it.

As I said earlier, I was captivated when I encountered this presentation of shifting outlooks. I had never considered looking at the last millennium like that. I hadn’t ever really considered examining the different criteria for truth that people (including myself) used. In fact, when it came to my own outlook, I leaned more into that last camp, where the standard for truth is what you can actually scientifically produce with repeatability in a controlled setting.

What I received from the great pastor Ratzinger wasn’t simply a pastoral instruction on belief; it was a framework for beginning to examine my own outlook on what’s true. Reflecting critically on my own criteria for truth would later flourish in unexpected ways for me personally, as little by little science and technology began to take a backseat role in my overall approach to truth (though I leave the discussion of what’s now in the front seat for another time). For now, I recommend to you this pastor of Christ’s flock, and not simply because he was pope (be that as it may, a good reason for recommendation). Rather, I recommend him because he so clearly shows Christians how to seriously and tirelessly reflect on the truth—an activity that can be put into practice whether you’re at Saint Peter’s Basilica or just your local Bojangles.