Peter Herbeck on the meaning of Truth
Below are the notes Al and Peter Herbeck used while discussing the meaning of Truth on December 13, 2022
In his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis John Paul II quoted the words of Christ about the liberating force of the truth. Then he added:
“These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.”
“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”
“Man is called to freedom,” he said. He meant freedom based on values and ethical attitudes. Freedom also rests on four main foundations: truth, solidarity, sacrifice and love.
Truth: “Man’s free creative forces will only develop to the full if they are based on the truth, which is given to every man as an unshakable foundation. Only then will he be able to realize himself fully and even outgrow himself. There is no freedom without truth.”
JPII, Camden Yards, 1995 in USA:
Then came this crucial passage: “Detached from the truth about the human person, freedom deteriorates into license in the lives of individuals, and in political life it becomes the caprice of the most powerful and the arrogance of power. Far from being a limitation upon freedom or a threat to it, reference to the truth about the human person — a truth universally knowable through the moral law written on the hearts of all — is in fact the guarantor of freedom’s future.”
“The central insight of classical Greek political philosophy is that the order of the city is the order of the soul writ large. If there is disorder in the city, it is because of disorder in the souls of its citizens. This is why virtue in the lives of the citizens is necessary for a well-ordered polis.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything
Pieper:
“Self-deception”
- Unobjective perception of reality dictated by the will
- Reconstitute reality to conform to my will
- Insist that it has a purpose not congruent to its proper end, e.g., ssm acts against ends of marriage
- Dethrone primary truth about human nature
- Requires the obliteration of the real and removal of those who insist on the existence of reality
- Today we are witnessing the deconstruction of traditional family and marriage itself
- Dethrone it as privileged, sacred, by reducing it to a social construct that has no unique design
- Truth was available to them but they did not want it nor the claim it would make on them (Ratzinger)
- 22 Human beings oppose the truth that would demand submission of them—submission in the form of honoring God and giving God thanks (Romans 1:21)…For Paul the moral collapse of society is merely the logical consequence and the exact mirror-image of this fundamental perversion.
- 87 “Opinion, untruth gains domination. The entire life of a society, political as well as personal decisions, can in this way rest on a dictatorship of untruth: of how things are presented and reported instead of reality itself. An entire society can thus fall from the truth into shared deceit, into a slavery of untruth, of not-being…
- …the ‘appearance’ of the world in the media is becoming more and more the real governance of the world. Fear of what appears becomes a universal power and damages courage of the truth…when the fear of God that has its proper place at the heart of the love of God no longer holds sway, people lose their standard, their criterion: fear of man exerts its domination over them, there emerges an idolatry of what appears, and thus the door is wide open for every kind of folly.”
Josef Pieper: Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power
“To be true” = “determined in speech and thought by what is real” p.17
Word and Language:
- “Medium that sustains common existence of the human spirit as such” p.15
- If the word becomes corrupted human exchange is corrupted
- W and L has twofold purpose:
- Convey reality
- Interpersonal communication
- Corruption happens on these two levels: to reality, to communication
- To perceive as much as possible
- All things as they really are
- To live and to act according to this truth
- Truth = “unveiling of reality”
- In this consists the good of man, defines meaningful human existence
- All men and women are nurtured first and foremost by the truth
- Truth is the nourishment of healthy human beings
- Society is sustained by truth being publicly proclaimed and upheld
- The Natural Habitat of Truth
- Interpersonal communication
- Healthy society depends on well-ordered language
- That is, when it expresses reality
Propaganda: to specifically deny portion of reality.
- The good itself, therefore, is endangered by sophists p.34-36
Revelation 12:9
9 And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
2 Thessalonians 2:9-10
9 The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.
Bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you, do good to those who hate you, love your enemies…
Get out of Satan’s narratives for your neighbor…
Your tongue must at the service of the King, under his Lordship, building up, not destroying…
If not, you will shipwreck what the Lord intends to do…if you keep his alive in you your heart will be hardened, you will not be like your heavenly Father, you will be an obstacle to what the Lord wants to do
Treat others the way you want to be treated, especially people that are different than you…
Get out of the mode, the mental and emotional preoccupation: worrying about myself in times of trouble, spend time finding faults in others, speaking of those perceived faults to others…stop, stop, stop…
Accusation, gossip, speaking against, pointing out faults, deception, creating division, building walls, is everywhere in our culture: hearts of men (including mine) are being revealed. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks
Jesus wants change at the heart level…Learn from me, I am gentle and humble of heart (meek and humble of heart)…slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Conqueror: Jesus, the Divine Warrior (Nikao, 17 times in 15 verses…”conqueror”)
- Centrality of witness:
- Give courageous, faithful witness
- To the truth of the Gospel, to the words and works of Jesus
- In an unbelieving and increasingly hostile world
- Suffering
- Sharing in the rejection of our Lord
- United to his suffering
- Follow him: the faithful and true witness
- Conquer the world through the mystery of Christ’s suffering
- Spiritual Alchemy:
- Faithful suffering witnesses
- Transformed into glorified victors
- Through faith, perseverance, patient endurance
- Suffering witness to the faith is the norm
- Conquer, “Not through violence afflicted, but through violence suffered”
- Temptation: abandon faith, compromise, purchase security and safety, protect idols, escape suffering, accommodate to the world
- Through the: Revelation 17
- Blood of the Lamb
- The word of their testimony
- They loved not their lives even unto death
- Foothold in the postmodern age?
- Declare the twilight of the idols! Warning to the magnates of the earth
- Morality and ethics divorced from revealed truth and the ground of being
- Reason divorced from faith
- Dictatorship of relativism
- Radical secularist ideology
- Unbridled growth of materialism and consumerism
- Unbridled autonomy; build a world without God!
- Declare the twilight of the idols! Warning to the magnates of the earth
