Just Gimme Some Truth

“Pilate said to him, Are you a king? Jesus answered, You say I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.
“Pilate said to him, What is truth?” (Jn. 18: 37-38)

This passage from the Gospel of John (chapter 18, verses 37-38) has been on my mind a lot lately, maybe because of the inexcusably prolonged presidential campaign, maybe because I’ve had to spend a lot of time the past few years dealing with marketing and PR people.

In John’s book, Jesus doesn’t answer Pilate’s question. In fact, Pilate doesn’t actually give him an opportunity to answer; it’s a truly rhetorical question. Here we have an upper-class Roman interrogating a Jewish laborer-cum-holy-man and not wanting to bandy words with him; as a presumably well-educated man of his time, Pilate has heard or read the extensive philosophical discussions of “truth” and isn’t interested in hearing some backwater crackpot’s views on the subject.

And in any case, John already has given us the answer: “Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (Jn. 14: 6) In brief, Jesus himself is truth, but the overly worldly Pilate can’t see it even when it stands directly in front of him.

A Zen teaching known as the “Flower Sermon” presents, I think, a similar message: One day, the Buddha sits before his disciples and instead of launching into the expected sermon simply holds up a flower. The disciples don’t understand, they scratch their heads and whisper to each other, “What does he mean?” Except for one, Mahākāśyapa, who just smiles.

The lesson in both cases, I think, is this: Truth is what really IS. Or put another way, every real thing is true, is a truth.

Where untruth enters is in any attempt to describe or explain what is. Whenever we venture beyond the actual object and start trying to give an account of its nature or causes or relationships or meanings, we run the risk of getting it wrong, of falling short, of misrepresenting reality. It isn’t necessary to attribute this to deliberate deception or plain stupidity, either; as Plato and his followers emphasized, every representation of a reality is, so to speak, less real than the thing it represents.

Such a representation, account, explanation or description was referred to by Platonists as a “logos.” Many modern Christians are aware of that word as meaning simply “word,” because of the standard translation of the opening verse of the same Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But that translation conveys nothing of the many implications the word “logos” would have held for John and his readers. By the time his book was written (late first or early second century), “logos” had been in use as a technical philosophical term throughout the Greek-speaking world (which included most of what we now call the Middle East) for a full four centuries at least. In Platonism, it especially referred to the expression in physical reality of an inexpressible “higher” reality: Just as a spoken sentence is an incomplete expression of a thought, a person or a dog or a tree is an expression of (so to speak) God’s idea of a person or a dog or a tree.

Another way of translating logos might be “narrative,” in the sense in which that term is used by social science types nowadays: a description of life and the world that we believe explains “the way things are,” that gives us a sense of how to fit into this complex and often confusing universe, and that helps us justify our choices and goals.

For example, the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” between the Christian (or post-Christian) West and the Muslim East might better be described as a “clash of narratives.” Similarly, the “culture wars” within American society could also be said to be a conflict between or among narratives. In both cases, I think this way of looking at it helps explain the frustration and exasperation felt by people who can’t understand why their opponents can’t see the point, why they “just don’t get it”: because both sides are looking at their narratives, not reality.

It was the ancient Greeks, of course, who invented formal logic, and I think they were impelled to do so by their own democratic traditions: They saw the risk of their institutions being hijacked by demagogues and sophists who could sway public opinion with untrue but emotionally stirring speeches about the issues. They realized that good decisions depend on good information, and saw the need for a reliable way to separate true statements about reality from untrue ones.

That analytical apparatus still exists, naturally, but judging from the blatant falsehoods so widely stated in our time – by the media, the marketers, the lobbyists, the lawyers and of course the politicians – our culture leaders obviously are confident that few of us have the time, the knowledge or the will to use it – or to “bear witness to the truth.”