My heart hath uttered a good word, I speak my works to the king; My tongue is the pen of a scrivener that writeth swiftly. (Ps. 44:2 Introit of Our Lady’s Mass for Saturday).
But he that doth truth, cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God (John 3:21).
I was thinking this morning about both of these verses, which I came across at the same time in my spiritual reading. No creature fulfilled these words better than Our Blessed Mother, who is the Mirror of Justice and the Seat of Wisdom. As Saint Augustine, or one of the fathers, put it: “Mary is by grace what God is by nature.”
One of the things that our good priest, Father Jarecki, never tires of emphasizing is our moral obligation to always speak the truth. Truth is the first thing to proceed from the Being of God, only it is not a thing in God; rather Truth is a Person, the Son of God, the Only-Begotten of the Father. Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Goodness in God proceeds from Being and Truth as One Principle. Even Aristotle, who, of course, knew nothing of the highest realty of God’s inner life, taught in his Metaphysica that truth and being are convertible concepts. What is, what is real, must be true. What is true must also be good and, just as the being of a thing precedes its truth, its truth precedes its goodness. Something must first exist in the order of reality before it declares its being (Saint Hilary of Poitier says, “truth is declarative being”) and something must first declare its being before it is good. This ontological order of reality reflects the two processions in the Blessed Trinity, where, in the Eternal Life of God, the Unbegotten Father first begets the Son, and the Father and the Son as One principle then breathe forth the Holy Ghost. First (not in the order of cause but in the order of origin), there is the Unbegotten; second, there is the Begotten; and third there is Love, who proceeds as a Person from the reciprocal embrace of Father and Son. The Holy Ghost is the mutual Gift of Father to Son and Son to Father. When theology teaches that Truth and Goodness in God are appropriated to the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity respectively, it does not deny that all three Persons are All True, All Wise, and All Good, because these attributes are of the Divine Nature, which is One and the same for each of the Divine Persons; it is merely appropriating Wisdom to the Son as the “Logos or Thought” of the Father, and Love or Goodness as the Gift that is spirated forth from the mutual Love of Father and Son. When Jesus said that “God alone is Good,” He could have also said, “God alone is Holy.” Goodness and Holiness in God are convertible terms. This is not true, however, in the created order. When God looked upon all that He created and said that “it is very good,” it was because the whole material universe was an expression of His love for man and through the visible things that He made man might come to know the invisible things of God, who is a Spirit: “For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity . . .” (Romans 1:20). All that God created is good because the existence and nature of all things came forth from His Goodness. Only the intelligent creature, however, can be called holy, and this, by participation in God’s divine nature by being elevated to a new life through His gift of supernatural grace. This is only given to those who believe in, and live in, Christ: “to them he gave the power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name” (John 1:12). In short, holiness (charity) is a habit of the will, which is infused into the soul by the Holy Ghost, whose act as the indwelling Sanctifier is to conform the created will to His own.
The adage, “actions speak louder than words,” reflects something of the truth of the passages I quoted at the start from Holy Scripture. Whether those actions be good or bad, they do speak. A person’s actions may be in conformity with what he speaks, or not in conformity. In the former case we have moral truth, but not necessarily logical truth. A person may utter a proposition, by way of an affirmative or negative judgment, that is contrary to what he believes, or thinks he knows. In either case he is guilty in his will of lying, even though what he speaks may not be a falsehood, because what he holds as true in his subjective mind may or may not be in conformity with objective reality, and objective reality is always ontologically true.
What is meant by “ontological truth?” The compound word “ontology” is derived from the ancient Greek words for “being” (on) and “word, or idea” (logos). All created things are true in that they are what they declare themselves to be to a knowing mind. They are, therefore, true in the reality of their created being. Saint Augustine put it this way: “Things exist because God [their Creator] first knew them; the created intellect knows them because they exist.” All things that God made are, therefore, true because they conform in their essence to the mind of God in whose “Logos” they were created. All creation declares itself to be what it is, which would have no meaning were there not a knowing intellect to receive their self-declaration and make their reality part of the mind (the soul, that is) of the knower. It is in this sense that Aristotle says that “the soul is in a certain sense all things,” or capax universi (capable of being all things). Saint Augustine elevated this truth to a supernatural plain when, in his meditation about the beatific vision, he wondered: “What shall we not see when we see Him who sees all things?”
In the case of the man whose actions are not in conformity with his words, we could have hypocrisy — if the act be evil — or we could have a virtuous act if the action conforms to the truth that he knows in his mind and heart, but doesn’t conform with what he has spoken in word. Such would be the case, for example, in Our Lord’s parable of the two sons: The one son promised his father that he would go work in his vineyard, but he did not; the other son told his father that he would not work in the vineyard, but he ended up doing so. It could be, although this possibility would not compliment the lesson of the parable, that both sons were lying to their father, the first hypocritically, the second with a mental reservation not really meaning what he said. Or, it could be, and this is the true sense of the parable, that both told the truth when they spoke, but the first, under temptation, denied his word by his inaction, whereas the second, overcoming temptation, denied his word by the good deed. So, therefore, since “actions speak louder than words,” the second son did his father’s will, the first did not. Our Lord commends the second son, who represents the elect Gentiles, who knew not the truth and rejected the law written in their heart, but upon hearing it preached by the Apostles, repented of their culpable blindness, and coming to the light, they “did the truth.” Thus, in grace “in God,” they “uttered a good word” and could “speak” their works to the King.
