Last time, I promised a sequel on the subject, Truth is Threefold, and God is Absolute Truth in a Threefold Manner. Having previously introduced the threefold character of truth and considered God as Absolute Logical Truth, I now proceed to some thoughts on God as Absolute Moral Truth and Absolute Ontological Truth.
For source material, I am again relying primarily on Monsignor Joseph Pohle’s book, God, His Knowability, Essense, and Attributes (pgs. 225-240).
God as Absolute Moral Truth
A brief reminder is in order here: logical, moral, and ontological truth all involve a conformity. In the case of moral truth, it is the conformity of one’s speech to what is known in the mind. It entails to elements: veracity and fidelity. As Monsignor Pohle says, veracity is “the firm purpose of telling the truth always and everywhere.” Its opposite is mendacity (or mendaciousness), which is the habitual disparity between thought and word that we encounter in dishonest people, liars. As we said before, the contrasting term to moral truth is a lie. Mendacity as a vice and truthfulness as a virtue are in the will; according to Saint Thomas, truthfulness is annexed to the cardinal virtue of justice — which makes mendacity a vice against justice. While the virtue and its corresponding vice are in the will, the intellect is directly involved here because it is precisely the equation of the truth known in the intellect and the speech uttered with the mouth (or written with the pen, etc.) that entails the essential element of veracity.
Related to veracity — but not identical to it — is fidelity (or faithfulness), which Monsignor Pohle defines as “the firm purpose of keeping one’s promises or carrying out one’s threats.” Here again, there is a moral defect in the person who violates fidelity — the unfaithful or deceitful person — but there is also a failure of conformity of speech to intellect, although the infidelity or deception is generally manifested after the fact by a lack of correspondence between speech and action.
Those who fail to keep their word — most notably their oaths and vows — are unfaithful people. They have “broken faith” and are said to speak “in bad faith.”
It is an aside, but as a teacher (and former student), the bit about fidelity to one’s threats speaks to me. Teachers, like parents, are cautioned not to threaten punishments that they will not administer. A comical contrary example to this sage advice was the case of a certain religion teacher at my all-boys’ school who used to threaten, “Son, I’ll kick you through the wall.” The fact that he was also the Karate instructor lent a short-lived terrifying effect to the threat, but, ultimately, he broke his word. That wall — and we students — were perfectly safe from the ravages of his black-belted foot. The lads were not impressed, either physically or morally.
Theologically, God’s veracity and faithfulness are very important attributes, because they constitute the foundation of two of the so-called theological virtues, veracity being the formal motive of faith, while faithfulness is the formal motive of hope.
What Monsignor Pohle is saying here is that our faith rests upon the truthfulness of God’s revelation — its veracity — while our hope rests upon His fidelity to His promises. In the former case, we say in the “Act of Faith,” that God “can neither deceive nor be deceived,” while in the latter, the “Act of Hope,” our confidence rests solidly upon God’s “almighty power and infinite mercy and promises.”
God’s Veracity
That God is truthful is a dogma of the Faith clearly taught in Holy Scripture:
- “But he that sent me, is true: and the things I have heard of him, these same I speak in the world.” —John 8:26b
- “…God, who lieth not…” —Titus 1:2
- “… it is impossible for God to lie…” —Heb. 6:18
- “But God is true; and every man a liar…” —Rom 3:4a (Which evidently means that while men can lie, God cannot.)
To this effect, Monsignor Pohle cites Saint John Chrysostom, from a homily on the Creed: “…there
are certain things impossible to God, viz.: to be deceived, to deceive, and to lie.”
God’s Fidelity
God’s fidelity, too, is a dogma of the faith. It is ex clara scriptura:
- “The Lord is faithful in all his words: and holy in all his works.” —Ps. 144:13b
- “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.” —Matt. 24:35
Saint Augustine speaks eloquently on this point, from a work Pohle cites of his on the Psalms: “Our hope is as certain as if the promise were already fulfilled. Nor do we fear, seeing we have the promise of truth. Truth can neither be deceived nor deceive.”
God as Absolute Ontological Truth
By ontological, we mean “of or concerning being.” The term in philosophy is generally synonymous with metaphysical. Whereas Monsignor Pohle puts this first in the order of God’s threefold truth, I put it last, only because it is the most abstract concept of truth. Again, to repeat what we said earlier, “Ontological truth is the conformity of the thing to its universal concept or essence.” Monsignor Pohle very compactly calls it “the conformity of the being to its concept.”
Ontological truth is being inasmuch as it is knowable. One way to grasp this concept is to meditate on the beautiful utterance of Saint Hilary of Poitiers: “Truth is declarative being.” Everything that is declares its nature or essence to knowing minds. Monsignor Pohle quotes Saint Augustine in this wise: “That which is, seems to be true.” The verb used there for “seems to be” — videtur — is stronger in Latin than in our modern English idiom; we might better render it, “That which is, is seen to be true.” Since God is the fullness of being — indeed, He is Being itself, as He assured Holy Moses — He is the fullness of truth, or Truth Itself.
Pohle very dogmatically states that:
Whenever the Divine Revelation and the sources of infallible teaching office of the Church employ the term “one true God” (verus Deus), they refer not to His logical [or moral], but to His ontological truth.
This is so because the term that we would contrast with “true God” is “false god,” i.e., those “gods of the Gentiles,” which Holy Scripture unerringly affirms are, in fact, “devils” (Ps. 95:5). In other words, all those other beings — real or imagined — that are called “gods” fail to conform fully to the concept, God. But the true God, the Blessed Trinity, and He alone, corresponds fully to the concept of God.
God alone possesses the attribute of aseity (“the property by which a being exists of and from itself”). Because of this, Pohle reasons that God’s truth is,
…essential, primeval, primordial truth (veritas a se [truth from itself]). God is Pure Truth in virtue of His proper essence, not by any agency extraneous to Himself. Since ontological truth, or cognoscibility [knowability], increases in the same ratio with being, it follows that He who Is… must likewise be the “first and sovereign truth”…. As St. Augustine puts it, [skipping the Latin here…] “Where greatness itself is truth, whatsoever has more of greatness, must needs have more of truth.”
God is the “All-Truth”
Beyond this, God is also the “All-Truth” because all else that is true is derived from Him as its cause. In fact, what we know in and around us is only true because each of these things existed first as an idea — an archetype — in the Mind of God. So, while God is Truth Itself — the highest “declarative being” — all else that is true must conform to the divine idea.
Pohle quotes Saint Thomas on this point, from De Veritate:
Natural things from which our intellect gets its scientific knowledge measure our intellect. Yet these things are themselves measured by the divine intellect, in which are all created things — just as all works of art find their origin in the intellect of an artist. The divine intellect, therefore, measures and is not measured; a natural thing both measures and is measured; but our intellect is measured, and measures only artifacts, not natural things.
To understand this passage, it helps to know that “measure” here means, to serve as a standard or measure for something. Another thing we should know is that an artifact is a work of human art — which is a much broader concept in scholastic philosophical usage as it embraces any product of human skill.
Climbing up even higher in his metaphysical considerations, Monsignor Pohle tells us that:
He [God] is the exemplary cause of all things, and therefore the ideal of all derived truth. Nothing exists — sin alone excepted — which cannot be traced to the eternal ideas of God.
In exploring the notion of God as “All-Truth,” the good Monsignor ascends still further, into the realm of abstract truths:
The archetype, basis, and measure of all (abstract) truths in logic, metaphysics, ethics, æsthetics, music, mathematics, etc., must be sought in God, the [All-Truth], Who drew forth from His own immutable Essence, where they had existed from all eternity, the unchangeable norms of these sciences, and imposed them as inviolable laws on the minds of His creatures. Even the sciences that deal with contingent and accidental things (such as history) are but reflexes of the divine All-Truth, exponents of its imitability and its ability to project itself outward. As for the truth or untruth of moral actions, Scripture teaches that all morality is grounded in an eternal and unchangeable idea, the lex aeterna [eternal law], with which our actions must conform in order to be ethically true, i.e., morally good. Sin alone does not correspond to any exemplary idea or creative thought in the Divine Essence; sin, therefore, is “untruth,” sin is a “lie.”
God is the “Super-Truth”
Above the notion of “All-Truth,” God is also the “Super-Truth,” which, for Monsignor Pohle, means this:
[T]he type of true Divinity is that infinite idea which God has of Himself from all eternity, and which He does not derive from anything outside Himself, but carries within His own Substance. With this infinite idea the divine being conforms to such a degree that there is substantial identity between God’s being and knowledge. While the Divine All-Truth determines all derived truths, as their canon and norm, it does not itself receive its measure and purpose from anything extraneous or superior to itself, but as “Super-Truth” finds these in its own essence, which infinitely surpasses everything that can be conceived in the domain of created truth.
And with that sublimely elevated thought — a “super-thought,” I suppose — our considerations of God as Absolute Truth in a threefold manner come to an end.
