95. Hating the truth
95. HATING THE TRUTH
Honesty is absolutely necessary, as necessary to the mind as food is to the body. But if truth is the food of the mind, how can we be mentally anorexic and hate it? How is dishonesty even possible?
Now it may happen in three ways that some particular truth is repugnant or hurtful to the good we love.
First . . . man sometimes hates a particular truth when he wishes that what is true were not true.
Second . . . is the case of those who wish not to know the truth of faith, that they may sin freely, in whose person it is said (Job 21:14): We desire not the knowledge of Thy ways.
Thirdly, a particular truth is hated as being repugnant inasmuch as it is in the intellect of another man; as, for instance, when a man wishes to remain hidden in his sin, he hates that anyone should know the truth about his sin. In this respect Augustine says in the Confessions that men love the truth when it enlightens, they hate it when it reproves (I-II,29,5).
We cannot hate truth in general, all truth, as we cannot hate food in general, all food. But we can hate a particular truth even though it is good for us, as we can hate a particular food even though it is good for us: because we obey our feelings (St. Thomas usually calls them “passions”) instead of our reason, and a particular truth might shock our feelings even though it is good for us to know it, as spinach, yogurt, or bitter medicine may shock our taste buds, even though it is good for us to eat it.
None of us is free of any of the three forms of truth-hating that St. Thomas mentions. This is one of the most pervasive effects of Original Sin, and one of the most dangerous. For without truth, nothing good can be known and therefore willed, just as without light nothing good can be seen and therefore desired. Even the greatest surgeon in the most perfect hospital cannot perform the simplest operation if the lights go out. Satan’s first trick is always to dim the lights.
(1) We are all spiritually lazy and self-satisfied: we all wish we were not sinners who have to change. But we are. We wish that all the changes we need could be painless. But they are not. We wish we did not have to “mortify the flesh”, i.e., the proud, selfish ego. But we do. We wish we could avoid death. But we can’t. We wish Hell was an unreal myth. But it isn’t.
(2) We all want to look away from truth, i.e., from God, when we want to sin. This was Nietzsche’s explicit motive for atheism: How could I bear that there be a God Who saw my dark side? Every time we sin against God, we sin against ourselves, against our reason, against the truth. The truth is that sin never brings joy and sanctity always does, but we choose not to know this when we want to sin. Whenever we sin, we choose something that we know, deep down, always brings misery instead of joy. To do that, we have to make ourselves temporarily insane. We have to put out the light of reason.
(3) And we don’t want other people to know our dark side any more than we want God to know it. (Read The Brothers Karamazov for a profound story about this, Fr. Zossima’s “midnight visitor”.)
There is no way around it: we absolutely need to fall in love with truth, absolutely, unreservedly, totally, “fanatically”. We need to pray Psalm 139 over and over. For that is our preparation for Heaven: learning to love the light, loving rather than hating the fact that God has searched us and known us down to every dirty detail. We must learn to stand in the light because that is what Heaven is, standing in the light of God’s mind. (Light comes into our mind but it comes from God’s mind, like a searchlight.)
We can do this (loving the fact that God knows everything about us including all our dirty little secrets) if and only if we trust Him to love us as no human being ever can: absolutely, unreservedly, totally, forever, no matter what. It is only because we don’t trust Him, only because we don’t trust His light to be love, only because we separate Light and Love, that we hate the light. It is faith (trust) that affirms that the light, the ultimate truth, is perfect love. (That’s because there is only one God, and He is both.) Therefore faith is the key to this absolute love of truth.