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Our search for truth in this earthly life is not a march to the grave, but a journey of progressive illumination, in which each day brings the promise of some new wonder, some fresh joy.

“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.” —G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Mystery is all around us, and man is a natural detective. Despite pretensions of the modern scientific method to explain all things, mystery remains, and thank goodness for that. It gives spice and interest to life. Truth is only partially known to us; it is sometimes hidden, covered in a cloud of unknowing. Every indication we have suggests that God desires to be known through mystery. God must be diligently sought; he leads us on the chase, keeps us guessing. Believers hold that full truth will be revealed at the end of time or in the next world; recall St. Paul’s words, some of the most famous of the New Testament: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor 13:12).

Many attribute this imperfect knowledge to the effects of original sin, for the tradition teaches that our lack of a direct vision of God in this life is the result of sin. On the other hand, perhaps it is part of God’s design—or perhaps it is both. Whatever the case may be, the search can be the happy and absorbing work of a lifetime. All our religious experience tells us that God, instead of handing us truth on a platter, desires to bring us to greater knowledge and greater spiritual insight gradually, slowly, through accompanying signs discovered in nature and revelation.

We do not come unequipped in this search. We have the wonderful gift of religious tradition, embodied in the church, which gave us the scriptures and the sacraments and has engaged in theological reflection for two thousand years. The search for religious truth thus should be conducted in communion with the rites and life of the church and the whole richness of Christian culture.

I am fascinated by the evolution of language through time, and how shifts in language can signal shifts in meaning and the understanding of truth. Our religious language comes to us in a complex tissue of meanings and associations, transferred through various tongues going back to ancient times. Culture, too, is one of the ways in which religious truth is meditated and handed on.

To be involved with Christian faith is intrinsically to be involved with history, culture, and civilization; first of all, the history, culture, and civilization of ancient peoples—of the Jews, Greeks, and Romans. The Christian faith is rooted in history. Religious truth comes to us through the church’s tradition, but this tradition is expressed through the very human medium of language—a medium to which Jesus humbly submitted himself, and which he sanctified and transformed. We should not underplay this. Our Lord was a master orator and storyteller who used language in the most ingenious way possible, being an heir to all the great traditions of Hebrew scripture and prophesy. Language was his medium, and culture was the backdrop against which he operated.

This is not stressed nearly enough in preaching and religious discourse generally. Many believers, I fear, suppose religion exists in a sort of ahistorical and cultureless never-never land. Too many of the sermons and homilies we hear consist of a mass of flowery theological poeticisms without much in the way of concrete cultural or philosophical grounding for the gospel. The impression is given that religion floats serenely above the concrete elements of history, of culture, of philosophical inquiry.

There are marvelous exceptions, of course. Recently at Mass we had the gospel reading about divorce and the indissolubility of marriage, and the monsignor at my parish delivered an excellent homily. He explained the sociocultural background on marriage in the Jewish world and elucidated what was so challenging and revolutionary about Jesus’ teaching—truly radical (in the true sense of that much-abused word) both in its emphasis on fidelity and in its elevation of woman. We came out with a richer, more embodied understanding of the gospel.

Yes, the Christian religion is nothing if not concrete. And this leads to the conviction that religion is, among other things, an intellectual and spiritual adventure.

Though truth itself is unchanging, our reception of it changes, colored by the human factors I mentioned above. Many Catholics in particular tend to think of their faith as a seamlessly woven tapestry handed down intact through the ages. There is a sense in which this is true. But individual nuances and understandings of the truth do indeed change and evolve. Faith is not merely a set of propositions to which one gives assent but also includes an imaginative concept of reality. Different eras have different imaginative concepts and so express the faith in with different emphases and nuances. The church embeds itself in every culture, taking on the coloration of that culture while declaring the same essential truths. It is one of the reasons why we can speak of, say, “medieval theology” or “medieval spirituality” as things distinct from theology or spirituality pure and simple. We do not compromise the idea of objective truth in the least by acknowledging that the Catholic and Christian faith is a complex interweaving of truths and insights discovered and refined gradually through time, not unlike the truths of science.

As Christian thought developed in the early centuries, it received substantial input from Greek philosophy. This went back a long way, in fact, for Platonic philosophy was present as a potential influence on both Judaism and Christianity from quite ancient times. One can perceive strains of Greek philosophy in the Old Testament wisdom literature, including the Book of Wisdom. Hellenistic Judaism engaged with elements of Greek thought before the birth of Jesus. And some of the New Testament—most notably John’s Gospel—shows influence of Greek concepts, such as the idea of the Logos or divine reason. There can be no doubt that the apostles of Christ were receptive to the ideas of their Greek neighbors; and far be it from me to say anything against the wonderful philosophy of Plato. Like all philosophies Platonism has its merits and usefulness, but Christian faith in its core and essence is biblical and Judaic: “Spiritually, we are Semites,” as Pope Pius XI famously put it.

Part of our problem is that in talking about religion we tend to mix different kinds of language indiscriminately. Our religious discourse is often a hodgepodge drawn from prayers, the liturgy, the Bible, theology, and philosophy. All of these are great sources of knowledge and truth, but without separating these strands and seeing them in their proper context we will not fully grasp religious truth. “Beatific Vision” is a beautiful term from scholastic theology, conveying the direct knowledge of God in the next life. “Truth, goodness, and beauty” is a great philosophical triad. Philosophy is a wonderful gift and an aid to faith and has informed theology from the beginning. But we should take care to separate these various strands of language and thought. If I were to say “Jesus promised the Beatific Vision to his followers,” I would not necessarily be saying something untrue, but my language and concepts would not be rightly ordered.

The language we use has a precise origin, just like the names we bear and the clothes we wear. We should seek to discover this history, so as to achieve a greater refinement in our understanding of our faith, always with the motto “faith seeking understanding.”

In his book Surprised by Hope, the theologian N. T. Wright makes a helpful distinction between orthodox and popular belief, and he illustrates the distinction in terms of our Christian beliefs about the afterlife. Wright points out that in the New Testament, the Greek word translated as heaven (Ouranos) is rarely used, and never in the sense of a place we go after we die. Rather, heaven denotes God’s realm or, as we might say today, “space.” This is true in the phrase “kingdom of heaven,” where “heaven” is more or less a circumlocution for God. To quote Wright: “heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.”

Most Jews in Jesus’ day (the Sadducees were the exception) believed in a bodily resurrection—at the end of time. When Jesus rose from the dead, what surprised the Jews was not so much the fact that this happened at all, but the fact that it happened now, ahead of schedule. What the resurrection proved was not that “human beings survive after death” but that Jesus was God’s Messiah and that the kingdom of heaven was being launched, right here and now.

As for the pagans, the news was equally startling because they did not conceive of a bodily resurrection at all, and their philosophers would not have considered it desirable in any case. For them the resurrection provided a challenge to affirm the idea of a good creation, a doctrine that was not fully present in their worldview.

In the early Christian centuries, human destiny was always understood as tied in with the resurrection. As medieval piety developed and flowered, the emphasis shifted. Much of our imaginative vision of the afterlife is affiliated to the poetic storytelling of Dante, who divided the afterlife into the three realms of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Among his many visions, Dante imagined human souls (another term with a complex history and signification) as beams of light encircling a space rather like the solar system. Dante was one of the great imaginative poets of Christian and Catholic culture, but he was not a theologian, and his poetic visions are not to be taken as theology or as literal truth.

In a similar way, Plato was a poetic philosopher who communicated his ideas by means of visions and imagery. In the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates say that death is “nothing other than the separation of the soul from the body.” So far, Platonism and Christianity agree. But Plato posited an ideal world of the Forms, which transcend material things and which have the highest degree of reality. By contrast to the world of Forms, the material world is illusory and unreal and the true philosopher must seek to transcend it. The body in particular is a distraction from the spiritual life which the philosopher seeks. Life after death, according to Plato, would consist in an eternal contemplation of the Forms, in which the body played no part.

The Jewish belief system was in strong contrast to this. It saw the human being as a unity of body and spirit and the body and the material creation as good and real, not an illusion akin to the Platonic “shadows on the wall.” After death, God would keep and look after the souls of the just until the end of time when, at last, there would be a bodily resurrection of the just.

According to Wright, Platonic ideas influenced Christian thought in the form of Gnosticism starting in the second century, and they remain as a powerful “residue” influencing Christians’ thinking on a number of topics. The turn of the medieval spiritual imagination toward the three-tiered vision of afterlife à la Dante, although it did not change orthodox teaching, altered the popular vision. The robustness of the resurrection gave way to an emphasis in which the spiritual “heaven”—in orthodox teaching, an intermediate state before the final resurrection—came to appear the final goal of all things.

Wright’s inquiry offers a case in point of how a deep dive into language, culture, and philosophy can illuminate belief and purge out misunderstandings. All of this raises the possibility that our understanding of truth occasionally needs correction and reorientation, with reference to the great sources of truth. In a work like the Catholic Catechism, we find a codification and synthesis, purged of popular errors and misconceptions, of Christian faith prepared by theological experts who know the entire breadth of the tradition and the language in which it can be expressed.

And what do we find in the Catechism, in the section on “The Hope of the New Heaven and the New Earth”? We find the following:

The visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed, “so that the world itself, restore to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the just,” sharing their glorification in the risen Jesus Christ. (1047)

There are two senses to the word mystery: an unknown thing that is to be solved; and a truth unknowable except by divine revelation. Perhaps one can consider both senses together. Our faith is based on mystery, and while the Trinity is not something to be “solved” like a puzzle, we are called to find out as much about the mysteries of faith as we can through our natural gift of reason illuminated by grace. This is surely an occupation for life, and when confronting a new work of philosophy or theology is to smile with delight in discovering new corners of truth. Augustine and Aquinas taught that happiness is attained through cognition and spiritual insight. Our “walking with the Lord” from day to day surely includes the diligent study of his creation and of the mysteries by which he has communicated his truth to us.

Everything we have been saying thus far leads us to conclude that creation is the cornerstone of Christianity—not original sin, not even salvation, but creation. After all, something has to exist before you have anything to sin against, any law to violate, or any reason to be saved. The creative impulse gives joy and hope to life, and the doctrine of New Creation elevates the Search itself, making it part of God’s cosmic drama that will achieve fulfillment in the final act.

Most inspiring to me is the fact that God’s kingdom is a dimension that starts in the here and now. It’s not so much that the kingdom of God will come; rather the kingdom of God is coming. Christianity is resolutely realist; it insists that the material creation is real and that it is good and worth preserving. Creation is to be celebrated and enjoyed in all its lavishness and—important for the subject under consideration here—to be examined and studied in all its intricacy and complexity. This is the great search for truth, a never-ending adventure bringing a continuous renewal and transformation of the mind and spirit.

In the end of Paradise, Dante the pilgrim is enthralled by his ever-deeper penetration into the mystery of God. The poem ends, not with a feeling of finality or completion, but with a sense that the mystery will continue to unfold in ever-greater splendor and subtlety of insight. I think that is an excellent image of our search for truth in this earthly life: ours is not a march to the grave, but a journey of progressive illumination, in which each day brings the promise of some new wonder, some fresh joy. Let me conclude this meditation with some relevant words of the great Josef Pieper:

“[H]e who wishes to behold, and to continue to behold, the totality of things, lives in perpetual expectation of new light.”

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The featured image is “Morning Light” (1869–1941), by William McGregor Paxton, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


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