Lies, repeated long enough, become the truth?

St Thomas Aquinas

How many of us were told as children that it took Columbus' discovery of the New World in 1492 to put paid to the notion that the world is flat? For those of us who heard this piece of knowledge to believe otherwise would have been perceived to be the height of ignorance. Yet over two hundred years before Columbus set out to find a quicker trade route to India, Thomas Aquinas, a portly monk, a man far less travelled than Columbus, introduced his Summa Theologica by stating to his students: "For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion – that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (I.e., abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself". (Summa Theologica, I, I, I)

The Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison in his work, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (1942), also writes: "for all of the vulgar errors connected with Columbus, the most persistent and the most absurd is that he had to convince people 'the world was round'. Every European man in his day believed the world to be a sphere, every European university so taught geography". (Morison, 1942, p. 31) Thus the claim that the Church believed the world flat, or that the scholars of the time of Columbus accepted this to be the case, is a well-repeated lie, which as Macchiavelli tells us about lies, if repeated often enough become the truth.

How many of us have been told by our history teachers that the practice of homosexuality was the accepted norm in Ancient Greece, and took this information to be true. Yet Plato in Laws I, writes categorically: "But homosexual intercourse and lesbianism seem to be unnatural crimes of the first rank, and are committed because men and women cannot control their desire for pleasure". (Plato: The Complete Works, 1997, p. 1330).

How many of us have been convinced by our teachers that Oscar Wilde was a poor victim of homophobia. For want of being able to read French, we were thus never exposed to Wilde the paedophile who in Algiers in 1894 supplied poor Arab children to the likes of the future Nobel Prize winner, Andre Gide, who was later to write of meeting Wilde: "Lord, I have come back to Thee because I believe that all is vanity save knowing Thee … I have followed tortuous ways and thought to grow rich with false gods … I find myself poor indeed. Lord, save me from evil … Wilde has done nothing but harm". (Gide, 2000, p. vii)

How many people over the centuries have been duped to take the side of the 'wise and good'. Thomas Jefferson, the famous author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote about the rights of man, but refused to free his long-time slave, Sally Hemmings, in his last will and testament. This is the same Sally Hemmings who in rumours at the time of Jefferson's death it was claimed was the mother of a number of children by her master, and who for over a 150 years after his death was considered by the Jefferson family to be far below their famous ancestor. As the Pulitzer Prize winner, Joseph Ellis wrote in the light of DNA evidence, in his biography of Jefferson: "Sally gave birth to seven children between 1790 and 1808. Whether Jefferson fathered all of them will probably never be known … The likelihood of a long-standing sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemmings can never be proven absolutely, but it is now proven beyond reasonable doubt". (Ellis, 1998, p. 367)

Uncertainty applies to many of our findings in human history…

What we can say of all these examples is that if incertitude is characteristic of every human being, then it must follow that uncertainty applies to many of our findings in human history.

Nicholas of Cusa

Nicholas of Cusa in his spiritual classic On Learned Ignorance, once wrote: "All we know of truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach". The knowledge that we build up in a lifetime is open to error due to the fallible and corrupt nature of our intellects and those of others.

Throughout history science improves upon previous discoveries, and historians discover new documents, yet no human being has access to all the knowledge in the world, or the time to digest this material in order to have a perfect understanding of the world in which they live. We continue to make errors as each of us in our own way is a man chained in Plato's cave, looking at shadows dancing upon a wall – understanding our worlds and our eras through eyes shaped by the limitations of our particular education and the context of our lives. As human beings we are indeed wounded healers, passing on in turn to the next generation either wisdom, ignorance, or mischief according to our purpose and/or our ability. We hear in the nineteenth century of scientists scoffing at the notion of God creating the world in six days, claiming the Catholic Church to be wrong in its understanding of Creation, even though fifteen hundred years before, the great Latin Father of the Church, St. Augustine, claimed in his The City of God, that only a fool would attempt to quantify the days of God to the days of men. Why the nineteenth century scientists were indeed wrong in accusing the Church, was that although they had good scientific knowledge, they were ill-read in the theology of the Church Fathers. Thus they debated issues with others who were also ignorant of St. Augustine, on matters that had been put to rest over a millennia before.

We must strive for Truth in our lives…

But if humanity is doomed to ignorance and the continual re-inventing of the wheel, should we not then close down our schools and universities and forget about the quest for Truth and understanding? Far from it! John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, discusses the need for every person to seek out the truth, which as Cusa warns us, is beyond our absolute understanding, but whose search is nonetheless required of us in order to come to self-awareness and completeness. According to John Paul II, it is our responsibility to find good teachers and learn from these people. Following this, as best as we can we must strive for Truth in our lives. We must combine the best use of our intellects with the best use of our spirits. As John Paul II wrote: "It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition. By the same token, reason which is unrelated to an adult faith is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being". (John Paul II, 1998, p. 74)

That the absolute truth is beyond our reach does not mean that this Truth does not exist. When the notion of an absolute truth is neglected all we have to live by is a series of endless and strongly debated opinions, which bombard our intellects and wrestle for authority over our consciences. We become as vessels carried away on a storm, with many lights luring us toward them for safety, but on reaching the source of the beacon, we find we have no adequate place on which to moor our lives. For this reason God revealed Himself to us and established His Church, in order that we not exist like mice who in a cage repeat their tricks each day for the sake of so doing, but that we can come to understand a purpose in our lives. There may not be certitude within human behaviour, but there is a certitude in our God — a certitude which dispels the limitations of our intellect, by granting us a glimpse of the Godhead. As Aquinas wrote in verse form:

"Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true".

Plato in Republic VII, extending on his cave-men imagery, wrote: "And if someone compelled him to look at the light itself, wouldn't his eyes hurt, and wouldn't he turn around and flee towards the things he's able to see, believing that they're really clearer than the ones he's being shown?" (Plato: The Complete Works, 1997, p. 1133) Our God indeed is like the light shone into a darkened cave — for in dispelling the darkness of our lives, through the revelation of Himself, we have despite all the conjectures and debates of the intellect, a certitude of who we are in this life. We begin to see each other with greater clarity and come to grasp a purpose in our lives. The light that shines also makes our minds understand possibilities that we once thought were impossible. Instead of narrowing the extent of human understanding — God extends this understanding; taking us from being creatures who know that they don't know, to creatures who know that they are — images of God in a world of uncertainty, shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.

©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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