Political Philosophy and Revelation

17. On That by Which Human Things Are Measured

203 17.  On That by Which Human Things Are Measured “Do you think truth is ordered to its measure or its lack?” “To measure.” “Then let’s also seek a mind naturally measured and agreeable, whose self-nature allows it to be easily led to the shape of each thing that is.” Plato We have now to consider the extrinsic principles of acts. Now the extrinsic principle inclining to evil is the devil.... But the extrinsic principle moving to good is God.  Thomas Aquinas My friend, in something like this a measure that falls short of what is, by even the slightest amount, can hardly be good. Nothing imperfect is the measure of any thing. But some seem satisfied even with that and think there’s no need to search further. Plato I • The great modern “heresy,” if I dare use that antimodern but still noble word, is that no truth can be found. Especially we find no truth according to which man is to live a life that orders him to a good whose essence is not concocted by himself. The truth is that there is no truth. That contradictory truth, at least, is true. It is a pragmatic “truth.” We “make” it; therefore we know it. It conforms to our mind’s notion of what is true “for us.” We need it to be true in order that we be not bound to anything but ourselves. “Truthlessness” is the foundation of liberty. An earlier version of this chapter was prepared as a lecture for a conference at St. Anselm ’s College, Vermont, September 2010, and published in Angelicum (Rome), 87 (2012): 1043–53. Epigraphs are from Plato, Republic, 486d and 504c, respectively; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, 90, Proemium. 204   Much That Is Fair Liberty is unrelated to being. We can only be “blamed” if we do not act, if we do nothing. The void of “being” is filled by the acting willmind shoving and pushing into existence whatever it wants because it wants it. This sovereign nobility of the “free” man is, in its own way, even more “lonely” than the Aristotelian God or First Mover who was said to be utterly unconcerned with what was not himself, however much he attracted what is not God to himself. Yet, when we read these things, we suspect that we are more likely to be talking to Nietzsche than to Aristotle. Aristotle knew about being and friends; he just did not know how to put them together in the Godhead. Nothing he said would preclude the right answer once known. All else was moved by love and knowledge toward the First Mover. Christian philosophers, however, read this “no truth” view in the light of Christ who said: “I am the truth.” This striking affirmation that locates truth in a person, in an “I,” suggests that disembodied truth lacks the fullness to which truth can attain. “I am the way and the truth and the life”—all three at once. If truth, as Aquinas says, is the “conformity” of mind to what is, then that which is finally reached by the human mind cannot simply be another “idea” that is not grounded in something concrete, nor can it be man himself since he knows that he is not the origin of being, particularly his own. This realization is why what we know, while it remains ours, always refers back to its origin in being. The quidditas, as we know it, must be found in re sensibili. Ultimately, we want to know everything about every “something,” whatever its level of being. We want to know why it is as it is; why it is not something else. If the being we want to know is also another human being, not ourselves, it must reveal itself to us because it chooses to do so. We cannot know another of our kind only from the outside. As an explanation of reality, humanism, in modernity, has become an understanding of truth that does not depend for its validity on any conformity to what is not itself. This understanding of autonomous humanism can only happen in a human mind, in a being with body and intelligence, mind and hands. In a sense, humanism is what logically happens when practical intellect becomes the criterion of theoretical intellect. The proper relation of theoretic and practical intellect Human Things 205 was a theme that much...