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"The Whole Risk for a Human Being": On the Insufficiency of Apollo
- Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture
- University of St. Thomas
- Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2004
- pp. 14-29
- 10.1353/log.2004.0020
- Article
- Additional Information
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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7.2 (2004) 14-29
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"The Whole Risk for a Human Being"
On the Insufficiency of Apollo
James V. Schall, S.J.
Now here, my dear Glaucon, is the whole risk for a human being, as it seems. And on this account each of us must, to the neglect of other studies, above all see to it that he is a seeker and student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible.
Plato, The Republic
People wondered: where was God when the gas chambers were operating? This objection, which seemed reasonable enough before Auschwitz when one recognized all the atrocities of history, shows that in any case a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates, was "the God" and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as "the truly divine" is absolutely no longer sufficient.
Josef Cardinal Ratzinger,
"The Beauty and the Truth of Christ"1 [End Page 14]
What is it, do you think, that causes the return (to the faith)? I think it is the problem of living, for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. The solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember.
Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome2
I.
Not long ago, a student stopped me after class. He apologized for asking an "impertinent" question. I am, after all, a Thomist—that is, "Ask and ye shall receive at least an opinion, provided you know the technical difference between opinion and truth!" The young man wanted to know whether I thought there was such a thing as truth. Note, he did not ask whether there was truth, but whether I thought there was. Though I think such a problem as the existence of truth might, deep down, bother not a few of our kind, still it is not a question that one is asked every day. My opinion is that there is such a thing as truth, which, technically, means that what I hold is not just an opinion.
To my knowledge, I had never given any indication in writing or speaking that I did not hold truth to be a decided possibility, to be a fact, something I hope we can still affirm today without seeming arrogant. Thus, I was puzzled. Why is such a question addressed to someone who obviously holds to the possibility of truth? I have, after all, pondered with delight Aquinas's famous phrase, omne ens est verum, "all being is true." Josef Pieper's The Truth of All Things I consider to be a jewel of intelligence.3 With some confidentiality, however, as if he were letting me in on some deep secret about which I was totally clueless, the student explained that "around here and in our age groups, few people [he might have said no one] think that truth exists." At this presumably startling, if not shocking, information, I did not bat an eyelash. I am a man of the world.
Surely, I thought to myself, this young man had not forgotten that I had read in class the beginning lines of Allan Bloom's The Closing of [End Page 15] the American Mind, in which Bloom bluntly states that the one thing any professor can be sure of, on entering a class for the first time, is that every student there thinks, or claims they think, that truth is relative.4 I will not here go into the self-contradictory irony of the "truth" of the proposition that all "truth is relative." The real iconoclasts today, young or old, are not the unbelievers in truth's existence (who...