By Dietrich von Hildebrand.

“Enamored of our present epoch, blind to all its characteristic dangers, intoxicated with everything modern, there are many Catholics who no longer ask whether something is true, or whether it is good and beautiful, or whether it has an intrinsic value: they ask only whether it is up-to-date, suitable to “modern man” and the technological age, whether it is challenging, dynamic, audacious, progressive.

Yet there is a tendency that is more refined than the subordination of truth to the fashions of our time. This is the attempt to interpret the notion of truth in a way that amounts to undermining its very content. This error is presented in an orthodox and religious guise and so is more dangerous to faith. We are referring to the distinction, gaining popularity, between “Greek” and “biblical” notions of truth. It is a typical feature of our sociology-oriented age to present the most elementary data of human experience as deriving from the mentalities of certain nations and cultures.

This intellectual fashion becomes particularly absurd when applied to truth. The authentic notion of truth is in fact so fundamental and indispensable that even attempts to give it a “new” interpretation presuppose it.

Truth is not a national, or cultural, or epochal property. Truth is the conformity of a statement to reality, to the existing facts. The entire emphasis is laid on the fact that something is really thus and so. The sphere of being to which the statement refers may vary, but the test of truth remains the same.

The proposition may refer to a general law, to an essential relation, or to a concrete fact. The statements “Moral values presuppose persons” and “Napoleon died at St. Helena” do not differ in quantum truth, however much the realities referred to differ.”

A true statement, whether in philosophy or empirical science, is one that possesses objective validity and is thus opposed to falsity, to the non-validity of an affirmed illusion or fiction. Moreover, the truth of a statement referring to a concrete fact— so-called historical truth—does not differ from the truth of universal statements.

The source of its truth is the actual existence of the fact. To say there is a truth that has an historical stamp is therefore quite ambiguous. The reality to which the truth refers is, of course, an historical event. But the truth itself is not historical.

That Napoleon died at St. Helena is true, was true fifty years ago, and will always be true. Thus, there is no “historical truth,” only a truth about historical facts. Even though truth is in the first instance predicated of the proposition, it remains completely focused on the existence of some being—whether a concrete fact or an ideal state-of-affairs.

In other words, the very soul of truth is the existence of the being to which it refers. The question “Is it so, or is it not?” is equivalent to the question “Is it true, or is it not?” To see in truth something merely logical, something belonging merely to the conceptual order, is to miss its all-important existential impact.

—- Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Dethronement of Truth

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”— Genesis 1:1

+ The Law of Non-contradiction

+ When popes condemned deliberate ambiguity as the “art of deception”