What is Truth ?

Truth must be understood as 'adequation' --a sort of cooperation between human mind and the created world, which seems to amount to poiesis.

So, we can reject the fact/value distinction, narrative, imagination, emotion, rhetoric etc ARE our only means of access to objective truth.

God and things truly give themselves to be participated in.

They are not obscure noumenon hiding behind phenomena.

To be "true" to things is to go along sympathetically with the inner reality of things. But this requires creativity, language, interpretation.

It is a receptivity which is also creative; an attuned creativity.

This is how Christianity (in its catechistic principles and mysteries) communicates truth, not as a theoretical or definable truth, but as an essential truth that ‘by some mysterious affinity’ is appropriate to humankind.

Such is how John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock explain it.

John Médaille HERE, speaks of reason as fully grasping the whole within contemplation,


“The rose can be “explained” by reduction to its causes, but it cannot be understood in this way. The scientist or the rationalist philosopher can only explain the rose by ignoring its actual being. ….the purchase of a rose does not have causes, but grounds.

When we look at the cosmos as a whole, we see order and beauty, and can only understand them through an aesthetic view. While the parts are governed by a strictly deterministic rationality and can be understood through knowledge of the causes, the whole is governed by order and beauty, and one that cannot be rationalized. The cosmos is cosmetic and like all things cosmetic, it escapes the purely rational in favor of pure contemplation. What it does not invite is some reduction of cosmic order to the four causes, the endpoint of all rational analysis. That is, the cosmos escapes rationalism.

When philosophy moves from the realm of causes to the realm of grounds it also moves from the world of determinism to the world of freedom. In one world, effects are determined by their causes, but in the other, actions are occasioned by their grounds. And clearly, the same grounds can always lead to different actions. The grounds are given, but the responses are, or can be, free.

Of course, abandoning the “knowledge by causes” of an analytic philosophy has its psychic cost. For one thing, we must abandon (or at least demote) the world of secure knowledge and enter the misty world, the cloud of unknowing, the world where humility rather than certainty is the watchword. And it brings us from the world of propositions into the world of art and story, of image and narrative.

In this world, “reason” itself shifts from “firm conclusions drawn from secure propositions” to reason as the ratio between the image and the object, between the narrative and the world. 

Some will allow that stories have an “emotive” power but doubt their necessary hold on reason.

But this gets it exactly backwards: a story might be emotive, but it must be reasonable. That is, a story must be proportional to a view of the world we either have or can imagine having. The story may extend or deepen our rationality, but it must appeal to it in some way, or else it will simply be rejected as untrue or as uninteresting. And it is precisely this proportionality, this ratio, which constitutes reason itself.

This view also solves a problem that bedevils the analyst, namely, why does God choose to speak to us as he does? Why did he give us a sermon on the mount rather than a seminar in the synagogue?

But this question is rooted not so much in bad philosophy as in bad anthropology. For the analytic philosopher, like the capitalist, imagines man to be a “rational” machine. But “rational” here loses it connection with ratio, proportionality, to become something more like “calculating,” either “utilities” (in the case of the capitalist) or “propositions” (in the case of the philosopher.)

But man does not work like that, and neither does God. Or at least, God chose to present himself as artist and historian rather than as philosopher.

He gives us stories, not propositions. And the stories must be believed before they can be used.

That being the case, I must start with the right stories rather than the “right” philosophy. Because that is how all people think and is the only way they can think."

Or, as David Bentley Hart puts it :

"There is no single master discourse here, for the good can be known only in being seen, before and beyond all words. Certain fundamental moral truths, for instance, may necessarily remain unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach’s fifth Unaccompanied Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual." Ethics is in some sense primarily aesthetic and so is irreducible to epistemology (tradition/reason). Philosophical knowledge of God as being itself is similarly inspired by the experience of the total gratuity of finite being.

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him.”
(John 18: 36-38)