God is Truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
Saint of the Day Quote: Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
There is much that St. Theresa Benedicta had to say about faith. here’s one which I had in a blog post about faith and science: ““Since the ultimate ground of all existence [alles Seienden] is unfathomable, everything which is seen in this ultimate perspective moves into that ‘dark light’ of faith, and everything intelligible is placed in a setting with an incomprehensible background.”
—St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), Finite and Eternal Being, p. 25
I made the point after this that science can aanswer the question how we came to be here, but only faith can answer why.
To say that God is truth presents problems. Truth is relational, the adaequatio mentis ad rem; what relation can we ever know of between God (whom St. Teresa acknowledges is unfathomable) and any creature? There is the relations among the divine Persons, yes, but this something known through revelation, and has no relevance to the question of truth in philosophy.
When Jesus tells us He is the way, the truth, and the life, He is speaking of Himself as the outpouring of divine love into creation. God in His divine nature is not truth just as He isn’t the way — a way is a means to something, not an end in itself. It is Jesus, the theandric Being, who is the way by which redeemed mankind may approach God, the truth because in Him, the perfect image of the Father, we apprehend what human wisdom cannot know, and the life which is the grace He bestows through and for the sake of His precious mystical body, the Church.
If God by His nature were truth, then any truth, even the most trivial, would be divine. If every search for truth were a search for God, then every justified conclusion of our fallible human reason would become an idol. This can lead to unfortunate consequences, like popes kissing Qur’ans.
“God is Truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.”
Amen
The Blessed Virgin Mary asked God only to do His will.
Theology, philosophy and even reason by faulty, fallen human beings is faulty and fallen.
Our priest mentioned her at Sunday’s Mass. He said she was killed by the Nazi’s in a death camp. She was a Jewish convert.