The Art of Living: Truthfulness
By Reid Bissen, Obl.S.B.
This article was originally published in our December 2024 Kansas Monks newsletter. Read the whole newsletter at www.kansasmonks.org/newsletter/december2024
Ge, Nikolai. “What is truth?” (1890). Oil on canvas.
“What is truth?”—the infamous words of Pontius Pilate to Jesus ring with a similar dissonance to modern skepticism. But was his question evidence of a merely intellectual reservation, or a lack of moral integrity? Surely handing over Jesus to the crowd was not the first time Pilate caved to outside pressures and acted in morally inconsistent ways. Leading up to this moment was a pattern of behavior towards reality that favored himself over what is true. Attitudes such as this one can color our entire approach to everyday realities, which means the ramifications to our moral lives are tremendous.
One might argue that all moral failures are created by lies. When I do harm to another, it is because I lied in believing that he is less than a person with an equal dignity to myself. But why do we lie? The willingness to lie in words, thought, or in an inconsistency in the way we act, is at its root the desire to use another person for one’s own gain. If I want someone to think well of me, I could act in a way that is inconsistent with who I really am. This is deceitful because the other person consented to those beliefs on false pretenses. I manipulated them into committing to a belief that benefited me. I used them for my own benefit. So goes the logic of other vices as well.
Apart from those who consciously lie for their own gain and those who like the Pharisees lie to themselves to deny hard truths they do not want to face, there is another kind of transgressor against truth that is even more sly and perhaps more common in Christian circles. Often, without realizing it, we can slip into fabricated and inflated behaviors or emotional states that find their end in self-seeking. This isn’t so much a lie as conventionally understood; it is a lie in the sense that it is a disregard for reality as it is, and by extension myself as I am. Ironically, the cause of this disregard is self-obsession. When we turn in on ourselves, we rarely look at the self as it really is, but at either an idealized or underappreciated version of ourselves. When the way we look at ourselves lacks truthfulness, we think and act in ways that are not in accord with reality. Instead of responding to reality, we respond to the distorted image of ourselves by enacting an equally distorted personality. Thus, we can very easily become fake, either by the way of inflating or deflating ourselves.
If we live in this space of self-obsession, then the way we interact with reality becomes distorted across the board. For example, when someone shares regretful news and asks for prayers, my reaction of sorrow and sympathy is exaggerated. I take pleasure in how compassionate I am. Perhaps later I say a single rushed Hail Mary. How was I actually affected by that news? When I experience strong consolations in prayer, do I relish the fact that they are happening to me, inflating the joy of feeling close to God to the extent that I lose sight of God Himself? In both of these scenarios, there is a discrepancy between the “input” that reality gives me, and the “output” that I generate in thought, word, and deed. When this becomes a habit, I live in a fantasy where everything is about me, and the world as given to me by God is manipulated for my own benefit. By lying, I live in a lie.
The antithetical attitude is a genuineness that springs from a deep respect for reality. I don’t feel the need to make reality any bigger or smaller than it is. I allow myself to be moved in proportion to my experience. What sustains this respect is an affection for what is. I must recognize that to think, act, and speak in accord with the truth is fundamentally to give witness to God as Creator and Lord. Because of this, the truthful man finds posturing and flattery repulsive. We all have insecurities. We have the choice to accept them or to compensate for them. The humble man realizes that he cannot be anything else except what he is in the current moment and is able to accept his limitations. “Humility is truth”, as St. Teresa of Avila attested. Humility will not allow us to lie. Pride, on the other hand, will attempt in vain to wrangle and distort reality into an image that best suits my own interests. Meanwhile, I stand afar off from reality—from others, from God—because I am no longer in contact with what is real.
These deceptions deny others the right they have to know the truth about who you are and who they are. In other words, to know the truth about reality. We ought to respect others so much that we would never present a false image of ourselves to another person, and neither would we mirror back to another person a false image of themselves. Likewise, we ought to respect ourselves enough not to make ourselves the center of the universe. And finally, we ought to respect God by choosing to receive reality, especially the reality about ourselves, as it is given by Him in love.