Jesus and Pontius Pilate, same historic moment, two accounts:
Jesus: “I came into the world to testify to the truth.”
Pilate: “What is truth?” With this he went out.
—John 18:38 (New International Version)
Jesus: “I look for truth and find that I get damned.”
Pilate: “But what is truth/Is truth unchanging law?
We both have truths/Are mine the same as yours?”—Jesus Christ Superstar (Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice)
I remember when my older sister, Lisa, got Jesus Christ Superstar, the two-album rock opera, when it came out. I remember the sturdy box the LPs came in, along with a brown-cover lyrics booklet in heavy beige paper. I remember listening to the songs over and over, most of the words ending up fixed in my head. But it would be years later when I meditated on what Pilate meant by truth, according to the Bible and also by the gospel of Weber and Rice.
“We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?” But wasn’t the truth the truth, even way back then? Could each person—say, Pilate and Jesus—have his own set of truths, giving the lie to any notion of one set of eternal truths?
I’ve wondered whether they were talking about something not exactly related to assertions of truth and falsity, but something that really belongs in the sphere of taste, maybe in the outer orbit of it. Were they using “truth” as a stand-in for the likes of, perhaps, ways, customs, traditions, worldviews? Some other thing, with both substance and essence, lasting, absolute, eternal?
You could say that truth is axiomatic—but really only if you can get others to agree with you. The Pontius Pilate in Superstar seems to be searching for that agreement. To say something is an axiom, a given, is really no different from getting agreement on a meaning of a contested word.
If a bunch of people say that truth is such and such, then that’s what truth is to those people at that time. I imagine Jesus and Pilate talking past one another. In my previous post “If a Lion Could Talk,” I quote the writer Ben Dupré on the agreement of meaning of words: “Language is . . . woven seamlessly into the fabric of lives that people live together; to share a language is to share a culture of beliefs and assumptions and to share a common outlook on the world.”
Of course Jesus and Pilate did not live a life together, and it’s doubtful they shared beliefs, assumptions, and an outlook on the world. They talked past each other, couldn’t get anywhere, and that brought about one of history’s most portentous moments.
Moving to recent times, the philosopher and popular writer Mortimer Adler surveyed the great thinkers and writers in history, going back to the Sophists of ancient Greece, and came to the conclusion that, among them, there was nearly unanimous agreement on the nature of truth—but not necessarily on what is true.
Adler, following history, says we’re in possession of the truth when there is “agreement or correspondence between what we’re thinking and what actually exists or does not exist in the reality that is independent of our thinking one thing or another.” And that seems just so much common sense.
My own thoughts about truth run like this. When it comes to the correspondence with reality, that reality is in the sensible world of physical things, where we perceive with our senses. There is the reality—or truth or fact—that a hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron; that entropy tends to increase; that I am sixty-nine inches tall.
Adler points out in his book Six Great Ideas (1981) that Plato believed there were two worlds, the sensible one of the physical things and one of intelligible objects that we apprehend by our intellect (or mind). Both worlds would exist even if there were no human beings with the human traits to think about the likes of justice.
Plato was right, Adler continues, that we could think about the likes of truth, justice, goodness as objects of thought. They’re objective in the sense that you and I can hold them out as objects before us, objects of thought, and discuss them. But they exist only because we’re thinking about them. They exist objectively, but not with the reality of the stuff in the physical world, like the hydrogen atom.
But Plato was wrong, Adler says, to say that the things of the intelligible world we apprehend with our minds would continue to exist even if there were no humans to think about them.
Sister Lisa happens to be on Plato’s side. She believes there are eternal truths, such as justice, and that they would exist, as I understand her, even if there were no humans on Earth. But I’m with Adler in the belief that physical objects would still be here, but not the likes of, say, justice or the truth of justice.
Finally, whenever we use the word belief, or believe, we do so knowing that we have doubt. Belief encompasses at least a tincture of unease. Lisa and I can marshal no sound evidence to reliably support our different positions. But we’re okay with these positions, these beliefs, these respective leaps of faith.
At least for now.
Usual thanks to R.J. Long for editing assistance.