I will structure my own proposal by combining these different approaches
with the triad of seeing, judging, and acting, which underlies the Pastoral
Constitution of the Second Vatican CouncilGaudium et spes.Truth, Values, SeeingThere is nothing new or original in saying that our culture needs to widen and
even recuperate its concept of reason. Postmodernism has rejected all univer-
sal systems of meaning as a reaction, in part, to a reductive conception of
scientific reason. Because it confuses scientific or modern reason with reason
tout court, postmodernism rejects reason as such. In reality, it only rejects the
distorted image of reason. Final causality and practical truth have thus been
lost, both in postmodernism and in scientific reason. Science analyses efficient
causality; it explainshowthings come to be and why they are in the sense ofby
whatthey have been shaped. It cannot explain why natural phenomena exist
in the sense of what they existfor. For science, there is nofinal causality in
nature; nature seems meaningless. Human reason alone can confer meaning to
nature from outside.
Obviously, irrational nature possesses no awareness of its ownfinality. Only
human reason does. However, we constantly experience that our reason is
embedded in our nature. We run into our natural needs, limitations, and
inclinations. We yearn for happiness, truth, goodness, and communion. In our
conscience, we inevitably make the moral experience of good and evil, of aims
we should desire and others we should not want, of means on which we may
rely and others we must not. We rely on the means we consider good to
achieve our happiness. We rely on practical truth; we rely on what we believe
will make us happy andflourish.
In the Hebrew Bible, the word for truth,emet, also means reliability,
trustworthiness, credibility, and safety.^58 Norms, rules, orientations, and val-
ues aretruewhen they reliably lead us to life and humanflourishing. The
world is full of continuing struggles and suffering, which oppose our desires
for happiness and for life in plenitude. In such a world, we cannot live without
hope, and hope can only build on truth.‘One word of truth weighs more
than the whole world,’Alexander Solzhenitsyn said at the end of his Nobel
Prize lecture.^59
(^58) See Francis Brown, Samuel R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs (eds),A Hebrew and English
Lexicon of the Old Testament, Based on the Lexicon of William Gesenius, trans. Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 54; an excellent explanation is to be found in: http://
http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Glossary/Word_of_the_Week/Archived/Emet/emet.html.
(^59) Quoted from Royal,Christian Humanism, 98.
A Catholic Concept of Christian Humanism 215