When my novel Feldy’s Girl came out, in 2019, a critic sent me a note: “You wrote a traditional Catholic novel, you clever bastard!” I thought that was funny, partly because it was true and partly because I hadn’t returned to the Church yet. I still considered myself atheist, at that time. But writing that novel put me back on the road to Catholicism.
The title character of that novel, Teresa Feldevert, observes that
“God’s love might best be defined as Truth. Or maybe I should say that the bounty of God’s love, is Truth.”
I wasn’t letting Teresa state my own beliefs, when I wrote those two sentences. Teresa is probably a more devout, more basic Christian than I am. At the time I wrote that book, I didn’t believe in a personal God, and I still don’t believe in a corporeal God. (Most Catholics believe that God is incorporeal.) I’m more inclined to believe that God is our way of putting a body, a face, and a long white beard on the concept of objective truth—which I do believe in. I may never know exactly what truth is, but I can make it my mission, for the rest of my life, to get closer to it.
Teresa, in her nightly prayers, always asks God to help her to be the person He means her to be. I guess the closest I can come to that is to pray that I will act in accordance with truth.
I can say, at least, that saying “Truth” is a way of saying “God,” and of saying “Good”—and that’s both a sobering and a comforting discovery when you stumble on it. I didn’t discover God, or Truth, or Good, or whatever word we might use as the name of this unknowable concept. What I did discover, on the contrary, is Evil.
Many people describe Good as a great light, as in, “I have seen the light.” I suggest that Good is anything but light. It’s darkness. That explains why it’s so hard to see.
Evil is not dark. Evil is so bright that we often can’t stand to stare it in the face. That’s why we are reluctant to call it evil when we see it. It’s why we’re reluctant to be “judgmental,” when a decent person can’t help being judgmental. Kids today aren’t told about evil. Instead, they’re taught, “People are basically good,” which is one of the most dangerous ideas a person can carry around. Kids are even taught, “You’re perfect just the way you are.” I can’t think of a better way to ensure that children will turn out horribly, than to tell them that.
We are not basically good. Man is concupiscent: naturally weak, naturally inclined to sin. Being good is not our default position. Our impulses are often evil. Good is a very difficult quality to achieve. Many theologians say you can never really be good. All you can do is strive to make yourself a little less bad.
We all struggle, all our lives long (unless we are downright sociopathic) against that natural tendency to do evil. If you’re a person of good will, you have to get rid of the notion that people are basically good, because that idea leads us to error, and sometimes to downright madness. If people are basically good, how do we explain all the evil in the world? Evil doesn’t surprise me. Instead, I’m amazed that some of us do our best to avoid evil!
We have to bear in mind, of course, that nobody except an outright sadist believes that he’s doing evil. The human conscience is infinitely malleable. It will allow us to rationalize even the worst behavior, and the most grievous sins.
Sin can be defined as “bad praise,” the opposite of right praise. If you think of God as the personification of Truth, sin is praise of Falsehood: giving the highest praise to that which goes against Truth; listening to a deceptive voice and being advised by it. You are integrated—that is, you are in line with Truth, you are right with God—when you are in a position of right praise.
Original sin is the original problem. Original sin is Pride: thinking that you can be as gods, that you can decide what is Truth, that you are the definer of Truth, that Truth does not exist outside of yourself. Pride means arrogating to yourself the discrimination between good and evil. Pride makes people wander off the path, and when they wander off the path they’ll often find it impossible to find the path again. That’s what religion is for: to keep you on the path. You can’t go without a guide—a guide other than yourself—to keep you on the right path. If you stray, you’re dead.
Wisdom begins when we admit that there is objective Truth, that exists outside ourselves. We gain wisdom when we recognize that God is Truth, if God is nothing else—and that there is not “your truth” and “my truth,” but only one Truth with a capital T. Without the search for that objective truth—without recognition of it when you occasionally glimpse it—wisdom and morality aren’t even concepts.
There is a tao (to use a non-Christian term) that makes us recognize something true, something beautiful, something just—which is why no serious person would say that a sunset is ugly, or that a mother loving her child is no different from a mother neglecting her child. But too many people have convinced themselves that truth, beauty, and goodness are all relative terms, and/or “oppressive” concepts.
I might call myself a person of conscience, but if my conscience is guided by falsehood, it will steer me over the cliff. That is why the world is such a mess: because too many people pretend that falsehood is truth, and consequently there is nothing they won’t rationalize. They will start with a false premise, assume that that premise is also the conclusion, and will create a narrative that purports to prove that conclusion—with no regard for truth.
