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Veritatis splendor Curso de Verano del Phoenix Institute
Justice and Mercy
Ensayo ganador elegido por Rocco Buttligione
Manuel Alejandro Gutiérrez González
In this essay I want to comment what I think is the notion, term, word truth. I think that this word is very important to re-discover or know the origins of the word, because in this age and all the places a lot of people think that the truth is something that is not absolute and it depends for the time and the place. The approach that is proposed to do this, is with the phenomenological ex- perience, so I will explain some elements of the truth with examples to approach to the reality or the essence of truth. I take the title of one of the encyclical letters of saint John Paul II, because I think that truth glow and shine of one of its elements, and its the light that illuminates all people.
The first thing that I can see of the element of truth is that a lot of people in the society thinks that the truth is relative and not ab- solute. I can say that this statement is true, but at the same time is false. This statement is true because the truth is a kind of relation between human intelligence and the things, its different the relation of the mathemati- cian with the numbers, that the relation that have the physicians, chemists and the philosophers, the approach that has the physicians and chemists to numbers is very particular, they use the numbers to explain their sciences, so the approach to numbers that these have is only using them; the approach that the philosophical science have is asking the essence of the numbers, and the approach that has mathematics is the relationship between the numbers with operations like addition and its reference to the geometric shapes. Also the relation that a lawyer have to the numbers is to poor, because his method does not include the numbers, but the lawyer has a little notion of numbers to ask the payment for his ser- vices. The truth is relative in the meaning of relation, not in the meaning that everyone
has its own truth. When the relation is big- ger the intensity of the truth is bigger, and when the relation is poor the intensity of it is less. So this little difference help us to ex- press the idea that there would be a bigger difference in the approach to the truth, and maybe it would be an absolute truth, and I think that if my experience with the objects are limited, are temporal, and I can make mistakes, maybe it would change over time or it can be perfected over time; but it would exist somebody that his experiences never change and knows perfectly the tru- th of all the things over time, maybe would exists somebody that can make perfect re- lations with all the objects; my experience is limited by my body, and this somebody no needs body to have perfect relations and also he never do mistakes in the time, so the relation that this somebody and all the things needs to be in the eternity (becau- se in this type of “time” doesn’t exist the measure of the before and after), absolute (without limitations), and this elements we can find them in the essence of God, God has a certain relation with all the things in His eternal and absolute mind. So, in our social context when people say that the tru- th is relative, they mean that everyone has its own truth, but in fact relative signifies a certain relation; we can also affirm that the truth is absolute because exist somebody that has no limits in the knowledge of all the things.
A second element that I found on truth is explained in the definition that Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas say: the truth is the adequation of the thing and the inte- llect. I think that this translation is to poor, because in latin it can explain a lot of things (adaequatio rei et intellectus), for instance the term adaequatio means that something goes to equality, tends to equality, this tenden-
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