"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate asked Jesus.
It wasn't a bad question to ask. Pilate's problem, one of them anyway, was that he wasn't looking for an answer, and he wasn't prepared to radically transform his life if he heard one. He didn't care what truth was. Particularly bad timing for him to be a man without a chest, for truth was standing before him, made manifest before his eyes; he could touch him.
Pilate was in a physical position to relate to truth in an intimate and life-fulfilling way, but he had other relations and relationships that weighed heavily on his heart and mind. He couldn't be bothered with the truth, even when it was literally within his reach. Instead, he sent truth away, washed his hands of it, and allowed truth to be destroyed because the Truth who is a Person didn't correspond to men's ideas of what truth is.
Pilate couldn't hear a profound answer to his question because his indifference to the truth put him in a poor relationship to truth, blinding him to the loving face of truth before him. He could not hear and could not see because he had false relationship to truth. We cannot know truth or what truth is unless we have a real relationship with truth.
How do we know what relationship we have to truth?
The language we use, and particularly the metaphors with which we play, give us some indication. Metaphors of sight and touch are perhaps the most common in my experience. We speak of seeing the truth and touching the truth. Wondering whether another understands our meaning, we ask, "Do you see what I mean?" or "Do you grasp my meaning?" Words for having knowledge of the truth use the metaphors of sight and light: enlightenment and illumination. The philosophers Gabriel Marcel and Paul Ricoeur, mindful of the majesty of truth, spoke of hope that they bathed in the light of truth. Hegel believed his hands were busy at truth's delivery. Even the word understanding is a metaphor: to stand under, to get at the roots of, to see the foundation. The word understanding implies digging and close examination of what's below the surface, and so makes use of both metaphors of sight and touch.
We can delve deeper into these metaphors and what they reveal about our relationship to truth. The metaphor of sight indicates a relationship of some distance from the truth, but where we can see more of the whole. Touch implies a closeness and intimacy with truth, but a blindness to what is outside our touch and close vision. These metaphors, as all metaphors do, conceal what they reveal.
Even when we touch the truth or see the truth, though, our relationship to truth can be false and dangerous. We can fool ourselves into thinking that our vision captures the totality of infinite truth. We can take hold of truth and jealously guard it as a possession or wield it as a weapon against those who to our minds do not have the truth.
Saying that we have the truth isn't necessarily wrong or bad, so long as we realize that it is not something we entirely understand or possess in our finite little minds. We have truth so that we may share truth, and truth is bigger than we are. I believe our relationship with truth ought to be one of love, humility, and hospitality. The truth isn't meant to be hated, manhandled, or hidden away.
When we touch upon the truth, is our touch an embrace of friends or family, a caress of a lover, or a handshake of hospitality? Is our touch that of a child hugging and kissing her parents? Or do we grab the truth and pull it to ourselves and to ourselves alone? Do we try to hide it from those we deem unworthy to hold it? Do we take truth in hands and swing it about like a scythe, reaping others away to weep and gnash their teeth? Do we think that truth is purely the product of our hands? Do we wave or push it aside like Pilate?
The metaphors we use to speak and think about truth shape and reveal our relationship to truth. They determine in part whether that relationship will be real and sustaining or false and fleeting. Metaphors can be a matter of life and death.
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