TRUTH AND TIMELINESS
It is not as an individual “great thinker,” not as “a man of genius,” that Thomas is apportioned that remarkable authority the extent and claim of which is often surprising. Thomas Aquinas has something of the status of an “institution.” We find him cited, in one of the great classical legal compendia, the Codex Juris as a standard of orthodoxy. An encyclical of a recent Pope states that the Church accepts his teaching as her own. The same encyclical, however, warns us explicitly against the dangers of sterile imitation and shows no intention to perpetuate what was time-conditioned in Thomas’s work. But it expresses beyond doubt that in his teaching—as distinct from the work of other saintly Christian teachers—the body of human traditional wisdom, in short, truth, has found expression in an entirely venerable and eminently exemplary manner.
In what, precisely, this exemplary manner consists, is not as easily demonstrable. For those who see in the unique position of St. Thomas more than the accidental effect of the forces of tradition, more than a disciplinary act of ecclesiastical politics aimed at “intellectual uniformity”—may find themselves faced again and again with the question: what precisely caused St. Thomas to become the Doctor Communis?
We may leave aside, as irrelevant, the skeptical question in how far an author of the long-vanished thirteenth century can be of timely interest. But another thought arises, with heightened emphasis: the decisive element in truth is not its timeliness but its truth. What then is the use of this endeavor to secure the sanction of timeliness for truth, as if truth were in need of such sanction?
The answer to this question has several facets. It is evident that timeliness, in itself, is no criterion for truth. But it is equally evident that the trueness of truth and the timeliness of truth are strikingly correlated.
To begin with, only truth can be truly timely. Only truth can correspond to chances and dangers of any given epoch—correspond as both affirmation and corrective.
On the other hand, the fullness of truth can never be grasped by a neutral and indifferent mind, but only by a mind seeking the answer to a serious and urgent existential problem. But this urgency can only be roused by an immediately experienced, real situation, of the individual and the community. This means that the truth will be more profoundly known as truth, the more vigorously its timeliness comes to light; it also means that a man experiencing his own time with a richer intensity of heart and fuller spiritual awareness has a better chance of experiencing the illuminating force of truth. Together with its timeliness, by which the responsive power of truth is focused on the immediate present, the eternal validity of truth which, incomparably compelling, transcends the whole of time, would become
This makes clear the twofold, never-ending task of the true teacher: to reflect the totality of truth in a constantly inquiring meditation, to discover and point out wherein lies the relevance of truth to his own time.