From Pontius Pilate to modern times, those who want to get away with injustice claim that truth does not exist.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*A paper presented at the webinar “In Solidarity with Tai Ji Men: Defending Victims of Discrimination and Persecution,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on March 24, 2024, International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims.
March 24 is the United Nations International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims. Celebrating such a day only makes sense if we believe that truth exists. If there is no truth, we cannot have a right to it.
While many words went from Greek to Latin and to modern European languages keeping the same roots, this is not the case for “truth.” We have three different words, “aletheia” in Greek, “veritas” in Latin, and “truth” in English. German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote lengthy discussions of these differences.
In fact, the three words both are and are not the same. All have deep meanings connected with religion. “Veritas” in Latin comes from the Indo-European root “ver,” which means “faith,” both in the sense of religious faith and of faithfulness. Old Roman husbands and wives wore a ring called “vera” to symbolize their faithfulness to their spouse—and many of us still do.
“Truth” has another, unrelated root and comes from an even older Indo-European layer, where “tru” had two different meanings, “religion” and “tree.” “Tru” in the sense of “religion” remains in the name of Nordic religious groups such as Ásatrú, the religion of the gods called Ása. The proto-Indo-European “Tru” is also the root of our word “tree.” What do religion, trees, and truth have in common? All are firmly rooted on the ground, as opposite to fantasies and unfounded beliefs that, so to speak, fly in the air.
Still different is the Greek word “aletheia,” which means “unveiling,” or taking away the “lethe.” “Lethe” is the veil that hides the reality and prevents us from seeing it and comes straight from the veil of Maya that according to Hinduism covers all the world in illusion. But “Lethe” is also a river, personified as a goddess who offers to drink a water causing oblivion and loss of memory. “Unveiling,” or overcoming Lethe, is “aletheia,” “truth,” meaning recovering the lost memory or piercing the veil of illusion and seeing things as they really are. Finally, there was also a different relation between truth and water. For the Romans Veritas, Truth, was a goddess who hid at the invisible bottoms of the wells, from which she emerged naked at night. Romans used to drink water from the wells before sleeping in the hope of encountering the “naked truth” (an expression we still use) in their dreams.
In the Christian tradition the words “What is truth?” are forever connected with Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, or governor, of Judaea, who had the authority to decide whether Jesus should be liberated or executed. When Jesus told Pilate that his mission was to testify to the truth, the Roman governor famously answered,“What is truth?” Although personally persuaded that Jesus was innocent, in the end Pilate decided it was politically expedient to humor the Jewish high priests who wanted the founder of the Christian religion executed as heretic. For this, Pilate is often portrayed as a relativist who did not believe nor care about the truth, and a coward. However, there are traditions claiming that after Jesus’ death he realized he had made a mistake and converted to Christianity. The story inspired works of fiction such as “The Gospel According to Pilate” published in 2000 by French novelist Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt and the decision of some Christian churches (but not the Roman Catholic one) to canonize Pilate as a saint.
In his most anti-Christian book, “The Antichrist,” German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche on the contrary “canonized” Pilate in his own way as the champion of a philosophical relativism that opposed the “Christian” idea that an objective truth exists.
This question is still with us, and it has a lot to do with religious liberty. We can consider Jesus a victim of religious persecution, as the Jewish establishment was not prepared to tolerate the competition of a new religion. If there is an absolute and universal truth, then persecuting somebody for unpopular religious views and executing an innocent man are crimes, then Pilate has no alternative and should let Jesus go free. But if there is no truth, Pilate can deny to Jesus the right to religious freedom and even the right to life for political reasons and get away with it.
This is, of course, the same story repeating itself with Tai Ji Men. If there is a right to truth, and if simply truth does exist, then persecuting Tai Ji Men for political reasons should be acknowledged as a crime, ill-founded tax bills should be recognized as fabricated and false, and justice should be restored. The only way corrupt bureaucrats can continue to persecute Tai Ji Men and hope in impunity is to claim or imply that there is no truth, or truth is just ever-changing and subjective. This is, as old Greek philosophers had already explained, an impossible and self-defeating position because if there is no truth even the sentence “there is no truth” cannot be true.
On the contrary, as Jesus said, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” We are here to know the truth about the Tai Ji Men case. By setting Tai Ji Men free, that truth will make at the same time our spirits freer as well.
