“Doubtless if men sought the truth with one tenth part of the zeal with which they seek to acquire wealth or secular knowledge, their differences would diminish year by year.” – Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman
In a sermon entitled “Truth Hidden When Not Sought After,” Blessed John Henry Newman preaches on a text from St. Paul: “They shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” From St. Paul’s teaching, Newman argues, a person learns that religious truth exists and that God is one; therefore religious error is possible and assumes several forms or “fables” when thinkers imagine “one set of opinions is as good as another.”
Because truth is “one,” the multitude and variety of religious creeds and doctrines are in error for the simple reason that they cannot all be right. This proliferation of conflicting moral views Newman attributes to man’s “love of indolence and self-indulgence”—the complacency of comfort that does not relish the exertion of thinking.
The strange phenomenon Newman ponders in this sermon is not the fact of religious error or the multitude of heresies or the variety of sects, but the ignorance of the educated and the learned devoted to the life of the mind and the pursuit of truth. For Newman, this blindness to truth does not merely belong to “the ignorant, or weakminded, or dull, or enthusiastic, or extravagant,” but to the best intellects and scholars, “men of powerful minds, keen perceptions, extended views, ample and various knowledge.”
Newman acknowledges that gifted minds do not possess a natural affinity for the love of truth on the basis of superior intelligence, noting that even in St. Paul’s time those who rejected the light of the Word made Flesh consisted of the educated classes like the Scribes, Pharisees, and Greek philosophers—the elite who would never deign to believe like Cornelius the centurion: “I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word . . .”
How does one explain this contradiction of the learned who do not know, the educated who do not think, and the intellectually endowed who prefer fiction to truth? First, Newman offers this reason. Because Christian revelation possesses universality and founds a Church that no longer distinguishes between Jew and Gentile, master and servant, man or woman, religious truth does not rest on the formal learning of the few, the philosophical education of the best minds, or the intellectual endowments of the distinguished: “for this reason, that the Christian revelation addresses itself to our hearts, to our love of truth and goodness, our fear of sinning, and our desire to gain God’s favour.”
Newman distinguishes the receptivity to truth and sensitivity to faith from the habits of mind associated with scholarship: “quickness, sagacity, depth of thought, strength of mind, power of comprehension, perception of the beautiful, and power of language”—all “excellent gifts” Newman acknowledges, but these gifts are not synonymous with “spiritual excellences.” Just as the most spiritual people are not qualified to translate foreign languages they have not learned, the most educated individuals are not the best suited for grasping the mysteries of faith. Truth, by its nature spiritual, appeals to the spiritually minded, to “lovers of truth, virtue, purity, humility, and peace.”
On the other hand, the intellectually prideful and the worldly wise that willfully reject revealed religion as a body of truth and a matter of faith do not seek knowledge with a pure heart or a genuine love.
Newman records the enemies of Christ: Herod, who did not want to be reminded that he married his brother Philip’s wife; Felix, who experienced guilt in hearing St. Paul preach about righteousness and temperance; and the skeptical Sadducees. They preferred “fables” because these fictions accommodated their corrupt ways as “proud men, men of hard hearts, and unhumbled tempers, and immoral lives.”
Worldly rulers and men of learning choose fables, according to Newman, “on account of their pride, or their love of indolence and self-indulgence.” The belief in fables substitutes for the love of truth because it requires no exertion. It indulges the vices of the degenerate and allows them to rationalize their rejection of divine revelation.
As the title of the sermon suggests, the truth must be “sought after” and desired with the heart. In Newman’s words, “is it not plain that earnestness is necessary for gaining religious truth?” The deadly sin of sloth, the indifferentism or apathy of luke-warmness, explains the proliferation of the fables that displace truth.
In their indolence men assume that religious truth comes as a matter of chance without effort: “Though there is no art or business of this world which is learned without time and exertion, yet it is commonly conceived that the knowledge of God and our duty will come as if by accident or by a natural process.” This negligence reassures itself when it does the minimum if it occasionally opens the Bible, entertains a moral question, assumes that religion is simple, or exaggerates the value of an education as sufficient proof of seriousness.
Indifference to spiritual knowledge sends the message “that religious truth is not worth seeking” or indicates “that religious truth cannot be obtained.” But the hard truth that Newman boldly states is that men spend more energy and time pursuing wealth or seeking entertainment than searching for truth. If they do not seek, they do not find, and “the pure in heart alone see God.” Because human beings must believe in something rather than nothing, the spiritually slothful turn to the fables in their many forms, heresies, ideologies, or sects as a substitution for the reality of the living truth or the light that has overcome the darkness.
Judges who do not know when life begins, physicians who have forgotten the Hippocratic Oath, lawmakers who ignore the Declaration of Independence, journalists who cannot distinguish between ideology and wisdom, professors who remain slaves to the “dictatorship of relativism,” and governments that presume to be the arbiters of life and death, have all turned their ears to fables and are guilty of the deadly sin of sloth.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Fisher More College and Fisher More Academy.
