What Is Truth? The Answer of St. Anselm
When he is interrogated by Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John, Jesus affirms that he came into the world to bear witness to the truth. He adds that “everyone who is of the truth hears My voice” (John 18:37, NKJV). Apparently unmoved, Pilate responds with a question, “What is truth?” and concludes the interview. (John 18:38). Jesus does not respond on this occasion, but elsewhere in John’s gospel he famously avers that he himself is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Had he answered Pilate’s question, he may have pointed to himself as not only a witness to the truth of God but as the very source of that truth.
Since ancient times, people have been asking Pilate’s question. Many answers have been offered over the centuries, some of which have been compatible with Jesus’s claim to be the truth, while others have been noticeably inconsistent with it. One of the most interesting answers to be found is in a short but highly stimulating and suggestive dialogue written by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). Anselm was a learned monk who became the abbot of his monastery in northern France and later was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. He is famous for his philosophical and theological writings, and in particular for his ontological argument for God’s existence and satisfaction theory of the atonement. Unfortunately, his dialogue “On Truth” tends to get overlooked in most cursory discussions of his thought. Examining this dialogue, and bringing to light the richness of Anselm’s theory of truth, is the task of this essay.
The most important and defining feature of Anselm’s theory is that it is thoroughly theocentric. Truth for Anselm is inseparable from God and his purposes. His being and his ends provide the entire framework for understanding what truth is and how the world is full of true things. Without God truth would be impossible, but with God it is ineluctable—as necessary, eternal, and immutable as he himself is.[i] As Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams point out, for Anselm “an account of truth is just theology under a different name.”[ii]
The dialogue has two interlocutors, a student and a teacher. At the beginning, the student raises the issue of the relationship of truth to God by asking the following question: “since we believe that God is truth and we say that truth is in many other things, I wish to know whether whenever truth is spoken of we ought to be saying it is God of whom we speak.”[iii] The teacher believes this question can only be answered by first determining the meaning of truth. He tells the student that they can make an effort to find out what truth is by “looking at the different things in which we say truth exists.”[iv]
The first thing they consider is the truth of statements. The student claims that a statement is true when it corresponds to reality or signifies what is the case. It is false when it fails to do so. This is of course a very conventional take on what is required for an assertion to be true, and Anselm does not disagree with it. Anselm wants to know, however, in what precisely the truth of the statement lies. The student asserts that it cannot lie in the reality signified by a proposition, because “something is true only by participating in the truth, and therefore the truth of the true is in the true itself, but the thing stated is not in the true statement.”[v] In other words, being true is a quality that is in true things, but the reality a true statement represents is not in the statement. Accordingly, the quality of being true in the statement cannot be the reality signified. The reality can only be a condition of the statement being true, as it remains external to it. The next question the teacher asks is whether something belonging to the nature of a statement might be the quality that grants truth to it. This is ruled out because if it were the case, then statements would always be true simply by virtue of being statements. The quality of being true, therefore, cannot be an essential feature of statements. The teacher then makes an interesting move by asking “what is the purpose of an affirmation?” and goes on to say that when a statement “signifies that what is is, it signifies what it should.”[vi] Anselm thus introduces the idea that statements exist for a purpose, which is to indicate or represent what actually exists or is the case. He believes that it is when a statement is fulfilling its function or purpose that it is in the truth and has the quality of being true. This purpose is given by God, the creator of the human capacity for language. Being true is thus an accidental quality that a statement has by virtue of honoring its God-given function to represent the reality of things.[vii] Anselm calls this the correctness or rectitude of a statement, and he affirms that its rectitude is identical with its being true.[viii]
After establishing to their satisfaction what it means for statements to be true, the teacher and student go on to consider how other things are true. In each case, they discover that truth is always a matter of rectitude, or of fulfilling a purpose bestowed by the Creator. The ability to think is given so that “we might think that what is is, and what is not is not.”[ix] Consequently, our thoughts are true for the same reason as our statements—they represent reality and in doing so conform to God’s intentions in making them possible. Our wills are true when they have rectitude, which means willing what God created them to will. In the same way, actions are true when they conform to God’s ends in bestowing capacities to act. With respect to actions, the teacher notes that the Bible refers to doing the truth (John 3:21) and asserts that “it is everyone’s opinion that he who does what he ought acts well and with rectitude. Hence it follows that to bring about rectitude and to do the truth are the same. For it is clear that to do the truth is to act well, and to act well is to bring about rectitude. What could be more obvious then than that the truth of action is rectitude.”[x]
Interestingly, Anselm claims that actions do not need to be voluntary or performed by rational agents in order to be true. When fire heats things in its vicinity, it fulfills the purpose for which its ability to heat was created, and thus it does the truth just as the man who serves his neighbor. Any activity expressed by a verb can thus be said to conform to the truth insofar as the activity is in keeping with the Creator’s will for the thing engaged in the activity. Our bodily senses are thus true when they function as they were designed and convey data to the inner sense of our minds.
Having looked at various kinds of things and their specific God-given roles, Anselm next proceeds to consider things in general as being the result of God’s providence. He affirms that there is a sense in which everything in the universe is true because nothing escapes the sovereign control of God. The teacher asks the student: “do you think that anything could be at any time or at any place that was not in the highest truth and that did not receive what it is, insofar as it is, or that it could be something else than what it now is?”[xi] The student responds that such would be unthinkable, since all proceeds from God and must unfold according to his plan. The teacher goes on to ask “if anything ought to be otherwise than it is in the highest truth.” The student replies no, since it is surely fitting that everything be according to God’s plan.[xii] The teacher then declares that “if all things are what they are there [in the highest truth], they are without doubt what they ought to be,” and therefore they evince rectitude or truth.[xiii]
The student finds this claim to be troubling, however, as it seems to suggest that everything that happens in the world is right. “How can we say,” he asks, “that whatever is ought to be, since there are many evil deeds which certainly ought not to be?”[xiv] This is of course a problem that all theists who affirm the meticulous providence of God must grapple with. Anselm provides a simple yet nuanced solution to the problem. It is the case, the teacher affirms, that sometimes “the same thing both ought to be and ought not to be.”[xv] This is because God sometimes wisely determines to permit evil deeds for the sake of some good end that he also forbids because they proceed from an evil will. Insofar as God has willed to permit an evil action for the sake of the good he can derive from it, it ought to be. But insofar as he has forbidden it due to its evil origin, it ought not to be. The teacher notes that this is exactly what happened in the case of Jesus’s crucifixion, which is the paradigmatic example of a thing that both has and lacks rectitude at the same time. He points out that “there are many ways in which the same thing receives contrary appraisals from different considerations.”[xvi] This is an insight that must be kept in mind whenever one seeks to understand divine providence and the problem of evil.
Anselm’s account of truth so far seems to have an admirable simplicity, consistency, and comprehensiveness. The notion that things are true when they possess rectitude, and they possess rectitude when they conform to God’s purposes, seems to carry with it another difficulty, however. For if things are true through compliance with the will of God, how is God himself capable of being true? Anselm’s response is that God is not capable of being true in the way that creatures are, since he is not subject to any authority or purpose higher than himself. Created things may be true, but God occupies the place of truth itself—he is that which makes being true a possibility. His eternal ends are the ground of truth, the immutable standard or measure of rectitude for all of his creatures. It makes sense, then, to say that God alone is truth, and other things are true only insofar as they are in the truth or according to the truth. In this way the question of the student put forward at the beginning of Anselm’s dialogue is answered: it is true that whenever truth is spoken of it is God of whom we speak, and this is because all true things only possess the quality of being true through their participation in the purposes of God. As Visser and Williams state, “all truth either is God or somehow reflects God; thus one simple being provides the norm by which all truth-claims must be judged.”[xvii] Because God is truth in this unique sense, there is no problem in saying that he is not able to have the quality of being true in the same way a creature does. Anselm understands that a ground must be ontologically distinct from that which it grounds. What is participated cannot have the same nature as that which participates in it. On this matter, then, one cannot find any fundamental incoherence in his theory.[xviii]
Are there any significant problems for Anselm’s understanding of truth? I don’t believe so. While there may be dimensions or aspects of truth that Anselm does not consider, his theory should seem both plausible and tenable to those who grant that God is real and all things depend on him. For if all things depend on him, then the truth of any created thing must ultimately be defined by the relation in which it stands to God, and Anselm has provided an elegant and illuminating way of conceiving what this relation is and how God establishes it. Some might wonder if Anselm’s theory involves or suggests a voluntarism which makes being true wholly contingent on arbitrary divine decrees. For a voluntarist, God might intend that our statements represent reality, but he could just as well have intended that they misrepresent reality. If that were the case, then true statements would be those which do not correspond to how things are. Is this a legitimate concern? There doesn’t seem to be any good reason to think that Anselm’s account requires voluntarism, for one can easily hold that God’s will and purposes must be consistent with his necessary and perfect nature.
In addressing these issues, we see that Anselm’s theory is quite defensible. Not only is it free from serious difficulties, it is also attractive and compelling due to its recognition that to talk of truth is always to talk of God. Although the most direct and simple answer to Pilate’s question is that Jesus is the truth, a compelling elaboration on this answer is found in Anselm’s contention that truth is the divine standard of rectitude that measures the rectitude of all things.
[i] Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams note that “no matter what the topic, Anselm’s thinking always eagerly returns to God; and the unchallenged centrality of God in Anselm’s philosophical explorations is nowhere more in evidence than in his account of truth.” Visser and Williams, “Anselm on Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 204.
[ii] Ibid., 205.
[iii] Anselm of Canterbury, “On Truth” in The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans, trans. Ralph McInerny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 152.
[iv] Ibid., 152.
[v] Ibid., 153.
[vi] Ibid., 153.
[vii] Visser and Williams assert that “Anselm’s account of truth in statements is a sort of double-correspondence theory. A statement is true when it corresponds both to the way things are and to the purpose of making statements.” Visser and Williams, 205.
[viii] See Anselm, 154. Anselm also claims that a statement can be true simply by virtue of being a well-formed, intelligible proposition, since this is what statements ought to be, and a statement’s intelligibility is a condition of its being used to represent reality. He acknowledges, however, that common usage only attributes truth to a statement with respect to its representative use.
[ix] Ibid., 156.
[x] Ibid., 156-157. Anselm also asserts that every action by a rational agent has a signification in the sense that by doing an action a person declares that it ought to be done and by abstaining from an action a person indicates that it ought not to be done. People can sometimes tell more by deed than by word. When this signification by deed is accurate, and reflects what truly ought to be done, such as when a man helps his neighbor, the signification is true. But when it does not, such as when a man steals from his neighbor, it is false. See ibid., 163-164.
[xi] Ibid., 160.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Ibid., 161.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Visser and Williams, 205.
[xviii] See Anselm, 164-165, 171-174.
Nathan Greeley is the managing editor of The Conservative Reformer and Fellow of Apologetics and Philosophical Theology at the Weidner Institute. He teaches apologetics at American Lutheran Theological Seminary.