What is Truth? Augustine and the Eternal Echo of God's Verbum

Aristotle and Augustine, together, provide a goal and means for moving toward that goal in terms of developing enduring relationships as an analogical and anagogical Truth of who one is. The Virtue Aristotle describes and the means to habituate Virtue show the individual the manner in which one can develop enduring relationships. Augustine takes those same enduring relationships and argues that the desire to develop such relationships suggest and even deeper or a more primordial drive to know oneself on a transcendent level. The relationships one develops in life, made enduring through habituation and Virtue, point to an even greater relationship with the Transcendent. The result is the eternal shout of one’s Verbum and the perpetual reception of that Verbum in the eternity of God and of all humanity. Perhaps we can say that the “Verbum” we begin to shout and hear in this life is but a shadow or an echo of the eternal Verbum. Indeed, Karl Rahner, the 20^th Century theologian, might say all of Creation is an echo of God’s own Verbum for us to hear. By looking Sacramentally at the material floors and walls of the Pit and the relationships we have in that Pit, maybe we can start to speak and to hear our Verbum.

Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St. Nicholas in Galway, Co. Galway, Ireland. The lofty expanse of the Cathedral invites us to consider our own lofty destination...our Authentic Self.