Life as Truth

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

The greatest thing that we can do in life is to live according to life. What is life-giving and life-sustaining is good, and this is the “truth” according to life, which is the only criteria that we can truly “know.”

The conscience is our life compass, guiding us instinctively to those things which give us life by the inspiration and interaction with God’s free and life-giving Holy Spirit. This is the knowledge that is passed to us through life, inherited with our life by the life we have received from our parents, the Church, and the Sacraments. This knowledge, seen by the Nous in the direction of our heart, and felt often in contrast and contradiction to the stories and logic of the reasoning mind, is the foundation of our experience and the receptor of the meaning and knowledge from beyond the natural world.

This search for life is the basis for our feelings of positive and negative perception, the attitudes which categorize people, places, things, and concepts according to their affirmation of our life and the enabling of our further survival. This grid is the basis for our reasoning, preceding it rather than following it. Only when this motivation is present can the sustained effort of proving and defending a worldview take place. Our reason is merely a tool used to protect and justify that which we understand to be the source of life (and thus the center of our identity). Therefore, you must first have a feeling, an experience with life, and then build a philosophy of life around that experience. In this way, doing predicates knowing, actually forming the basis of knowledge. The Word, the Revelation of God, completed and fulfilled in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, is known through the activity of our relationship and our interaction with His Community, the Church, there is no un-predicated knowledge that somehow gives us access to God. There is no un-predicated, detached-from-experience gnosis capable for the human person. 

Communication, then, must be based on affirmation and a protection of the life of others. To negate or threaten is to lose the war of reason from the beginning, for you provide the basis of resistance and the impetus for negation before a different perspective can even be entertained. The natural response of life is therefore to preserve itself, and life's greatest tool is memory, association, and communication. These are harnessed to serve the interests of preservation, and therefore cannot be negated without creating the context of a fight to the death.

Life responding to outer realities creates emotion, emotion motivates the tying together of memories to create associations, which gives rise to meaning. Meaning produces symbols, abstractions that represent mental associations that only exist in our consciousness and memory. Symbols are communicated and assumed by others, which produces a common ground of understanding and common experience, which is the foundation of culture. Culture operates upon these symbols of history and acts upon them as values, which form the basis of the complex relationships of mutual exchange. Mutual exchange and specialization then create an economic system that produces the incarnation of values within a material context - material culture is the manifestation of the culture's mutually held associations within practical use, a lifestyle defined by a cosmology of consciousness, emotions, and human relationships.

Religion and science, both receive their “goodness” through increasing and enhancing human life and experience, and they must both be used in life-affirming ways. Religion must never be used as a negation of man's aspirations for life, free-will, un-coersed consent and an honest pursuit of truth (as Christianity has sometimes done when it has mistaken cultural or political authority for its source of revelation or hermeneutical mechanism), just as science must not be used as a hammer to dismantle and destroy the basic realities of human spiritual experience. This is why love, freedom, and peace are all hallmarks of a sincere and holy faith, and open inquiry, friendly debate, and the free exchange of ideas are the primary characteristics of good science. We must never use religion to accomplish that which God Himself refuses to do - deprive humankind of the ability to choose. Religion must then act as the cultural conscience to the sciences, and prohibit them from becoming tyrants that undermine human freedom and dignity. When we lose this balance, the world suffers, and life becomes a casualty of a human culture that no longer reflects the nature and attributes of God.