I’m currently reading The Court of the Air, a fantasy novel by Stephen Hunt, and have run into the following striking passage. Two of the characters have come across the bodies of refugees who died trying to escape from a brutal regime. The younger asks how this can happen. The elder says this:

“Why?” said Harry. “For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea—could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your class, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same—wouldn’t it be good if everyone was the same as me—if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.

“But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at the door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can see only wickedness in it—you and them—the them become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it’s always open season on them….

“Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind to small to hold more than a single truth.”

My emphasis.

There’s a lot of truth in what Harry says; the 20th Century was replete with examples, not to mention the French Revolution, which is more or less the pattern for the fictional country being discussed. But I’m especially struck by that last sentence. According to Harry, insistence on One Truth always leads to the same thing: repression, violence, and so forth. We must have open minds large enough to hold multiple truths.

The difficulty is that this notion is simply incoherent. Truth is. What is, is true. What is not, is not true. Two compatible truths are, in a sense, one truth; two incompatible truths cannot both be true. They can, however, both be false—and that’s what Harry’s ultimately arguing: we can’t know the truth. It sounds brave and bold enough, to say that our minds must be open wide enough to hold multiple truths, but it’s simply intellectual despair.

And then, is it necessary that an insistence on One Truth will always lead to repression, violence, and so forth? The Catholic Church claims to have the One Truth; but the Church doesn’t say, “if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.” In fact, the Church says, “If everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, the world would be in a real mess—because I’m a sinner.” The Church does say that if everyone lived in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Church…we’d have a paradise on earth? In fact, no. If everyone lived in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Church, then everyone would be saints. No doubt the trials of life would be much easier to cope with under those circumstances, but trials would remain.

And even then, even if we were all saints, we wouldn’t all look and act the same. We would all be drawn into unity with Christ…but Christ is the infinite eternal God incarnate, God of perfection inexhaustible. Each saint reflects God’s perfection in his own peculiar way. There are as many ways to be a saint as there are saints.

So what about “shaving off the imperfections”? The Church does teach that we all need to be working at shaving off our own imperfections, or rather, allowing God’s grace to do that. But that’s something each person must do for himself, with God’s help: you can’t do it for or to someone else. And given what the Church teaches about sin, it’s inevitable that at times men of the Church will commit precisely the sin that Harry describes. We did it during the Inquisition; we did it during the Wars of Religion in the 1600’s in Europe. But if what the Church teaches is true, these happenings should be the exceptions rather than the rule; and examining history we see that they are.

The real Truth doesn’t need “knives and racks and axe-men and camps”.