"Truth is the bread without which the mind cannot live."

"[Gaudium et spes, Article 14]... sees the affirmation of the soul (i.e. man's spirituality) as an affirmation of metaphysics and therefore as the affirmation of man's capacity for truth, man's openness to truth. And contact with truth is not only possible to man, it is as necessary as love. Truth is the bread without which the mind cannot live." 130

"The conciliar statement... [points] to the fact that man only attains the real truth of being when he goes beyond the zone of what is merely verified to be correct. The soul cannot be found in the realm of purely observable facts. Anyone who restricts himself to the latter may come to regard the soul as an abstract collective term for a multiplicity of elements which can be accounted for as the reflex of physical (biological) and social factors. In fact to reject metaphysical statements on principle in this way, posits an anti-metaphysics, it makes a principle out of the methodical renunciation of truth in the exact sciences, which have to be positivist and therefore restricted to what can be correctly established. Consequently it does the most inhuman and destructive thing possible; it robs man in principle of the capacity to attain truth..." 130

"...[T]he theme of the two Councils [Vatican I and II] is ultimately the same; the question of metaphysics and the question of God are fundamentally the same. The problem of God is not a supplementary section of metaphysics, but is posited simultaneously with the question of being itself, while conversely, the question of being implies the question of God. Consequently the present text [Gaudium et spes, Article 15] simply deepens the statements of Vatican I by inserting the problems connected with the question of God into the context of the relation between scientia and sapientia. In this way it exhibits the specific form of knowledge of God in contradistinction to the world of modern science. At the same time the reference to sin as endangering knowledge of God only assumes its full meaning in this light, for purely objective, demonstrative knowledge is of course not hindered by sin. With sapientia, on the other hand, what is involved is man's very humanity, and this is hampered by his tendency to be inhuman or less than human. Only where he is light can he see the real light; but since so often he is darkness and aversion from the light, he sees nothing. The dynamic character of the metaphysics of light, in which knowing and being are inseparable and both are envisaged as vital activities, makes plain the demands made on man in his totality by knowledge of God (and by the knowledge of 'truth' generally). The affirmation of metaphysics which Articles 14 and 15 formulate with regard to the question of man and of God, in one of the fundamental positions of the schema. Where the metaphysical question is definitively rejected, the 'death of God' is the inescapable consequence. But equally inescapable is the mutilation of man of the dimension of wisdom, and any theology which survives is inconsequential chatter." 132-133

Joseph Ratzinger, "The Dignity of the Human Person" in Herbert Vorgrimler editor, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol. V, New York: Herder, 1969.

Theology without truth is no theology at all, it denies the Logos and the Theos.