On January 9^th, in his Address to Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See, Pope Leo XIV stated that “rediscovering the meaning of words is perhaps one of the primary challenges of our time.” The pope’s concern might seem to some to address a issue of mere semantics – if so, it serves only to confirm the accuracy of his diagnosis. The lack of care for truth and precision in contemporary conversation and media – secular and, even especially, religious – is totally discomfiting and bewildering to anyone trained in systematic thought and formed by the prayer of the Church. As I have been wont to say, going from the rigor and eloquence of the Office of Readings to the algorithmically recommended content which floods the YouTube feed where we post it, causes nitrogen to build up in the bloodstream; careful decompression is warranted.

Philosophy – above all, the philosophy which grounds theology – seeks to identify the nature of things, what they are at base, to name them and to express them with great attention to (specifically linguistic) accuracy. The prevailing indifference to all of this is baffling, and scandalous. Empirical science demands precision down to the nanoparticle. How are the more global operations of reason, itself the very engagement with and orientation to truth, expected to proceed with no regard at all for the demands of critical thinking? Failure to train one’s taste makes for bad art; failure to train one’s ear makes for bad music; failure to train one’s mind makes for bad ethics, a bad society, bad religion. At a certain point, these omissions become culpable. No rote memorization of the Scriptures or the penny Catechism can compensate for an intellect willfully dulled in its function, no more than exact recall of a lovely chant melody will, of its own, guide the unpracticed voice into a pitch-perfect rendering thereof. All virtue has its foundation in an alignment with the real.

The great 20^th century Thomist Josef Pieper addressed these issues masterfully. In his small work Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (the title speaks volumes already), he mines the perennial wisdom of Plato’s refutation of the Sophists and applies it to the world of the 1970’s. Today, given the rapidly expanding possibilities of communications and technology, the dangers of sophistry are massively amplified.

Pieper begins with recourse to Hegel:

You need not have advanced very far in your learning in order to find good reasons even for the most evil of things. All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and Eve have been justified with good reasons.

We all know this to be the case; Pieper himself treats the truth of the statement as sufficiently self-evident as to need no particular defense or reiteration. But why is this so? Of course no one is at liberty, metaphysically speaking, to make a choice for pure evil (a reality merely privative and therefore not even technically there) except insofar as it presents itself under the guise of some good. This, while true, is somehow not gratifying.

I believe that there is an answer to be extrapolated from a few lines of Louis Évely (which I happened to have encountered in Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity):

The whole history of mankind was led astray, suffered a break, because of Adam’s false idea of God. He wanted to be like God. I hope that you never thought that Adam’s sin lay in this… Had God not invited him to nourish this desire? Adam only deluded himself about the model. He thought God was an independent, autonomous being sufficient to himself; and in order to become like him he rebelled and showed disobedience.

Wherever there is a shift in paradigm, however implicit, the whole logic and objectives of the preexisting situation are reset; every paradigm necessarily generates its own order. In the case cited, if by “God” you mean “that supreme deity whose supremacy consists in and is expressed through power,” rather than “that supreme deity whose supremacy consists in and is expressed through love,” it is clear that, having chosen a different paradigm, you are no longer speaking of the same being; you are operating from a different playbook. Yet “love,” in turn, alas, is subject to the same tectonic drift. Where language is designed to be manipulable and elusive, interpersonal communication and the reality it references become like a water snake toy, by design too slippery ever to be held securely.

For Pieper:

Word and language, in essence, do not constitute a specific or specialized area; they are not a particular discipline or field. No, word and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit as such. The reality of the word in eminent ways makes existential interaction happen. And so, if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.

This passage should be a watchword for all Christians. For Christianity is the religion of the Logos, and Logos – reason and dialogue – is a milieu which is all-encompassing. A fully individual inner language, in contrast, is solipsism. It is on this basis that Leo laments our current state in which “words lose their connection to reality, and reality itself becomes debatable and ultimately incommunicable.” Where reality, which is commensurate with the good, cannot be communicated, there can be no friendship. The Pope quotes St. Augustine, who points out the obvious: When conversation with your neighbor becomes impenetrable, it is a natural consolation to start speaking to your pet. I have no doubt that my Siamese understands things by estimation with a great deal more sense than I hear promulgated by many of our public figures and content creators.

As Leo remarks, “Today, the meaning of words is ever more fluid, and the concepts they represent are increasingly ambiguous.” This is convenient for those who love power more than truth, as it allows for a shape-shifting narrative, better to fit the moment, with a built-in margin for plausible deniability at all points on any matter. Pieper teaches that to lie is to obstruct the other’s access to reality; it cuts him out of the deal. So far, so good, but Leo continues, “Language is no longer the preferred means by which human beings come to know and encounter one another.” I do not know what the Pope has in mind here as the alternative. Is it image, digitally conveyed and altered? Is it broad categorical inclusion in groups? Is it a will to domination, prior to any encounter? There are many possibilities, all of them problematic.

Gorgias, “the Father of Sophistry,” nemesis of Plato, has been given the further sobriquet “the Nihilist,” on account of one of his writings beginning with the sentence, “Nothing is.” However appropriately (or not) he bears that name, Pieper deems it apt; for the Sophist, “there is no such thing as being, endowed as it were with normative authority that the one who speaks would have to respect or would be able to respect!” Many of our public figures today have manifestly made of themselves each a sole criterion.

Pieper sums up Plato as to an eventuality which should give pause to us in the Digital Age, namely that:

…something could well be superbly crafted – that it could be perfectly worded; brilliantly formulated; strikingly written, performed, staged, or put on screen – and at the same time, in its entire thrust and essence, be false, and not only false, but outright bad, inferior, contemptible, shameful, destructive, wretched – and still be marvelously put together!

Put another way, the presuppositions hardwired beneath rhetorical or artistic excellence may be poisonous, though I am not content to let stand unproblematically the merit of so shallow an “excellence.”

In a now-outmoded parlance, “flattery” carries a meaning different than in our own. It is more pernicious than a mere lie; it has nothing to do with bestowing sincerely meant compliments, niceties and good wishes (which I for one would count as virtue, and great fun besides), nor can it be reduced to insincere praise. Also rendered as “the art of persuasion,” flattery in that older sense occurs wherever a conversational partner, an audience, a voting contingent is knowingly reduced to an object to be exploited for the speaker’s own purposes – no longer the mystery of an other, but a resource to be freely strip-mined, be it for money, attention, advantage, clicks, or whatever nefarious aim the tongue of the covetous may fancy. The recipient of the flattery is made to believe that he is being built up; in point of fact, his weaknesses are being capitalized upon, and he is being played for a fool.

Yet more grievous is how such doublespeak is so much welcomed that ancient Rome had the adage: Mundus vult decipi, the world wants to be deceived. Again Pieper:

What the world really wants is flattery, and it does not matter how much of it is a lie; but the world at the same time also wants the right to disguise, so that the fact of being lied to can easily be ignored. As I enjoy being affirmed in my whims and praised for my foibles, I also expect credibility to make it easy for me to believe, in good conscience or at least without a bad conscience, that everything I hear, read, absorb, and watch is indeed true, important, worthwhile, and authentic!”

Yet it is not just pleasure taken in goods, however disordered this may or may not be, which is at stake. Over and beyond desires for ego, fortune, novelty and undying youth, “there are also cruelty and indeed Schadenfreude, the vicious enjoyment of others’ misfortune. There are the obsession with slander, the frenzy to destroy, and the readiness to accept radical answers, to go for the ‘final solution’.”

These temptations may unfortunately be relevant for religion as well, at least in its most debased manifestations. Pieper points out that no discipline is so exalted as to be immune:

A philosophical discourse, or notably even a theological discourse, can equally be listed here, especially when it draws its power from the element of surprise, when thus it exploits the general intellectual ennui. Yes, even philosophy, theology, and the humanities, just like any fictional literature, however demanding and challenging, in essence may well be mere entertainment in our specific sense here – that is, a form of flattery, extremely refined perhaps, yet nevertheless courting favor to win success.

Belief, which judges content based not on its propositional merit but rather insofar as it is held up for assent by authority, is in the will as much as it is in the intellect. To turn a blind eye to sophistic flattery as it is visited upon one is to have covert complicity in being manipulated; it is to have an appetite for one’s own degradation. Assuming one is sufficiently capable, adherence to religion offers no excuse for accepting any given proposition too cheaply. In Fides et Ratio, Pope St. John Paul II wrote: “The admonition Know yourself was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm…” Even a dust speck of self-knowledge suffices to uncover the tangle of interests and prejudices which leave each of us woefully prone to credulity, to a party line, to groupthink.

We are, in fact, accountable for whom we choose to have shepherd us. St. John of the Cross, the Church’s great teacher of mystical doctrine, cautions against both inept leadership and adherence thereto: “These directors together with their penitents have gone astray… realizing in themselves the words of our Savior: If a blind man leads a blind man, both fall into the pit.”

And what is the source of such woe as St. John says is assured?– “He does not say that they shall fall, but that they do fall. In order to take a fall it is not necessary for a blind man to wait until he falls into error, since, by the very fact that he dares to be guided by another blind man he is already in error” – misattribution of supernatural origin to what is merely human, or worse. To believe oneself or the person by whom one chooses to be instructed to have gnosis is the ultimate in flattery.

John Wild, the Yale scholar who instructed Roger Duncan, my own mentor, is cited by Pieper as having noted that “the Sophist appears as a true philosopher, more so than the philosopher himself.” Many, consciously or unconsciously, so favor the logic of what Leo, following Augustine, identifies as pertaining to the city of man – which, for the Bishop of Hippo, was typified by the Roman Empire –  “centered on pride and self-love, on the thirst for worldly power and glory that leads to destruction,” that their discernment leads them to invert the true order in their assessment of reality… all the while calling on the name of God.

Leo decries that, in our world, “peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.” A bit further into the address, we might find ourselves surprised to hear which Leo considers prime among these tools of domination: “In the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents.”

Pieper educes the connection between word and violence even more pointedly:

Wherever the main purpose of speech is flattery, there the word becomes corrupted, and necessarily so. And instead of genuine communication, there will be something for which domination is too benign a term; more appropriately we should speak of tyranny, of despotism. On one side there will be sham authority, unsupported by any intellectual superiority, and on the other a state of dependency, which again is too benign a term. Bondage would be more correct. Yes, indeed: there are on the one side a pseudoauthority, not legitimized by any form of superiority, and on the other a state of mental bondage.

All of this conforms exactly to my experience of the politicians, pundits, and power brokers of the contemporary governing caste – and, even more, those who arrogate to themselves authority on the Catholic internet. Here I will say no more.

Sophistry at its best (or, more aptly, its worst) teases to its victim that the notions suggested to him from without are in fact arising spontaneously in him from within. It taps into preexisting fears, wants and drives, such that it becomes as indistinguishable to its victim (though not apart from his subtle culpability).

Thirst knows no season; wouldn’t you like a delicious and refreshing Coke right about now, friend? Whoever You Are, Whatever You Do, Wherever You May Be, When You Think of Refreshment Think of Ice Cold Coca-Cola. It’s the real thing.

Pieper even goes on to say something which I would never have dared to articulate. He writes of “the degeneration of language into an instrument of rape,” adding “it does contain violence, albeit in a latent form.” These are harsh words and a bold accusation. Given all that I am seeing, I think they are worthy of being relayed; I will not shy away from them. Some of the ideas propagated these days are so steeped in malice, so degrading to human persons, so flagrantly if not indeed demonically mendacious, that they are violating even to this degree.

So, how are we to respond? In Fides et ratio, Pope John Paul II notes with concern how:

with a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence… the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has dwindled.

A timid, half-hearted pursuit of truth opens a wide path for sophists, charlatans, the power-hungry, and the deranged to proclaim their own versions of truth without regard or respect for human dignity or for basic reality.

As Pope Leo pointed out in his address earlier this month, we need not – indeed, we must not – be complacent in passivity. Each of us has a part to play in the ongoing unfolding of the City of God:

In Augustine’s view, the two cities coexist until the end of time. Each has both an external and an internal dimension, for they are to be understood not only in light of the external manner in which they are constructed throughout history, but also through the lens of the internal attitudes of each human being towards the realities of life and historical events. In this perspective, each of us is a protagonist and thus responsible for history.

We must, each of us, actively and intentionally form our minds, question radically though without skepticism, courageously cherish truth over advantage, and hold fast to the confidence that it does make a difference.

Image: Vatican News