Pontius Pilate Lives

When Jesus, standing before Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, makes a truth claim_ (how tacky of him!), Pilate, in all his sophisticated Roman cynicism, retorts, presumably with a sneer, “What is truth?” Well, it so happens that not long before that time Jesus has told his disciples that he is truth. Pilate then declares Jesus innocent. Meanwhile, someone has finally found Pilate’s hot button and pushed it: “He said he was a king!”

Oops! It so happens that Tiberias, who was emperor at that time, was exceptionally paranoid about treason or any semblance of such. To further complicate matters, Pilate was already in deep cagada with Rome for a long series of atrocities that exceeded even the standards of the empire. He most emphatically did not want to have word reach Rome that he had released a man with a charge of claiming to be king of the Jews extant against him.

So Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucified. So much for truth. For him, truth turns out to be whatever will allow him to save his own neck. Oh, but he does hypocritically have a notice placed over Jesus’ head on the cross. The Gospels give portions of it, but the full text seems to have been “This is Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews.” Jesus’ enemies jump up and down in rage, claiming it should read “He said he was the king of the Jews” (which Jesus never did in any case). Pilate’s retort, as recorded in the Greek, is powerful: “What I have written stands written.” The Greek for stands written is in the perfect tense, which indicates that an act has been completed and remains firmly established.

Later, Pilate was summoned to Rome to answer a whole shipload (not to put it less delicately) of charges, but as he was on his way the emperor died. He was ultimately exiled to the South of France, where a lot of Roman bad guys seem to have ended up. Gee, what an awful fate, having to sit on the pebble beach at Nice, wishing you were back in one of the world’s trouble spots.

So what is truth? Well, where moral culpability is concerned, it seems the sole truth recognized by many among us is that “judgmentalism” is the only sin. One college student claimed that no one could ever be blamed for any act whatever. (Shades of Camus’s Meursault.) When asked about Hitler, he responded, “Oh, Hitler probably had his reasons.” One thing has to be said for him: At least he knew where radical relativism leads.

As I’ve noted before in this column, the Medieval way to truth was by reference to authority. If the parish priest was unable to answer a question, he went to his bishop, and if necessary the bishop went to the archbishop, and so forth up the Aristotelian chain to the pope. As things developed, especially into the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Reason, an issue was decided on the basis of whether it was reasonable or not. In more recent times, we believed that a proposition had to be proven scientifically in order to be considered valid. In its most extreme, and most pernicious, form, that led to a cold, impersonal reductionism.

Perhaps it is in reaction to the spiritually deadening effect of reductionism that we have today’s relativism, according to which truth is whatever works for me in my present circumstances. (And we thought existentialism was passé.) As a culture we have resoundingly rejected history as a guide to anything, since history has allegedly been “written by the winners” and as such must be seriously distorted. (In practice, historians are extremely critical of each other, and merciless in their attacks on distortions.) Perhaps this is why, for example, a recent poll showed that only 53% of Americans feel that capitalism is a better economic system than socialism.

Someone remarked during the sixties that the hippies were demonstrating their rebellion against conformity by all dressing and acting alike. Correspondingly, today we seem to have adopted a sort of star system in our evaluation of politicians. In order to be successful in politics, it is no longer necessary to make sense in one’s speeches. What is necessary is to find out what is the fashionable trend and get the press on one’s side. It is proverbial that, in a given discourse or conversation, what is said on the surface is of little or no importance, while the implications running around below the surface mean everything. I once had lunch with two men, one a major contributor to a great university and the other a high official of that university. At the end, the official said to me, “Call my secretary for an appointment and I’ll show you the campus.”

When he had left, the school’s benefactor asked me, “You know what he means by ‘show you the campus,’ don’t you?”

“Well, I figured he meant he’d give me a tour of the facilities-you know, one of the great physics departments, that sort of thing.”

“No. He means he’ll try to find a position for you in the university.” Silly me. I concluded then that I’d never make much of a politician.

Something even more striking in that regard took place in Cartagena, Colombia in 1979. As I was about to board a plane to return home following four months of work in the country, I was told that my documents were out of order and that I would have to go to the office of the Colombian equivalent of the FBI to straighten things out. The official there could not have cared less that it was his country’s New York consul who had fouled things up; he was going to hold me for four months so that I could obtain the proper documents to remain in Colombia. Then I could leave. (Unless you understand the logic of that you won’t do well in the Third World.)

I managed to get into contact with an extremely powerful businessman and politician, who had his chauffeur drive us back to that office. The grumpy official was new in the area and didn’t recognize the man, so he ignored us as he shuffled papers for a while. The man I had come with, a former governor and senator, winked at me to indicate, “Watch me deal with this pathetic little bureaucrat.”

When the official looked up, he snarled, “What do you want?”

My friend calmly said, “I am Eduardo Lemaitre Román.” Those two last names had about the same impact as “Rockefeller Vanderbilt” would have had in New York 80 years before, and the official did a B-movie double-take. He knew he was had, and the real meaning of the conversation that ensued had nothing to do with what the words were about and everything to do with whether I was going to be released that afternoon or said official was going to spend the rest of his career cutting grass with a machete. So where was the truth in that scene?

Correspondingly, what today’s politicians say may have no importance whatever on the surface, and everything to do with how they relate to what the people want to hear and what the press is willing to promote. If Al Gore declared that humans were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, I am convinced that millions would believe him.