What is truth?

 A go to text for the feast of Christ the King is the account of the dialogue of Jesus with Pilate, in Part Two of Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth.

Yet during the interrogation we suddenly arrive at  dramatic moment: Jesus' confession. To Pilate's question: "So you are a king?" he answers: "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice" (Jn 18:37). Previously Jesus had said: "My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; by my kingship is not from the world" (18:36).... it is entirely understandable that the pragmatic Pilate asks him "What is truth? (18:38).

Pope Benedict then goes on to explore the meaning of that word "truth". He asks a question that can be placed alongside an observation of Pope Pius XI with regard to the League of Nations and the international efforts for peace in the years immediately after the First World War (italics added to both quotations to draw out the parallel):

Can politics accept truth as a structural category? Or must truth as something unattainable, be relegated to the subjective sphere, its space taken by an attempt to build peace and justice using whatever instruments are available to power? By relying on truth, does not politics, in view of the impossibility of attaining consensus on truth, make itself a tool of particular traditions that in reality are merely forms of holding on to power?

And Pope Pius XI in his first encyclical letter, written at the end of 1922, when conflict in the near East and the Balkan region was already emerging despite the negotiations and treaties that had followed the conclusion of the First World War:

45. When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. 

Pope Benedict offers a succinct account of Thomas Aquinas teaching on truth: firstly, as the conformity of intellect to reality; secondly, as properly present firstly in God's intellect and derivatively in the human intellect; and finally God as "truth itself, the sovereign and first truth".

... if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the stronger. "Redemption" in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognisable. And it becomes recognisable when God become recognisable. He becomes recognisable in Jesus Christ. 

Which brings us back to the appeal of Pius XI, in Quas Primas, that the world should recognise and obey the rule of Christ the King.