“Each truth, whoever may say it, is from the Holy Spirit.”
That line translates this Latin sentence from Thomas Aquinas:
Omne verum, a quocumque dicatur, a spiritu sancto est.
The line occurs in Aquinas’s treatise about truth and “trueness”: De Veritate. He borrows the line from Ambrose, who wrote 800 years before Aquinas (who wrote it 800 years before I copied and pasted it into this blog post).
It’s a proposition that remains true today. It’s also a proposition that more Catholics should reflect on. Because it’s a proposition that opens up the possibility of insights in corners that might otherwise remain unexplored.
Aquinas drew on Ambrose when addressing the question “whether every other truth is from the ultimate truth” (utrum omnis veritas alia sit a veritate prima). This “ultimate,” “first,” or “foundational” truth is God.
So is every truth, no matter what it is or whoever says it, from God?
Some were arguing: No, there are truths or realities that cannot be from God. The real wrongs and truly ugly things within the world cannot be from God.
Aquinas’s full response is nuanced, but the basic response is the simple and bold reminder that anything that truly is, is truly from God. Reality is reality, no matter what kind of reality it is, and all reality is held in existence by God.
A variation on that theme is the line quoted above: anything that is true, regardless of the immediate source (this or that human being), is from the Holy Spirit (God) as the ultimate source.
This is encouraging. Truth is not limited. No one has a monopoly on it. It can pop up anywhere. And when you come across the truth, no matter how humble it may be or weird it may seem, it will be something worth attending to: a spiritu sancto est.