Certainty, Doubt, and Truth

In John Patrick Shanley's 2008 film adaptation of his prize-winning stage play Doubt, the principal of a Catholic school takes on a young priest she believes has been preying on altar boys.

Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is determined to rid the parish of Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) even though she has no evidence the man had done anything wrong— only rumor he abused a boy in a previous parish and recently got a young Black boy drunk on altar wine.

In a pivotal scene near the end of the film, the priest confronts the nun and charges her with being on a self-righteous crusade. He challenges her to call his former parish and talk to the vicar there. She refuses. When he asks where she had gotten her information, she refuses.

"You don't have the slightest proof of anything," he says.

"But I have my certainty," she responds.

This was a chilling, irrational stalemate, but bringing the film into the present mirrors where we are as a nation.

Truth & Trust

Though the story is pinned to reports of abusive priests in the Catholic Church, it transcends those particulars to probe our troubling relationship with trust, faith, and fraudulence. I believe that is why we have so little patience with one another, rejecting competing evidence or viewpoints wrapped in our respective cocoons of certainty.

Shanley told the Jesuit journal America in February that he hoped to probe more universal ideas in Doubt, especially the limitation of our knowledge about the world and one another.

He said, “You can’t know the truth of another person. And guess what? You can’t even know your own truth. The extent to which we lie to ourselves is so breathtaking, why even bother to worry about whether somebody else is telling the truth? You can’t even be certain, even in the throes of your deepest convictions, that you’re telling the truth. Because we deceive ourselves (America Magazine).”

Productive Doubt

Even those who are more left-brained embrace doubt as crucial. Science Historian Liv Grjebine wrote in Scientific American in 2020 that she and her colleagues are obliged to pursue objective proof. However, they must also accept that the uncertainty in each discovery will lead to new knowledge that brings us closer to the truth.

“(T)he scientific approach requires changing our understanding of the natural world whenever new evidence emerges from either experimentation or observation. Scientific findings are hypotheses that encompass the state of knowledge at a given moment. In the long run, many of (them) are challenged and even overturned. Doubt might be troubling, but it impels us towards a better understanding; certainties, as reassuring as they may seem, in fact undermine the scientific process (Scientific American).”

Faith & Fraudulence

The title Doubt describes not only the narrative thread tying Shanley’s story together, but the play’s message to the audience: limited human knowledge and rigid beliefs can be stifling.

Though Sister Aloysius triumphs over Father Flynn in that he leaves the parish for another posting, we are left to wonder what it is she has won and if the world she was trying to protect is indeed safer because of her “certainty.”

Maybe her "certainty" without proof made the world more dangerous.

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