et vita. "I am the way and the truth and the life." Our words "truth" and "true" take their meaning from verum and veritas as these prevail in the Latin language of the Church. Whether, besides this, and prior to it, our German "true" had a root meaning proper to it, not determined by verum and hence by falsum, is controversial, because it is obscure. It is obscure because nowhere does another essence of "true" and "truth" come to light within the historicity of German history. It would not be said as decisively of the word "true" what the brothers Grimm say of "false": an un-German word. Nevertheless we must say it: "true" is an un-German word in view of the unequivocally clear fact that the basic meaning of "true" is determined by the Latin-Christian verum.
But what does the Latin verum mean? The stem ver is Indo-Germanic, as is the stem fall of σφάλλω, fallere, "fall." The stem ver appears unequivocally in our German word wehren ["to resist"], die Wehr ["defense"], das Wehr ["dam"]; therein lies the moment of the "against," "resistance": "the resistant"—the dam against ... Italic-Oscic veru, the gate—which shuts off passage and entrance—verostabulum—vestibulum—vestibule, the space before the properly separating entrance, which stands ver, against, it, (stabulum), the space in front of the door. But the standing-against is not the only moment in the ver. For in that case the word Ab-wehr ["resistance," literally, "defense-from"] would be a mere tautology; Wehr ["defense"] is not already in itself and only defense-against. In "Parcifal," ver does not mean resistance; instead, it means to defend oneself, maintain oneself: resistance-for. Thus ver means to keep one's position, hold one's place. To be sure, resistance always belongs here in a certain sense, yet this resistance is one that has to derive from a steadfastness. Ver means to be steady, to keep steady, i.e., not to fall (no falsum). to remain above, to maintain oneself, to keep one's head up, to be the head, to command. Maintaining oneself, standing upright-the upright Thus it is from the essential domain of the imperial that verum, as counter-word to falsum, received the sense of established right. Thereby from the original word ver a meaning has been extracted that clearly comes to the fore in the old Latin veru in the sense of gate and door, but also in the German das Wehr ["dam"], the gate that shuts and locks. the dam that seals off. The original element in ver and verum is that of closing off, covering, concealing, and sheltering, but it is not die Wehr ["defense"] as resistance. The corresponding Greek word of this Indo-Germanic stem is ἔρυμα—the defensive weapon, the covering, the enclosure. Ἔρυμα—to which the Roman word verum is immediately connected—means in Greek, however, precisely the opposite of the Greek word for "true," i.e., it is the opposite of ἀλήθεια. Verum, ἔρυμα—the enclosure, the covering; ἀλήθεια—the dis-covering, the dis-closing. But how else could an opposition hold sway here unless they both shared, though in a concealed way, the