To many the idea of bringing the intellect fully into action in religion seems almost repellent. The intellect seems so cold and measured and measuring, and the will so warm and glowing. Indeed the joy of the will is always figured in terms of warmth—such words as ardor, fervor and the like come from Latin words for a fire burning: there is a fear that intellect can only damp down the fire. Many again who do not find the use of the intellect in religion actually repellent, regard it as at least unnecessary—at any rate for the layman—and possibly dangerous. One can, they say, love God without any very great study of doctrine. Indeed, they say, warming to their theme, some of the holiest people they know are quite ignorant. Plenty of theologians are not as holy as an old Irishman they have seen saying his Rosary.
All this is so crammed with fallacy as to be hardly worth refuting. A man may be learned in dogma, and at the same time proud or greedy or cruel: knowledge does not supply for love if love is absent. Similarly, a virtuous man may be ignorant, but ignorance is not a virtue. It would be a strange God who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him. It is true that some get vast love from lesser knowledge; it is true even that some get vast light from lesser knowledge: for love helps sight. But sight helps love too.
After all, the man who uses his intellect in religion is using it to see what is there. But the alternative to seeing what is there is either not seeing what is there, and this is darkness; or seeing what is not there, and this is error, derangement, a kind of double darkness. And it is unthinkable that darkness whether single or double should be preferred to light.
Indeed light is the joy of the mind as warmth is the joy of the will. But warmth and light are both effects of fire, warmth fire as felt, light fire as seen (and seen by). It seems strange to value the one effect and not the other of that fire by which the Holy Ghost is figured to us. It is an odd delusion that one is warmer in the dark, that one can love God better in the dark—or should we say in the half-dark, since a Christian can never be wholly in darkness.
We can be saved and even holy without a great deal of knowledge; for holiness is in the will and we are saved by what we love not by how much we know. But knowledge of the truth matters enormously all the same. It matters for the reason we have already stated, namely that every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him. It matters also for a reason that may not at first sight appear: that, in the appallingly difficult struggle to be good, the will is helped immeasurably by the intellect’s clear vision of the real Universe. Unless our mind has made that kind of study, then the position is that the Church is living in one world (which happens to be the real world) and we are living in another. One practical consequence is that the laws of right living promulgated by the Church, moral laws generally, are the natural and obvious laws of that real world and would seem so to us if we were mentally living in it; whereas in the twilight world we are living in, they often seem odd and unreasonable, which does not make obedience any easier. Thus the whole burden of right living is cast upon the will—do it because the Church says it—with no aid from the intellect, or rather with active hindrance from the intellect which naturally tends to judge by the half-reality it sees. And this is sheer cruelty.
The problem… is how our minds are to “master” the Church’s landscape, habituate themselves to it, move about easily in it, be at home in it. Somehow or other we must become fully conscious citizens of the real world, seeing reality as a whole and living wholly in it.
From Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed. Copyright 1945 Sheed and Ward, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the National Catholic Reporter. All rights reserved.