Wise Yet Simple

BE WISE in the ways of the world, but simple in your openness to God and each other, said Jesus. The deep secrets of life and of faith, he added, are hidden from the learned and clever and revealed instead to those with the openness of a child. Matt 10.16, 11.25
Clearly intelligence and learning are good, a gift from God. Every healthy society and every healthy individual strive to overcome ignorance and lack of education. Scripture praises both wisdom and intelligence, and the health of any Church is partly based on having a lively intellectual stream within it.
Popular piety and the prayer life of ordinary people is essential for growth in the Church. At the same time there is need for solid theological reflection to ensure, before God, that we are on the right lines. The Reformation arose out of just that, and one of the first things that the Council of Trent mandated for Catholics was that its priests be better trained intellectually.
Intelligence and learning are good things. Naiveté is not a virtue and should never be confused with innocence. So why is being “intelligent and clever” something that can work against our understanding of the deeper secrets within life and faith?
The fault is not with intelligence and learning, both good things in themselves, but in what they can inadvertently do to us. Intelligence and learning can have the unintended effect of undermining what’s childlike in us. The very strength that they bring into our lives can allow us unconsciously to claim a superiority and have us believe that, given our intelligence, we have both the need and
the right to isolate ourselves from others in ways that the natural neediness of children does not permit them to do.
Children are not self-sufficient even though they may want to be. They need others and they know it. Consequently they more naturally reach out and take someone’s hand. They don’t have the illusion of self-sufficiency.
When we are “learned and the clever” we can more easily forget that we need others and consequently don’t naturally reach for another’s hand as does a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves. When we are less aware of our contingency we more easily lose sight of the things to which God and life are inviting us.
The very strength that intelligence and learning bring into our lives can instill in us a false sense of self-sufficiency that can make us want to separate ourselves in unhealthy ways from others and understand ourselves as superior in some way. And superiority never comes alone, but always brings along arrogance, disdain, boredom, cynicism. All of these are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever” and none of these helps unlock any of life’s deep secrets.
But we must be careful not to misread the lesson. Faith doesn’t rule out stretching our minds. Neither ignorance nor naiveté serve faith. Faith not only doesn’t fear the hard questions it invites us to ask them.
The depths of infinity are never threatened by finite intelligence. So it’s never a bad thing to become learned and sophisticated; it’s only a bad thing if we remain there. The task is to become post-sophisticated, to remain full of intelligence and learning even as we become like children in our openness to God and each other. 4/11/11

Peter Knott SJ