Chapter 13. The Gift of Intellect

There now remain to be examined the two gifts which perfect the speculative rea son or intelligence, namely, intellect and wisdom. For clearness and precision it will be better to use the name of intellect rather than understanding to express this gift. It may be defined as a supernatural and active habit impressed upon the reason, and giving to it a perspicuity and a precision in apprehending and comprehending the truths of faith, with their principles and motives of credibility.

The natural faculty of intellect is the power by which we are able to apprehend and to comprehend natural truths. Philosophy is the highest exercise of the natural intellect because it knows truths and things in their causes and first principles. It is as the eye of the soul. As the eye is to things of sense, so is the intellect to ideas or ob jects of the invisible or supersensible world. It has a world of its own, wider and deeper and higher than the world of sense; for in stance, God, self, and morals are objects of the natural intellect.

The supernatural gift of intellect is a faculty superadded to nature, and related to the spiritual world, by which things of the spirit, the internal acts and facts of our spiritual life, the full and inner meaning of the truths of faith, of theology, and of Scripture are discerned and under stood.1

Now the operations of this gift are chiefly as follows:

1. It enables us to understand what we believe. It makes explicit what was implicit; and it gives a clear perception of the 1 S. Thomae, Sum. TheoL 2. 2, q. 8.

meaning, with the reasons and motives why we believe it.

For instance, those who come to faith hi adult life, with mature reason, need first to know the preambles of faith or the motives of credibility on which they believe, and submit their intellect to ' the obedience of faith.'2 They who are baptised in infancy receive the infused habit of faith before they know the preambles; for them the preambles are not necessary. The millions of the Christian world have never known them: the children, the unlettered, the poor, could never explicitly know them. They live and die, sanctified and made perfect in the truths of God by faith. Nevertheless, even for such as have received infused faith from in fancy, it is good; and often it is a duty to know with clearness as well the reasons and motives of credibility as also the full meaning of the dogmas of faith.

(1) But in their case faith precedes reason. It is on the condition of believing first that * Rom. xvi. 26.

the gift of intellect illuminates them afterwards. ' Believe, and you shall under stand.' « Unless you believe, you shall not understand.'8

(2) And yet faith is not a blind act, but the implicit act of the natural intellect j and intellect accompanies faith through all its processes and operations. It apprehends, step by step and truth by truth, what faith believes, and what it believes it appreciates.

(3) This is the difference between the legitimate and the illegitimate use of reason. Reason illuminated by faith is made perfect. Reason testing, measuring, criticising, limiting faith is rationalism, which inverts the divine order, and not only destroys faith, but dwarfs reason also.

S. Augustine says, 'Far be it from us to believe without having a reason and with out inquiry; for we could not even believe at all if we had not rational souls.'4 Again

' S. Aug. in Evang. S. Joan. Opp. torn. iii. p. 604.

4 S. Aug. Epi'st. cxx. 3, Opp. torn. ii. p. 347.

we say, * But first we must bow our necks to the authority of the Holy Scriptures, that by faith we may each of us come to under stand.'5

S. Anselm: ' As the right order requires that we first believe the deep things of the Christian faith before we presume to discuss them by reason, so it seems to me to be neglect if, after we are confirmed in faith, we do not study to understand what we believe.'8

2. The gift of intellect is the power by which the Church defends and propagates the faith. It is the supernatural light by which, as witness, teacher, and judge, it pre vails over the intellectual perversity and antagonism of the world, and that especially in three ways.

(1) First, in giving evidence. The Church, as S. Augustine says, ' Securus

• De Peccatorum Meritis, c. xxi. 16, torn. x. p. 1C.

• Cur Deus Homo, lib. i. c. ii., and S. Thomas. Sum. Iheol. 2. 2, q. 2.

indicat orbis terrarum.' It sits calmly in the See of truth, with a luminous universality and unity of faith confounding the multitudinous contradictions of error. It is a witness visible to the eye, audible to the ear, authoritative to the intelligence, and, as the Vatican Council says, ' the irrefragable proof of its own divine legation.'7 As the true key alone fits and turns in the wards, so the faith alone can open the heart in man, and meet the needs of life and the fears of death. It understands man, and they who believe understand the Church. They know its voice by the answer in their own heart.

(2) It also unravels objections drawn from inspired and uninspired history, from Holy Scripture, from the Fathers, and from heretics: as in the Harmony of the Gospels, it solves the verbal differences, the apparent contradictions of the sacred narratives, the seeming oppositions, such as those about faith and works and the like; and still more the T First Constitution on Catholic Faith, ch. iii.

controversies of word- splitters, who say that ' This is My body,' no more means that it is His body than I am the way, the door, the vine, means that He is these things. It is of this mental obscurity S. Paul says, ' The letter killeth, the Spirit quickeneth;'8 and S. Jude, speaking of those who err from the faith, * These are they that separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.*9

3. By this gift also the Catholic Church has elaborated its science of faith. Theo logy, though it is not a science in the strict propriety of the term, because it does not resolve itself into principles which are self-evident, is nevertheless the highest of sciences in a true sense because all its truths descend from God and rest upon His vera city. Given His revelation, theology be comes infallible in its certainty and scientific in its form. From the beginning the Church has defined its doctrines partly and chiefly for the clear and compendious instruction of its own members, and partly also in conflict • 1 Cor. iii. 6. » v. 19.

with the world outside of faith. It has chosen and fixed the very words and phrases and formulas by which truth, like the coin age of gold, bears the image of God and the superscription of its own authority. Such are the sacred words Trinity, Substance,. Person, Consubstantial, Transubstantiation, Immaculate Conception, Infallibility. And as the divine truth has expanded itself into definition by the action of Councils, so has the divine law unfolded itself into the wonderful legislation of Pontiffs and Coun cils, that is, into the pontifical or canon law; and upon both of these the sanctified intellect of the Church, ever working in its Schools, has wrought out and built up the greatest intellectual structure the world has ever seen, namely, dogmatic and moral the ology and the science of faith and morals in its unity, harmony, and procession of truth from truth.

For thus the gift of intellect adjusts this immutable truth to the ever-changing con ditions of men and of the world, as, for instance, in public life, in the science of politics, of authority and obedience, in physical science, in social laws such as usury, in the lawfulness of wars, and the like. So in private life it is this gift which protects piety from the illusions of visionaries and fana tics, and from the spirit of singularity and false conscience, by which religion is often made not only ridiculous, but hurtful to souls and to households. It gives a Christian common sense, which is the salt of devotion. If this lose its savour, devotion often becomes Pharisaic and intolerable.

There is, as there must be, an absolute harmony between divine and human science, for, as the Councils of the Lateran and the Vatican have defined, ' truth cannot contradict truth.'10 Yet for a time they may seem to do so; as, for instance, astronomy and geology have been supposed to be at variance with revelation; and yet no fact as yet has been proved which is at variance with any definition of the Church. No interpretation

'• First Constitution on Catholic Faith, c. iv.

of Holy Scripture except that of the Church constitutes doctrine of faith. No part of Holy Scripture has ever been interpreted by the Church against which human science can array itself. Apparent difficulties are only appearances, not proofs, and one by one they have vanished. So with history. The world professes to know the history of the Church better than the Church itself. But the Church not only knows its own history by unbroken consciousness of its own personal identity; it is its own history, for its past is present in its lineal intelligence; for in the mind of the Church there is not a memory of things gone by, but a living knowledge of what was and is in its divine tradition. So again with progress and civilisation, and the gospel of * modern thought.' The Church contains in itself the civilisation which has created the Christian world, the moral forces which have disposed and sanctified the material order of human society. It has in itself the highest ethics, the highest politics, and therefore the highest civilisation; and these alone are the motive powers of progress. The undoing And pulling down of the unity of nations, of faith, of morals, of religion, and of civil life is not progress, it is retrogression. Tt is -a relapse, the end of which is disorder, over throw, stagnation. So long as lawgivers and statesmen were in the unity of the Christian order, the gift of intellect taught them that conformity to the truth and law of God is the first and only principle of civilisation, progress, and stability to commonwealths. When they threw off the light obedience of faith to God in His Church they departed into the ways of political and social disorder, which has bred a century of revolutions, wars, and intolerable misery to the world. They have forfeited the Christian common sense which the gift of intellect once be stowed upon their fathers, and the nations they have misled are heaping up their own chastisement.

4. It is this gift which has formed the.households and schools of the Church. It has taught Christian parents to count the faith and morals of their children better, not only than literature and culture, but more precious than life itself. It has formed the teachers of the faithful, giving to each his own office and character as to the four chief doctors of the Church — S. Jerome, the literal interpreter of Holy Writ; S. Ambrose, the allegorical; S. Augustine, the doctor of grace and of unity; S. Gregory, the moral teacher and lawgiver, and pastor of pastors. So again of the theologians, as S. Anselm and S. Thomas, the dogmatic teachers, and all their followers, who have wrought up the materials, which others laid together, in scientific order.

5. It is this also that teaches us the one true method of forming man for his own welfare and the good of others. This can only be done by the rectification and sanctihcation of the intellect; but rectified it can not be unless it be sanctified; and as the intellect leads or misleads the will, and as the man is what his will becomes — holy or unholy, upright or crooked, true or false, kindly or malicious — so the illumination and sanctification of the intellect is the only method and way to the welfare of men and of nations. Therefore the Church founded its seminaries, schools, universities, upon the divine tradition of faith, binding together the culture of the intellect with the discipline of the will, forming the whole man by the Word of God and the grace of the Sanctifier. It has been reserved for the sensuality and the stupidity of revolutions and of men who have lost the light of God to call instruction education, and to seek for intellectual elevation without God, the Father of Lights. From this come the intellectual aberrations of the nineteenth century. No power of man can control or bring them back. The power of God seems to be held for a time in suspense, that they may finish their course like the rotation of storms, till the pride of men is brought down by the wreck of their ambitions, and by the scourging of their impieties.

There are three things which will keep us from sharing in these sins and chastise ments: (1) mental prayer; (2) study of the Holy Scripture; (3) devotion to the Holy Ghost.

Lord Jesus, let me never lose the love of Thy truth, lest I should believe a lie. Let me never trust in my own intellect, but in the Light of the Holy Ghost, who guides the Church and conforms all who are sanctified to its illumination. Let me never de part a hair's breadth from the mind of the Church or of its Head.

Jesus, have mercy on me.

Holy Mary, pray for me.