Theological Intelligence

It is not the greatest, but certainly not the least of the many forms of human intelligence. I would define theological intelligence as: the ability to receive, engage, understand, and explain in concept and word the great Mysteries of God and of  human life in relation to God.

It is more valued within Catholicism than anywhere else. We have a rich, extensive legacy of theological reflection which draws from both Greek philosophy and the Revelation of Jesus Christ as preserved in Sacred Scripture and Tradition. The core of this legacy is that our Creator, a Trinity of infinite love, is absolute Truth, Goodness and Beauty and has filled Creation (analogously) with Truth (intelligibility), Goodness and Beauty. We humans ourselves are created in the divine image, as spirits or persons with heart, intelligence, will, freedom and the capacity to know and love. We are created to "know, love and serve God here on earth and forever in heaven" (in the incomparable words of the Baltimore Catechism.)

The goal of human existence is to receive, engage, respond to and commune with the communitarian, dramatic God of endless Truth and Beauty and Goodness. This eventful encounter crucially entails the intellect, but it is not exhausted by that. It also involves the heart, will, body and community. The entirety of Creation is intended to be given to and received by the human community and the human person. Our engagement with reality is essentially, but not only intellectual: it is volitional, mystical, aesthetic, dramatic as well. To understand is already and always also to delight, to suffer, to choose and commit, to exult and to adore. The life of faith is the encounter of myself, as Freedom, with God and others as Freedoms; and this involves a dense symphonic interplay of contemplation, reception, thought, decision, action and communion. Understanding, judgement and decision are at the heart of this drama; and it expresses itself in action. 

Catholicism is the most intellectualist faith as it contemplates the Eternal Logos, the Word, in which all existence finds purpose, meaning and intelligibility. This Logos, Jesus the Christ, is a Person, and is supra-intelligible, Mysterious, far surpassing the capacities of the finite human mind. So our faith is not rationalist in a reductive sense: our intellect does crave union with the Infinite but is incapable of achieving that without faith as receptivity of divine grace and revelation. Faith is, primarily, much more than cognition and intellection; but it is a deeper form of intelligence, again intuitive, an act of Trust and reception from above. So faith is the total engagement of the human spirit, heart-intellect-intuition-will, with the Revealing Trinity in a communion of surrender that entails the active intelligence but also far surpasses it. So faith is neither fideism (a pure act of faith), nor emotion (Schilermacher and liberal Christianity), not an autonomous, ungrounded rationalism.

Theological intelligence is integrated with and coinheres with related forms of intelligence: spiritual, moral, social, emotional, aesthetic, legal, scientific, musical and other.

The most important is spiritual intelligence as the capacity of the human soul to receive God and heavenly things, in a non-conceptual, intuitive, mystical fashion. The mystical dimension, which is deeper than the mere emotional, is primary; it is the basis for the theological. It is the union of the human heart and soul (and thus the intellect and will) with God. Sound theology is only as good as the underlying spiritual union that nourishes it. Very much of academic theology is abstract, unrooted in adoration and prayer, and therefore superficial and sterile, however erudite and complicated. On the other hand, a holy person may have little theological ability. St. Joseph Cupertino was apparently slow intellectually: but he was a genuine mystic, casting out demons, levitating during the Eucharist, bilocating, healing people. When he was dying, someone spoke to him about God's love; he replied "Say that again!" in the manner of a little child who is delighted with the simple repetition. Good theology can only flow from a theologian at prayer, "on his knees" (in the words of Balthasar.) Holiness is the making of the saint; intelligence flowing from holiness the making of good theologian.

Moral intelligence is again intuitive before being intellective or conceptual: it is recognition of and attraction to the Good, and aversion to Evil. Here the will especially interacts with the intellect as our decisions for the Good enhance our intuitive moral intentionality. Theological ethics will, of course, draw from this deep, intuitive current to express with clarity and accuracy principles by which we choose the Good and renounce Evil. But again, primacy is on the knowing of the heart which instructs the intellect. 

And so it is with social, emotional (empathy, gratitude, delight), aesthetic (Beauty in music, art, architecture, etc.), and even legal and scientific intelligence: prior to the conceptual articulation, there is an intuitive, mystical event of encounter with the Real, something that is far more than mere feeling.

John Allen, in his newsletter Crux, is advertising an advanced form of artificial intelligence that consumes encyclopedic quantities of theological material from Church documents, historical sources, theologians. I do not doubt that this machine, using a sophisticated logarithm, can summarize these sources more completely and accurately than our greatest living theologian. But....it is a machine, not a person. And so, there is no spiritual, moral, social, emotional interiority. There is no heart. It is the human heart, along with the intellect and will, that mediates the heart and mind of Christ. The artificial theological intelligence is mechanical, sterile and impersonal.

A marvelous fact of the Mystical Body of Christ, as well as humanity at every level from family to the globe, is that the many types of human intelligence are dispersed among us so that each of us enjoys some, but not all. Together, we build a world that is true, good, beautiful, just, hopeful. For example, I myself am well below average in intelligences dealing with: athletics, mechanics, animals, gardening, fashion, the physical and biological sciences, carpentry/plumbing/fix-it-stuff, music, computers, engineering. I am above average in intelligences dealing with: theology, philosophy, culture, history, literature, politics, morality, law, math, and some kinds of social and emotional life. Our strengths and weaknesses beautifully work together for the common good.

Theological intelligence is important for the Church as a body. But it is not required for every person. Ignorance in this area is no problem for most people as long as they have a spiritual union, however unclear, with God; and they have a moral conscience; and they use whatever intelligence they have generously for the community. 

We are in a strange dilemma now with  Pope Francis who has strong spiritual and moral intuitions but is challenged in theological intelligence. Last week he told the German Church: Get away from all these committees and get back to adoration and to the streets to care for the suffering. That is the best spiritual direction I ever heard! But he has no clue that the train wreck called "German Synodality" is the fruit of his own loopy, convoluted fantasy about "synodality." He is in many ways an exemplary disciple of Christ and priest, but he is a catastrophe as a pope, whose job is to be the worlds most important theologian. His capacity for theology is about the same as mine for mechanics; that does not make me or him a good or a bad person; it does make him a weak pope and me a terrible mechanic!

Across our society today there is pervasive theological ignorance, an incapacity among Catholics to think with clarity, depth and accuracy about God and the things of faith. It is especially striking that so many entirely intelligent people of apparently sound moral character show an incapacity to comprehend simple theological realities, despite years in Catholic schools. It seems similar to color blindness or inability to hear a tune...things that afflict people randomly.  There are other levels to this reality. 

First of all, many are good, holy people without interest in or capacity for philosophical thinking. Just like not all of us have to be able to do statistics or calculus. That is fine as long as there is a critical mass of sound theological thinking guiding the community.

Secondly, there was a catechetical crisis in the Church after Vatican II as we threw away our old catechism and had nothing in its place. It is not clear that the overall level of theological literacy was so much better before the Council as it was largely mechanical, rote, unreflective, and not always rooted in intuition and prayer. But the dual pontificate of JPII and B16, and especially the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in large part addressed this deficit.

Thirdly, more profoundly, the Catholic demographic in the post war USA experienced a euphoric wave of prosperity, security, and esteem and so surrendered to an ethos of bourgeois consumerism, careerism, and materialist trust in science and technology. And so, there has been a loss of prayer, a sense of the sacred and the sinful, and the eternal and transcendent. A superficiality that is at once lazy, restless and eventually nihilistic.

Lastly, this retreat from the spiritual to the material was pronounced at the upper, elite levels of society, especially the academy. Accompanying this was a diminished attention to the properly philosophical or metaphysical and so theology was drawn increasingly to the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology. Emotional healing was sought in psychotherapy; and communal liberation in the political activism of the left. Theological intelligence surrendered to woke models of Marxist and Freudian liberation. 

During these years since the 60s, there has, however, been a faithful remnant. In the 1970s for example, I benefited from studying under Avery Cardinal Dulles S.J. who represented theological intelligence at its pinnacle/ arguably he is the greatest American Catholic theologian of the century. At the same time, Joseph Whelan S.J. taught my mystical theology, more from his own holy manner than his excellent scholarship. He introduced me to Balthasar and then we receive John Paul and Benedict. These three are for me, the defining Catholic thinkers of the 20th century. That body of teaching was applied brilliantly to our American culture by David L. Schindler and his collaborators. I was blessed also by my association with fine theologians at Seton Hall University, including my friend Fr. Tom Guarino, heir of Dulles, my son John Laracy and nephew Fr. Joseph Laracy and other scholars in the tradition of Fr. Stanley Jaki and Monsignor John Osteriecher.

Dulles, Whelan, Schindler, John Paul, Benedict and Balthasar have gone on to their reward. Their accumulated theological work, all of it interconnected, is monumental. It may equal that of the early fathers and doctors and the medieval scholastic scholars. May they pray for us...our theologians...our priests, bishops, popes..that we all surrender to the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit!