Our intelligence just cannot be on its own

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THAT’S right! Our intelligence just cannot be on its own. Without God, it can only go nowhere even if it can spin a very sophisticated web of reasonings and discoveries. Our intelligence needs God to guide it, to enlighten it, and to lead it to its proper end.

Our intelligence is first of all a creation of God. Its operation should always be under the guidance of its creator. It may be subjected to various human and natural conditions, like genetics, culture, politics, profession, etc., but these conditions do not detract from the basic truth about it is that it is God who is its origin and end, and guide.

And God’s guidance over our intelligence takes place through the faith that he gives us. It would just depend on us on whether we would receive that faith or not, and act according to it or not. We need to see to it that we would always feel the need to be with God, to be guided by faith for us to be on the right path in our life.

It’s when we see, think and reason out with faith that we can discern the will and the powerful ways of God in our life. It’s faith that gives us the whole picture of things, blending well the different aspects of our life—the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, etc.

And faith means that we always do things—starting with our thoughts and intentions, and then with our words and deeds—with Christ and for Christ. And because of that, we would always be thinking and caring for the others, for everybody and for everything else, because that is what Christ does. Christ has no other business than to love all of us, to sanctify and save us, even all the way to offering his life.

We need to train ourselves to have the very mind and heart of Christ because that is what we are meant for. We need to strongly and widely propagate this truth of our faith about ourselves, helping one another to pursue and achieve that goal as best that we can.

We need to realize that our intelligence just cannot be beholden to the data provided by our senses and our own understanding of things. That would confine our reasoning to the world of the sensible and the intelligible, that is, to the world of matter and of ideas.

Thus conditioned, our reason cannot go beyond those levels and would miss the world of the spiritual and the supernatural. It would get trapped in some subjective mode as opposed to what is objective.

It’s important that we do some disciplining to our intelligence because it tends to get contented only with the sensible and the intelligible in the many forms that they come and attract us.

We know that our intelligence does not create the truth. It does not create the reality. It can only apprehend, reflect, process and transmit the truth and reality. It will always depend on a reality that is outside and independent of itself.

And reality just cannot be sensible and intelligible. A lot more goes into it than what our senses can perceive and our intelligence can discern and understand. Our intelligence itself, if used properly, can acknowledge that at the limits of its capability, it can discern a world that is beyond the physical and the ideal.

No matter how perceptive and intelligent we are, we can always detect that there is another world that is beyond the sensible and the intelligible. This is the world where our senses and intelligence cannot anymore cope. Our intelligence would need God.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com