Virtue and Intelligence

A friend recently expresses chastened sentiment. “Great books and good philosophy,” he sighed, “don’t really help us become virtuous, do they?’

Well, mostly no, they don’t. In my youth I hitch-hiked across America many times, worked all sorts of jobs, and spent a great deal of time with people who could barely read and write, much less read great books. My conclusion:

God is not a respecter of persons. Virtue and vice are spread pretty evenly across social classes and educational levels. (Although different social classes have different characteristic virtues and vices, so its not the case that everybody tends to be the same.)

In the main, reading makes one more articulate, not more wise. It’s a good thing to become articulate about the small margin of wisdom one has gained in life, so I commend reading to my students. Furthermore, for certain kinds of people, perhaps you and perhaps me, reading provides a crooked, but useful path to greater wisdom. To express thoughts to oneself in a clear, critical fashion—it’s helpful for correcting false truism that have been circulating on your mind.

Though we should beware. Educated folks, especially college professors like me, tend to compliment ourselves with the thought that intelligence gives us an advantage. Hardly.  Intelligence only gives us leverage, which like other forms of power mostly magnifies our virtues and vices rather than guides them. Intellectual vanity is more refined than crude arrogance about how much money you make—and it is therefore more difficult to see in oneself and more difficult to dislodge.

The main reason great books and good philosophy can’t carry is very far is because vice is a spiritual debility, and only spiritual remedies work for spiritual sicknesses. There is a spiritual dimension to the life of the mind. To read Virgil carefully encourage diligence, and to be ravished by his poetic genius can encourage a proper sense of humility.

But the moral dimension is only a dimension, and it’s a typical mistake of academics to imagine that one can apply purely intellectual methods to remedy spiritual and moral problems. As St. Bonventure warned his students at the end of his beautiful evocation of the spiritual value of intellectual work, The Journey of the Mind to God, let us not imagine “that it suffices to read without unction, speculate without devotion, investigate without wonder, examine without exultation, work without piety, know without love, understand without humility, be zealous without divine grace, see without wisdom divinely inspired.”