I had to tell a Catholic woman I know, a kind and thoughtful woman, that someone she had known had been a sex abuser. “But how could he have been?” she said, mentioning how nice he had been, and then added, “He was so smart.”

That wasn’t so odd a response as it may seem. We Americans, I think, tend to connect intelligence with insight and wisdom, as if having the first meant having the second, and to connect insight and wisdom with goodness. It’s more instinct and attitude than conviction. We think of Doctor Who more than of Dr. Frankenstein, Gandalf and Galadriel more than Sauron and Saruman. I’ve heard and read a lot of people say what the Catholic woman said.

The most famous, indeed notorious, example is the collective “best and brightest” who led America into the Vietnam War. The only aspect of their characters that made them the “best,” as they were called at the time, was being part of America’s intellectual elite. They were “best” because “brightest,” but it turned out that in trying to shape the world to America’s demands, they weren’t that bright, because they weren’t wise or good enough to see that they couldn’t control the world the way they thought they could.

The Limits of Intelligence

Many Christians make the same connections, but connect intelligence not just with goodness but with godliness. We absorb the attitude from the culture.

But intelligence is only a capacity, an ability to think thoughts. Very intelligent people just think more complex thoughts and think them faster and more easily than other people. They connect ideas and find reasons for them in a way most people can’t. They can usually more easily put them into words and explain them in a convincing way.

They don’t necessarily think better than other people, defining “better” as getting closer to the truth, because people can move quickly and easily to a mistake as well as to a truth. Intelligence is a tool. You can use it to seek and tell the truth or to lie to your own advantage — the way you can use your car to take food to the homeless or deliver fentanyl to addicts.

The first time I read St. John Henry Newman’s autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua, the line “the truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral” surprised me. I was a Christian and knew he was right about the danger, but the insight felt wrong, because I felt about the mind the way almost everyone did in the college town in which I grew up. Few people I knew would have drawn the distinction at all, much less as sharply as Newman drew it, and fewer would have agreed with him. Most, probably without ever thinking about it, took intellectual excellence as by itself a sign of moral excellence.

Growing up there, I’d seen enough to have been a little protected from the idea. Some of the worst human beings I’ve ever known were highly intelligent and successful professors. The evil mad scientist of the old movies caricatured a kind of person you could find in milder form at your local university, and in the humanities and social sciences more than in the hard sciences. The one moral effect high intelligence gave them was the ability to invent reasons to justify doing what they wanted.

Goodness and Intelligence

The Catholic tradition sees that goodness is a form of intelligence, but intelligence is not a form of goodness. I mean that goodness improves our ability to see what’s there, meaning that whatever thoughts we have about our subject will be based on better information and therefore likelier to be truer. Especially about the most important things, like justice, beauty and goodness, the things we need wisdom to understand.

For one thing, goodness removes some of the ego and vice that distorts our vision. Each of the deadly sins changes the way you see someone else. It’s impossible to see fairly someone you envy and someone whose goods you covet. George Orwell, a man involved with many of the smartest people of his day, saw this. Intellectuals are people, too, and will use their brains as their morals dictate.

“As fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved,” he explained in an essay, “the sense of right and wrong becomes unhooked also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it.” In the same essay, “Notes on Nationalism,” he made the famous observation that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Becoming holier is like trading a weak, broken pair of glasses for a perfect prescription. Goodness doesn’t make the mind work any faster, but it does help it come to more accurate conclusions.

The highly intelligent scholar-theologian Friedrich von Hügel knew exactly how far intelligence got you. He had to explain this to his niece, who seems to have looked down on intellectually simpler people, in a note included in the wonderful book Letters to a Niece. Higher intelligence didn’t necessarily keep one from grace. But it could get in the way in a way that “ordinary intelligence — real slowness of mind” didn’t, he explained. Slow-mindedness is “more easily accompanied by simplicity, naiveness, recollection, absence of self-occupation, gratefulness, etc., which dispositions are necessary for the soul’s union with God.” (Notice that he said “more easily,” not “necessarily” or even “often.”)

He was, he told her, “struck too at how the little regarded, the very simple, unbrilliant souls — souls treated by impatient others as more or less wanting — are exactly pretty often specially enlightened by God and specially near to Him.” He pointed to the “striking interconnection between an apparent minimum of earthly gifts and a maximum of heavenly light.”

The brilliant and massively learned Hügel may have been a little romantic about this, the way some rich people get all romantic about the simple peasant or the noble working class. But he at least counters the smart person’s romantic view of intelligence (the smart person without wisdom), which is that they know more than most people about some things, so they must know more about the important things, too.

Intelligence and Wisdom

Christians have said things like my friend said as long as I’ve known serious Christians. They knew better, but they instinctively felt a connection between intelligence and goodness and confused intelligence with wisdom.

We see high intelligence easily, because it shows itself off, with titles and books, with a sophisticated way of speaking and allusions to people you’ve never heard of, as comfortable with ideas as Aaron Judge with a high school pitcher’s fastball. Apparently we don’t see wisdom so easily, because it doesn’t show itself off. It speaks with the still, small voice that Elijah heard, a voice you have to listen for to hear. We may not recognize the holy person’s wisdom because we aren’t that holy or wise.

We all have the brains we have, with different capacities and abilities. We should use them as well as we can and develop them as far as we can, as gifts God has given us to use. But we shouldn’t confuse the employment of the tool of intelligence with secure knowledge about the most important things, the truths only wisdom can see. To get smarter, to think better, the best thing we can do is pursue holiness. Fortunately for us, the spiritual life includes intellectual training. Confession and Communion are good for the mind.