The Virtue of Being Intelligent
The virtue of being intelligent is always a central feature of people who call themselves Christians. ” That’s right – when he was speaking to the Jewish crowd, he was advising his followers not to reject people because they were born of other cultures.
People today need the wisdom of the wise and the power of being intelligent.
The virtue of being intelligent is always a central feature of people who call themselves Christians. Not long ago, I was looking at the quotation from The Gospel According to St. Matthew in a famous study Bible that I own. What I found was rather fascinating, to say the least.
According to Matthew, Jesus said – “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and him that comes to me I will not cast out.” That’s right – when he was speaking to the Jewish crowd, he was advising his followers not to reject people because they were born of other cultures. He said they should welcome them and respect them. He said that everyone had the same nature and human dignity was a gift given by God. So the writer of the Gospel According to St. Matthew was a hypocrite.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the writer of the Gospel According to St. Matthew that another wise man was trying to give him advice on whether or not to follow Jesus. If you can see what he’s doing, he’s attempting to correct his prophet by attempting to correct his prophet’s followers. There’s nothing clever about that.
The Native Chinese word for smart is hsiu. Intelligent is an adjective meaning well educated, sharp, enlightened, clever, crafty, and gifted. Intelligent means, basically, well-read, well-educated, and disciplined. It’s an intellectual ability that stems from acquiring knowledge, though it’s not necessarily similar to any of those other characteristics.
You might ask, how would it help you to be smarter? You’d be the wiser, less fearful, more self-aware, less consumed by fear, more effective in your spiritual life, and less likely to allow fear to overwhelm you.
People today need the wisdom of the wise and the power of being intelligent. Many of our technological advances are directly the result of us embracing the virtues of the wise. We’ll never advance as a civilization unless we work with this higher intelligence. We will never progress until we understand how it operates.
The idea of being intelligent is central to the creative genius. The thing that makes people creative is the fact that their minds aren’t weighed down by the years of accumulated experience and information.
As our species continues to grow, there will be new ways to explore and conquer new areas, and what’s important will be to continue to have the wisdom of the wise on hand so that we won’t need to rely on modern technology to find the answers to the riddles of life. What will keep us alive and functioning, then, is not a purely physical power but a spiritual wisdom.
Humanity isn’t yet at the stage where we can live among others who understand the whole truth about life and reality. We’ll only progress to that point if we persist in our quest for wisdom. Having the knowledge that we need to answer the questions that confront us with the aid of modern technologies only becomes a good idea when the wisdom is part of us. If it’s not part of us, it’s just a technology.
I do believe that the intellectual elements of our civilization are part of us. For example, most of the things that are considered modern day wisdom were part of our civilization during the earlier civilizations, such as the theory of relativity and Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Hsiu-Ling was the name of a Chinese genius who learned all of these things and died a martyr for those principles. We owe him our civilization because he died for them. People who understand the virtue of being intelligent are a rarity. If you’re not one, you are living without the higher wisdom of the wise.
Our civilization depends on people like Hsiu-Ling and you. If you’re not a Hsiu, you are without the value of intellect and spirituality of those who are. Hsiu people are doing great things. After all, they are the ones who are still willing to stand up for the higher wisdom of being intelligent.
