Ord Om ordet
Veritas
Homily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity.
Filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, Jesus said: ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Luke 10:21-24.
So are divine realities really inaccessible to the learned and the clever? If so, it’s bad news for a community of Dominicans. Before we despair on their behalf, however, let us consider the context of the Gospel words. Jesus exclaims them as he welcomes back the 
seventy proto-disciples sent abroad to spread his peace and to proclaim the proximity of God’s kingdom. The seventy are amazed at what they have accomplished.
Returning with joy, they say, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!’ Jesus assures them that he has seen Satan fall like lightning from heaven. That is what causes him to rejoice ‘in the Holy Spirit’ and to speak the words we have heard.
There is a connection, then, between the sort of ‘intelligence’ Jesus condemns and demonic presumption. The demons are intelligent but soulless creatures. They can be cunning. They excel at manipulation. But they are uninterested in truth. Their purpose is confusion.
The Gospel cuts through their stratagems by proposing, not just a theory of the universe, but new life as man’s integrity is restored by grace. Grace-filled man rises above deceit when he discovers that the ultimate reality making sense of things is not some speculative, abstract formula but love, divine love incarnate in Christ Jesus and sharable by women and men who freely let his peaceful power work through them.
Jesus does not celebrate stupidity. The power of reason is an integral aspect of his image in us. We are obliged to develop it as well as we can. St Peter, one of those to whom Jesus speaks in this scene, urges us, in his first epistle, to be always ready to make a defence to those who call us to account for the hope that is in us (1 Pet 3.15). For that, we need all our resources of learning. What we must remember, quite simply, is that arguments are not enough. Argument left to its own devices is only too prone to stray off course, abandoning the lead of truth-inspired reason for self-generated chaos. 
Our Dominican friends, thank God, are kept on the straight, narrow path by their Order’s glorious motto: ‘Veritas’! Human intelligence deployed in search for truth, illumined by love, is a wonderful faculty apt to enable growth in wisdom and virtue, apt to bring light into darkness.
Let us resolve to use our intelligence responsibly and well, according to our calling or state of life. Not everyone has to give lectures or write books. Being intelligent is primarily about maintaining a concern for the meaning of things, about resisting demonic disorder, about courageously unmasking senselessness.
If you think of H.C. Andersen’s well-known tale of the emperor’s new clothes, an important use of intelligence right now is ability to state that the emperor is naked when, in fact, he is. To do that, we must indeed become like children — not by becoming childish, but by retaining, or redeveloping, an ability to see reality clearly, in truth.
Amen.