Limits Of Intellect

Like Free Will, man's intellect is a gift from God and is most often used to serve man himself and his ego but rarely used to serve God. [1]  This entry relies on the assertions that the foundation of man's intellect is reason and reason gravitates toward justice.

Man's sense of justice is necessarily imperfect because his knowledge of the facts is incomplete. Incomplete facts contribute to flawed reasoning which in turn results in injustice.  Even if the facts are complete in a hypothetical situation where motives of every act relied on and cited are known, man's reasoning remains faulty because of his many biases and self-serving interests.  In contrast, "angels are perfect intellects [2]" and therefore they have flawless reasoning and can dispense perfect justice every time.  Even Lucifer was able to do so before It fell from Heaven.

Lucifer was supposedly the most beautiful angel whom God favored.  After man came along, Lucifer was no longer in first place.  Angels were made to serve man and that did not sit well with Lucifer. Not only was Lucifer not given the experience of incarnation, he had to share God's attention with a new creature that Lucifer considers sinful and inferior to angels.  Precisely because of his angelic nature, Lucifer was able to judge man accurately for what he is, an intellectually feeble and chronic sinner.  Lucifer thus rebelled against God to for what he perceived as God's unfairness.

Reason would concur that Lucifer was correct in his judgment regarding man but the same reasoning cannot be applied equally to God.  God is not subject to reason even though reason came from God. God is beyond reason.  God is love, and love is superior to reason.  What angels lack is the ability to love.  Love is inherent in the flesh and it is through incarnation that love is born. Man is part spirit and part flesh and therefore he can reason and he can love.

After God created man and gave him the capacity to love, God has continued to love man even after his fall from Eden and hopes that he would use his intellect to find his way back by choosing freely to love God in return.  On his way back to God, Satan has scattered before him every conceivable temptation to distract him from his potential to reason flawlessly, leading him away from his unconditional love for God.

The nature of intellect is pure but malleable, therefore intellect is easily manipulated.  Man's sinfulness compels it to be dishonest.  Yet, it wants to stay pure and it does so by distorting itself through a process called rationalization. Another name for it is intellectual dishonesty.  Man's sins result in man's constant need to rationalize and man's continuous failure to reason purely and flawlessly.

Faulty reasoning is the cause of injustice and injustice is the cause of conflicts in the world.  There are people who think they are so intellectually gifted that they can dispense justice around the world and re-order their lives [3] but what they fail to see is their intellect's limitation.  The more wicked their rationale, the more hellish the world.

Those who fail to recognize defects in their intellect are proud, arrogant, fortitudinously weak and feeble-minded. Their pride has obviated their need for God Who has become for them an occasional asset that is used as an expedient political gain.  A little humility before God would awaken their God-given intellect which will show them that they are nothing without God. That is unlikely to occur anytime soon for they are so blindly in love with themselves and their intellect that they have become like Lucifer who is now Satan.  "Lucifer became so infatuated with himself that he forgot that he was dependent on God for his very life." [4] There are people in the world with a similar infatuation.


[1] Exceptions apply to God's saints, as distinguished from political saints who had been canonized for reasons that had little to do with holiness.
[2] http://www.aquinasonline.com/Topics/angels.html  ( Ia 50,1 )
[3] Those who thought and are thinking that they could establish a new world order, obviously with their defective intellect, are now seeing a whole new world of disorder coming into being.  It is always better to humble oneself before God than to have a humble pie shoved down one's throat.  If being force-fed in the flesh is undesirable, one ought to consider being punished by demons for an eternity in Hell.  For those still in the flesh, it is not too late for repentance and reparation.
[4] http://mcdonaldroad.org/bible/study/lucifer.htm