Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests (Ascension)

GOFP 185

Chapter 5: Intellectual Formation

183 A sound intellectual formation also preserves the mind from the tyranny of impulse and an unmoored imagination. As has been said many times before, without doctrine the Christian becomes a mere sentimentalist. “From the age of fifteen,” St. John Henry Newman wrote, “dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.” 153 184 Perhaps most importantly, intellectual formation nourishes our love for God. No one can love the unknown, and the one who loves can never know enough about the beloved. Our relationship with God is no exception. We learn directly about him through the Scriptures and the teaching of the Church. This study is the work of both grace and nature, culminating in a conversion of heart, a genuine renewal of mind. “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” St. Paul wrote to the Romans, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect” (Rom 12:2). 185 We also learn about God indirectly through the wider panorama of intellectual formation. In a sense, every field of human knowledge can give us glimpses of the divine, whether we are captured by the beauty of a sunset, the stunning majesty of faraway galaxies, or the intricate beauty of organic cells—whether we are studying the great works of literature or music or sorting through the complexities of human history. For believers who know that nothing is outside the Providence of God, everything we learn becomes an occasion to find him in new ways.

153 St. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1865, chap. 2.

83