It’s the plain teaching of the Gospel, and the whole Christian tradition, that to find truth one must first find humility. That arrogance is doomed to ignorance is the wisdom of Scripture and the saints.

But it’s also the wisdom of all sciences and arts. The untutored remain fools, pathetically deluded by bluster and bravado, which can quickly become dangerous. “If ignorance makes beasts of us, arrogance makes us like demons,” St. Bernard of Clairvaux once wrote. This is true of us all, no matter our religion. That humility is necessary to intelligence, which is also good for peace, is something we should in theory all agree on. It’s why what Wendell Berry said is correct and should be repeated by teachers, students, and humans, all: that it’s the “first responsibility of intelligence…to know when you don’t know or when you’re being unintelligent.” A plainly human lesson, true for everyone, it’s what, aside from religion, we would do well to remember, and that’s, the moral good of intellectual humility.

But it’s wisdom also for believers and spiritual seekers. Speaking of his own early resistance to Christianity, St. Augustine said, “I in my pride was daring to seek only what a humble person can find.” He was brilliant; but he thought Christianity intellectually unimpressive. He didn’t immediately see the genius of humility; he didn’t see the compassion of God’s condescension, that God would humble himself so that we too—all of us, not just elites—could find him. His arrogance was ignorance, Augustine admitted, rendering him spiritually and philosophically blind.

Which is a lesson of this passage from Luke. “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk 14:11) In context, the point is that those who took pride in their “religion” and learning, who couldn’t humble themselves to see in the carpenter from Galilee something more, failed to see the truth of God. In their arrogance they were ignorant. As Jesus said in John’s Gospel, those who say they see are those who’ve become blind (Jn 9:39). True in all areas of human learning, it’s true in the area of the spirit too.

And so, what this means is that if we’re to approach Christianity or God well at all, we must first discover humility. For many this means admitting that what you think you know of Christianity or Catholicism might not be very much at all, no matter how much you went to Catholic school. Augustine once said he was ashamed to look back at all the nonsense he used to think about Catholicism; “what I had barked against for so many years was not the Catholic faith but the figments of carnal imagination,” he said. This is true today for so many of us, both within the Church and without. We think we know Christianity when we don’t, and we don’t realize it or won’t admit it. That’s the intellectual lesson of this passage, a lesson quite relevant for we very intelligent people.

So, simply put, discover humility. Temper your intellectual confidence. Destroy arrogance to destroy ignorance and then discover the truth. And then be set free.