Faith & Spirit Quote by Huston Smith

Smith is trying to collapse the gap modern life assumes between “religion” and “knowledge.” Instead of treating human intelligence as a lucky evolutionary byproduct, he frames it as an emanation: our capacity to know is not merely ours, but a local expression of a deeper intelligence woven into reality. That’s the provocation. It quietly demotes the modern heroic image of the autonomous thinker and replaces it with a participatory model of mind: cognition as continuity, not conquest.

The line “we mimic the mind of God, so to speak” signals his rhetorical caution. He’s aware that God-talk can sound naive or imperial in a post-Enlightenment register, so he softens it with conversational hedging, then sharpens it again: “Or better…” The revision is the tell. “Mimic” implies imitation at a distance; “continue and extend” implies intimacy and obligation. We are not copying transcendence; we are part of its unfolding. That’s a theological claim smuggled in as epistemology.

Subtextually, Smith is defending the perennialist intuition running through his work: traditions differ on the surface, but they converge on the idea that mind is not an accident in a mindless universe. The context is late-20th-century religious studies, where faith is often treated as cultural artifact and science as the only serious knowledge-maker. Smith pushes back by re-enchanting intellect itself. If intelligence is derivative of a cosmic Intelligence, then inquiry becomes more than problem-solving; it becomes a form of participation in the sacred order of things, with humility built in.