Sertillanges explains why virtue and scholarship cannot be separated:
Life is a unity: It would be very surprising if we could give fullest play to one of its functions while neglecting the other, or if to live our ideas should help us to perceive them.
What is the source of this unity of life? Love. “Tell me what you love, I will tell you what you are.” Love is the beginning of everything in us; and that starting point which is common to knowledge and practice cannot fail to make the right paths of both in a certain measure interdependent.
Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her, and this love cannot be without virtue. For this reason, in spite of his possible defects, the man of genius at work is already virtuous; it would suffice for his holiness if he were more completely his true self.
The true springs up in the same soil as the good: Their roots communicate. Broken from the common root and therefore less in contact with the soil, one or other suffers; the soul grows anemic or the mind wilts. On the contrary, by feeding the mind on truth one enlightens the conscience, by fostering good one guides knowledge.