The abuse of intelligence
The abuse of intelligence must not be confused with intelligence itself, as was done in classical Greece, the Renaissance, the Age of Philosophy, the Nineteenth Century and, with new and rather unpleasant modalities, in the Twentieth; the human spirit has the right to be creative only to the extent that it is contemplative, and if it has this quality, it will acknowledge that which "is" before busying itself with that which "may be."
The progressivist ideology of the Nineteenth Century believed that it could reduce the problem of the human spirit, in a certain respect at least, to the rather expeditious distinction between "civilized" and "barbarian" peoples. Now if to be intelligent is to be realistic, the Red Indians for example, with their ecological realism, were more intelligent than the chimerically industrialist Whites, and they were so not merely on the surface, but in depth. And this allows us to note that the naturism of peoples without written language is based, more often than one may be prepared to admit, on a "primordial choice" that is far from being devoid of wisdom. Instinctively distrusting the intelligence of the sorcerer's apprentice, they preferred to abstain.(12)
12. Their axioms are: if you create something — by going too far in outwardness and concretization — you become its slave; and: urban conglomerations produce both degeneracy and calamities. These convictions explain the vandalism of naturist peoples when they become conquerors, even though afterwards they cannot resist the hypnosis of urban civilizations. Judeo-Moslem iconoclasm is not unconnected with this perspective.
Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism
Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism are the two great abuses of intelligence, which violate pure intellectuality as well as the sense of the sacred;(1) it is through this propensity that thinkers “are wise in their own eyes” and end by “calling evil good, and good evil” and by “putting darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah, 5:20 and 21); they are also the ones who, on the plane of life or experience, “make bitter what is sweet,” namely the love of the eternal God, and “sweet what is bitter,” namely the illusion of the evanescent world.
1. By a curious and inevitable backlash, the abuse of intelligence is always accompani ed by some inconsequentiality and some blindness: on the plane of art for example, it is inconsequential to copy nature when one is condemned in advance to stop halfway, for in painting, one can realize neither total perspective nor movement, any more than one can realize the latter in sculpture, without mentioning the impossibility of imitating the living appearance of surfaces.
Similarly in philosophy: by forgetting that thought is there to furnish keys, and by wanting to exhaust all the knowable by thought alone, one ends by no longer knowing how to think at all; and likewise for science, which out of principle bypasses everything essential, as is proved moreover by its dismal results. Some persons will term our doctrine “ dogmatic” and “ naïve,” which for us is a compliment.