Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

... it has to be acknowledged that rationalism benefits from extenuating circumstances in the face of religion, to the extent that rationalism becomes the mouthpiece of legitimate needs for causality raised by certain dogmas, at least when these are taken literally, as theology demands.(4)

In an altogether general way, it goes without saying that a rationalist can be right on the level of observations and experiences; man is not a closed system, although he can try to be. But even aside from any question of rationalism and dogmatism, one cannot begrudge anyone being scandalized by the stupidities and the crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, or even simply by the antinomies between the different creeds; however, since horrors are assuredly not the appanage of religion — the preachers of the "goddess reason" furnish the proof of this — it is necessary to confine ourselves to the observation that excesses and abuses are a part of human nature. If it is absurd and shocking that crimes claim the authority of the Holy Spirit, it is no less illogical and scandalous that they take place in the shadow of an ideal of rationality and justice.

What is important to understand is that the "positivistic" rationalism of the West does not exclude the presence of a valid element that also pertains to reason, namely the habit of relying on reason in all the cases wherein it is normal to do so; thus of considering the nature of things rather than obeying conventional reflexes.

If the Westerner — "free thinker" or not — has a tendency to "think for himself," wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the Western mind expressed itself through Plato and Aristotle before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers.

Howbeit, if finally the West had need of that messianic and dramatic religion which is Christianity, it is because the average European was an active type and an adventurer and not a contemplative like the Hindu; but the "Aryan" atavism had to resurface sooner or later, whence the Renaissance and modern rationalism. No doubt, Christianity presents elements of esoterism that make it compatible with all ethnic temperaments, but its formal structure, or its moral bearing, had to be in keeping with the fundamental temperament of the West, whether Mediterranean or Nordic.

As regards the question of Western rationality, ... the following must be taken into account: the "critical mind," if one may so express it, developed in a world where everything is called into question and where intelligence is continually forced into a state of self-defense; whereas the East has been able to slumber in the shade of the sacred and of the conventional, in the security of a religious universe without fissures.

In the West, such disciplines as the "science of religions" and "textual criticism," whatever their errors of principle, benefit from extenuating circumstances, given the irrefutable documentary evidence; so that certain hypotheses may be valid, despite the falseness of their context.

In short: we reject rationalism not because of its possibly plausible criticisms of humanized religion, but because of its negation of the divine kernel of the phenomenon of religion; a negation that essentially implies the negation of intellectual intuition, thus of that immanent Divine Presence which is the Intellect. The basic error of systematized rationality — by the way, it is wrong to attribute this ideology to the great Greeks — is to put fallible reasoning in place of infallible intellection; as if the rational faculty were the whole of Intelligence and even the only Intelligence.