What modern man is no longer willing to admit is above all the idea of an anthropomorphic, "infinitely perfect" God, creating the world "out of goodness" while foreknowing its horrors — creating man "free," while knowing he would make bad use of his freedom; a God who, despite His infinite goodness, would punish man for faults which He, the omniscient Creator, could not fail to foresee. But this is to be hypnotized, quite uselessly, by the inevitable defects of anthropomorphic symbolism, a symbolism which moreover is inevitable and which has been proven to be well-founded by thousands of years of efficacy. It is to contend, not without a certain pretentiousness, against modes of speech which, though no doubt imperfect, are opportune in certain circumstances; and it is to shut oneself off from truth — including even the truth which gives salvation — merely for reasons of dialectic.(1)

The answer to these sophistries is that the Absolute is not an artificial postulate, explainable by psychology, but a "pre-mental" evidence as actual as the air we breathe or the beating of our hearts; that intelligence when not atrophied — the pure, intuitive, contemplative intellect — allows no doubt on this subject, the "proofs" being in its very substance; that the Absolute of necessity takes on, in relation to man, aspects that are more or less human, without however being intrinsically limited by these aspects; that the possibility of human goodness is metaphysical proof of the divine Goodness, which is necessarily limitless in relation to its earthly traces; that the sentimental anthropomorphism of monotheists is what it has to be, given the character of the masses to which it is addressed; that in a general way the sacred Scriptures, far from being popular tales, are on the contrary highly "scientific" works through their polyvalent symbolism which contains a science at once cosmological, metaphysical and mystical, not forgetting other equally possible applications; that man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational.

Far from proving that modern man "keeps a cool head" and that men of old were dreamers, modern unbelief and "exact science" are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism — sometimes apparently antirationalist — which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the "age of reason." The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly "intelligent." To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but "worldly," logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised.

Modern man collects keys but does not know how to open a door. A confirmed sceptic, he flounders among concepts with no suspicion of their intrinsic value or their efficacy. He ‘classifies’ ideas at the surface level of thought but never ‘realizes’ a single idea in depth. He treats himself to the luxury of despair — the most paradoxical form of that commodity. He thinks he is experienced, whereas he does nothing but avoid those experiences which are incumbent upon him and which he has not even the intellectual capacity to undergo; his experience amounts to that of a child which has burnt itself and wants to abolish fire.