One of the great errors of our times is to speak of the "bankruptcy" of religion or the religions; this is to lay blame on truth for our own refusal to admit it; and by the same token it is to deny man both liberty and intelligence. Intelligence depends in large measure on the will, hence on free will, in the sense that free will can contribute towards actualizing intelligence or on the contrary paralyzing it. It was not without reason that medieval theologians located heresy in the will: intelligence can, in fact, fall into error, but its nature does not allow it to resist truth indefinitely; for this to happen it needs the intervention of a factor connected with the will, or, more precisely, with the passions, namely prejudice, sentimental bias, individualism in all its forms. There is, at the basis of every error, an element of irrational "mystique," a tendency not deriving from concepts, but making use of them or producing them: behind every limiting or subversive philosophy can be discerned a "taste" or a "color"; errors proceed from "hardenings," drynesses or intoxications.

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.

It has been said that the flaws characterizing the modern West are rationalism, materialism and sentimentalism. According to the first, reason alone brings about all knowledge; according to the second, only matter gives meaning to life; as for sentimentalism, one ought to rather speak of psychologism, besides the fact that one should not confuse a given emotivity with emotivity as such, nor wish to minimize the defects of the East by exagerrating those of the West. According to psychologism, the spiritual and the intellectual are reduced to the psychic, hence in a certain way to the infrahuman: quite paradoxically, it is some rationalists who say so.

 

The most specifically modern thought readily makes the mistake of introducing the psychological notion of ‘genius’ into the intellectual sphere, a sphere which is exclusively that of truth. In the name of ‘genius’ every distortion of the normal functioning of the intelligence seems to be permitted and the most elementary logic is more and more readily rejected on the ground that it is lacking in originality and therefore ‘tedious’, ‘tiresome’ or ‘pedantic’. However it is not the person who applies principles who is the pedant, but only the person who applies them badly; moreover the ‘creative genius’, by a curious derogation of his ‘inspiration’, is never short of ‘principles’ when he needs some illusory pretexts for gratifying his mental passions.

 

In our times it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most "advanced" minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth – as is shamelessly admitted – or rather what usurps its place in man's consciousness.

It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of "science" and of "human genius" man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it. And just as matter and machines are quantitative, so man too becomes quantitative: the human is henceforth the social. It is forgotten that man, by isolating himself, can cease to be social, whereas society, whatever it may do – and it is in fact incapable of acting of itself – can never cease to be human.

 

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to categories connected with time; a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but their value is always related to the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered as the expression of a “period” and not as having a timeless and intrinsic value; and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism, and with a psychologist or biologist that destroys essential values.

In order to “situate” the doctrine of a scholastic, for example, or even of a Prophet, a “psychoanalysis” is prepared—it is needless to emphasize the monstrous impudence implicit in such an attitude—and with wholly mechanical and perfectly unreal logic the “influences” to which this doctrine has been subject are laid bare. There is no hesitation in attributing to saints, in the course of this process, all kinds of artificial and even fraudulent, conduct; but it is obviously forgotten, with satanic inconsequence, to apply the same principle to oneself, and to explain one’s own supposedly “objective” position by psychoanalytical considerations; sages are treated as being sick men and one takes oneself for a god. In the same range of ideas, it is shamelessly asserted that there are no primary ideas; that they are due only to prejudices of a grammatical order—and thus to the stupidity of the sages who were duped by them— and that their only effect has been to sterilize “thought” for thousands of years, and so on and so forth; it is a case of expressing a maximum of absurdity with a maximum of subtlety.

For procuring a pleasurable sensation of important accomplishment there is nothing like the conviction of having invented gunpowder or of having stood Christopher Columbus’ egg on its point. This philosophy derives all it has in the way of originality from what, in effect, is nothing but a hatred of God; but since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly through the laws of nature, and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the very intelligence one thinks with and abuses with. There is however no escape from the immanent Truth: “The more he blasphemes”, says Meister Elkhart, “the more he praises God”.