We know by means of the intelligence that what the intelligence does not apprehend is more real than what it does apprehend. Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love. But the intelligence must recognize, by the means proper to it -- that is, by observation and demonstration -- the preeminence of love. It must submit only in knowing why, and in a perfectly precise and clear manner. Otherwise its submission is an error, and what it submits to, despite the label, is something other than supernatural love. It is, for example, social influence. In the domain of the intelligence, the virtue of humility is nothing other than the power of attention. False humility leads one to believe one is nothing insofar as one is oneself, insofar as one is a particular human being. True humility is the knowledge that one is nothing insofar as one is a human being and, more generally, insofar as one is a creature. Intelligence plays a large part in this. One must conceive the universal. When one listens to Bach or a Gregorian melody, all the faculties of the soul are strained and silent, in order to apprehend this perfectly beautiful thing, each in its own way. The intelligence among others: it finds nothing there to affirm or deny, but it is nourished by it. Should not faith be an adhesion of this kind? One degrades the mysteries of faith by making them an object of affirmation or denial, when they should be an object of contemplation. The privileged role of the intelligence in true love comes from the fact that the nature of intelligence consists in being something that effaces itself by the very fact of exercising itself. I can make an effort to reach truths, but when they are there, they are, and I am nothing in the matter. There is nothing closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to be proud of one's intelligence at the moment one is really exercising it. And when one exercises it, one is not attached to it. For one knows that, were one to become an idiot the very next instant and for the rest of one's life, truth would continue to be. The mysteries of the Catholic faith are not made to be believed by all parts of the soul. The presence of Christ in the host is not a fact in the manner of the presence of Paul's soul in Paul's body (both are completely incomprehensible, but not in the same way). The Eucharist must not therefore be an object of belief for the part of myself that apprehends facts. Here lies the share of truth in Protestantism. But this presence of Christ in the Host is not a symbol, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image; it is something representable by the human intelligence; it is not supernatural. In this the Catholics are right, not the Protestants. Only the part of oneself that is made for the supernatural should adhere to these mysteries.
The share of the intelligence -- of the part of us that affirms and denies, that forms opinions -- is only submission. Everything I conceive as true is less true than those things whose truth I cannot conceive but which I love. Saint John of the Cross calls faith a night. Among those who have had a Christian upbringing, the lower parts of the soul attach themselves to these mysteries, though they have no right to them. This is why they need a purification whose stages Saint John of the Cross describes. Atheism and unbelief constitute an equivalent of this purification.
The desire to discover something new prevents one from fixing one's thought on the transcendent, unrepresentable meaning of what has already been discovered. My complete lack of talent, which forbids this desire, is a great favor I have received. The recognized and accepted absence of intellectual gifts compels the disinterested exercise of the intelligence.
The object of inquiry must not be the supernatural, but the world. The supernatural is the light: if one makes it an object, one debases it.
The world is a text with several meanings, and one passes from one meaning to another by a labor. A labor in which the body always plays a part, as when one learns the alphabet of a foreign language: this alphabet must enter into the hand by dint of tracing the letters. Apart from this, every change in one's manner of thinking is illusory.
One does not have to choose among opinions: one must welcome them all, but arrange them vertically and place them at the appropriate levels. Thus chance, fate, Providence. The intelligence can never penetrate the mystery, but it can, and it alone can, give an account of the fitness of the words that express it. For this use, it must be sharper, more penetrating, more precise, more rigorous, and more exacting than for any other. The Greeks believed that truth alone befits divine things, not error or approximation, and the divine character of something made them more exacting with regard to exactitude. (We do exactly the opposite, deformed as we are by the habit of propaganda.) It was because they saw in geometry a divine revelation that they invented rigorous demonstration... One must, in the domain of relations between the human being and the supernatural, seek a precision more than mathematical; it must be more precise than science. The rational in the Cartesian sense -- that is, mechanism, humanly representable necessity -- must be assumed wherever possible, in order to bring to light what is irreducible to it. The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. But one does not see the transparent. One sees the opaque through the transparent, the opaque that was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. One sees either the dust on the window or the landscape behind the window, but never the window itself. Cleaning the dust serves only to see the landscape. Reason must exercise its function only in order to arrive at the true mysteries, the true indemonstrables, which are the real. The not-understood conceals the incomprehensible, and for this reason must be eliminated. Science, today, will seek a source of inspiration above itself or will perish. Science presents only three interests: 1) technical applications; 2) a game of chess; 3) a path toward God. (The game of chess is embellished by competitions, prizes, and medals.) Pythagoras. Only this mystical conception of geometry could furnish the degree of attention necessary for the beginnings of that science. Is it not recognized, moreover, that astronomy emerged from astrology, chemistry from alchemy? But this filiation is interpreted as progress, when in fact there has been a degradation of attention. Transcendent astrology and alchemy are the contemplation of eternal truths in the symbols furnished by the stars and by combinations of substances. Astronomy and chemistry are degradations of these. Astrology and alchemy as magic are even lower degradations. There is fullness of attention only in religious attention. Galileo. Having as its principle unlimited straight-line motion, and no longer circular motion, modern science could no longer be a bridge to God. The philosophical cleansing of the Catholic religion has never been done. To do it, one would have to be both inside and outside.