One cannot state too clearly that a doctrinal formulation is perfect, not because it exhausts the infinite Truth on the plane of logic, which is impo… - Frithjof Schuon

It has been said that man is a rational animal; while this formulation is insufficient and ill-sounding, it nonetheless points to an undeniable truth, though in an elliptical fashion, for the rational faculty actually serves to underscore the transcendence of man in relation to the animal. Man is rational because he possesses the Intellect, which by definition has a capacity for the absolute and therefore a sense of the relative; and he possesses the Intellect because he is made "in the image of God", which, moreover, he demonstrates physically by his corporeal form and his cranial form, as well as by his vertical posture, then by language and his productive capacity. Man is a theophany in his form as much as in his faculties.

One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing; the Absolute alone confers on our intelligence the power to accomplish to the full what it can accomplish and to be wholly what it is. Similarly, in the case of the will, which is no more than a prolongation or complement of the intelligence: the objects it commonly sets out to achieve, or those that life imposes on it, do not measure up to the fullness of its range; only the "divine dimension" can satisfy the thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love.

The man who rejects religion because, when taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd − since truths have to be selectively chosen and parceled out in a manner required by the formal crystallization and by the adaptation to an intellectually minimal collective mentality − such a man overlooks one essential thing, despite the logic of his reaction: namely, that the imagery, contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys information that in the final analysis is coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of it or of grasping it. It is true that there is, a priori, a contradiction between an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinitely good God who created man without foreseeing the fall; who grants him too great a freedom with respect to his intelligence, or too small an intelligence in proportion to his freedom; who finds no other means of saving man than to sacrifice His own Son, and doing so without the immense majority of men being informed of this − and being able to be informed of it in time − when in fact this information is the conditio sine qua non of salvation; who after having powerfully revealed that He is One, waits for centuries before revealing that He is Three; who condemns man to an eternal hell for temporal faults; a God who on the one hand "wants" man not to sin, and on the other "wills" that a particular sin be committed, or who predestines man to a particular sin, on the one hand, and, on the other, punishes him for having committed it; or again, a God who gives us intelligence and then forbids us to use it, as practically every fideism would have it; and so on. But whatever may be the contradiction between an omniscient and omnipotent God and the actions attributed to Him by scriptural symbolism and anthropomorphist, voluntaristic, and sentimental theology, there is, beyond all this imagery − whose contradictions are perfectly resolvable in metaphysics − an Intelligence, or a Power, which is fundamentally good and which − with or without predestination − is disposed to saving us from a de facto distress, on the sole condition that we resign ourselves to following its call; and this reality is a "categorical imperative" which is so to speak in the air we breathe and independent of all requirements of logic and all need for coherence.