[D]oes not the mutual love of two beings complete them both, and call forth in each of them higher and more irreducible qualities? That is, in propor… - Henri de Lubac

There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.

Modern philosophy acts particularly like a critic. In a manner that is more positivistic and scientistic in some, more rationalistic and idealistic in others, its overall action remains corrosive. […] This whole work of thought, whose greatness we must not fail to recognize, is paid for in practice by the loss of the living God. The world then becomes a world of abstractions, when it is not absurdly reduced to a world of phenomena. In losing its mysterious innermost depth, it has lost its soul. Man is isolated, uprooted, "disconcerted". […] The world itself appears "broken". There is, at the innermost part of consciousness, a metaphysical despair.[…] It is then that substitute faiths inevitably present themselves to fill this tragic void. Such is the fourth and final period of the process. Man is not satisfied by ideologies cut off from any source of real efficacy: the hour must come when he is disenchanted with them. He lives still less from criticism and negations. He does not live by and neutrality. Inevitably something like a great call for air is produced in his inner void, which opens him to the invasion of new positive forces, whatever they might be. The latter conquer him all the more quickly, the more coarse and virulent they are. Cut off from a higher life, he gives in to the brutal pressures that, at least, give him the feeling of a life. Having abused criticism to make truth itself vanish, he now dislikes using it[,] to protect his mirages. A troubled credulity succeeds his faith. Rationalism has expelled mystery: myth takes its place.

The supernatural dignity of one who has been baptized rests, we know, on the natural dignity of man, though it surpasses it in an infinite degree.[…] Thus the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race.[…] Was it not shown […] in Genesis where it was taught that God made man in his own image? For the divine image does not differ from one individual to another: in all it is the same image.[…] Whence comes the notion, so beloved of Augustinianism, of one spiritual family intended to form the one city of God.