Worldly intelligence is not enough. Rationalism equated Reason with discursive, conceptual thought (
ratio) – thought that is both “prosaic” and “mechanical”. All very well in its place. But there is another, rather vital kind of intelligence, which the medieval writers tended to call
intellectus. “Intellect”, in this sense, refers to our capacity for the intuition of essences. The Intellect is not discursive, linear or mechanical. It makes leaps, it is “poetic”; it is the heart thinking (if by “heart” is understood the highest or most central element of the person, or the faculty in which body and soul are gathered to a unity). Intellect perceives the truth directly, rather than inferring or deducing it; and indeed it may never express that truth in words, for the deepest truth of an essence or of a being is not such that it can be fully captured by any verbal proposition. Intellect, then, perceives the truth directly; but normally in our human condition it does not do so without some kind of mediation or support, at least as a “trigger”; and this support for intellection is called the
symbol.
