The portion of humanity, that from Sarajevo to Cambodia, witness a host of cruelties in the course of a century in which its Europe, with its "human sciences," seemed to have fully explored its subject -- the humanity that, during all these horrors, breathed -- already or still -- the smoke from the ovens of the "final solution" crematoria where theodicy abruptly appeared impossible -- will it, in indifference, abandon the world to useless suffering, leaving it to the political fatality -- or drifting-- of blind forces that inflict misfortune on the weak and conquered, while sparing the conquerors, with moral consciousness. This is the kingdom of transcendent ends, willed by a benevolent wisdom, by the absolute goodness of a God who is in a sense defined by that super-natural goodness; or a goodness invisibly disseminated in Nature and History, whose paths, indeed painful but leading to the Good, benevolent wisdom would direct. This is pain henceforth meaningful, subordinated in one way or another to the metaphysical finality glimpsed by faith or belief in progress.
