In Father Roman's grim view, politics cause carnage and misery because such is the way God has ordered the world (it is "a divine dispensation"). Absent the religious consciousness, and this is exactly the narrator's own view. Sure enough, we are told that Father Roman has "no illusions" about worldy affairs, and that he posseses "clear-sightedness" and "intelligence." His intelligence is merely "uninformed," i.e., he lacks specific information about the world (such as the location of Europe ); but this lack, we are told, serves his clear-sightedness. The implication is that too much learning clouds our view of essential truth.

It is interesting to compare Father Roman, Captain Mitchell and Decoud. Father Roman and Decoud both perceive the skeptical truth, suggesting that simple experience and audacious intellect reach the same view of the world. Captain Mitchell is lost in the dreary middle -- he is the opposite of Father Roman, informed but not intelligent -- utterly cut off by his learning from any true vision of things. However, what saves Father Roman from Decoud's fate is his similarity to Captain Mitchell. In the rest of the paragraph, note that Father Roman's sense of self is, like Mitchell's "public character," an idealized creation based on public forms. It is only Decoud, whose intellect extends the skeptical view to include the self, who suffers.