Thursday, August 12, 2010

Quote du Jour: My Imperative Moderated

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A quote from Flannery O'Conner and the Christ-Haunted South:

[Allen] Tate extols neither the gospel nor the church so much as the power of "classical-Christian culture." By uniting the virtues of the biblical and Greco-Roman traditions, this ideal hybrid civilization provided "for the highest development of man's potentialities as man. Man belonged to his village, valley, mountain, or seacoast; but wherever he was he was a Christian whose Hebraic discipline had tempered his tribal savagery and whose classical humanism had moderated the literal imperative of his Christianity to suicidal other-worldliness.

This challenges my inherent tendency toward gnostic dualism, insofar as that tendency is an expression of "suicidal other-worldliness." It's worthy of some thought...
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