Showing posts with label terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terror. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Counterfeit Compassion

".....Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."  Flannery  O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 227