Word: saint
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...saint, as James treats him, epitomizes the Jamesian attitude toward religion and the religious life. "Instead of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person.... Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity--these are splendid excellencies, and the saint...
...these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticisms or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment...
...month ago I attacked the student opera The Cursed Dauncers for its facile use of medieval setting. The Conversion of Saint Pelagia, the Harlot, by undergraduates David Cole and Ronald Perera deserves to be attacked on the same grounds, but much more harshly. If the first opera had a plot with only half a dramatic issue, this one side-steps cheaply a powerful moral question. If the Daunsers exerted a shallow dramatic impact, this opera is simply not a drama, and its production made it all the more a sham...
...questioning of traditional ethics. Christianity has taken a dramatic position on this issue, giving no quarter to sins brought on by the harlot, yet offering her soul communal redemption. But in by-passing the powerful intellectual and emotional conflicts posed by the Church's stand, Cole and Perera give Saint Pelagia its sorry artistic impotence...
...Litany. To call someone an individual involves many personal and historic judgments as well as an endless play of paradoxes. In the litany of the saints of individuality, men have placed all the holy rebels and unholy dissenters, the blessed visionaries and diabolic prophets, the leaders and pioneers, the artists and discoverers, and all the mere eccentrics who enlarged (and sometimes narrowed) the human spirit. There are the true dissenters, in whom a sense of injustice, like Karl Marx's boils, is almost a physical affliction: Spartacus and Tom Paine, Abelard and John Brown, Saint-Just and Sam Houston, Cromwell...