I just finished reading the Flannery O'Connor novel by that name.
The passage that lends the book its title (a title which is a reference to Mt. 11:12) makes me think of how Chesterton once explained about how Christian virtue differs from pagan.
The modern-progressive-atheist type (a species of pagan) in the book (a schoolteacher) explains to his son about why he should not be like Tarwater (the reluctant prophet/baptist), "You want to avoid extremes. They are for violent people."
Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy (see Chapter Six, on the paradoxes of Christianity), explained about how he discovered that for pagans, balance was found by diluting contradictory passions into lukewarm tepidity. This denies to man, for instance, "both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity, however, frees you by allowing these passions both to have their full expression - but in such a way that they counterbalance each other. For instance,
It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray.
This is very disconcerting to pagans, like the schoolteacher in The Violent.
Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe -- that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy -- that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can grovel" -- that was an emancipation.
Perhaps also you remember that He said that He would vomit the lukewarm from his mouth.
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