My answer, of course, is "no." It's obvious if you compare trends in wimpiness and trends in religious belief that the decline of Christianity has turned people into wimps. Nietzsche is big among left-wing academics. Wimpiness is big among left-wing academics. It's wimps who have superman fantasies. People, you should connect the dots!
A wimp is someone who can't stand his ground because he thinks he's nothing and has nowhere to stand. You won't be a wimp if you know what you are and what you have to do. That means that a Christian can't be a wimp, not without abandoning Christianity.
If you go a bit lower in the spiritual pecking order, it must mean something that neither Chaucer or Boccaccio or any other writer from the Christian centuries bothered with the Wimp as a human type. Their people had flaws, but wimpiness wasn't one of them.
At bottom, I think, "turning the other cheek" means abandoning contentiousness, acting rather than reacting, and accepting a standard that you don't think you'll grasp or achieve perfectly and doesn't make you the center of everything. The injunction strikes me as a way of shocking people into stepping back and looking at what they're doing from a less small-minded point of view. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see what's wimpy about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comment will appear after it has been checked for spam, trolling, and hate speech.