Sentimentalism leads to the gas chamber

Courtesy of Matthew Lickona, here is one of the most insightful quotes from the 20th century:

If the average Catholic reader cold be tracked down through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be more of a Manichean than the Church permits. By separating nature nad grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. HE forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite. We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite. Pornography, on the other hand, is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purpose, and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.

--Flannery O'Connor.

I find such ways of thinking exhibited exemplarily when I talk to Catholics who love films like "The Notebook" and avoid films like "The Departed", usually by recourse to some some standard that judges the former clean and noble, and the latter dirty and unedifying. Reminds me of O'Connor's aunt who wished she would write stories about nice things, rather than about violence and the grotesque.