Friday, August 29, 2008

Innocence

Innocence: The quality of being free from things that could endanger one’s soul. Although Innocence is a good quality, it is often impossible to have both Innocence and Catharsis.

4 comments:

don pedro said...

Ok, I seriously can't think of any sort of work of literature longer than a short poem that contains mainly innocence. Do you have any examples?

Old Fashioned Liberal said...

I don't think you'll find any sort of story (except for the man-vs.-nature plot type) that is completely innocent because a plot needs a problem to be solved, and problems usually involve some sin, and the mentioning of a sin equals a potential temptation. But for normal people, the catharsis purges the temptation, making the end result beneficial, not detrimental. For example, a story with a murder mentions murder, but because the end result (if the story is good) is causing the reader to realize the evil of murder, the story is not innocent, but is still quite good.
Oh, and by the way, when I said endanger one's soul, I did not mean random mental associations that might be some sort of temptation. That is unreasonable for both aritst and critic.

Old Fashioned Liberal said...

Oh, and Ive been having technichal problems with blogging. On my other blog, it won't let me put an article unless I put a comment first.

Old Fashioned Liberal said...

Here's some more on innocence. One can distinguish several progressive levels of innocence vs. catharsis. On the lowest level would be those things with no evil at all. Then would come those things that have defeated evil, such as most fiction. Then would come those things that have evil, and the work is redeemed only through literary devices such as tragedy or satire. Finally come those things that are in favor of the evil: these have evil without any form of cathrsis. Then of course are those evils that can be occasions of sin or occasions of increased knowledge of new evils in children for those with difficulties or ignorance regardless of whether there is catharsis. Drugs would be a possible example of this, while children hitting their siblings owuld not be at all.