“FEAR OF REDEMPTION”: Brilliant essay. Excerpts:

…When Emerson says, “Imitation is suicide,” he is drawing attention to the spiritual death that stems from self-alienation. When we stretch ourselves to meet the standards and goals set by others, we risk waking up one morning drowning in the responsibilities of marriage, children, job, and mortgage, feeling as though we have lost touch with all the passions and desires that once animated and moved us. An empty life is the antithesis of self-possession, and it is against the dispersing, emptying force of duty and responsibility that Emerson preaches his American version of the faith of the Savoyard Vicar: “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and evil are but names readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.” The highest good is self-affirmation, and thus Emerson concludes, “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” Self-loyalty is the antidote to alienation. To thine own self be true is the first commandment.

[clipped]

…Like Dante before the wall of fire that forms the exit from purgatory, Augustine hesitated before the disjunctive demand of Christian morality, a demand that is the moral form of the promise of redemptive change. The demand seems to require a death of the self, a renunciation of personal identity. Augustine could not believe that a bush might burn without being consumed.

more! you know you want more!