Flannery O'Connor vs. Ulrich Zwingli

Because creation is always the medium by which God comes to us, O'Connor argued that Catholic writers must not attempt to bypass creation on their way to transcendence, but rather must expect to find the "presence of grace as it appears in nature." This world is the site of God's action, and therefore the writer's faith ought not "become detached from his dramatic sense and from his vision of what-is." Manicheanism separates "nature and grace as much as possible" and in doing so reduces "his conception of the supernatural to pious clichés and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene." .....

Approaching the infinite "directly without the mediation of matter"—it describes the "modern spirit" perhaps, but equally and perhaps better it describes the spirit of Zwingli, the Zwinglian spirit that Luther could not recognize as his own. Insofar as Protestantism is infected with various strains of the Manichean virus, to that extent modern evangelicals are incapable of discerning the theophanies that surround us on every hand.

Read the whole article by Peter Leithart here.

I suppose no matter how much I would like to fudge with my Catholic upbringing, I will never be able to shake this incarnational sense of things. And thank God!