Some religious polemicists are Rigid Wise: they know the truth and, rather than teach it, they will beat people over the head with it. They are like monkeys trying to figure out the use of a book; unable to read the pages, they use it to crack nuts.
They who use the books of the Church Fathers to beat people with shall receive their due recompense. They who use Scripture as a club shall find it turned against them as a sword.
Some religious polemicists are both Rigid Wise and Rigid Righteous: not only do they beat people over the head, they pat themselves on the back for it. They do not merely use the book to crack nuts; they count as enemies those who do not use books in the same way. Such people are like the first kind; but their mischief has been squared. They open their mouths and spew forth a plague of unclean spirits like frogs.
Were this world filled with Rigid Wise and Rigid Righteous alone, it would be bad enough; but there is a third kind of religious polemicist, whose mischief is taken to an even higher dimension. They are Narcissists.
Narcissists will speak of Christ in order to expound their profound understanding of Christ; they will speak of the Trinity in order to expound their profound understanding of the Trinity; they will speak of the Church in order to expound their profound understanding of the Church. Never will they speak of these things for their own sake. Christ, Trinity, Church, all the mysteries and glories of creation and redemption, are for the Narcissists only the occasion for speaking of their own Twelve Labors. They have no interest in bringing others to truth; they say the name of truth, but the Truth does not know them; they speak the words of truth, but their words are corpses that spill off their tongues, lacking the breath of God.
The first group is a line; the second is a square; the third a cube or worse. But the Saint who attacks error is a point, for he sticks to the point, and he does not diffuse his fervor out in all directions from it.
The angel of the Lord walked through the Cities of the Plains, the lands of religious polemic, and not even ten just men could be found; only the family of Lot kept the sacred laws of hospitality. And this was their righteousness: that they did not treat the strangers as means for their own satisfaction, but accepted what sacrifice was needed to receive the strangers as guests, terrible though the sacrifice might be. The Saint receives the stranger as a guest, not as a mind to rape; and for it he is spared.
