Hate was just a failure of imagination

Sometimes instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, "What is God like?" and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion...But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery -- that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said "Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?" and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.

 *     *     *

He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity -- that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

--Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

'a morbid surge of the love that terrified him'

His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.

He was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be used. He had seen it transform in cases where nothing else had worked, such as with his poor sister. None of this had the least bearing on his situation. The love that would overcome him was of a different order entirely. It was not the kind that could be used for the child’s improvement or his own. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant. And it only began with Bishop. It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated.

—Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

The echo of himself

Beside the window he saw his daughter's crib, the child asleep within, and drawing near he stood over her. Hardly breathing, he stared. He saw the line of her jaw, the small closed lids of her eyes. She is so perfect, he thought, so fresh and new. The moon-light is an angel in whose wings she breathes and sleeps. She was no longer than his forearm, and when he reached down her head fit into the palm of his hand. He smoothed her hair, then drew his hand back and folded his arms over the railing.

Here he beheld her, and in the lovely way of her form he found the echo of himself.

--Shann Ray, "The Way Home," American Masculine (2011)

'this fury to deface'

The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what grave-stones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich, forgotten timber merchant. It was odd—this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

—Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

The Original Image of the Creation

Now our Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, the essential Image, the essential Harmony, the Righteousness of God, becomes a creature, springs up from beneath the foundations of the Creation in an Human Soul and Body in the midst of its ruines. This Jesus is the Original Image of the Creation, of Man, of every Creature, the Root, the Rule, the Actor of all, who virtually, eminently comprehends all in their distinct Ideal Forms within himself. As so many eternal Beauties in his own eternal Beauty, who bringeth them forth from himself, beareth them in himself, as Flowers in their Garden-beds.

—Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedome of the Will (1675)

The Pictures We Create

"Well, there are many saints I'm particularly fond of-Stephen, St. Francis and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Savior and the Virgin-such utterly lying and false and silly pictures-and I can put up with them just as little as you could with that picture of Goethe. When I see one of those sweet and silly Saviors of St. Fancises and see how other people find them beautiful and edifying, I feel it is an insult to the real Savior and it makes me think: Why did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a picture as silly as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that my own picture of the Savior or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls short of the original, and that the Savior Himself would find the picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly reproductions."

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)