And so West comes, at last, after all her experiences and meditations in the land of the South Slavs, to one of the worst positions a person can occupy in thinking of her fellow human beings: an Augustinian anthropology without its accompanying theology. She sees with an absolute clarity our innate dividedness, the immovable and constant presence of an ever vigilant ugly head, always determined to expel nourishment and thereby to reject life and to choose death instead. But the Christian idea that the death of Christ somehow redeems our death wish, transforms it (by a kind of powerful
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