The Church is at once Desert and City. Within her precincts she nourishes human personality on a divine food and leads it away from the crowds at the circumference, where the soul finds content in life ... towards the deeper solitude at the centre where it finds its chief content in life inter divinas personas.
The Christian body has at such a time as ours two opposite dangers that it needs to avoid: the danger of seeking sanctity only in the desert, and the danger of forgetting the need of the desert for sanctity; the danger of enclosing in the cloister of the interior life and of private virtue the heroism it ought to share among mankind, and the danger of conceiving this heroism, when it overflows into social life and endeavours to transform it, in the same manner as its materialist opponents: according to a purely external standard; which is to pervert and dissipate it. Christian heroism has not the same sources as heroism of other kinds. It has its source in the heart of a God scourged and turned to scorn and crucified outside the city gate.
Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World
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