"As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue"
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Bovee reaches for an agrarian image that does two jobs at once: it flatters virtue as something real and weighty, and it demotes suffering to a kind of necessary technology. Threshing is not gentle. It is repetitive force applied until what matters can no longer hide inside what doesn’t. By pairing affliction with a farm tool, he drains pain of drama and recasts it as process: brutal, ordinary, productive.
The intent is moral filtration. Virtue, in this view, isn’t proven by good intentions or polite consistency; it’s revealed when comfort is removed and the self is put under pressure. “Purify” signals a Protestant-inflected suspicion that even our best qualities are mixed with vanity, laziness, and self-deception. Affliction doesn’t invent goodness; it burns off the impurities that make goodness unreliable. That’s a consoling promise for a 19th-century audience living with disease, early death, economic shocks, and the lingering religious habit of reading hardship as instruction.
The subtext is also disciplinary: if suffering improves you, then complaining becomes a kind of spiritual illiteracy. The metaphor quietly legitimizes endurance and, at its worst, can be recruited to sanctify avoidable misery, especially for people with little power to refuse it. Still, it “works” because it offers a narrative people crave in crisis: pain as a sorting mechanism, not a random vandal. It turns chaos into character and gives adversity a job title.
The intent is moral filtration. Virtue, in this view, isn’t proven by good intentions or polite consistency; it’s revealed when comfort is removed and the self is put under pressure. “Purify” signals a Protestant-inflected suspicion that even our best qualities are mixed with vanity, laziness, and self-deception. Affliction doesn’t invent goodness; it burns off the impurities that make goodness unreliable. That’s a consoling promise for a 19th-century audience living with disease, early death, economic shocks, and the lingering religious habit of reading hardship as instruction.
The subtext is also disciplinary: if suffering improves you, then complaining becomes a kind of spiritual illiteracy. The metaphor quietly legitimizes endurance and, at its worst, can be recruited to sanctify avoidable misery, especially for people with little power to refuse it. Still, it “works” because it offers a narrative people crave in crisis: pain as a sorting mechanism, not a random vandal. It turns chaos into character and gives adversity a job title.
Quote Details
| Topic | Resilience |
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