Faith & Spirit Quote by John C. Ransom

Ransom is staging a small rebellion against the modern compulsion to litigate every human experience in the courtroom of reason. The “enfant terrible of logic” is a wickedly apt metaphor: logic is not the wise elder keeping order, but the disruptive child blurting out inconvenient truths, knocking over the furniture of feeling, ritual, intuition. The line flatters logic’s power even as it indicts its bad manners. In art and religion, Ransom suggests, the point is not to win an argument; it’s to build a habitation for meaning. Logic can audit that house, but if it becomes the contractor, you end up with something structurally sound and spiritually unlivable.

The key phrase is “make allowances.” That’s not anti-intellectualism; it’s a plea for interpretive hospitality. Art requires metaphor, ambiguity, contradiction; religion requires mystery, symbol, communal performance. Both depend on a kind of disciplined suspension: not ignorance, but restraint. Ransom’s subtext is that the 20th-century prestige of scientific rationality - and the culture of debunking that trails behind it - risks turning the richest forms of human expression into failed experiments.

Contextually, this fits the posture of the New Criticism-era sensibility Ransom helped shape: a defense of aesthetic experience as its own mode of knowledge, not reducible to paraphrase or proof. The provocation lands because it’s not asking us to abandon logic, only to stop letting it heckle everything else off the stage.