Word: manichean
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...sense, Maral/Sade is a Manichean morality play. There are forces of good and evil, but they move impartially through all of the characters. As Sade says in an epilogue, he wished to test great propositions and their opposites but they all seem colored and half-true by the end of the play, and thus if nothing else, the play makes a brilliant statement of the mixed nature of men's souls. Good and evil. Playwright Peter Wiess wisely refuses to sort out clear alternatives, or declare a final winner. The script gives only vague clues as to whether Weiss feels...
Fundamentalist Character In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter once defined the fundamentalist mind as "essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities." Wayne's fundamentalist character was not against the American grain...
...Wilbur Flick, the poor little rich boy, after running through a couple of wives and a great deal of money, finally sops his conscience by becoming the angel of a minuscule Communist front organization. Ellen Terhune's entire life is oppressed by her guilty sense of the past. The Manichean heresy that God and the Devil are each in control of half the world, a heresy which the New England ministers of the seventeenth century all unwittingly dramatized into the permanent fabric of American thought, captures the soul of Asa Stryker eventually to destroy...