Flannery O’Connor’s “both/and” vision of reality

In the wake of Flannery O’Connor’s death on March 25, 1965, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton said, “When I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”

Her stories—a few of them recently adapted by Ethan and Maya Hawke in Wildcat—are famously violent, disturbing, and dark. At first glance, they can seem pessimistic, even nihilistic. But as those who venture beyond the stories and into her essays and letters know well, her fiction was animated by a deep Catholic faith.

And as a Catholic, O’Connor had a deep “both/and” instinct, shaped not only by Thomas Aquinas (she wasn’t, as she explained in one letter, a “hillbilly nihilist” but a “hillbilly Thomist”) but also by the various Jesuit thinkers she read: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and William F. Lynch, whom she called “one of the most learned priests in this country.”

In her review of Lynch’s The Integrating Mind (which she proposed for a “reverse Index” of required reading), she wrote, “it is an essay against the totalistic temptation—in history, in politics, and art—which rigidly separates categories into either/or choices.” And in a review of de Lubac’s More Paradoxes, she wrote that “paradox exists in reality before it exists in thought,” and that “these paradoxes are based on the experience of all thinking Christians.”

At the heart of this worldview was, of course, the Incarnation—the union of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. God reveals himself in and through a particular human nature. “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian,” she wrote in one letter, “is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience.” In another letter, she writes, “God is pure Spirit but our salvation was accomplished when Spirit was made flesh.” Fiction, she wrote in one essay, is “very much an incarnational art.”

The logic of the Incarnation, O’Connor saw, also extended into the sacramental life of the Church, with its union of the spiritual and the physical—especially in the Eucharist, which she called “the center of existence for me.” (“If it’s a symbol,” she famously quipped at a fancy dinner party, “to hell with it.”) The modern mind, she argued, followed the Manichean path of sharply separating spirit and matter; the Catholic mind, by contrast, holds them together, and in fact sees spirit operating in and through matter, as God operated in and through the human nature of Jesus.

Of course, very rarely do O’Connor’s stories deal with the Incarnation and the sacraments directly—though when they do, it’s to great effect. (One thinks, for example, of the Eucharistic imagery on the last page of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”) But what they do deal with time and again is another both/and: that of grace and nature. “There is a moment of grace in most of the stories,” she writes in one letter, “or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected.”

But as with the Incarnation and the sacraments, these heavenly breakthroughs do not occur in separation from the grittiness and brokenness of our lives: “You cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature.” On the contrary, they break through precisely in and through nature: “It is our dignity that we are allowed more or less to get on with those graces that come through faith and the sacraments and which work through our human nature. God has chosen to operate in this manner. We can’t understand this but we can’t reject it without rejecting life.”

In her essay “In the Protestant South,” Flannery O’Connor draws these various both/ands together in a beautiful summary, one that captures the faith, hope, and love shining through the darkness of her stories. What she describes is, in the abstract, “the Catholic novel,” but what we recognize is precisely her Catholic novels:

The Catholic novel can’t be categorized by subject matter, but only by what it assumes about human and divine reality. it cannot see man as determined; it cannot see him as totally depraved. It will see him as incomplete in himself, as prone to evil, but as redeemable when his own efforts are assisted by grace. And it will see this grace as working through nature, but as entirely transcending it, so that a door is always open to possibility and the unexpected in the human soul. Its center of meaning will be Christ; its center of destruction will be the devil. No matter how this view of life may be flesh out, these assumptions form its skeleton.

But O’Connor knew—a theme she returns to again and again in her essays—that simply being religious, even passionately so, is no guarantee of good writing. As long as there have been novels, there have been “sorry religious novels”—stories that are seriously committed to spiritual things but dispense with the “obligation to penetrate concrete reality”—which is precisely where the Spirit, on an incarnational-sacramental worldview, is operative.

Thus, she goes on, emphasizing how her experience of the South grounded her Catholic commitments:

But you don’t write fiction with assumptions. The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all. . . . This discovery of being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work into real human perspective for him. . . . The imagination is not free, but bound.

No wonder O’Connor called fiction writing an “incarnational art”: She wrote her Catholicism—that union of God and man, spirit and matter, grace and nature—precisely in and through her life in the South. And she did it well. In the concrete realities of her place in time and the sorts of eccentric characters she knew firsthand, she discerned—as we all must do—the movements of grace and the hand of the living God.