Paideia

Thomas Hardy as Poet

The major goal this summer for me is to imbibe deeply in poetry. I thought I would share someone I did not recognize as a major poet until recently and is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. I stumbled across Thomas Hardy as a poet while reading the excellent (if sometimes dry) biography of Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner. Apparently "Red" Warren encountered this poem and loved it. 

I also ran across a great story in Blotner's biography that exhibits not only the death of a era but also the wisdom of "Red" Warren. While Warren was teaching at Yale at the end of his career the literary world was controlled by the ideology of class, race, marxism, etc. Student strikes and other issues controlled literary exploration and the actual contents of literature were left to the side.

During this time it is said Warren went into the first day of class on poetry and asked what seemed to him a simple request. "Can anyone here recite a poem?" The class looked blankly at him. No one spoke and all stirred uncomfortably in their seats. He than asked, "Can anyone tell me the outline of a short story?" Again uneasy silence. He went around the room asking people individually, hoping someone just didn't have the gumption to step into the spotlight. No one could do it. Warren got up and left the class. It was the last class he was to teach. For someone who could recite the Wasteland by Eliot and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge by heart (among hundreds of other poems) this would just not do.

With sadness I must confess I would have also been the cause of Warren's disappearance. Hopefully this summer will remedy this.

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to
mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the
moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now
passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the
night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a
shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

Athos Agion Oros : Trip to Athos: Mylopotamos library day

I enjoy the consistently beautiful pictures posted on the Athos Agion Oros blog. ESPECIALLY ones focused around the books/libraries found on Mt. Athos!

"To end day one I will show the pictures of the library of Mylopotamos. First of all I have to thank father Ioachim for taking the time to show us this special place and secondly our thanks go to Giannis, who used his influence to make this possible.

The library of Mylopotamos, Father Ioachim and pilgrim Bas

For me this visit to the library brought back memories to that special day in 1986, when my friend Pieter and I visited the library of Docheiariou, accompanied by a Greek professor from Thessaloniki, who explained us everything about the very old books we were allowed to hold in our hands and look though it. Most of the parchment books were eaten by bookworms and had holes in it........ The professor put the books on microfilm."

book: Akolouthia 1901

(notice the dolphin and anchor- this is the symbol of the Aldine Press, a famous Renaissance printer. Erasmus, yes the Erasmus, even lived with them for a time)

Check the link below for more beautiful pictures!

via athos.web-log.nl

A Sighting of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney- lecturing this Thursday evening at Indiana University. Greatly anticipating this!!!

Song for the Luddites - Lord Byron

"Song for the Luddites" Lord Byron
[sent in a letter to Thomas Moore, 24 Dec. 1816]

. . Are you not near the Luddites? By the Lord! If there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers--the breakers of frames--the Lutherans of politics--the reformers?

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
     So we, boys, we
   Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
   We will fling the winding-sheet
   O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
    Yet this is the dew
   Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

Illumination | Spring 2007 | Scott Cairns

Six times Scott Cairns, celebrated poet and MU professor of creative writing, has made pilgrimage to the holy peninsula of Mount Athos, that forbiddingly austere sliver of Northern Greece that for nearly 16 centuries has served as the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodox monasticism.

On his first journey, recounted in a new memoir, Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven -- A Pilgrimage, Cairns searched for a "spiritual father," someone to redefine his relationship to God, to teach him to live his life as a "prayer without ceasing." Finding such a mentor proved elusive, but the holy men he encountered made a profound impression. The more time he spent with the monks at Mount Athos -- in worship, at meal times, in their offices or touring the grounds -- the more he hungered for the peace, the abiding stillness, the closeness to God that these men seemed to carry in every situation. Or, perhaps more to the point, Cairns yearned to realize the closeness to God that carried them in every situation.

"God leans into us always, and we only lean into him intermittently," Cairns says. "The monks that I'm talking about have attained this state of leaning into God always. ... It's something I want to achieve, but haven't achieved yet."

In the meantime, Cairns writes. At 52, he has published seven volumes of poetry, two in the past year, and his poems have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The Paris Review.

His admirers include author Annie Dillard, who has called Cairns "one of the best poets alive," and best-selling literary critic Harold Bloom, who describes Cairns's poetry as "original and well-wrought." Last year, Cairns's work earned him a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, an award reserved for those who, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, have demonstrated an "exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." The fellowship included a $38,000 cash prize, which Cairns used to make three visits to Mount Athos.

Cairns joined the MU English faculty in 1999 after spending five years teaching at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. He was recently named director of MU's creative writing program and also heads the University's Center for the Literary Arts.

While Cairns' work is steeped in religious sensibility, he's not interested in writing sermons. In his view, any worthwhile literature, poetry especially, must begin as an exploration, not a dissertation. As Robert Frost famously put it: "I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

Unfortunately, Cairns says, the majority of those we might call religious poets are making too few discoveries.

"They think it's about saying what you think, about expressing what you know. If you write that way, whether you're a religious person or a secular person, if you're writing propaganda about your particular disposition, then the result is always going to be crappy poetry."

...

via illumination.missouri.edu

When Science & Poetry Were Friends - The New York Review of Books

The Age of Wonder means the period of sixty years between 1770 and 1830, commonly called the Romantic Age. It is most clearly defined as an age of poetry. As every English schoolchild of my generation learned, the Romantic Age had three major poets, Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge, at the beginning, and three more major poets, Shelley and Keats and Byron, at the end. In literary style it is sharply different from the Classical Age before it (Dryden and Pope) and the Victorian Age after it (Tennyson and Browning). Looking at nature, Blake saw a vision of wildness:

Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Byron saw a vision of darkness:

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air....

During the same period there were great Romantic poets in other countries, Goethe and Schiller in Germany and Pushkin in Russia, but Richard Holmes writes only about the local scene in England.

Holmes is well known as a biographer. He has published biographies of Coleridge and Shelley and other literary heroes. But this book is primarily concerned with scientists rather than with poets. The central figures in the story are the botanist Joseph Banks, the chemists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, the astronomers William Herschel and his sister Caroline and son John, the medical doctors Erasmus Darwin and William Lawrence, and the explorers James Cook and Mungo Park. The scientists of that age were as Romantic as the poets. The scientific discoveries were as unexpected and intoxicating as the poems. Many of the poets were intensely interested in science, and many of the scientists in poetry.

The scientists and the poets belonged to a single culture and were in many cases personal friends. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin and progenitor of many of Charles's ideas, published his speculations about evolution in a book-length poem, The Botanic Garden, in 1791. Humphry Davy wrote poetry all his life and published much of it. Davy was a close friend of Coleridge, Shelley a close friend of Lawrence. The boundless prodigality of nature inspired scientists and poets with the same feelings of wonder. The Age of Wonder is popular history at its best, racy, readable, and well documented. The subtitle, "How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science," accurately describes what happened.

...

One feature of the old Age of Wonder is conspicuously absent in the new age. Poetry, the dominant art form in many human cultures from Homer to Byron, no longer dominates. No modern poet has the stature of Coleridge or Shelley. Poetry has in part been replaced in the popular culture by graphic art. Last year I took part in a "Festival of Mathematics" organized in Rome by Piergiorgio Odifreddi, a mathematical entrepreneur in tune with the modern age. Odifreddi borrowed the largest auditorium in Rome, left over from the 1960 Olympic Games, and filled every seat for three days with young people celebrating mathematics. How did he do it? By mixing mathematics with art. The presiding geniuses were the late artist Maurits Escher and the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, with their followers displaying new works of art created by humans and computers. John Nash was there, enjoying the adulation of the students since the film A Beautiful Mind made him an international star. There was also a performing juggler who happens to be a professor of mathematics. He stood on the stage, simultaneously juggling five balls in the air and proving elegant theorems about the combinatorics of juggling. His theorems explain why serious jugglers always juggle with an odd number of balls, usually five or seven rather than four or six.

If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is still struggling to be born. It must struggle against cultural barriers as well as technical difficulties, against the myth of Frankenstein as well as the reality of genetic defects and deformities.

If this dream comes true, and the new art form emerges triumphant, then a new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses, might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds to enrich the ecology of our planet. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder. The new Age of Wonder might bring together wealthy entrepreneurs like Venter and Kamen, academic professionals like Haussler, and a worldwide community of gardeners and farmers and breeders, working together to make the planet beautiful as well as fertile, hospitable to hummingbirds as well as to humans.

via www.nybooks.com

What Will Replace Behemoth State University? « Public Discourse

When Russell Kirk wrote about his experiences as a junior professor at Michigan State University, he invariably referred to it as Behemoth State University. Michigan State, my alma mater, was a decent agricultural college grown into a massive research university by a politically adept poultry scientist, John Hannah. Today, I work at a similar institution, the University of Texas at Austin, which recently gave its head football coach a $2 million raise while cutting $8 million from its budget for foreign language instruction. The research university, whether public (like Texas or Michigan State) or private (like Stanford, Duke or Johns Hopkins), represents 20^th-century gigantism at its apogee, combining all the virtues of Stalinist central planning, progressivist-utopian fantasy, and industrial mass-production.

On the surface, the Behemoth State Universities appear to be a smashing success, realizing all of the ardent hopes of the egalitarian architects of the G. I. Bill of the 1940’s and the scientific boosters of the Sputnik era. Millions of Americans have dutifully jumped through the hoops and claimed their credentials. Promoters of the system are quick to point out that college graduates earn an additional 60% in income, amounting to a college-education premium of over $1 million on average during the course of a lifetime. However, skeptics have a ready and cogent response: that such an argument is guilty of a crude post hoc fallacy, confusing causation and correlation in a way that would earn no more than an A- in even the most grade-inflated college statistics course. College graduates earn more than those who have not graduated primarily because bright, literate people are more likely to succeed both in college and in life. There is virtually no evidence that success in college yields tangible benefits later in life, in contrast to the very tangible debt typically acquired.

But what about intangible benefits? Virtue? Character? A coherent and serene philosophy of life? I can still remember the day when deans and presidents at least gave lip service to such ideals (as La Rochefoucauld put it, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue). Nowadays, such pretense would provoke nothing but cynical chortles.

What about the benefits of university research? Mark Bauerlein has ably documented the fact that the deluge of literature and language research monographs is now far beyond the saturation point, with output up 26% over the last six years and average sales of each monograph dropping from 2500 to 700 or 800. To paraphrase Churchill, never before in history have so many written so much to be read by so few. Even in the hard sciences there is reason to be skeptical. Many in industry report that university-sponsored research is no longer useful. This is to be expected, since university research is funded by log-rolling peer review within communities of specialists, many of whom have a vested interest in perpetuating research programs that have long since exhausted their potential. Add to this the ideological pressure to reach politically correct results, as has come to light in the Climategate scandal. And perhaps it is worth noting that the state of Texas is flourishing economically with only three top-level “Research I” universities, while California, with nine, languishes on the brink of bankruptcy.

America’s higher-education system perpetuates itself in a tightly circumscribed feedback loop: a university education is popular because universities are selective; universities are selective because admissions are competitive; and admissions are competitive because a university education is popular. Instead of making university education more affordable, huge federal and state subsidies drive the spiral of costs higher, resulting in runaway tuition inflation, which persists even in the midst of a deep recession. At some point in the near future, the prohibitively high costs will unwind the positive feedback loop into a vicious, downward spiral as thousands of the best students join the ranks of the university refuseniks, depriving admission to university of its selective cachet.

What has brought us to this point? Russell Kirk blamed the influx of federal funds, beginning with the G. I. Bill, for creating overgrown institutions that lost the quasi-monastic communities and academic traditions of America’s small liberal arts colleges. However, this influx of aid could not be the sufficient cause, since it might instead have led to the proliferation of small colleges dedicated to classical learning. The windfall of government aid wouldn’t have ruined the system had it been intellectually sound. However, the colleges and universities in America in the post-war era were already under the influence of forces deeply antithetical to the classical and Judeo-Christian heritage: Baconian scientism and Rousseauite sentimentalism, as was brilliantly outlined by Harvard’s Irving Babbitt in his 1908 jeremiad, Literature and the American College.

As Babbitt observed, the superficial tensions between the “two cultures” of scientific pragmatism and romantic individualism merely disguise their more fundamental affinities. Both are united in their rejection of the teleologically ordered cosmos of the classical tradition, with its finite and universal goal of happiness-through-self-restraint (eudaimonia). In its place, the moderns substitute the unbounded pursuit of infinite progress, both through the attainment of ever-greater technical power over nature (including human nature) and through the ever-novel exercise of the idyllic imagination and the ever-freer indulgence of spontaneous whim. These aspirations expressed themselves in the new college curriculum of the twentieth century, which substituted a smorgasbord of electives for a common and coherent course of studies, and replaced the scholar’s reflection and synoptic vision with the fragmentation and hyper-specialization of the professional researcher.

The examination of the new college curriculum brings to light the underlying commonality between scientistic and sentimental humanitarianism. In practice, both advance a course of study that privileges the quantity of information absorbed over any selection based on quality. Both conceive of the college as an engine of social progress, ignoring the vitally important task of the “assimilation and perpetuation of culture,” in Babbitt’s words. Both deny the existence of a natural end or telos of man, the conception of a finite, bounded and balanced fulfillment of human nature, rationally intelligible and fixed. Both reduce the scope of knowledge to what can be secured by the methods of physical science, with the capacity to control and manipulate as its acid test. Both hold the wisdom of the past in contempt, replacing piety toward our forebears with a chronological narcissism and a naïve faith in the fusion of scientific technique with the sentiment of humanity.

Technological advances, ironically enabled by the modern research university, may make its eventual displacement possible. The great texts that make up the ancient canon and well crafted lectures and introductions to those texts are now freely available on-line as an academic open source (Babbit’s book, available on Google Books, is just one example). Social media and teleconferencing make possible the spontaneous formation of international communities of scholarly amateurs (in the original sense of the word), in and through which the heritage of the West can still find its outlet. All that is needed is for scholars committed to the true republic of letters to join together to provide some formal quality control to the process. This model would provide students from modest backgrounds who aspire to a classical education a low-cost credential by examination (modeled on the final examination schools of Oxford and Cambridge), as an alternative to the residential four-year college.

Existing colleges and universities will no doubt survive in some form, but in order to best meet the needs of the present and the future they will need to outsource their vocational training efforts to community colleges and distance learning and decentralize control over the traditional arts curriculum. The large-scale bureaucracy should concentrate on what it does best (ancillary student services, property maintenance) and leave education to small and innovative “charter colleges,” freed from the control of the politically correct bureaucrats and the tyranny of the faculty majority. This reform would empower small cadres of teachers to revive the classical curriculum and the close-knit communities of our ancient and native liberal-arts tradition.

The task of the classical educator in today’s world is not to tame the verdant wilderness but rather, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “to irrigate the deserts.” The corporate and financial crises of the past decade, and the looming political crisis of today, have revived in the public’s mind the ancient truth that character matters. A successful revival of the classical tradition can only take place when the connection between liberal learning and virtue can also be brought back into view. Such a revival of the tradition is possible: in fact, America has been the locus of several such revivals in the past. The reconstitution of civilization will begin with Burke’s small platoons growing organically into the space left by an increasingly sterile modernity. There is no substitute for patient, persistent toil, sustained by fellowship and by hope.


Robert C. Koons is a professor of philosophy and founding director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas-Austin. He is a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

via www.thepublicdiscourse.com

h/t to millinerd

He Loved Much

_{^{You must excuse this moment of slightly sappy indulgence, but in finding this image it was all too clear that this may be a perfect opportunity to share this sweet little anecdote that may provide some insight into our daily life as the Greesons, since that is what is stated as the subcategory of this blog, as well as being very fitting for the approaching holiday. O SO many books, but O so much love!! :)}} 

quotable auden

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.

--W. H. Auden

The Iconographic Fiction and Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor | The Clarion Review

Vigen Guroian has a great article up on the Flanner O'Connor over at The Clarion Review.

“...

Flannery O’Connor did not use paint to make icons. However, she was an “iconographer” with words. For she embraced the Incarnation with utter seriousness in her life and in her fiction. To her close friend whom we know through their correspondence only as “A,” O’Connor writes in September of 1955, “God became not only a man, but Man. This is the mystery of Redemption.”¹

Some years later, in another letter to “A,” O’Connor explains how this belief in the Incarnation ran up against the secularity of her audience as she was challenged to lend fresh expression to the Christian vision of life.

The setting in which most modern fiction takes place is exactly a setting in which nothing is so little felt to be true as the reality of a faith in Christ. I know what you mean here but you haven’t said what you mean. Fiction may deal with faith implicitly but explicitly it deals only with faith-in-a-person, or persons. What must be unquestionable is what is implicitly implied as the author’s attitude, and to do this the writer has to succeed in making the divinity of Christ seem consistent with the structure of all reality.

This has to be got across implicitly in spite of a world that doesn’t feel it, in spite of characters that don’t live it.²

The ancient defenders of icons said essentially the same about paintings and the Incarnation. The icon made the divinity of Christ seem consistent with the structure of all reality, and most especially human existence. Icons of Christ and the saints testified to the real potential of human life, exceeding even the highest expectations of pagan humanism. God became man and made it possible for man to become God—not, of course, by nature God, but most assuredly by grace that transfigures life. The Incarnation made it possible for all believers in Jesus Christ “to be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Christian humanism introduced the ideas of Creation, Incarnation, and the sanctification of life, while at the same time rejecting the strong prejudice of Hellenic culture that spirit is opposed to matter and that, therefore, God, who is spirit, would never enter the material world. In light of the Incarnation, bodily Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ, human salvation could no longer be thought of as a captive soul escaping from the prison of the body. The early Church condemned as heresies Docetism and Manicheanism, two gnostic movements within Christianity, precisely because they embraced this dualism of matter and spirit. In her day, Flannery O’Connor combatted what she viewed as modern incarnations of these ancient gnostic heresies. She detected the gnosticism in currents of contemporary spirituality that thrived even within the Christian churches. In her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O’Connor names the enemy:

The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art.³

...

Thus, when modern people turn to religion, they often look for release from this syndrome in a flight from the body and materialism to peace of mind by the quickest means available. A plethora of mysticisms, transcendental religions, and New Age spiritualities compete for the attention of the people. O’Connor writes: “Today’s reader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as instant Uplift.”⁵

As Frederick Asals has observed so wisely in his study of O’Connor’s craft: “The central thrust in all of Flannery O’Connor’s later fiction is to explode this . . . escapism or pseudotranscendence by insisting again and again that existence can only be in the body, in matter, whatever the horrors that may entail.”⁶ Even this astute assessment falls short of naming all that is at stake for O’Connor in her defense of incarnate being. Nature does not end in orgasm, a full stomach, or owning a late model luxury vehicle. Nature is both a window into and a path to the supernatural. O’Connor understands the special challenges that a secular age poses for a writer of fiction with orthodox Christian convictions and a sacramental vision of life. Even the “average Catholic reader” is smitten with the Gnostic spirit, she observes. “By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché”⁷ and nature is emptied of grace.

In a discussion of O’Connor’s fiction, Peter S. Hawkins concludes that “what is distinctive about the modern era is that the conflict between nature and grace has been resolved by the elimination of the notion of grace altogether.”⁸ This may be an exaggeration. O’Connor did not believe that the modern person dismisses grace entirely. However, she does conclude that when modern people entertain grace as a possibility in their lives, they are inclined to think of it as a divine utility, not as a sacramental presence. Grace is an extra, alien ingredient added to nature by God, conjured up by priests and prayers, useful but not present under ordinary circumstances. What is more, this instrumentalist view of grace makes it “almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace,” says O’Connor. Supernatural grace is not magic; it is not subject to human manipulation, or restricted to human needs. In an effort to impress this upon her readers, O’Connor says that in her fiction she approaches grace “almost negatively.”⁹ In practical terms this means that the majority of her protagonists strenuously resist the action of God upon them. The lesson they learn, often through suffering, is that grace is God’s own free doing and can come upon anyone even in the face of his or her disbelief.

Although Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Sienna may have helped shape her religious imagination, O’Connor felt acutely how different her location in life was from theirs. She recognized that the vast majority of people for whom she was writing lacked a vision of a unified world that comes from the hand of God, is fallen but redeemed by the Creator-Word, and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. She assayed that only a small minority of her readers, and even fewer of her reviewers, shared her incarnational faith: even many Catholics did not take the Incarnation with seriousness as a rule for their lives, nor truly believe in the resurrection of the body. Nevertheless, O’Connor made it her task to show her readers that the world is surrounded by mystery and that the physical creation is itself an icon and a window into that mystery. In her essay “Novelist and Believer” she explains that the Christian novelist will reject the influence “of those Manichean-type theologies which . . . [see] the natural world as unworthy of penetration,” because he knows that the infinite cannot be approached directly in his art. Rather, “he must penetrate the natural human world as it is,” without an ideological formula or hardened preconceptions of what lies behind it. “The more sacramental [the writer’s] theology, the more encouragement he will get from it to do just that.” With these prerequisites of belief the Christian writer of fiction seeks “to penetrate the concrete world” with a confidence that he may catch a glimpse of “the image of the source, the image of ultimate reality.” ¹⁰¹¹

Thus in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, a pigpen momentarily becomes the place from whence Jacob’s ladder reaches into the heavens and bears the saints upward; a line of tree tops may be experienced as the protecting wall of an Edenic garden sanctuary; and a water stain on a bedroom ceiling takes flight as a bird of pentecostal grace to cure one rebellious youth of his spiritual blindness. Much like the icon painter, O’Connor turns to inverted perspective and distorted form in order to impress upon her reader that the ordinary may be revelatory, that the natural bears the image of the supernatural. And just as the icon painter’s art, O’Connor’s art is figural and typological. The images she paints with words and the mysteries that are revealed to her protagonists join the biblical world and its events with theirs. Just as the iconographer paints his gospel scenes in such a manner that the Old Testament prefigurements of the New Testament events are gathered up in icons of Christ’s birth and baptism or his transfiguration. In other words, for O’Connor fiction truly is an incarnational art.

..."