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.
..."
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