Baron von HĂźgel, one of the great modern Catholic scholars, wrote that âthe Supernatural experience always appears as the transfiguration of Natural conditions, acts, states . . . ,â that âthe Spiritual generally is always preceded, or occasioned, accompanied or followed, by the Sensible. . . . The highest realities and deepest responses are experienced by us within, or in contact with, the lower and lowliest.â This means for the novelist that if he is going to show the supernatural taking place, he has nowhere to do it except on the literal level of human events, and that if he doesnât make these natural things believable in themselves, he canât make them believable in any of their spiritual extensions.
FLANNERY OâCONNOR, MYSTERY AND MANNERS
I see, as a mysterious but most real, most undeniable factâthat it is precisely the deepest, the keenest sufferings, not only of body but of mind, not only of mind but of heart, which have occasioned the firmest, the most living, the most tender faith.
BARON FRIEDRICH VON HĂGEL,
ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
When I first read a story of OâConnorâs in college, I was immediately intrigued. Who was this maniacal writer who also claimed to be a serious Christian? Since when was Christianity, and since when were Christians, so freakish, so violent, so foolish? After deciding many years later to do my PhD on her work, I read reviews of her work, and the earlier ones, in particular, confirmed my initial suspicions and were virtually unanimous on one count: OâConnorâs stories, and especially her characters, were a strange combinationâindeed, many argued, a contradictionâof the holy and the grotesque, of faith and violence, of divine wisdom mixed with hillbilly superstition.1 Beyond this consent, however, the unanimity fell apart. Though most reviewers agreed that her stories were odd, some found them disturbing and offensive to the point that they either dismissed her as a hack or castigated her for being such a misanthrope, while others found in them a profound and beautiful truth creatively wrought by a budding genius. All agreed that this writing was audacious stuff, heady and esoteric material for a young Catholic girl from the Deep South. Evelyn Waugh remarked that âif this is the unaided work of a young lady it is a remarkable product.â2
The divergent and even contradictory reactions to OâConnorâs stories reminded me of G. K. Chestertonâs paradoxical quip about the âtremendous figure which fills the gospelsâ:
Suppose we heard [of] an unknown man spoken [of] by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.3
Maybe OâConnorâs stories were âthe right shapeâ in that they toldâor rather, showedâthe truth embodied in that toweringâeven paradoxicalâgospel figure. Perhaps both sides of the debate, in other words, were right about OâConnorâs stories. Maybe the truth of things was both disturbing and profound, offensive but beautiful. Maybe her stories were compelling because they reflected not only the paradoxical nature of Christ but also the paradoxical nature of life. As a believer myself, I was familiar with such paradoxes in Scripture: of the minor prophet Nahumâs jealous and avenging God, on the one hand, who was also Jesusâ loving and gracious Father, on the other; of the profound purpose of life reflected in the Genesis accounts of creation tempered by the equally profound meaninglessness of life echoed in the pages of Ecclesiastes.4 But I sensed also something else in this unity of opposites so prevalent in OâConnorâs stories (especially the later ones): a theological influence, perhaps, that gave OâConnor the language to embody such paradoxes.
As I continued to read and study OâConnorâs work, I also began to notice a subtle but noticeable shift from her earlier to her later work. Though I couldnât quite name it at first, it became clear that her later stories had a theological depth that her earlier stories lacked, and I couldnât help but wonder if her proclivity for a âunity of oppositesâ was somehow related to this shift in depth. This impulse to place OâConnor somewhere and to pin down the reason(s) for this change in her work gave the whole question of the provenance of her paradoxical vision an even greater urgency. Where on earth did she come up with this kind of material? Who gave her the permission to write like this? Whence the vision?
The search would eventually lead me to a name I did not recognize, nor was it one I had run across in OâConnor scholarship. I would come to find that a relatively obscure figure, especially in American theological circles, had helped to lay the foundation for OâConnorâs radical vision. It had begun, I suspected, with OâConnorâs acquiring an English translation of Saint Catherine of Genoaâs Treatise on Purgatory in 1949.5 But before we examine this figure, Baron Friedrich von HĂźgel, and his influence on OâConnor, we need first to establish that a shift in theological depth did, indeed, occur between OâConnorâs early and later stories.
A SHIFT IN TONE, A CHANGE OF DEPTH
A shift in both theological depth and moral seriousness from OâConnorâs early to her later stories is evident to many of her critics, but the event, idea, or influence that led to such a change continues to be debated.6 Of course, there is nothing morally fatuous about the murder of an entire family (âA Good Man Is Hard to Findâ) or the drowning of a small child (âThe Riverâ), both of which are found in OâConnorâs first collection of short stories, but in the main, OâConnorâs later fiction exhibits a theological and spiritual weightiness that her earlier fiction lacks. Robert Golden and Mary Sullivan suggest that the body of early criticism largely rejectsâor at least does not see the centrality ofâa religious foundation in OâConnorâs work.7 In discussing the âfour schools of thoughtâ that predominate in OâConnor studies, Golden and Sullivan observe that the fourth school
denies the religious intent completely, preferring to read her work in various other ways: as another example of âsouthern gothicâ and its interest in private neurosis and public degeneracy, as a humanistic cry against the evils of the American South, as OâConnorâs way of working out the frustrations of her inner life, or as a closed fictional world, a world in which questions of ideology or belief are not relevant. Much of the early criticism of OâConnor belongs in the fourth school; religious readings of her work increased as her fiction became more familiar and as she increasingly made clear her religious intent, but the fourth school is not silent, occasionally sallying forth against the other schools, especially the first and the second.8
The reason why much of the early criticism largely ignored OâConnorâs religious intentions is that her early stories (pre-1954) are not primarily religiousâand by this I mean they are not primarily theological. The six stories OâConnor submitted for her masterâs thesis tend to content themselves with societal and psychological questions and concerns, with race relations, for example, and familial turmoil and dysfunctionâwith âmannersâ more than âmystery.â âThe Turkeyâ is an exception, but even here its âspiritualâ elements fall more squarely into the category of adolescent religious recalcitrance than genuine religious curiosity.
EXCURSUS: THE âTHINGâ
âThe Geranium,â âThe Barber,â âWildcat,â âThe Crop,â âThe Turkey,â and âThe Train,â the six short stories that OâConnor submitted for her masterâs thesis at the Iowa Workshop in 1947 under the title âThe Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories,â essentially limit their theological reflection to what would become a signature literary device for OâConnor: the mysterious âthingâ that haunts her fiction, which her characters can never name but that symbolizes their abiding fears. In âThe Geranium,â it is referred to as that âthing inside him [that] had sneaked up on him for just one instantâ; in âThe Barber,â the main character has âa blind moment when he felt as if something that wasnât there was bashing him to the groundâ; the entire premise of âWildcatâ centers on an unseen and foreboding âthingâ (a wildcat for the purposes of the story) that never actually shows up; âThe Cropâ mentions a characterâs âthinking about something big way offââ;9 and in âThe Train,â the main character (Haze) is terrified to get into the sleeping berth of a trainâit reminds him of the coffin his mother was put inâand then, when he finally does go in, âHe lay there for a while not moving. There was something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste.â The darkness itself takes on the objective materiality of death in the story so that, after heâs been lying in the berth for some time,
from inside he saw it closing, coming closer, closer down and cutting off the light and the room and the trees seen through the window through the crack faster and darker and closing down. He opened his eyes and saw it closing down and he sprang up between the crack and wedged his body through it and hung there moving, dizzy, with the dim light of the train slowly showing the rug below, moving, dizzy.10
Even âThe Turkey,â the most explicitly âtheologicalâ of her first stories, ends with a reference to âSomething Awful [that] was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.â11
It would be too convenientâand incorrectâto reduce every reference of this âthingâ in OâConnorâs earliest stories to something divine or evil, but there are clearly spiritual undertones to its presence. It seems plausible to consider that in each of these stories, the anonymity of this âthingâ signals an ambivalence on OâConnorâs part regarding the paradoxical nature of Godâs good but terrible character, and it is an ambivalence she appears to only begin to come to terms with in her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, where the mysterious thing is introduced to us as a character in the story, first named the âStrangerâ and then, eventually, the âFriend.â
As a counter to the suggestion that OâConnorâs earliest stories are not theological, one might argue that the sociological and psychological elements of the South can hardly be separated from their cultural religious expressions, in which case all of OâConnorâs early stories are theological to one degree or another. Caroline Gordon touches on this inescapable blending of southern culture and its religion, and of OâConnorâs fascination with this blending, in a book review she wrote in 1955 of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, where she suggests that many of OâConnorâs critics âmisunderstand her because they do not see her characters as symbols for spiritual and social aspects of southern life.â12 Gordon...