Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination

Christian humility is clearly what Flannery O’Connor’s protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God.

Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, by George A. Kilcourse, Jr. (336 pages, Paulist Press, 2001)

“I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy,” said southern writer Flannery O’Connor. “This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.” Though we need not see as she does to appreciate her stories, understanding the vision that informs them is essential to apprehending their deeper meanings. Few understand this vision better than George A. Kilcourse, professor of theology at Bellarmine University and a priest of the Archdiocese of Louisville.

In six engaging chapters, Kilcourse gives us what we have, until now, only anticipated: a rigorously Catholic reading of America’s foremost Roman Catholic fictionist. He builds an interpretive basis for his study, explaining, among other things, O’Connor’s uncanny depictions of violence and the grotesque. On this basis, and in chronological order of their publication, he examines O’Connor’s novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), along with her short story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and the posthumously published Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

Besides explicating these achievements, Kilcourse associates the thought behind them with eminent Catholic minds of the twentieth century. He reveals parallels, for instance, between the culturally subversive aspects of O’Connor’s fiction and the cultural commentary of Thomas Merton, the Kentucky Trappist monk who hailed O’Connor as a modern Sophocles. Kilcourse also scrutinizes O’Connor’s attraction to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Karl Rahner. Two other thinkers whom Kilcourse identifies as major influences, and to whom he devotes his entire third chapter, are Romano Guardini and William F. Lynch.

Of the two, says Kilcourse, the former had the profoundest effect on O’Connor’s art. In reviews and letters, O’Connor repeatedly lauded The Lord (1954), a book of essays in which Guardini spent a number of words defining Christian humility. Acknowledging another’s grandeur, conceding another’s greater talent, or appreciating without envy another’s accomplishments is, to paraphrase the crux of Guardini’s definition, an expression not of Christian humility but of simple intellectual integrity. Christian humility, he maintained, consists in bowing to the weak, loving the unloved, and serving the undeserving; it finds perfect expression in the incarnation and passion of Christ. As Kilcourse observes, Guardini’s concept of Christian humility figures prominently in practically every story O’Connor penned after admitting, in 1954, that she was reading all the Guardini she could get.

Christian humility is clearly what her protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists, Kilcourse reminds us, undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God. In short, God mercifully mortifies them in the hope that they will freely open their hearts to the Holy Spirit, either at the moment of death (as in the case of the grandmother who reaches out to the Misfit seconds before he shoots her three times in the chest), or as they begin to expiate their pettiness (as Julian does in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” when he surrenders himself to guilt and sorrow upon witnessing the sudden death of his mother, who had for years patiently suffered his haughty scorn).

Kilcourse’s study is not without its flaws. In his discussion of contemporary influences, for example, he omits T. S. Eliot. Although Eliot was neither a trained theologian nor a Roman Catholic, he was yet an important philosopher-poet in whose work O’Connor early and continually found as much intellectual validation as creative inspiration. (See Sally Fitzgerald’s introduction to 3 by Flannery O’Connor [1983].) In significant ways, O’Connor’s stories function as mirrored fictionalizations of “The Waste Land” (1922), Eliot’s image of modern decadence and moral anomie.

Notwithstanding such oversights, Kilcourse gives us a penetrating exegesis. What recommends his book above all else is its painstaking concentration on what is truly significant in O’Connor’s symbolism. Indeed, Kilcourse’s focus is right where O’Connor said it ought to be, not on the “dead bodies” but on “the action of grace” in her characters’ souls. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination is for anyone who would better understand this action and the mind of a writer whose stories of conversion “summon us time and again,” as Kilcourse aptly puts it, “to contemplate the mystery of the Christ who throws off balance every status quo that threatens to seduce and paralyze us with its tempting illusion.”

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