the protestanism of O\'Cconnor

American Women’s Literature Nov.16 The Protestantism of Flannery O'Connor Robert Milder The Southern Review 11.4 (Autumn 1975): p802-819. [What Miss O'Connor wrote] about might be comprehended by the word “mystery.” “There are two qualities that make fiction,” she was fond of saying: “One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of experience that surrounds you”; the sense of mystery is the writer's own. [Mystery] for Miss O'Connor, a Roman Catholic, ... centered upon the three basic theological doctrines of the Church: the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment. The South provided her with a language and a social fabric, a “texture of experience,” but it was never more than the scene for a pageant universally enacted, the pageant of salvation through divine grace. As an artist in the Jamesian tradition, profoundly convinced that a story “must carry its meaning inside it,” Miss O'Connor was sensitive to the charge that Christian dogma inhibited a writer by imposing homiletic conclusions upon his work.... Belief, in her view, was an instrument for “penetrating reality,” not for molding it, and the Catholic novel was nothing more or less than “one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by.” “In the greatest fiction,” she wrote, the artist's “moral sense” coincided with “his dramatic sense,” with judgment so implicit in perception itself that the writer had no need to moralize. And here, she added, the Catholic writer enjoyed an inestimable advantage over the secular writer, who, skeptical of any absolute moral order, felt called upon to create one in his fiction. Secure in his faith “that the universe is meaningful,” the Catholic writer was free to observe and reflect his world unburdened by the moral responsibilities of the unbeliever. Had Miss O'Connor described her art as Christian rather than Catholic, the congruence between its theory and practice might have been almost complete. But she did not. The longest section in Mystery and Manners consists of four essays dealing with the Catholic writer and his audience, in each of which Miss O'Connor makes a strong case, implicitly or explicitly, for the Catholic nature of her fiction. She chooses “Catholic,” she tells us, because “the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart.” And for Miss O'Connor a golden heart was not merely “a positive interference in the writing of fiction,” but a symptom of everything that was wrong with modern religion—most notably, of the “tenderness” of the liberal reformer which she considered mawkish, “theoretical,” and corrupt. By insisting upon “Catholic,” Miss O'Connor sought to emphasize the literalness with which she took the traditional doctrines of the Church and to separate herself from “those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.” The paradox is that in repudiating what she regarded as the predominantly ethical mainstream of American Christianity, Flannery O'Connor was returning not to the Catholic tradition but to the evangelical Protestantism of the Reformation and the seventeenth century, a Protestantism whose lineal, if shrunken, descendants were the backwoods prophets of the modern South (pp. 802–04) [When] a staunch Catholic writes of backwoods prophets, it would presumably be with a consciousness of the perils of private inspiration and, preferable as this may be to secularism or religious complacency, a strong sense that it is only a second best—the best lying within the tradition of the Church. This is the position Miss O'Connor develops in “ The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” her most explicit treatment of the subject in Mystery and Manners. Elsewhere, however, Miss O'Connor has remarked of old Mason Tarwater, her prophet par excellence, that she is “right behind him 100 per cent,” justifying this by distinguishing between the visible and the invisible church and making of her arch-Protestant what she calls “a natural Catholic”: “When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church.” The idea of an invisible church of devout believers, Catholic in spirit though not in form, is well within the pale of Catholic orthodoxy, provided such believers “are in good faith, and are simply and loyally seeking the truth without self-righteous obstinacy.” Yet if old Tarwater is to be included among the census of Catholics, natural or otherwise, we are left with a Catholicism of an extremely latitudinarian sort, a Catholicism without Church or sacraments or priesthood, predicated solely upon the Bible and the individual's immediate confrontation with God—a Catholicism remarkably like Evangelical Protestantism. Though Flannery O'Connor should not be identified with old Tarwater, whatever her sympathies for him, her particular brand of Catholicism would not have been averse to the old man. Like Protestantism, it elevated the Bible over those “legal and logical” aspects of Christianity which, according to Miss O'Connor, have been prominent in the Catholic tradition since the Counter-Reformation. More importantly, however, it reflected what one critic has called “a temperamental affinity with Jansenism,” that tradition within the Catholic Church most akin to Calvinism in its ascetic spirit and its vision of Jesus “as a severe and inscrutable redeemer.” ... Miss O'Connor's vision of Christ [is of] “a stern and majestic Pantacrator, not ... a smiling Jesus with a bleeding heart.” (pp. 804–06) [Two] of the “heresies” which aroused most opposition among the orthodox and caused the Jansenists to be labeled as Protestants in their own time are “heresies” which inform Miss O'Connor's vision and constitute the theological center of her work. The first is an insistence upon the absolute and irremediable corruption of the natural man, and consequently upon the necessity of divine grace for every good work; the second is an exaltation of private religious experience at the expense of the sacraments and the institutional Church.... [Both] are essential to the Protestantism of Flannery O'Connor's fiction.... (p. 806) For the Protestant [specifically, the “Calvinist” or “Puritan”], the gulf between saint and sinner was absolute and unbridgeable; there was no middle way. In this context Miss O'Connor's fiction belongs unmistakably to the Protestant tradition, for there is virtually nothing in her work to suggest an ethical alternative between her fanatical prophets and misfits at the one extreme and her motley assortment of worldlings, cynics, and “good country people” at the other. The rationalists Rayber (The Violent Bear it Away) and Sheppard (““The Lame Shall Enter First” ”) represent the best hope for a middle way, if only because as social scientists they are closest to the modern liberal spirit. Yet it is precisely figures like Rayber, whom she regarded as “the typical modern man,” that Miss O'Connor caricatures most savagely. If there is an unpardonable sin in Flannery O'Connor's fictional world, it is the pride of secular intelligence, the arrogant and self-deluded belief that man can be his own savior.... With their faith in the power of reason to understand and transform human life, Rayber and his analog, Sheppard, are embodiments of the melioristic spirit of sociology, and the failure and humiliation they both encounter are compelling evidence of the futility of secular works. (p. 807) Theologically, what Miss O'Connor is insisting on through Sheppard and Rayber is the Protestant doctrine of the absolute corruption of all good works not founded upon divine grace. It is an uncompromising vision and, to the humanist, an appalling one. Because Rayber can offer him no middle way, young Tarwater is left to choose between the devil on the one hand and a half-crazed backwoods prophet on the other.... It is not merely that Tarwater's Christianity is uncongenial to the modern mind, it is unthinkable—a ludicrous anachronism in an age of behavioral psychologists and death-of-God theologians. Miss O'Connor herself was acutely aware of the problem, remarking, “When you write about backwoods prophets, it is very difficult to get across to the modern reader that you take these people seriously, that you are not making fun of them, but that their concerns are your own and, in your judgment, central to human life.” If Miss O'Connor's words seem explicit enough, they have not prevented readers from trying to mitigate what is essentially unmitigable in her vision: the absolute dichotomy between nature and grace.... Rayber's failure is not a failure of personality; it is the inevitable failure of the rationalist, the man of works, the unbeliever, who cannot offer love for the simple reason that (in Miss O'Connor's words) he is detached “from the source of love, the person of Jesus Christ.” Grotesque as he seems, it is the old man who embodies the principle of divine love.... As readers we may be discomforted by the violence of old Tarwater's Christianity and search for an implied alternative, a gentler love which Rayber might have given but didn't. But this, Miss O'Connor would claim, is our own failure, not the story's: as modern men we have “the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior.” In Miss O'Connor's world the only alternative to violence is emptiness; and between Rayber and old Tarwater, Sheppard and the club-footed Rufus Johnson, Flannery O'Connor's own choice is unequivocal: the violent bear away the kingdom of heaven; the lame shall enter first. (pp. 808–09) Perhaps Miss O'Connor's upbringing in the rural South made her more receptive to an evangelical, Bible-centered Christianity, in effect “Protestantizing” her Catholicism. Or perhaps a sense of the literary possibilities in the South—a Tarwater or a Hazel Motes—exercised a subtle but formative influence upon the shape of Miss O'Connor's vision, molding it to the exigencies of her art; so that being a writer (to paraphrase Blake), she came to belong to the Protestant party without knowing it. The result in either case was a dramatic ambivalence toward southern Fundamentalism: an awareness of the idiosyncracies of extreme Protestantism, yet an almost involuntary admiration for the intensity of its faith. Miss O'Connor addressed herself to Fundamentalism in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” an extended apologia for her concern with Protestant culture and a eulogy on the religious heritage of the South. Chiding the Catholic for his condescension toward the Bible Belt, Miss O'Connor professed to see nothing unnatural in a Catholic's sympathy with southern Protestantism: the strenuousness of the Protestant reminded the Catholic of “the terrible loss to us in the Church of human faith and passion,” while the waywardness of his “extreme individualism” revealed a need for tradition and authority which only the Church could fill. Though this seems a balanced estimate of both religions, the tenor of Miss O'Connor's essay is strangely laudatory of southern Protestantism. (pp. 809–10) [What] made the Church unsatisfying to Miss O'Connor as an artist made it equally unsatisfying to her as a Christian. Far from lacking a culture, the Church in Miss O'Connor's view had too much of one—too much of a social culture, the very wealth and complexity of its communal life mitigating the force of its doctrines and insulating the believer from those spiritual discoveries often made by those in the invisible church. More than anything else, what Miss O'Connor sought in a culture was a universal sense of the immanence of the divine. And here she felt that the southern Protestant, with his dependence upon the Bible and the austerity of his religious life, possessed a more vitally Christian culture than did the Catholic and lived more immediately in the presence of God. (p. 811) For Miss O'Connor the artist, this common scriptural heritage provided an ideal backdrop for a fiction concerned with the drama of salvation. Ultimately, however, Miss O'Connor's fascination with southern Protestantism derived less from its literary possibilities than from her temperamental response to its stark, unmediated version of Christianity.... In other circumstances Miss O'Connor's need for spiritual immediacy might have found expression in some form of neo-Jansenism or Pentecostal Catholicism. In the rural South it manifested itself in a compelling attraction toward southern Fundamentalism, a religion in which “the struggle against Satan is individual, continuous, and desperate, and salvation is a personal problem, which comes not through ritual and sacrament, but in the gripping fervor of immediate confrontation with eternity.” ... For Miss O'Connor, as for the Protestant, the foundation of religious life lay not in the Church or the sacraments, but in the private and often terrifying experience of divine grace. The effect of Flannery O'Connor's unmediated Christianity upon her fiction was an almost single-minded preoccupation with conversion experience—in her own words, with those moments “in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected.” In dramatic terms, such moments arose during a moral crisis when a character was forced “to decide forever, betwixt two things” ...—the two things generally consisting of God and Satan. What this type of art required of the novelist was a unique ability “to see different levels of reality in one image or situation,” the eternal commitment as it revealed itself in the concrete choice—a way of seeing which Miss O'Connor, reviving the scholastic term, labeled the “anagogical vision.” What it also required, however, was a belief that grace could be received directly through nature. In the Catholic tradition this idea is inherently suspect, for it threatens not only to bypass the sacraments but to dispense with the priesthood and the institutional Church.... For most Protestants,... and this would include the majority of English and American Puritans—grace was the culmination of a long process of “preparation” aimed at plowing up the stony ground of the heart in anticipation of the redeeming seed. Among the New England ministers of the seventeenth century the most articulate preparationists were Thomas Shepard and Thomas Hooker, who described the journey toward grace as a process of contrition and humiliation.... (pp. 811–13) In bringing her characters to their own moments of potential grace, Miss O'Connor not only omits the orthodox Catholic means of sacrament and priest but leads them through a process of preparation remarkably similar to those defined by Shepard and Hooker, wrenching them from their self-satisfaction into a humiliating awareness of who and what they are—vain, selfish creatures blind to themselves, dead to others, and desperately in need of grace. It is so customary to speak of the “banality of evil” that the phrase itself has become banal, yet this is precisely what Miss O'Connor means by original sin: not the murderousness of a psychotic like the Misfit, but the complacency of Mrs. Turpin (“Revelation”), the bigotry of Mrs. Shortley (“The Displaced Person ”), and the intellectual arrogance of Asbury Fox (“The Enduring Chill”). In a word, original sin is equivalent to “self,” and before grace can be extended to a character that “self” must be annihilated. For this reason, Flannery O'Connor's stories generally turn upon a moment of humiliation intended, like the Puritan's sermon, to prostrate the sinner and force upon him a sense of his helplessness. Sometimes, as in “Good Country People” and “ Everything that Rises Must Converge,” the moment of humiliation is just that: not an offer of grace but, through the discovery of spiritual emptiness, a realization of one's dire need for it. But often the moment of humiliation is a prelude to grace itself. In “The Artificial Nigger,” to cite one example, Mr. Head's humiliation leads him through contrition and despair to his final regeneration through divine mercy. (pp. 813–14) Although Mr. Head's moment of grace comes upon him unexpectedly, it has been amply prepared for through the spiritual process which began with his denial of Nelson. To the extent that this process takes place outside of the sacraments and culminates in an unmediated reception of divine mercy, it may be called Protestant rather than Catholic. But the resemblance is deeper and even more explicit, for in moving toward his moment of grace Mr. Head progresses through the four stages of evangelical conversion outlined by Thomas Shepard in a representative Puritan treatise on the subject: conviction of sin, compunction for sin, humiliation, and faith.... [“Conviction of sin”] was a vital, immediate, affective sense of one's own unworthiness, and this the Puritan minister sought to instill through the rhetoric of his sermon.... (p. 815) Miss O'Connor's insistence on the free acceptance of grace is one of the few remaining doctrinal points which link her to the Catholic tradition. It is a position which she reiterates in several of the essays in Mystery and Manners and one which, in theory at least, is central to her anagogical vision. In some of her stories grace does seem to revolve upon a character's free choice, as in “ A Good Man is Hard to Find” where the grandmother, in reaching out toward the Misfit, “does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.” But these stories are more the exception than the rule. In “ The Enduring Chill,” for example, Asbury Fox not only fails to do “the right thing,” he tries his best to keep from doing it: “A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.” Where the grandmother chooses grace, Asbury and Mrs. Turpin are chosen by it—“singled out,” as Mrs. Turpin says, randomly and with no apparent regard for penitence or even for faith. Grace proceeds from the sovereign pleasure of an arbitrary, inscrutable God who saves whom He will, when He will, and whose offer of salvation can neither be declined nor withstood. The issues of predestination and irresistible grace are particularly acute in Miss O'Connor's two novellas, The Violent Bear it Away and Wise Blood, whose heroes labor under an inescapable burden or prophecy.... [Miss O'Connor reconciles] freedom with religious calling through an appeal to mystery—a logic common enough in Protestant theology, where predestination coexists harmoniously with moral responsibility, but largely alien to Catholicism. On the questions of free will and spiritual election which have divided Catholics and Protestants since the Reformation, Miss O'Connor's fiction plants itself firmly on the Protestant side. (pp. 817–18) [There] have been numerous attempts to mellow her Christianity, the Catholic critics seeking a more orthodox Catholicism, the secularists a liberal humanism. But the harsh, unrelenting core of Miss O'Connor's vision will not be tampered with. In its insistence on the corruption of all secular works and the divisiveness and irresistibility of grace, Miss O'Connor's Christianity is virtually indistinguishable from the Fundamentalist Protestantism of the South. Yet even more important for Miss O'Connor than what the Fundamentalist believed was how he believed it. Armed only with the Bible and his own invincible faith, the Fundamentalist went forward to a life of incessant battle against the temptations of the world. It was a strenuous but immensely exhilarating vision in which each moral decision became a contest between God and Satan and the smallest gesture assumed a profound anagogical sig