flannery o conner

Christianity and LiteratureVol. 60, No.1 (Autumn 2010)

The Anagogical Imaginationof Flannery O'Connor

Peter M. Candler, Jr.

Abstract: This essay explores O'Connor's sense of the art of fictionas an art of anagogical vision, which sees all things as instances ofparticipation in God. Such created things are, then, when read or "seen"properly, fragmentary disclosures of the divine glory. To O'Connor, thelogic of anagogy implies that the visible realities of this world only takeon a fullness of meaning-indeed, they only become truly visible-whenseen in the paradoxical light of the unseen. The anagogical sense-thefinal of the four senses of scripture according to Christian traditionrefers to a text's figurative signification in relation to eternal glory oreschatological reality. This anagogical sensibility is often represented inO'Connor's work by the recurring image ofthe sun at the closeofmany ofher stories. Therefore O'Connor's "anagogical imagination," operative inso much of her work, is intended to lead one through the contemplationoffuture glory to the reimagination of temporal existence in light of theIncarnation, and to enable one to see such existence as imbued with thegrace of divine creation and ordered towards its consummation. That isto say, when seen in the light ofthe yet-to-be-fully-disclosed divine glory,the world-including most especially humanity-becomes more trulyvisible for what it is.

The story has by now almost the status of legend: Flannery O'Connorwas in New York visiting with friends and a couple of what she called "BigIntellectuals" when

toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I,being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwatersaid when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the

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12 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

HolyGhost, He being the "most portable"member of the Trinity;nowshe thought of it as a symboland implied that it wasa pretty good one.I then said, in a very shakyvoice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it:'That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize that this is all Iwill ever be able to say about it, outside of a story,except that it is thecenter of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. (Habit ofBeing 124-25)

It is O'Connor's sense of the story, the art of fiction, as an art ofanagogical vision that I aim to explore in this essay. I will proceed in twostages: first by reading O'Connor's own account, as put forth in her lettersand essays, of fiction as an art of anagogical vision that sees all things asinstances of participation in God which, read properly, are fragmentarydisclosures of the divine glory; and second by a reading of the role of visionand visibility in several of her stories. I suggest that for O'Connor the logicof anagogy implies that the visible realities of this world only take on afullness of meaning-indeed, they only become truly visible-when seen inthe paradoxical light of the unseen.

The anagogical sense-the final of the four senses of scripture accordingto Christian tradition-refers to a text's figurative signification in relationto eternal glory or eschatological reality. "In its most general and abstractconception;' writes Henri de Lubac, "the anagogical sense is that which leadsthe thought of the exegete 'upwards" (Medieval Exegesis 2: 180).1 Accordingto the patristic and medieval traditions of interpretation, the anagogicalsense is that "through which speech is borne over to the invisible things tocome." This anagogical sensibility is often represented in O'Connor's workby the recurring image of the sun at the close of many of her stories. ThereforeO'Connor's "anagogical imagination;' operative in so much of her work, isnot intended to remove the individual from this world so as to make him "soheavenly minded" that he is "no earthly good" (Cash). On the contrary, theanagogical sense leads one through the contemplation of future glory to thereimagination of temporal existence in light of the Incarnation, as imbuedwith the grace of divine creation and ordered towards its consummation.That is to say, when seen in the light of the yet-to-be-fully-disclosed divineglory, the world-including most especially humanity-becomes moretruly visible for what it is.

The ahistorical modern self is for O'Connor nothing to be praised, andfor this reason she saw in the South, where one could not so easily pretendto be in just any place, an implicit rejection of this. She rejects as a Gnostic

THE ANAGOGICAL IMAGINATION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR 13

illusion the concept of the hero in the modern novel, that of the alienated,rootless outsider for whom the "borders of his country are the sides of hisskull" (Mystery and Manners 200). Above all, O'Connor saw the moderncondition as basically Manichean, a world of dualistic oppositions betweennature and grace, form and content, story and meaning, body and soul.Fiction no less than theology is "infected" with this heresy. For O'Connor,this isparticularly insidious because fiction is "so very much an incarnationalart" (Mystery 68). She frequently reprimanded aspiring young writers thatto try and write fiction which is more immediately concerned with grandideas than with the more mundane details of human life is not only to becondemned to a life of writing badly but also a matter of infidelity. "Fictionis about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorngetting yourselfdusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grandenough job for you" (Mystery 68).

But it is O'Connor's understanding of the incarnational character of artgenerally, and of fiction in particular, that prevents her from collapsing intoa fetishization of the human over against the divine, or of the visible overagainst the invisible (Srigley). It is the invisible which, for O'Connor, rendersanything visible to begin with. Of a piece with this is her understanding ofvision as basically sacramental. This sacramental vision is, contra many ofher critics in her own time, not what prohibits clarity of vision, but rather thatwhich enables it.3 To see the world rightly is to see it anagogically, to see it interms of "the Divine life and our participation in it" (Mystery 72). Readinganagogically is not just a function of biblical exegesis; it is a way of readingthe entirety of creation as teleologically ordered to its consummation in itsTriune creator. The anagogical vision, then, she understood as basic to thefiction writer as such-even the writer who rejects the Christian evangel,for the ends of art transcend the intentions of the author.vlhus O'Connor'swork is fraught with the symbolic, although not in the sense of a "sort ofliterary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated:' Nor is the meaning ofa story simply the aggregate of symbolic codes that must be deciphered inorder for "meaning" to be discovered. Rather, the symbols that the fictionwriter uses are those which are already to hand. Symbols do not have to beassigned significance or reference by the imposition of an authorial will;instead, they have "their essential place in the literary level" but "operatein depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction"(Mystery 71). Meaning, then, once "found;' "cannot be drained off and usedas a substitute" for a story. As the American poet John Peale Bishop once


said, "You can't say Cezanne painted apples and a tablecloth and have saidwhat Cezanne painted" (qtd. in O'Connor, Mystery 75).

With this in mind, it does not seem quite adequate to O'Connor's ownsense of this way of seeing to reduce the anagogical to a multiplicity of"levels" of reference, as some commentators are prone to do. To cite onesuch example, Lucretia B. Yaghjian writes:

If the first level of O'Connor's anagogical vision consists in a literalreading of the story, with all of its specificity of concrete detail, andsubsequent levelsinvite the accumulation, intensification, and symbolicordering of that detail into configurations of deeper, more pervasivemeaning, the end of this anagogical process in O'Connor's fiction is thereader's experience of "mystery;' or an experience of transcendence.(274)

A generic "experience of transcendence" is not, it seems to me, whatO'Connor understands anagogy to be intended to effect. Rather, sheappears to presuppose the anagogic not as a species of a more general modeof "symbolic reference" but more in the terms of the ancient practice ofreading scripture according to the four senses: the literal, the allegorical,the moral, and the anagogical.' In this sense, O'Connor's affinity is morewith the ressourcement school in the mid-twentieth century (figures suchas Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou) and associated thinkers of the lay neoThomistic revival (such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson) thanwith figures such as Roger Haight and the early David Tracy, with whomYaghjihan relates her. 6A classic expression of the fourfold sense is foundin the first question of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, whichO'Connor no doubt knew:

Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For as the Apostle says(Heb. 10:1) the Old Lawis a figure of the New Law, and Dionysius says(Coe!. Hier. i) "the New Law itself is a figure of future glory:' Again, inthe New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type of what we oughtto do. Therefore, so far as the things of the Old Law signify the thingsof the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things donein Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of whatwe ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify whatrelates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense (Summa IheologiaeIa.Ll O, resp.).


No writer did more in the twentieth century to rehabilitate the ancientand medieval practice of the four senses of scripture than de Lubac,particularly through his four-volume work Exegese medievale: les quatresensde l'Ecriture? which appeared during the last decade of O'Connor's life.Although O'Connor did not read this text, she was no doubt well-acquaintedwith the tradition of the four senses, as shown in "The Nature and Aim ofFiction":

The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaningin the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, inwhich one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, ormoral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they calledanagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participationin it. Although this was a method applied to biblical exegesis, it wasalso an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading naturewhich included most possibilities .... (Mystery 72-73)H

This passage displays a deep understanding of the four senses-which arenot Simply "layers" of meaning but which constitute a means of the soul's"manuduction" into the inter-trinitarian life (Candler). It constitutes notjust a way ofreading the book of scripture, but also what the same medievalscalled the "book of nature,"? What is more, O'Connor astutely grasps thatthe three "spiritual" senses are contained within the literal sense (Desmond).They are not a dispensable superstructure erected on top of the letter; ratherthey are somehow included within it, as Aquinas says:

Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are foundedon one-the literal-from which alone can any argument be drawn,and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epis. 48).Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this,since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sensewhich is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.(Summa Theologiae, Ia.Ll O, ad 1; Cf. Holcomb 60-80)

In the same way, for O'Connor, the literal in some sense already "contains"the figurative. Far from being a level of meaning superadded to the literalsense, the "spiritual sense" is already inherent in any attempt to rendersomething artistically. ''A good story:' she wrote, "is literal in the samesense that a child's drawing is literal" (Mystery 113). It is not a deliberateact of abstraction but an unconscious act of distortion; and it is a kind


of distortion which does not destroy but reveals.'? Distortion is not onlyinevitable insofar as the writer writes with the whole personality, but it isalso an effect of the mystery which already inchoately inheres in any createdobject. In this sense, she understands the "anagogical way of seeing" (Habit180) to be prophetic (Srigley 37-54).11 It is "a matter of seeing near thingswith their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up:' Theprophet, therefore, is what she calls a "realist of distances" (Mystery 44). ForO'Connor, this kind of realism "does not hesitate to distort appearances inorder to show a hidden truth" (179).

Though their particular approaches are quite different, O'Connorand Thomas Aquinas are both, in some sense, "realists of distances:' Forexample, in a discussion of the nature of prophecy in Question XII of theDe Veritate, a section often referred to by O'Connor, Thomas Aquinas says,

As is said in the Gloss, Prophecy is called sight, and the prophet iscalled seer. Still, not every sight can be called prophecy, but only thesight of those things which are far beyond our ordinary knowledge.As a result, the prophet is said to be not only one who speaksfrom afar(proculfans), that is, one who announces, but also one who seesfromafar (procul videns), from the Greek phanos, which is an appearing:'(Truth 1, resp., p. 105)

O'Connor was clearly familiar with Henri de Lubac; and though shemost definitely did not read his Surnaturel, her conception of the relationbetween the natural and the supernatural bears a strong affinity with deLubacs claim, made in Surnaturel, that the idea of "pure nature" is at roota modern chimera, the product of a centuries-long tradition of misreadingSt. Thomas. Her own thought is in deep sympathy with de Lubacs claimthat "It is always within the real world whose supernatural finality is nothypothetical but fact, and not by following any supposition that takes us outof the world, that we must seek an explanation of the supernatural" (Mysteryof the Supernatural 80). With de Lubac, O'Connor suggests that modernityin its basic constitution is Manichean-and this is no less true of the averageCatholic than of the enlightened literary critic. "By separating nature andgrace as much as possible, [the average Catholic reader] has reduced hisconception of the supernatural to a pious cliche and has become able torecognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and theobscene" (Mystery 147). Bauerschmidt aptly summarizes the implicationsof this separation:


In losing that which is beyond our nature, we lose our nature. Thedifficulty in the culture of nihilism is at root not the loss of a sense ofgrace, but the loss of nature. Just as modern culture wants its mysterywithout manners, so too it wants its grace without nature. Or, moreprecisely,it understands nature as an emptiness that is entirely subject tohuman manipulation; human nature is the object of self-actualization.For O'Connor, this spells death for nature. Cut off from grace, it cannotreach its destiny; cut off from its creator, it cannot even exist. (176)

In spite of her reading of (or at the very least acquaintance with)figures such as de Lubac, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Karl Rahner,Romano Guardini, Louis Bouyer, Jean Danielou, Frederick Copleston,Anton C. Pegis, Josef Pieper, Edith Stein, Karl Adam, Charles Peguy, HenriDaniel-Rops, Baron von Hugel, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Charles Iournet,Jean Mouroux, Yves Congar, Gabriel Marcel, and many others (to name afew), she did not regard her age as one of "great Catholic theology" (Habit306),12 at least not in the sense in which she viewed the Protestant "crisis"theologians of the same period (preeminently Karl Barth, whom she heldin high regard) in terms of their alertness and creativity. What she didnot learn directly from either Gilson or de Lubac, however, she no doubtimbibed vicariously through conversations and letters and through theseother authors. Despite the extent of her reading of these figures, there hasbeen no attempt in O'Connor scholarship to understand her fiction withrespect to her theological thought as it developed in relation to fa nouvelletheologie, even though this was the body of writing more influential thanany other upon her theology.

Apart, that is from Aquinas himself, whose Summa Theologiae she readbefore bed every night. She wrote:

If my mother were to come in during this process and say,"Turn off thatlight. It's late;' I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression,would reply,"On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal andlimitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes;' or some such thing. Inany case, I feel I can personally guarantee that St. Thomas loved Godbecause for the life of me I cannot help loving St. Thomas. His brothersdidn't want him to waste himself being a Dominican and so lockedhim up in a tower and introduced a prostitute into his apartment; herhe ran out with a red-hot poker. It would be fashionable today to bein sympathy with the woman, but I am in sympathy with St. Thomas.(Habit 93-94)


O'Connor famously described herself as a "hillbilly Thomist," whoseparticular form of Thomism is, as Bauerschmidt writes, "the broadThomistic humanism that was the shared inheritance of the Church fromthe doctor communis" (165). Her favorite reference to the Summa is fromQuestion 57 of the Prima Secundae, on whether prudence is distinct fromart, where Thomas argues that the good of an art is found in the goodness ofthe thing made. Consequently art (like prophecy) does not require rectitudeof the appetite but depends upon God's gracious giving of a gift. FollowingAquinas, O'Connor calls art "reason in making:' The consequence of themodern Manichean dualism of matter and spirit and its cognate separationof nature and grace is that "imagination and reason have been separated,and this always means an end to art" (Mystery 82).

Seeing and making are therefore one activity of the "habit of art:' To seethe world truthfully is already to draw it, like the child, anagogically. Thus"reading the world" is a function of the whole personality, and therefore thewriting of fiction is essentially an act of justice. Thus, as Rowan Williamspoints out, writing is a matter of "doing justice" to the world (99). InO'Connor's own words, "[tjhe basis of art is truth, both in matter and inmode. The person who aims after art aims after truth, in an imaginativesense, no more and no less" (Mystery 65). This explains why the modusof comedy is particularly suited to seeing anagogically, as Denise Askinnotes: O'Connor "points us not to a rhetorical formulation but to the formof the work itself, a form that makes manifest the all-surrounding order ofexistence. If comedy, through its ordering of the unreasonable, allows theunderlying reason to emerge, it becomes a fitting vehicle for the anagogicalvision" (50). Thus for the writer, "everything has its testing point in the eyes,an organ which involves the whole personality and as much of the world ascan be got into it:' For O'Connor's fiction is concerned with "what-is:' forthis is all the fiction writer has to work with. In this sense, as Williams rightlyshows, O'Connor gives a particular centrality to visibility: "[tjhe tightropethe Catholic writer is to walk is to forget nothing of the visually, morally,humanly sordid world, making nothing easy for the reader, while doing soin the name of a radical conviction that sees the world being interruptedand transfigured by revelation" (99-100).

As she writes to "A:' in 1956, "I suppose when I say that the moral basisof Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God, I mean about thesame thing that Conrad meant when he said that his aim as an artist wasto render the highest possible justice to the visible universe. For me the


visible universe is a reflection of the invisible universe" (Habit 128). Thus noindependent thing is capable of its own determination as a thing; rather tounderstand fiction as an incarnational art is to recognize that all things aremeaningful only insofar as they all are by virtue of their participation in thedivine life and as an expression of the divine glory. Such is the sacramental"reason in making" which constitutes the anagogical imagination, whichreveals every visible as a register of the invisible. It is therefore not only asan eschatological reality that creation will be made whole in Christ, it isthe beginning of true vision to see the creation groaning now towards itsconsummation. Sight begins with a blurred vision of men as if they weretrees, but nevertheless walking (Mystery 50), in the same way that the child'sgrotesque drawing "sees the lines that create motion" (113).

For example, in "A View of the Woods;' Mr. Fortune, an old man who"never let a cow pasture get in the way ofprogress" (O'Connor, Collected Works525), deeds his front lawn to a local entrepreneur in order to demonstratehis power over his despised son-in-law, Pitts. Fortune's granddaughter, andPitts' daughter, Mary Fortune-the only one of Fortune's progeny in whomhe can recognize his own image-persistently protests the sale, because itwill mean she will no longer be able to see the woods from the front porchof their house. Fortune's power of Sight is strictly literal:

Several times during the afternoon, he got up from his bed and lookedout the window across the "lawn" to the line of woods she said theywouldn't be able to see anymore. Every time he saw the same thing:woods-not a mountain, not a waterfall, not any kind of planted bushor flower, just woods.... A pine trunk is just a pine trunk, he said tohimself. (538)

It is only when Fortune has destroyed the sole reflection of himself that hebegins to see with the child's eyes, that is, anagogically. All that remains is"his conquered image:' Feeling himself as tugged through the woods, heimagines that he spies an opening through which he can escape the trees:

He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the whiteskywasreflected in the water. It grewas he ran toward it until suddenlythe whole lake opened up before him, riding majestically in littlecorrugated folds toward his feet. He realizedsuddenly that he could notswim and that he had not brought the boat. On both sides of him hesaw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files thatwere marching across the water and awayinto the distance. (546)


Finally, Fortune looks around to find someone to help him, but he sees onlya deserted expanse, but for "one huge yellow monster which sat to the side,as stationary as he was, gorging itself on clay" (546). According to RichardGiannone, this is precisely an instance of the anagogical "recovery of vision:'''Atlast, Mr. Fortune's optic nerve, damaged by demonic pressure, is restoredby divine justice so that he sees his personal evil in punching down MaryFortune, who is perceived as the monster to his side" (215).

But such restoration does not come so easily for Fortune. It is perhapsno accident that the name of "Pitts" is the very thing Fortune cannot abide,much less be sullied with. "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me:' he declaresupon having murdered his granddaughter. The converse of this is that theremaybe an ounce of Fortune in the Pit, as O'Connor subtly plays upon thelanguage of Sheol in the Old Testament, particularly that of Job and thePsalms. In English this is often rendered "pit": for example, in Psalm 88, thepsalmist writes, "I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I amas a man that hath no strength" (Ps. 88:4). Indeed, this is the very languageO'Connor uses at the beginning of ''A View of the Woods" to describe thehole the big machine is digging in the erstwhile cow pasture: "She sat on thehood, looking down into the red pit, watching the big disembodied gulletgorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea anda slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up" (Works 525).

At the other end of the story, Fortune, not unlike the psalmist, recognizeshis frailty-this time in his inability to swim, and he is powerless to resistthe inexorable pull of the lake. Moreover, the long line of trees on either sideof him that has thickened into "mysterious dark files" resembles the walls ofa tomb that have grown up around him. The only "person" he then sees is abackhoe, "gorging itself on clay:' as if digging the pit for Fortune himself. Inthis particularly eschatological vision, Fortune is presented with his destiny,but it is a kind of anti-anagogical image insofar as he sees a future whichis beset by death on all sides. The living world is constituted by motion; itis Fortune and the backhoe-the very incarnation of his mechanistic viewof the universe-that are "stationary" (Desmond 72-73). It is not in thelight of eternal glory but its opposite that Fortune comes to some kind ofrecognition of his own desperate fate. "But thou, 0 God, shalt bring themdown into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live outhalf their days" (Ps. 55:23). The extent of Fortune's desperation is indicatedby the fact that not only can he not see truly, but, perhaps more importantly,he cannot be seen. In his final act of treachery, the face of the child he has


just murdered does not return his gaze; it "appeared to pay him not theslightest attention" (Works 545). "The eyes had rolled back down and wereset in a fixed glare that did not take him in" (546). The story concludes inan act of reciprocal non-vision: Fortune neither sees nor is seen. And yetthe possibility of his redemption abides in this singular privation wherebythe vision of himself and his cosmos under the sign of a negation opens upthe only possible site for his transformation. Thus he is consumed both bythe "convulsive motion" (546) of his expanding heart, and surrounded bya similarly moving world in which the trees march toward and across thewater of the lake that is steadily advancing towards his feet.

Tocite another example, in Wise Blood, Hazel Motes is the self-appointedfounding prophet of the "Church Without Christ:' whose only pulpit is thetop of a forty-dollar Essex sedan, whose gospel is that the only truth is thatthere is no truth (Works 93), and that "no man with a good car needs tobe justified:' But the instrument of Haze's justification becomes that of hiscondemnation when he runs down Solace Layfield with the Essex. His flightfrom guilt ends when he is pulled over by a state trooper. After a fairly icyexchange between the two, the trooper cons Motes into perching the Essexon the precipice of an embankment so that he can ostensibly have a betterview of the horizon. As the car unceremoniously tumbles to its death, thepatrolman remarks:

"Them that don't have a car, don't need a license:' the patrolmansaid,dusting his hands on his pants.

Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His faceseemedto reflect the entire distanceacrossthe clearingand on beyond,the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank grey skythat went on, depth after depth, into space. His knees bent under himand he sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feethangingover. (117-18)

Hazel Motes' vision only becomes truthful when it becomes an extensionof the sky itself, that is, when it sees in terms of participation in the divineand when it becomes absorbed into it. "Motes:' writes Ralph Wood, "comesto the truth by means of silence and vision. With his Essex gone, he can atlast see that there is a more habitable place than the suffocating confines ofhis sinful ego" (Flannery O'Connor 169). The tumbling Essex transforms thepanoptic observation of a neutral space into the enactment of a scene, froma partly burnt pasture and a scrub cow to the perception of "depth afterdepth" (llS).


For O'Connor, VISIOn takes account of reality in its appearing asinexhaustible, as it always paradoxically discloses that which is notimmediately available to sight. In other words, to see anagogically is toperceive in the world a plenitude that is nevertheless not properly an objectof sight. It is, therefore, to anticipate, in vision, that beatific vision "whenall you see will be God" (Habit 124). Thus the union, in her stories, of therevelation of the invisible through the objects of Sight and the ordering ofdesire, which, for O'Connor is the task of a painful mortification of thewrongly ordered passions for self-mastery. Her metaphor for this is theterrestrial source of light itself, the sun, which not only illumines but alsoburns. To share in the light of the Son is to endure, as in the sacrament ofbaptism, a death. To see "sacramentally" thus refers to the transformativeburial and resurrection of sight itself. As such, her account of anagogicalvision assumes that participation in Christ's death is as much a physicalevent as a "spiritual" one. Indeed, to separate the two would be to "findyourself a Manichean without knowing how it happened" (Habit 173).

Just as there is no diremption of the soul and the body, there can be nolight without heat. To see truthfully, to see visible reality as pregnant withthe invisible is to be subject to a kind of burning. For light must travel in abody, and for O'Connor it is the freaks, the Misfit, and the conniving Biblesalesman, who are the bodies that are the unwitting sites of illumination.

In the twenty-fourth of John Cassians Conferences, "On Mortification;'Abba Abraham, commenting on Matt. II:12 ("the kingdom of heavensuffers force, and the violent bear it away")," says, "These violent personswho forcibly prevent their own ruin are certainly praiseworthy.... Our ruinis delight in the present life and-by way of expressing it more clearly-thecarrying out of our own desires and will. If a person removes these fromhis soul and mortifies them, he certainly prevents forcibly, in glorious andbeneficial fashion, his own ruin, to the extent that he denies it its mostpleasant desires" (850).

The redemption of the characters in O'Connor's fiction is oftenmediated through the violent, who unwittingly "warn the children ofGod of the terrible speed of mercy" -characters who, like most of us, arenever quite unambiguously on the side of either good or evil. It is oftenthey, and not ourselves, who forcibly prevent our own ruin. And theprevention of that ruin is frequently accompanied with death, whether atthe hand of an escaped convict on the loose in the backwoods of Georgiaor by an unbridled bull. There are those who die violently but their deaths


correspond to an analogous violence of the paradoxical beginning of sight,the partial and blurred foretaste of the beatific vision.It The story is perhapslegend, but nonetheless true, but O'Connor was once asked why so manyof the characters in her stories were getting killed. She is supposed to havereplied, "Alot of my characters get killed, but no one gets hurt"

In her 1954 story "The Displaced Person;' O'Connor tells the tale ofa Polish immigrant fleeing the Holocaust called Mr. Guizac, who, at theassistance of the local Catholic priest-a man who "spoke in a foreign wayhimself, English but as ifhe had a throatful ofhay" (Works 288-89)-arriveson the farm of Mrs. McIntyre, an obstinate and frugal old widow, whosehusbands are all either dead, locked up in the nuthouse, or drunk insome Florida motel room (309). While initially suspicious of the demonicEuropean provenance of this new foreigner, eventually her suspicionbecomes outright fear-driven hostility, and she resolves to fire Mr. Guizac.In the meantime, Father Flynn, the wry and somewhat dull priest, comesto visit her regularly to sit on her porch sipping ginger ale and to offer herunbidden instruction in Catholic doctrine. At one point she interruptshim: "Listen!" she said, "I'm not theological. I'm practical! I want to talk toyou about something practical!" (316). Flynn responds with his customaryunintelligible grunt, and then prepares to "make his escape:' In defense ofher recalcitrance,

Shesmiled angrily and said, "1 didn't create his situation, of course:'The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached

the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving hisneck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmeringtimbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-goldhaze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs.McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man."Christ will come like that!" he said in a loud gay voice and wiped hishand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

Mrs. Mcintyre's face assumed a set puritanical expression and shereddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the waysex hadher mother. "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizachas nowhere togo:' she said. "1 don't find myself responsible for all the extra people inthe world:'

The old man didn't seem to hear her. His attention was fixed onthe cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against thespread tail. "The Transfiguration:' he murmured.

She had no idea what he was talking about. "Mr Guizac didn't have


to come here in the first place;' she said, givinghim a hard look.The cock loweredhis tail and began to pick grass."Hedidn't haveto come in the first place;' she repeated,emphasizing

each word.The old man smiled absently. "He came to redeem us;' he said and

blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go. (317)

This is of course a deeply ironic interchange: in saying, "He came to redeemus;' ofwhom is Father Flynn speaking? It is, of course, a double entendre: hemeans both Mr. Guizac and Christ-not in the sense of two separate agentsof redemption, but the first as the "type" of the second. Some time later,though, Father Flynn returns to Mrs. Mcintyre's place, and in the middle ofhis customary catechesis, she interrupts:

"Father Flynn!" she said in a voice that made him jump. "I want totalk to you about something serious!"

The skin under the old man's right eye flinched.''As far as I'm concerned;' she said and glared at him fiercely, "Christ

wasjust another D.P:'He raised his hands slightlyand let them drop on his knees as if he

were considering this. (320)

In the penultimate scene in the story, Mr. Guizac is crushed to death underthe wheels of Mrs. Mclntyres tractor while she looks on, frozen. As his bodyis carried away, she watches "like a stranger:' Later that evening, one by oneher farmhands desert her, leaving her alone on her farm. Mrs. McIntyredevelops a "nervous affliction" and her health begins slowly to decline, asshe loses her eyesight, feeling in her extremities, and finally, her voice.

Mrs. McIntyre-much like Dmitri in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The BrothersKaramazov-is not "technically" guilty ofmurder, at least not in a legal sense.Mrs. Mclntyres guilt is theological, and therefore all the more real. She isguilty of a kind of "collusion" of inaction in failing to warn the DisplacedPerson of the approaching tractor. Of course, for O'Connor, Christ isn't justanother displaced person, but Mrs. Mcintyre's inability to recognize Guizacas genuinely and tragically expatriated is a function of her failure to graspthe exceptionality of Christ's displaced-ness. Her failure to "see" Christmakes her also incapable of seeing Mr. Guizac for what he is too: not justanother "D.P:'

Linda Munk has astutely drawn attention to the deeply typologicalresonances of this story, which are often missed by critics. As for Guizac, he


isoften read as an allegory for Christ, but in Munk's view he is more properlyan anti-type of Israel. His very name contains a reference to this: "What noone has remarked is the fact that the name 'izac' or Isaac is hidden/disguisedwithin Mr. Guizac's name. As Saul is to St Paul, Izak is to Guizak: in both casesthe Christian antitype includes and fulfills its figural counterparts" (Munk248-49). In this sense he is a "figure" of Christ, but understood anagogically.Seenfrom the perspective of what he figures-Christ in glory-he is seen inhis fullness. His particularity, one might say,only becomes truly apparent inthe refracted light of the glorified Jew, who is not just "another D.P;' but theonly true Displaced Person in whose light every other "D.P:' is visible in hisown terms. This is the paradox of anagogical vision: we can only be seen inour own right when we are seen sub specie aeternitatis. This does not effaceparticularity; on the contrary, in the Jewish flesh of Jesus (which typologyhelps to elucidate but not dissolve) the old is made new but not different.Thenew creation, which is the referent of anagogy, is not an annihilation butan elevation; as O'Connor knew so well, grace does not destroy but perfectsand elevates nature. IS Mrs. Mcintyre's final blindness is reminiscent of theblindness of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King or the ironic blindnessof the prophet Teiresias in the same play and in several other instanceswithin Greek epic and tragedy, in which the blind prophet or king is theone who alone sees truly. But here there is something more: Mrs. McIntyreloses not just her sight, but all feeling whatsoever. And most importantly,she loses her voice, which has been for her the agent of her resistance toFather Flynn. Hence her demise is, like Lear's, her utter kenosis, her selfemptying. She is moreover the object of an inverse displacement: throughthe death of Guizac she is abandoned to utter solitude, with the exception ofthe peacocks and Fr. Flynn, who alone remembers her (Giannone 126-43).16

There is now no possibility of her response to his continued teaching, shecannot interrupt him with pleas for the practical or self-justifying appealsto "reality:' She can only lay in bed and listen. Hence the story concludeswith the ever-patient priest feeding the peacocks, and then feeding Mrs.Mclntyres soul, by calmly, deliberately, unsentimentally instructing her inthe dogma of the church. The conclusion brings McIntyre to the edge ofthe abyss of her own soul: it may not be what she thought she wanted, butfor O'Connor it is the very thing she needs. It is all he has to offer, but it iseverything. I?

In a final example from "Revelation;' in which, alas, no one gets killed,a group of women are sitting in a doctor's waiting room exchanging


pleasantries. One of them, Ruby Turpin, fancies herself genuinely blessedby God because she was born neither black nor white trash nor ugly.She even considers her own hogs to be the cleanest and smartest in thecounty. The action comes to a climax when one of the women's daughters, acollege student at an enlightened Northern liberal arts college, becomes soinfuriated with the ladies' polite condescension that she hurls a book at Mrs.Turpin's head and calls her a "wart hog from hell:'

In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue.The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green and the streak ofhighway had turned lavender....

The color of everything, field and crimson sky,burned for a momentwith a transparent intensity....

Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all hermuscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared,returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road.Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowlyand gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pigparlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the oldsow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appearedto pant with a secret life.

Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpinremained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbingsome abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. Therewas only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimsonand leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk.She raised her head from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic andprofound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as avast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field ofliving fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time intheir lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions offreaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. Andbringing up the end of the procession there was a tribe of people whomshe recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had alwayshad a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. Sheleaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind theother with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for goodorder and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were onkey.Yetshe could see by their shocked and altered faces that even theirvirtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped


the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on whatlay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where shewas, immobile. (Works 653-54)

This is perhaps O'Connor's most poignant instance of anagogical vision:for Mrs. Turpin, "revelation" comes in the transformation of her owninadequate conception of beauty as it is rent asunder by a vision of the divine.Her failure to discern the disclosure of God's glory in the most rejectedand scorned members of her society is a function of this. One might evensay that Turpin's vision is insufficiently anagogical because insufficientlyChristological-her Christ is not the scorned and rejected Jew, but a welldressed savior with perfect pitch. This occlusion of her vision renders herconception of society and its hierarchical order distorted: perhaps she doesnot grasp the radical nature of a properly Christian view of social orderas determined by Christ's claim that the first shall be last, and the last first(Mark 10:31). The problem is not that her view ofsocial order is hierarchicalper se, but that it is a perverse hierarchy. As Ralph C. Wood writes, the factthat Mrs. Turpin's "hierarchy is humanly constructed rather than divinelyrevealed makes it potentially fascist" (Flannery O'Connor 261).

Nonetheless, despite all its overwhelming silence, Mrs. Turpin'sis a vision which also speaks, which returns her own audacity to her asjudgment. And as a result, she sees that her own claim that "there'll stillbe a top and bottom" fulfills itself, but in the form of a radical subversionof her own power of sight. There is still much for her to learn, to be sure;but it is clear that henceforth she must see her world in a new light. This"Visionary light" is the light of anagogy, by which one may come to beholdan intimation of the divine glory. The ending of "Revelation" is perhaps themost explicitly eschatological conclusion to any of O'Connor's stories, andthe fact that it is so closely connected with the transformation of the powerof vision illustrates that it is not primarily physical but intellectual visionthat must be transformed if we are to see the world truthfully.

For the novelist, as much, I might add, for the theologian, "To look atthe worst will be ... no more than an act of trust in God" (Mystery 148).For O'Connor, if one is incapable of seeing in the pig parlor an anagoge ofthe Incarnation, one is therefore not entitled to see it in the more pristineexemplars of divine revelation. On the other hand, if one is not capableof seeing in the mundane elements of the Eucharistic rite the instance ofsharing in the Triune life of God, one is not entitled to see it in the pig parloreither. It is the vision of the elevated host, above all, which for O'Connor


is that which renders all other visions intelligible as glimpses, howevercloudy and confused, of the already-graced character of creation. It is avision that not only perceives but that marks, which is both audible as acall and sensible as a burning wound. The beginning of all knowledge is inthe sensible intellect, but to know sensibles as in themselves "sensible" is afunction of the light of grace. But to see in this way requires, for O'Connor,a kind ofviolent upheaval of desire in vision. She writes:

For me, it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection whichare the true lawsof the fleshand the physical.Death, decay, destructionare the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasisthe Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will risebut the body, glorified. I have alwaysthought that purity was the mostmysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never haveentered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were notto look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh andspirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. (Habit 100)

The same could be said for her understanding of vision. This "lookingforward" to the resurrection is not simply a disposition of the emotions,but a "habit of art" that is practiced in all the lesser seeings of Christian life.For O'Connor, it is, finally, the beatific vision that renders all other visionspossible, and indeed, significant. It is toward this which "the whole creationgroaneth and travaileth in pain" (Rom. 8:22) even now, like Mrs. Turpin'shogs, panting with a "secret life:'

Baylor University

NOTES

IDe Lubac notes, '1\s the philologists are wont to observe, the term anagogiais a barbarism. It did not usually replace the simple transliteration anagoge tillrather late. Thus one can scarcely explain it by a confusion made by the Latintranslator between two Greek words anagogia and anagoge. It rather results froma deformation caused by the influence of the other words of the series: historia,allegoria,tropologia... For it is certain that, in the bad Latin of some of our authors,this word anagogia, canonized by association, is intended to translate the Greekterm anagoge. The translator takes this word in the meaning that had becomenormal in the first centuries of our era and that the Neoplatonic school wouldsettle upon ... not in the sense of a 'trip' or 'passing through' as it had among theancient Pythagoreans, but in the sense of a 'climb' or an 'ascent'. The etymology


bruited about would be explained by its equivalent 'sursumductio': it comes, as theysay, 'from ana, which is sursum' (upward) 'and agoge, which is ductio' (leading)"(Medieval Exegesis 180).

2(anagogen sonat, per quam ad invisibilia ac futura sermo transfertur ... ) JohnCassian, Collatio decima quarta. De spiritali scientia, in J.P. Migne, Patrologia LatinaXLIX, 965A (qtd. in de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis 180).

3Itseems to me to be incorrect to say only that anagogy "should be understood asan interpretive concept, and, therefore, directly dependent for its validity upon thetools of critical analysis" (Wynne 34). "Sacramentality" is an interpretive concept,but it is more basically a theological and metaphysical one. Its validity does notdepend upon the tools of critical analysis but upon the theological understandingof what constitutes a sacrament. Such misunderstanding may stem in part fromthe sensibility according to which this author can bafflingly describe O'Connor'sChristianity as "fundamentalist, albeit Catholic" (35).

"O'Connor's understanding of atheism is quite possibly linked to Henri deLubacs own account in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, a copy of which shepossessed (Getz 102).

SManycommentators on O'Connor's work seem to pass over this fact in silence.There is a recurrent tendency to treat "anagogy" and "analogy" as generically literaryprinciples applicable to any text whatsoever, as functions of a medieval "literarytheory:' Rather, anagogy is indeed a literary practice but only insofar as the particulartext of scripture has God as its author (and this is not to be understood in anypuerile "literalist" or "fundamentalist" sense). The concept ofanagogy (and analogy,for that matter) in Christian tradition is intelligible in its relation to the Incarnationof the Second Person of the Trinity, which is the ontological priniciple renderingintelligible the created order-an order, to wit, that is, in Christian thought, createdin and through the Son of God. Hence talk of O'Connor's "incarnational art" inabstraction from the hypostatic union in Christ sometimes results in unhelpfulinterpretations of her work insofar as the latter engage Christian thought. Forexample: "Through word play and irony O'Connor consistently tests the limits ofour abused and fallen discourse as though to distinguish between the Word andour words. She turns our mortal language inside out-with the view to making ussee. In so doing, she practices an incarnational art, which, as we have suggested,is an essentially masculinist aesthetic, calling for an essentially male perspectiveor gaze. Not surprisingly, O'Connor adopted the anagogical vision, espoused bythe patriarchal Church, and embodied that belief in her art" (Gordon 133). Theimplication ofthis claim is that O'Connor found in the "anagogical vision" a methodready-made to her allegedly pre-established blind allegiance to a patriarchal Church.Despite Sarah Gordon's nearly exhaustive knowledge of the O'Connor corpus,from which I have learned a great deal indeed, her account seems to me to tradeon rather dated notions of patriarchy and feminism. O'Connor, I think, did notregard "Roman Catholicism" (which Gordon appears to treat as an abstract cipher


for everything misogynistic and retrograde) primarily as an institution but as acommunity of faith of apostolic provenance with a particular tradition. The rangeof O'Connor's reading in contemporary Catholic theology would bear this out,even despite an incontrovertible and excitable obsession among her commentatorswith the figure-however badly misunderstood-of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,S. J.

60'Connor's debt to Maritain and Gilson is well-known: see Habit of Being230-31. Though she appears not to have read Danielou or de Lubac or otherrepresentatives of the "nouvelle theologie" extensively, she read widely in many ofthe figures in the generation preceding these authors, such as Leon Bloy, GeorgesBernanos, Francois Mauriac, Romano Guardini, Karl Adam, and others. The roleof the controverted figure of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is particularly difficult tounravel, especially given how, at least according to Henri de Lubac, his project wasrepeatedly misunderstood. If de Lubac is correct, then a re-appraisal of Teilhard'sproject and legacy would seem to be indispensable for an estimation of his influenceon O'Connor. For his part, Gilson could never really forgive de Lubac for his longsuffering defense of his fellow Jesuit. In a 1967 letter, Gilson exclaimed to de Lubac,'Td a hundred times rather be a Lutheran than a Teilhardian" (de Lubac, Letters ofEtienne Gilson 136). On Guardini see Edmondson 71-72, and passim.

"The first volume in English translation did not appear until 1998; thus far thefirst three volumes have been translated.

"Her source-possibly in addition to Aquinas himself-may well have beenWilliam F.Lynch, S. J., Christ and Apollo. See David Bentley Hart's excellent reviewof the 2004 reprint.

"See Turner: "That creation in its own character as creation has a quasisacramental form is there in Hugh of St. Victor, who concedes a certain generalsense in which the words of Scripture, but also all creation, being in both cases'signs of something sacred: may be called 'sacraments: It is there in Bonaventure,for whom Christ's human nature, being the resume of all creation, and so a minormundus incorporating all the meaning and reality of the maior mundus, is theexplicit 'sacrament' of the world's implicit created sacramentality. But it is there ina form most significant for the purposes of my argument in Thomas, who arguesthat anything at all in the sensible world is a sign of something sacred, and so in ageneral sense is a 'sacrament' even if, other than in the cases of the seven sacramentsof the Christian dispensation, they lack the character of a sacrament in the strictsense, for only those seven are 'causes' of our sanctification.... The connection ofthoughts between creation's power to disclose God and its possessing in a generalsense the form of the sacramental is in Thomas incontestable" (224-25). On the"two books;' see Harrison.

"See Williams 93-105 and Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-HauntedSouth, and The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in FourAmerican Novelists. No one has more thoroughly and brilliantly treated the paradox


of grace as both "destructive" and "therapeutic" (in the fullest sense of Gregory ofNazianzus' axiom, to gar aproslepton atherapeuton ("what is not assumed is nothealed"), than Ralph C. Wood.

"Srigley gives a particularly compelling account of the extent of O'Connor'sdebt to Thomas Aquinas' account of prophecy.

12This is partly attributable to the limited availability, at least in 1958, of Englishtranslations of these authors.

13The source, obviously, of the title of O'Connor's second novel.140'Connor's notion of paradox was certainly not uninfluenced by Henri de

Lubacs Further Paradoxes, which she held in her personal library, and evidentlyreviewed at some point (Getz 102,209).

15The relationship between the Iewishness of Jesus and the Polishness, as itwere, of Guizac is far too rich and complex a topic for me to enter into here. Onecould extend the range of such a question to other stories such as "The ArtificialNigger:' Over against a recurring tendency to sentimentalize Christ to the pointof irrelevance, to understand Christ properly is for O'Connor to imagine himprecisely as a "nigger" in the sense of that term common to O'Connor's time andmilieu. Jesus Christ is despised, rejected, scorned, and lynched; but it is somehow inthe fractured humanity of the weak and unjustly condemned that divine revelationis disclosed. This is, of course, an extremely delicate matter fraught with manydangers which should be handled with great care-no less than the paradox of therevelation of the Christian mystery in the crucifixion of the incarnate Logos.

"This of course also suggests the Eucharistic anamnesis, in which the body ofChrist is remembered, and as such the whole body of Christ, extended throughtime and space, both future and past, is present in the sacrament (Cavanaugh).

171n the context of "The Displaced Person;' Sarah Gordon claims that O'Connor's"refusal as an artist to engage in any sort of social or political commentary leadsher to use the Holocaust as a metaphor to further her Christian vision" (187).It is curious when literary critics appear to look everywhere else than literatureitself for "social or political commentary" or a "commitment to act on behalf ofsocial or political justice;' as if the only legitimate form of such political or socialresistance consisted in participating in protest marches. The fact that the latter maybe indulged in for entirely self-serving and egotistical and not truly just reasons isone lesson-of social commentary, no less-that can be learned from O'Connor.Moreover, to read "The Displaced Person" as devoid of such cultural critique issuperficial, if not grotesquely myopic. Gordon's grossly generalized claims on thesame page about "the Catholic Church" are perhaps the broken lens through whichshe views this alleged failure on O'Connor's part. She writes that O'Connor, "as adutiful daughter of the traditional Church, is prevented from seeing the logicaloutcome of her own argument-that even the Church is capable of refusing to seethe whole of humanity; instead, it sees from its own 'infallible' and condescendingposition. Thus in 'The Displaced Person' O'Connor can take Mrs. McIntyre to task,


but O'Connor seems never to have questioned the authority of her own Church andthe diminishment of others that results from the Church's unbending assertion ofinfallibility" (187). What Gordon means by "the Church" is unclear, although her useof it partakes of a popular journalistic sentiment according to which "the Church"is regularly conflated with the pronouncement of some particular Vatican dicasteryor other, or even the pope (in either case this would be a mistake). Even if one wereto grant the premise here that O'Connor is insufficiently critical of "authority" (thepresupposition behind Gordon's understanding of what constitutes "obedience"),this does not necessarily follow from the fact that she is "a dutiful daughter of thetraditional Church" -as if "duty" necessarily leads to blindness. Moreover, it is wellknown that the doctrine of infallibility is of very precise definition and limitedapplication; it does not apply to everything "the Church" (even in Gordon's vaguesense) does or says. Ultimately, the lack of theological precision on such mattersrenders Gordon's use of the term "Church" as an unhelpful abstraction.

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143-56.Edmondson, Henry T., III. Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response

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Limits ofArt. 2 vols. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.Munk, Linda. "Understanding Understatement: Biblical Typology and 'The

Displaced Person" Literature & Theology 2.2 (September 1988): 237-53.O'Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988._. The Habit ofBeing. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1979._. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds., Sally Fitzgerald and Robert

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Four American Novelists. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1988._. Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

2004.Wynne, Judith F. "The Sacramental Irony of Flannery O'Connor:' The Southern

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