Understanding the Hillybilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art
By Fr Damian Ference
Word on Fire, £20.00
Flannery O’Connor succumbed to lupus inherited from her father at the age of just 39 after defying prognoses of imminent death for seven years. Her demise in August 1964 spelled not only the tragic end of a young life but also the loss of a writer hailed ever since as the perhaps the finest and most gifted Catholic literary talent of 20th century America.
Scholars still discuss her work today even though her professional career spanned less than two decades and she was by no means prolific. Her two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), were published only to modest acclaim and she made her name chiefly by her short stories, with her Complete Stories winning the US National Book Award for Fiction after it was published posthumously in 1972. Her legacy also includes her lectures, some of which are contained in Mystery and Manners (1969), and private letters compiled in The Habit of Being (1979).
Together they continue to draw a cult-like following which includes US Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, founder of Word on Fire media ministries, the publisher of this new book, and father and daughter actors Ethan and Maya Hawke who recently filmed an O’Connor biopic called Wildcat (the title of one of her early stories).
The attraction of O’Connor’s works to such figures doesn’t lie in the superficial “beatings, maulings, drownings, rapes and murders” for which her stories were criticised as “brutal” in her own lifetime. The allure lies rather in their multi-layered complexity and theological and philosophical foundations. None is skin deep. Beneath their surfaces are rich and meaningful orthodox Christian themes like the working of grace and the mystery of redemption expounded through symbol and allegory, among other literary devices, and told through characters who are grittily realistic. One might come away from reading such stories, like Bishop Barron, convinced that O’Connor is essentially an artist, and a great one too.
In this volume, Fr Damian Ference, a philosophy professor and vicar for evangelisation in the US Diocese of Cleveland, explains how such “narrative art” is best understood beyond the grotesques and landscapes O’Connor created with rigorous literary discipline and an economy so tight there is seldom a superfluous word, let alone sentence, to be found. Her skill was such that Evelyn Waugh once said that he found it “remarkable” in such a young woman. Like him she was fluent and transparent, able to find exactly the right word to convey and to illuminate, to construct characters who were utterly plausible and recognisable. Yet she was unique in concealing the fact that she was not only “practically swimming” in the works of St Thomas Aquinas, according Ference, but cleverly preaching Thomism too, and this is the focus of his work.
Ference says that many scholars who have studied her works have missed this point and only a handful – most notably Marion Montgomery, Henry Edmondson and Christina Bieber Lake – have approached her stories philosophically. He promises the reader that for the first time he will provide the “thorough and long overdue treatment of the Thomistic philosophy upon which O’Connor’s narrative art stands”.
He offers to fully unlock the hidden treasures of these tales so people can enjoy them fully and learn from them. He delivers handsomely upon his promises with accessible yet scholarly sections dedicated to the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics that the author sought to transmit to her readers “like osmosis”.
This work is indeed overdue because O’Connor does have a lot to teach. Like so many people today, she was also concerned about the rise of new and destructive ideologies. She saw in post-war America atheism rapidly gaining ground in the form of Nietzschean nihilism, a movement which partly paved the way for the collapse of faith that accompanied the Sexual Revolution.
She tackled modern apostasy most obviously in the character of Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. Motes is a man who founds a “church without Christ”. He obviates the role of conscience, described by St John Henry Newman as “the connecting principle between the creature and his Creator”, with the words: “Your conscience is a trick, it don’t exist, and if you think it does, then you had best get it out in the open, hunt it down and kill it.”
Ference shows how O’Connor wrestled with the same phenomenon more subtly in her shorter stories, with the character of Mr Paradise in The River, for instance, representing the peddler of utopian ideologies threatening to corrupt the young.
Without a doubt, O’Connor saw what was coming. The benefit of this excellent new book is that it helps us to look better through her eyes – not only at the threats opening before us but to the remedies she recognised as vital to withstanding the trials of the age.
She found in Thomism many, if not all, of her answers, especially the teaching of Aquinas that each person is a composite whole of body and soul. Like him, she saw people as knowers rather than just thinkers, beings who reach true happiness by learning of the nature of God and the truth of Man through the senses as well as the machinations of the rational mind.
Contrast this to the stark separation of flesh and spirit inherent in the ideology of gender. “Man calls his nature into question,” lamented by Pope Benedict XVI in a speech to the Curia weeks before he relinquished his petrine ministry. “From now on he is merely spirit and will … From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.”
O’Connor wrote tales not merely to be enjoyed but to bring people closer to God. Ference reveals the extent to which she was both a tremendously talented artist and a Catholic of prophetic vision who anticipated the tribulations of the post-modern era, yet clung with hope to a faith which in charity she was eager to share.
Simon Caldwell is the author of The Beast of Bethulia Park (Gracewing 2022)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.