Could Flannery O’Connor Have Been A Predecessor to Vox Nova?

Last updated on: April 2, 2009 at 11:03 am by Henry Karlson

Could Flannery O’Connor Have Been A Predecessor to Vox Nova? 2009-04-02T11:03:13-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Last week I went to the Mid-Atlantic AAR Conference, and presented a paper on the relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien and William Morris. A fellow CUA student, Rob McArthur, gave a good speech on Tolkien’s notion of sub-creation. The third paper, by Stephen Johnson, was on Flannery O’Connor. Before then, I had only read a couple short stories and a few, random quotes by her. I had been told many times that I should read her writings. What I heard at the conference more than confirmed it, and I decided to get a copy of her complete writings. It will be awhile before I have much of a chance to go through them, but I wanted to look up the quotes I heard, and read them in context. I wanted to see if I could find similar quotes, and see what I could learn from O’Connor. Call me impressed. Her understanding and criticism of American Catholicism is similar to what many on Vox Nova complain about. Take, for example, this one:

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the Church when you have only the Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. [1]

O’Connor understood the problem of unreflective, unthinking Catholicism. It’s simplistic. It’s radically unfaithful. Dogmas and doctrines are used as rubrics to judge, not to understand. The constant appeal to manuals is a simple way to hide the fact that one does not have real faith. It’s easy to point to words; it is more difficult to comprehend what they mean and how they apply beyond the written page. There is no need to make prudential judgments when everything appears to be comprehensible so that even an idiot can understand everything. It’s all well and good, but the faith bound by the manuals can never be the faith of the Catholic Church. The manuals can never preserve the mystery and wonder. They can only limit and simplify. The effects of this were well known by O’Connor:

If the average Catholic reader could be tracked down through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be more a Manichean than the Church permits. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. He forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence and that innocence whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite.[2]

Henri de Lubac would find it difficult to put the problems of modern Catholicism (and its undue division between nature and supernatural) as well in as little words (of course, he would be able to explore the depth of the issue beyond O’Connor). The early 20th century American Catholic in the “golden age” which “conservatives” want to bring back had greatly misunderstood the implications of the incarnation. Grace was kept away from nature, nature was looked down upon, frowned upon, and the faith itself was simplified to a mechanical, rote memorization of words. “The Americans seem just to be producing pamphlets for the back of the Church (to be avoided at all costs) and installing heating systems – though there are a few good sources like THOUGHT, a quaterly published at Fordham.”[3] Just as grace was kept away from nature, so the meaning of the words was kept outside of the life of the average Catholic. Jansenism didn’t need it, and Jansenism, through the Irish, was a broad influence on the American Catholic psyche. O’Connor seemed to understand this, even as she understood why the Irish were Jansenists:

I like Pascal but I don’t think the Jansenist influence is healthy in the Church. The Irish are notably infected with it because all the Jansenist priests were chased out of France at the time of the Revolution and ended up in Ireland. It was a bad day if you ask me. I read a novel by Sean O’Faillon about the demise of the Irish novel. Apparently someone had suggested that there wasn’t enough sin in Ireland to supply the need. O’Faillon said no, the Irish sinned constantly but with no great emotion except fear. Jansenism doesn’t seem to breed so much a love of God as a love of asceticism.[4]

What a brilliant remark! It’s not a love for God as a love for asceticism that we find within many American Catholics today. They look out in the world to find sin, and to denounce it, not as love for God, nor as a love for their neighbor, but as a love for themselves. They point to others, not out of faith in God, but from their lack of faith; for if they had faith, they would do as Jesus asked, and love their neighbor – showing the fruit of that love. Focusing on others allows one to avoid correction in oneself. Moreover, one who truly believes they need to help someone overcome sin, they wouldn’t rejoice in shaming people, but be humble and sorrowful that such correction is needed. The joy people have in pointing fingers shows how little Christian joy they have in themselves. No wonder she finds this problem exists also when Catholics read a work of fiction:

It is popular to suppose that anyone who can read the telephone book can read a short story or a novel, and it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics since we possess the Truth in the Church, we can use this Truth directly as an instrument of judgment on any discipline at any time without regard to the nature of that discipline itself. Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.[5]

With all of these sentiments, I have to wonder, how did O’Connor ever become popular? I would think she would be as controversial as many writers on Vox Nova. Indeed, she seems to be of the spirit of Vox Nova itself.

Footnotes

[1] Flannery O’Connor, Letter to Cecil Dawkins, July 16, 1957 in Collected Works. ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1037-8.
[2] Flannery O’Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer” in Collected Works. ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 809.
[3] Flannery O’Connor, Letter to Cecil Dawkins, July 16, 1957 in Collected Works. ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1038.
[4] Flannery O’Connor, Letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey, November 16, 1958 in Collected Works. ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1080.
[5] Flannery O’Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer” in Collected Works. ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 811. What O’Connor said here remains true; just look at all the unjust criticism given to the Harry Potter series! Oh how easy it was for Catholics (and other Christians, often directing the Catholics) to misunderstand what they read! We don’t need to stop here. What she said is true about other ways Catholics “live” out their “faith.” Just look at how they try to engage politics without prudence! Talk about a mechanicalized faith!

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