Flannery O'Connor's Beatific Vision

It is dangerous to show man too clearly how much he resembles the beast, without at the same time showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. --Blaise Pascal Christianity is a humanism, else it is misunderstood. On the other hand, secular humanism is the absolute antithesis of the gospel. --John Milbank, summarizing views of Henri de Lubac, S.J. It is not too much of a stretch to argue that American culture has been bombarded by the dangers laid out here by Pascal and de Lubac. The so-called new atheists insist that we are no more than the product of our genes and environment, while transhumanists devote themselves to the deification of humanity through technology. Whether one is a scientific materialist or a New-Age spiritualist, the only verboten thing is to believe that God made us, is outside of us, calls us to obedience, loves us, and died and rose to save us. With each new insistence that humanity is the end of meaning and the source of religion, the gospel of Jesus Christ recedes into the background, reduced to a mere symbol of our deepest desires. But one sign that the gospel endures is the ongoing appeal of Flannery O'Connor. Though her entire oeuvre fits easily into one volume, it continues to stimulate substantial critical interest, including numerous books, articles, and a dedicated journal. There are many reasons for this, of course, but one of them must be that O'Connor represents something readers need that is very different from the despair of the new atheists and the presumption of the transhumanists. O'Connor's hope was in Christ, and she believed that human beings were created to glorify him. She thus flatly refused to separate nature from grace; as Ralph Wood argues in this issue, her work unites them in a "radically surprising way" (36). She was committed to telling stories that insist that God's love for his creation, his validation of humanity's goodness, was literally incarnated in Christ. What is of great value to the rest of us who share her convictions is that her stories are wicked good--at once laugh-out-loud funny and profound. This special issue of Christianity and Literature is both a testimony to O'Connor's well-deserved reputation and a commitment to its continuation. Collectively, the essays focus on the distinctiveness of O'Connor's Christian vision, illustrating how she sought to avoid the dangers described by Pascal and de Lubac. They each point to O'Connor's agreement with St. Thomas Aquinas that human beings have been created with a desire for something outside of themselves, a desire for the bonum universale, the whole good. Although that complete good is found only in God, it is suggested everywhere in creation. What men and women can possess of happiness on earth is limited by our vision of that good. As Josef Pieper explains, "the fulfillment of existence takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality; the whole energy of our being is ultimately directed toward attainment of insight" (58). That O'Connor was fundamentally interested in exploring this question of insight--sight into the good of creation--is reflected in how each of these essayists concern themselves, in some way, with O'Connor's novella The Violent Bear it Away. The novella enacts a battle between the secular vision of Rayber and the audacious supernatural vision of the protagonist Francis Tarwater and his great uncle, Mason Tarwater. And since the battle is for nothing less than the dignity of the most vulnerable members of humanity--a dignity that is under siege in the twenty-first century--it is worth paying attention to. In "Flannery O'Connor, Benedict XVI, and the Divine Eros,' Ralph Wood argues that O'Connor's work can be seen through the main ideas of proponents of the la nouvelle theologie to share interesting similarities with the ideas of the current pope, Benedict XVI. …