Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible: A Revolutionary Witness for the Sake of the Gospel
By Ralph C. Wood.
Baylor University Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 181 pages, $42.99.
Reviewed by Henry T. Edmondson III.
Ralph C. Wood, over his long and remarkable career, has been a prolific scholar, a revered teacher, and a deeply committed Christian. He has never found it necessary or desirable to separate any of those dimensions of what he has done and who he is. He is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor since 1998, at which he is now emeritus. He previously served for 26 years on the faculty of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Those of us who know Ralph know that though he himself is not Roman Catholic, the Roman Catholic Church has no better friend.
Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible is a compilation of essays chosen from several previously published sources, although some of the chapters have been enhanced in this book. With this kind of project, the challenge for the author is to craft a thesis that justifies the collection of essays and brings unity to the collection. Wood has done so as well as anyone might. The thesis of the book makes a statement about the Christian church in America. Although Christianity is good for America, Wood explains that America has not always been good for Christianity, given that the church, over time, has been so absorbed into the country, and so “Americanized,” that it is not the witness that it should be.
The fault is on the Church itself: For much of American history, Christianity has had it too easy, and the consequences of its relaxed existence are now evident. For too much of its existence, American Christianity has been too accommodating, and has become individualist and subjectively defined, a phenomenon that Robert Bellah called “Sheila-ism” in Habits of the Heart. Wood looks for help in American literature but finds little from American authors, though Walker Percy receives appreciative mention. Unfortunately, “Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Frost, and Faulkner” were either “heterodox at best or atheist at best.”
Wood, however, finds what he is looking for in Flannery O’Connor. She is by far the best, although he also includes a fascinating chapter on Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. The parallel between the former and O’Connor’s work is clear; the latter novel (or better said “narrative”) is a harder sell, but Wood makes an insightful case. Wood also looks kindly on Emily Dickinson and her poetry, even though her relationship with religion was complex.
Wood explains,
My central claim is that the life and work of Flannery O’Connor—her novels and stories, her letters and essays—are imbued with an understanding of the Church that deeply accords with that of Pope Benedict XVI as well as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like them, she summons the Church to make visible its revolutionary witness at a time when it has become virtually occluded.
Chapter 5 is entitled “Baptizing and Prophesying: The Fierce Struggle of Good and Evil in The Violent Bear It Away, and it is one of the most illuminating treatments of O’Connor’s second novel. Wood first considers the title, taken from Matthew 11:12:
And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away.
The passage has been interpreted as a reference to heretics who would seize the Church or to the Jewish Zealots who through asymmetric warfare sought to drive the Romans out of Israel. The proper interpretation is probably personal and spiritual. The individual Christian must do violence to his own sinfulness or he will be driven away from the faith. To this, Wood adds his own interpretation that those who attack the kingdom are none other than Satan and his minions. Wood sees both these latter two in The Violent Bear It Away. The latter receives the most thorough treatment with three objectives he seeks to demonstrate: “(1) the waning American regard for the demonic; (2) the proper Christian understanding of evil as Nothingness; and (3) the anti-Christian estimate of the satanic as symbolic at best.” St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, all make an appearance. This in turn, prepares the reader for a discussion of O’Connor’s understanding of evil. Wood quotes from Mystery and Manners:
To insure our sense of mystery, we need a sense of evil which sees the devil as a real spirit who must be made to name himself, and not simply to name himself as vague evil, but to name himself with his specific personality for every occasion. Literature, like virtue, does not thrive in an atmosphere where the devil is not recognized as existing both in himself and as a dramatic necessity for the writer.
Wood argues plausibly that the devil assaults the younger Tarwater both from within and from without. The former occurs, for example, by means of the “inner voice” of the “Stranger,” a voice that tries to convince him, à la C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, that the devil does not exist. Tarwater, then, mentions both Jesus and the Devil, but the inner voice exclaims, “No no no, . . . there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own experience. I know that for a fact.”
The Devil without is the “pale, lean, old-looking young man” who gives Tarwater a ride in his “lavender-tinted car” wearing a “lavender shirt” who “carries a lavender handkerchief” and who had “lavender eyes.” He drugs the boy and then sodomizes him. The violation, Wood explains, is a demonic act but one that rids Tarwater of his inner demon and sets him on his God-ordained path.
O’Connor’s politics (Chapter 6) are “thoroughly Augustinian.” She saw a stark difference between the Church and America. This is a matter of proper ordering rather than identity. America and its politics must be properly ordered to the Church. Wood also uses this chapter to reinforce his thesis as he quotes O’Connor’s observation about the “vaporization of religion in America,” the beginning of which she marked with Emerson’s refusal, in 1832, to celebrate communion in the First Church of Boston unless the bread and wine were removed.
For some, the most valuable chapter in Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible is Chapter 9, “Flannery O’Connor’s Black Characters: Race Revisited.” Here Wood confronts the firestorm ignited by Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (2020) by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, which provoked Paul Elie’s “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” in the June 22, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. O’Donnell quotes from newly released O’Connor correspondence made available through a donation to Emory University, shortly before the publication of her book. The quote is no doubt troubling: O’Connor emphatically expresses her dislike of “Negroes;” and, she describes herself as “an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste.” Wood does not attempt to defend O’Connor’s comment although he does note two important points: First, O’Connor was three months away from her death of lupus erythematosus; she was constantly medicated and her suffering was intense. Secondly, the remark was made to “her friendly antagonist Maryat Lee, who often posed as the pluperfect liberal, even as O’Connor assumed her antic role as the unreconstructed Southern racist.”
Anyone who has read that correspondence knows that it is playful and ironic, even if some might find it in poor taste. Though what O’Donnell cites is unfortunate, it is difficult to know just how serious O’Connor was. If she were, one would expect this apparent prejudice to consistently run through more of her correspondence: there is an unprecedented quantity of O’Connor correspondence available. O’Donnell’s work unwittingly encouraged faculty and administrators at Loyola University Baltimore to remove O’Connor’s name from a dormitory in case black women might reside there and find offense. All of this occurred in 2020 when the George Floyd protests were on full display. To O’Donnell’s credit, she composed a letter of protest to the university to which a number of O’Connor scholars and aficionados were signatories, myself included. But the damage was done.
O’Donnell, however, upon finding the derogatory passage, reacts as if she had just discovered that, for three years, her grandfather was the cruel superintendent of a Nazi concentration camp. She also picks up the well-worn trope that O’Connor should have been more publicly active in the Civil Rights Movement, and this also constitutes her “ambivalence” toward race. As Wood explains, though O’Connor knew that justice and charity demanded the hopeful eradication of racism, she was indeed ambivalent about the Civil Rights Movement because she thought that some of the personalities and ill-conceived tactics were misguided and counterproductive. She worried that the movement was too often undertaken with little regard for the social fabric that would sustain long term success. Wood’s discussion of Radical Ambivalence is a respectful, yet potent, take-down of O’Donnell’s book, some of which Wood rightly calls “nonsense.” The thoughtful reader will recognize that, unfortunately, O’Donnell’s book is at times as muddled as any book beginning with “Whiteness Critical Theory” is likely to be; her sincere attempt to clarify O’Connor’s racial dispositions obscures as often as it illuminates.
Wood’s most forceful refutation is his demonstration of the dignity O’Connor bestows upon the black men and women of her fiction. No one has undertaken this analysis as comprehensively and persuasively as Wood has done. Few have even tried. Risking immodesty, let me say that this was my aim in Chapter 9, “Redemption and the Ennoblement of Suffering in ‘The Artificial Nigger,’” that appeared in my first O’Connor book, Return to Good and Evil. Wood however, leaves no story unturned and he convincingly demonstrates O’Connor’s genuine and sincere regard for the black race in “Revelation,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and, her first published story, “The Geranium.”
Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible is not to be missed. In addition to Wood’s deep scholarship and skillful rhetoric, his prose is elegant and his vocabulary rich. In his span of eighty-two years, he has truly been “A Scholar For All Seasons.”
Henry T. Edmondson III is Carl Vinson Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Georgia College.
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