Flannery O’Connor was a Christian humanist. One of the key tenants of Christian Humanism is that the fall did not entirely erase the image of God in man; nor did it completely remove Eden from his memory. Another key tenant of Christian Humanism is the reality of the Incarnation. The implications of these tenants are manifold and writers like Flannery O’Connor explored those implications with tremendous acumen.
One implication of the first tenant is that man is endowed with an innate longing for his edenic home, a garden place where he can flourish. Thus, for O’Connor, the city is usually the devil’s domain (i.e., St. Augustine’s City of Man), where morals are loose, sin is rampant, people are disconnected, disingenuous, and lonely. In the city, people exist there but real community is non-existent. On the other hand, the agrarian settings, like the southern homes and farms which serve as the setting for most of her stories, are where people experience family and community, loyalty and belonging.
In this vein, she also frequently depicts the woods or wilderness—neither garden nor city—as the place where people meet God, usually through the grace of violence.
Another implication of the first tenant is that the essence of man is his divine dignity. He carries the image of God within himself and is, therefore, never reducible to his material or psychological properties. To strip man of his divine dignity would be to relieve him of his moral responsibility. If man was only psychological or biological, psychology or chemistry would determine mankind’s manners, not ethics. For example, while Darwin tried to reduce man to his biological self (i.e., we are only evolutionary animals), Marx to his economical self (society is socially constructed and mans is either a victim or an oppressor), and Freud to his psychological self (i.e., we are all just products of sexual determinism), writers like O’Connor gave the world a more wholistic view of man—a theological self.
Since God is the very source of man’s vitality, and the divine image of God is the foundation of his being, man’s essence is, first and foremost, religious, theological. But this is only the foundation. Out of his theological nature organically flows the knowledge of his “self” (i.e., man is not God); thus man is also psychological; and to know the essence of one’s self, is to be a social being (i.e., man is neither God nor his neighbor). This means there is a natural and progressive connection in the Christian humanist’s vision of human nature. Man is first religious, then psychological, and, finally, a social being.
An implication of the second tenant—the Incarnation—is that because God became human and took humanity up into divinity, he boldly and eternally affirmed the dignity of human beings. God is for man; not against him, essentially.
Another implication of the second tenant is that the Christian humanist is opposed to any kind of dualism that separates man into body and soul. Man is both body and soul at the same time. The Christian humanist is neither a Puritan nor a Platonist; he (or in O’Connor’s case, she) is not a gnostic idealist who rejects the physical world as being evil. But neither is he a materialist who rejects the supernatural and transcendent in an attempt to dismiss mysteries as speculative or disconnected from real life. Rather, the Christian humanist sees the supernatural and the natural—the material and the eternal—participating in one another at all times. Thus, intrinsic in every image presented by a Christian humanist writer are at least two levels of meaning. This is called anagogic vision.
O’Connor, herself, explained that the aim of a fiction writer is to capture the whole cosmos in a single scene. In Mystery and Manners, she wrote, “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world (cosmos) you seen in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene” (p. 77).
To put this altogether, in O’Connor’s view, The Incarnation affirms the divine dignity of human beings and the end of any dualities. Mankind is a theological being made up of both body and soul. The source of his vitality is God, and at all times he can be envisioned as occupying both the natural and supernatural realms.
Nevertheless, while man is divine in this sense, he is infinitely different than God and is thus a grotesque and comic creature. This is why all of O’Connor’s characters are freaks. They are Everyman. She wants her readers to see themselves (ourselves) in her characters. And because we all share in this grotesque state of freakishness, we are called to avoid both ditches—of sentimentally on one side and self-righteousness on the other.
Further implications drawn from this vision of man is that for a human being to be fully evil, it would mean the human being would cease to exist. Thus, even the worst sinners are capable of being redeemed. But a person who is estranged from God is also estranged from one’s essential self. The first could never be separated from the second. Both will always be true at the same. Further, one who is estranged from God, and estranged from oneself, will naturally be anti-social and estranged from his community.
O’Connor employs the grotesque because it involves judgment; the grotesque recognizes and reveals the deficiency in man, the degree of deviation from his ideal—from his perfected nature which accurately reflected the image of God before the fall. In other words, the more one estranges him or herself from God, the more grotesque and comic that one becomes. Freedom in O’Connor’s characters is obtained by submitting to the will of God while bondage and brokenness is the result of their rebellion.
‘The Turkey’ by Flannery O’Connor
Since we’re reading “The Turkey” for the Tsundoku Reading Society this month, let me summarize the story and invite you to apply some of these insights I just shared to this early O’Connor short story about law and grace. I’ll not spoil the story by unpacking all the spiritual elements, but a few key ones might prove insightful and lead you further up and further in.
The story opens with a young protagonist, Ruller, playing with pretend guns out in the bushes near the woods when he spies a wounded turkey. Giving chase to the dying bird, he imagines wildly what kind of glory he is going to be honored with when he brings it home to his family. But before he can catch it, he is knocked down by a tree he inadvertently runs into, and the turkey escapes his capture.
Discouraged by the futility of his pursuit and the wounds he receives from the tree, Ruller lays in the dirt and begins to experiment with profanity. As he experiments with more intense profanity, he thinks about the feelings of shame that arise and the alternating silly jubilation of rebelling. Eventually, he is unable to continue his blasphemy and falls into making an irreverent prayer; and it is a prayer that he offers. As the guilt sets in, he is compelled to make his way home; but suddenly, in the course of talking to God, he stumbles upon the dead turkey. Maybe God is doing something “to keep him from going bad,” Roller says to himself. Then he wonders if it’s a sign that God is calling him to be a preacher; he impulsively thanks God and makes his way home with the Turkey.
But Ruller is compelled to give away his dime and makes his way through town, the city, praying for God to send him a beggar. Immediately, he encounters a beggar and relives the feeling from when he ran into the tree. He thrusts the dime at the beggar before hurrying away. His act of self-righteousness makes him feel like he is walking on air. Soon some town boys catch up to him asking to see the turkey. He shows is off to them, only to stand in amazement when they take his turkey from him; he watch them walk away with his turkey in disbelief.
Broken hearted Ruller only walks a few blocks before he notices it is getting dark. He runs for home home, heart beating out of control, certain Something Awful was tearing behind him.
Why not join us Monday evening for the September Tsundoku Reading Society.
September’s Tsundoku Reading Society meeting is Monday, September 29th at 4:00 pm PT / 7:30 pm ET.
Download this free short story and give it a read. If you’re interested in joining us for the Tsundoku Reading Society, just become a paid subscriber. I’ll email you a Zoom link the day of our meeting.
September Giveaway
When you become a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to the growing resource page, all the archived content, and free books when I publish them. Plus, once you join our merry band of bards, bishops, and bibliophiles, students, scholars, and philosophers, and poets, preachers, and pirates, you’ll also be entered into a drawing for a chance at September’s Giveaway—Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories. I’ll draw a random name and announce the winner at the end of the month.
