“Wait, don’t bite”
Flannery O’Connor would have been eighty-four today — the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Many of her stories involved some kind of annunciation, some short encounter that changes everything (think of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”). She rarely wrote directly about the events of the Gospel, but her fiction recapitulated those events in surprising ways. O’Connor used the shocks and displacements of modernism to rescue our sense of the supernatural from old formulas. Pound said, “Make it new,” and she did. The risen Christ says, “Behold, I make all things new,” and O’Connor wrote stories that startled many readers into beholding him as if for the first time.
Here’s a short passage from a letter she wrote to Alfred Corn on May 30, 1962. Corn was a college student at the time, and worried he was losing his faith:
What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free — not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.
Thanks for the quotation, Mr. Boudway. O’Connor at her best.
It seems to me that it is the Church’s great insight that though there are mysteries, these mysteries are not, cannot be, irrational even if we in our limitations can hardly understand them. That God should love us is a mystery, given our weakness, meanness, and even cruelty, but there is His grace. That God should become man is a mystery, but there He is at Sundays at Mass. (Yes, as O’Connor said, “If it’s only a symbol, then the Hell with it.”) That anything exists *at all* is mysterious beyond even the beginnings of our comprehension — but there, beyond all rational doubt, is the vast fact we call the cosmos. No mere Richard Dawkins is a match for that.
Yes, we have faith in ultimate rationality, but know better than to expect much of it from mere mortals.
Nothing to say except many thanks, Matt.
Mr. Brouday, thanks for bringing up Flannery O’Connor again and thanks for this wonderful quote. Below is a quote from a letter she wrote in 1958 . It gives us, I think, a little more insight into her Catholicism and perhaps her understanding of grace. After all what Miss Flannery was always writing about was grace, grace, grace.
“Lourdes was not as bad as I expected. I took the bath. From a selection of bad motives, such as to prevent any bad conscience for not having done it, and because it seemed at the time that it must be what was wanted of me. I went early in the morning. Only about 40 ahead of me so the water looked pretty clean. They pass around the water for ‘les malades’ to drink & everybody drinks out of the same cup. As somebody said, the miracle is that the place don’t bring on epidemics. Well, I did it all and with very bad grace.”
That is a wonderful quotation. Alfred Corn has had a distinguished career as a poet and critic, with a definite Catholic sensibility.
The image of the sea and the alternation of faith and doubt brought to my mind the beginning of Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, from the same era, 1968. Ratzinger recalls a scene from Claudel’s play Soulier de Satin in which a jesuit is thrown into the sea, which causes Ratzinger to think about the necessity of doubt:
“If on the one hand, the believer can only perfect his faith on the ocean of nihilism, temptation and doubt, if he has been assigned the ocean of uncertainty as the only possible site for his faith, on the other hand the unbeliever is not to be understood undialectically as a mere man without faith….Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the non-believer is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world which he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole… Just as the believer knows himself to to be constantly threatend by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world.” (pages19-20)
Real generosity of spirit in these writers. Joyce Carol Oates gets O’Connor dead wrong in the current NY Review. Oates find that the heart of O’Connor’s work is not “the shimmering multi-dimensionality of modernism but the two-dimensionality of cartoon art” and that O’Connor’s “unshakable absolutist faith provided her with a rationale with which to mock both her secular and bigoted Christian contemporaries.”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22532
“The risen Christ says, ‘Behold, I make all things new,’ and O’Connor wrote stories that startled many readers into beholding him as if for the first time.”
IMO that’s an apt summation of O’Connor’s work, Matthew. “Startled” is exactly how I felt after reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for the first time. I scratched my head for days trying to find a link between Christianity and the unusual (to put it mildly) events in that short story. Sometime later I read O’Connor’s published correspondence, and light bulbs finally started to turn on. No above-the-clouds theories of faith for Flannery; instead, faith is very hard work, often gritty in its revelation, and found in the most unlikely places. I recommend reading her published correspondence. Not only does it help connect the dots of an original voice and a serious religious thinker, but it is often very witty, as the excerpt provide by Michael Miller demonstrates.
And no offense to Joyce Carol Oates, but she’s but an acolyte in comparison to O’Connor. ;)