A Meeting of Minds – Henry T. Edmondson III

It’s a nice tribute to the profundity of Flannery O’Connor’s work that it continues to generate high quality secondary literature a few years after her loss of life. Currently the dialog has taken a philosophical flip, exploring O’Connor’s relevance to among the defining debates inside fashionable philosophy. A superb instance of this type of work is Ann Hartle’s Flannery O’Connor and Blaise Pascal: Recovering the Incarnation for the Fashionable Thoughts.

It’s an insightful and at occasions good evaluation of the Southern author’s work. Hartle makes a beneficial contribution to O’Connor scholarship by inserting her in dialog with necessary fashionable thinkers, whereas additionally using the instruments of literary idea. Hartle explains, “I method O’Connor’s work from a philosophical perspective moderately than the attitude of a literary critic.” She later reiterates she is “illuminating the which means of her tales for the looking thoughts of recent man.”

An Intriguing Mode of Evaluation

Hartle’s purpose is to indicate that O’Connor offers a coherent and forceful response to “modernity,” although she understands modernity in a really explicit approach. She is within the lack of the “prophetic imaginative and prescient,” starting within the Enlightenment, that after supplied the lens via which we perceive “the character of man, his fall from innocence, and the divine supply of goodness.” 

To clarify the currents of modernity, Hartle employs an fascinating methodology. She builds her dialectic round two “groups,” one keen about modernity and the opposite much more essential. In a single nook, O’Connor is allied with Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician, scientist, and Christian apologist, who shares a lot of O’Connor’s issues about modernity’s deep deficiencies. Within the different, we discover the sixteenth-century French thinker and essayist, Michel de Montaigne, and the twentieth-century psychologist Carl Jung. Hartle argues that modernity, particularly because it has emerged within the twentieth century and past, is a calamity for religion, cause, and morals, and that Pascal is the quintessential anti-modernist to unfold O’Connor’s philosophy. 

One could marvel why Hartle has assembled these historic figures as she has, particularly Montaigne. Hartle anticipates our query as she explains, 

Jung captures the essence of recent consciousness, the type of human consciousness which emerged in early fashionable philosophy, particularly within the Essays of the sixteenth-century thinker Michel de Montaigne. … To grasp how O’Connor responds to the trendy situation, I flip to one in every of Montaigne’s most trenchant critics: the seventeenth-century thinker Blaise Pascal.

Although Montaigne contributed to the philosophical evolution that pulls man into himself and consequently away from God, on the similar time, Montaigne was himself a Catholic and humanist whose essays converse to O’Connor’s insistence on self-knowledge. Helpful for productive self-reflection, for instance, is his essay, “To Philosophize Is to Know How one can Die.” As well as, Montaigne was influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo, particularly his Confessions. Although it’s true that Pascal was troubled by sure of Montaigne’s essays, Pascal was additionally, in flip, influenced by Montaigne, all of the whereas leveling sharp criticism on the essayist. Pascal was additionally essential of René Descartes, who’s a extra necessary early determine within the emergence of modernism; certainly, Descartes is the central determine. Hartle, although, is targeted on Montaigne moderately than Descartes; an affordable technique given her scholarly experience in Montaigne.

Hartle sees in Montaigne not less than two traits that make him a extra important affect in philosophical modernity than some notice. His essay medium brings philosophy all the way down to the road stage, accessible to a broad viewers. Secondly, Montaigne turns our consideration away from the divine to the solely human. Certainly, and as Hartle notes, Pascal discovered Montaigne’s obvious indifference to significant faith deeply disturbing, although, mockingly, Montaigne as a foil introduced out the perfect in Pascal, not solely in substance but additionally within the aphoristic model that characterizes the Pensées. Nonetheless, Pascal’s criticism is at occasions surprisingly harsh, virtually visceral. In #63, he wrote, “Montaigne’s faults are nice. … He suggests an indifference about salvation, with out concern and with out repentance. As his ebook was not written with a spiritual objective, he was not sure to say faith; however it’s all the time our obligation to not flip males from it.” Montaigne’s conception of loss of life is “pagan,” even “cowardly and effeminate.”

To some, this dialectic could really feel curious or advert hoc, however Hartle rightly notes that each Jung and Pascal had been of curiosity to O’Connor. As is typical for O’Connor, nonetheless, her feedback about each are transient and incidental to different discussions. She as soon as instructed Alfred Corn, a younger man scuffling with religion at Emory College, that Pascal is perhaps helpful for him, and he or she remarked to a different correspondent that “Jung might be simply as harmful as Freud.” But O’Connor appears to acknowledge the psychologist as an necessary determine worthy of consideration: “Jung has one thing to supply faith, however is on the similar time very harmful for it.” O’Connor wrote to Fr. James McCown (and this confirms Hartle’s technique): “You must pay money for [Jung’s writing] simply to see what it’s important to fight within the fashionable thoughts.”

Pascal and the “Spiritualization of the Incarnation”

Pascal’s inclusion deserves some clarification, additionally. His response to the Cartesian custom doesn’t draw upon the classical or scholastic custom, although O’Connor is deeply indebted to these traditions. Pascal endorsed man’s capability and obligation to cause; on the similar time, and in contrast to sure different figures of the Enlightenment, Pascal famously insisted that cause has its restrict, as he asserts, “The center has its causes which cause is aware of not.” He argues {that a} actually rational method requires balancing cause with divine thriller. “Actually, thou artwork a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior,” writes Isaiah (45:15, KJV). Pascal’s understanding of thriller would undoubtedly have been gratifying to O’Connor, as would Pascal’s name to humility. Man is “misplaced” in a “distant nook of nature.” His existence is dwarfed by the universe.

Hartle explains that her thesis relies on the “spiritualization” of the incarnation. That is an fascinating phrase, however its which means will not be self-evident, and a few clarification is so as: she appears to contemplate that the central Christian occasion has been redefined and given a “purely human which means.” Different phrases that is perhaps used embody “secularizing the incarnation” or “desacralizing the incarnation.” Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) warned towards “naturalism,” which reduces the non secular and supernatural to merely human expertise. Hartle’s phrase underscores the way in which through which these she criticizes have “abstracted” the non secular into meaninglessness.

So, for instance, she explains that “Jung denies the historic actuality of the incarnation, turning it right into a mere thought or image which is important for psychological well being.” Accordingly, “Pascal and O’Connor see their job because the restoration of the historic embodied actuality of the incarnation for the trendy thoughts from the distortions of this spiritualization.” This misappropriation of the central Christian occasion is re-purposed within the curiosity of “fashionable man’s try at self-creation and self-redemption.” This brings to thoughts O’Connor’s well-known response to American novelist Mary McCarthy (The Group, The Groves of Academe), who, at a cocktail party, insisted that the Eucharist is only a image. O’Connor answered, “Nicely, if it’s only a image, to hell with it!”

Fiction and the Struggle

Hartle analyzes a number of of O’Connor’s tales and demonstrates how they’re significant responses to modernity: her novel Smart Blood, her quick story “Good Nation Folks,” O’Connor’s second novel The Violent Bear It Away, and her oft-anthologized “A Good Man Is Arduous to Discover.” All of those analyses are revealing; Hartle’s mixture of Pascal and “A Good Man Is Arduous to Discover” is essentially the most easy and compelling. On this story, the character of the Misfit appears to talk for O’Connor: He’s uncompromising relating to the suitable response to Divine revelation. Certainly, he asserts that Jesus has “thrown all the pieces off steadiness.”

If He did what He stated, then it’s nothing so that you can do however throw away all the pieces and observe Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing so that you can do however benefit from the jiffy you bought left the easiest way you possibly can—by killing any person or burning down his home or doing another meanness to him.

For Pascal, the alternatives aren’t any much less stark as he anticipates the equivocation that may be a hallmark of the trendy age. He asserts,

There are solely three kinds of individuals: those that have discovered God and serve him; those that are busy searching for him and haven’t discovered him; those that stay with out both searching for or discovering him. The primary are affordable and completely happy, the final are silly and sad, these within the center are sad and affordable.

Just like the Misfit, Pascal affords no center floor. He asserts that there’s “an absolute distinction between those that attempt with all their may to be taught and people who stay with out troubling themselves or desirous about it.” This “supernatural torpor” is a “monstrous factor.” 

He has little sympathy with people who are usually not brutally trustworthy with themselves: “I can solely approve of those that search with groans.” A number of of O’Connor’s characters are given the chance to answer grace with nothing lower than brutal honesty.

Descartes purports to cause his option to his personal existence after which to the existence of God; Pascal, against this, laments how simply man is led astray, given how simply cause and the senses mislead. Much more, cause and sense expertise could also be set in turmoil by the passions. He explains, “These two sources of reality, cause and the senses … deceive one another in flip.” The colleges “rival one another in falsehood and deception.”

Hartle additional demonstrates that for all of her supposed reasoning powers, Hulga, in “Good Nation Folks,” is trapped in self-deception exactly by her misdirected cause, made even worse by her doctorate in philosophy. Her defective senses, furthermore, mislead her to the ill-starred encounter with Manley Pointer, taking her to some extent of no return when the hunter turns into the hunted. Hartle observes that Hulga’s “wood leg captures the situation of the character within the grip of recent consciousness: one thing important is lacking.” Hulga is, to borrow Pascal’s phrase, “with out grace,” although the reader is left suspecting that her abject humiliation could expose her divine intervention. That chance is usually recommended by the mirage of Pointer as O’Connor describes Hulga watching the fake Bible salesman, carrying away her wood leg. She writes, “When she turned her churning face towards the opening, she noticed his blue determine struggling efficiently over the inexperienced speckled lake.” The phantasm of his capability to “stroll on water” means that, evil although he’s, Pointer is the unwitting instrument of God’s grace to drive a wedge into Hulga’s puerile conceitedness. As Pascal notes, “Evil is simple, and has infinite kinds.”

Hartle’s ebook requires a loyal learn from even a well-informed reader—however it’s well worth the effort. Her progressive technique is profitable, yielding deep insights into O’Connor’s issues and work. Maybe subheadings throughout the chapters is perhaps helpful, and a few may recognize an early chapter on Pascal, Montaigne, and Jung to set the stage for his or her employment in Hartle’s mission. 

Quibbles apart, Hartle’s evaluation of O’Connor rings true in just about each occasion; her observations are neither sharp nor flat, and her mixture of Pascal and O’Connor is a satisfying concord—the distinction with Montaigne and Jung appropriately cacophonous. Flannery O’Connor and Blaise Pascal: Recovering the Incarnation for the Fashionable Thoughts is to not be missed. Like O’Connor and Pascal, furthermore, the one consequential response to the misdirection of modernity is, on the finish of the day, spiritual conversion. Such conversion, although framed by cause, is a matter of the guts. 

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