Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton both figured significantly in the revival of Catholic literature in the 20th century.
O’Connor’s fictional works – the few novels and short stories she was able to write in her short life – had a profound effect on the Western imagination for their depiction of memorable characters from the American South who were ‘Christ-haunted’. Chesterton’s voluminous writings in every genre registered on both the mind and the imagination, inspiring fresh understandings of the Christian faith and the inspiration it could give to a culture without God.
Gary Furnell explores the intellectual background to Flannery O’Connor’s writings in this review of a recent book, Fr Damian Ference’s No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky: Flannery O’Connor and Modernity (Wiseblood books, 2025).
The interest in Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) continues unabated. New publications, highlighting various aspects of her life, thought, or art, appear every few months.
No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky is an 84-page essay on O’Connor’s primary intellectual influences. She had discerned modernity’s strictures, and this knowledge informed her fiction. The essay’s writer, American scholar/priest Damian Ference, delved into O’Connor’s personal library – held at Georgia College and State University – to uncover what she had read and especially those passages she’d underlined or where she’d added margin notes.
Fr. Ference also studied the many book reviews O’Connor wrote for her diocesan newspaper.
The resulting essay is a measured explication, based on evidence, of O’Connor’s intellectual journey. It is complemented by the essay’s structural clarity, the careful organisation aided by headings and sub-headings. The prose is unpretentious and accessible, for the most part. There are numerous endnotes for those who require references or additional contextual detail. The foreword by Christopher Scalia establishes Fr. Ference’s scholarly bona fides and outlines the essay’s themes.
While some familiarity with philosophical discourse will aid the reader, no deep familiarity with O’Connor’s short stories is required. The newcomer will likely be encouraged to read her fiction, while established fans will re-read her stories and her novels, especially Wise Blood, with greater understanding. We’ll discover that her characters are distorted by modernity’s peculiarities.
A prophetic artist
O’Connor admitted that, in the modern West, scepticism about Christianity was prevalent, especially among the would-be cultured or intellectual. Attendant to this scepticism were nihilistic tendencies, masked by liberal sentiments.
O’Connor was a devout Catholic; she maintained its doctrines while living – as much as the physical debilitations of her lupus condition allowed – in the modern world. She wasnot an indisposed anchorite; she was a prophetic artist.
Her faith was challenged during her studies at Georgia College, especially in the philosophy courses. Modernism, beginning with René Descartes, was espoused. O’Connor doubted the worldly philosophies, but she listened and learned. She found faith-affirming intellectual assistance, both philosophical and historical, in the books of Romano Guardini and Étienne Gilson.
Guardini was valuable because he highlighted the “pre-eminent philosophical problem of man …modern man experiences alienation from God, the world, other people, and even, at times, himself.” The alienation results when man turns away from God and seeks integration independently of the creator. O’Connor benefited further from Guardini because he warned of the Church’s inadequate responses to modernity: sentimentality, exaggeration or anti-intellectualism.
Those of us who discovered the Catholic Church in its post-Vatican II configuration, and imagine that the pre-Vatican II Church was vastly superior, are reminded that O’Connor found plenty of vapid piety, silliness and fantasy among Catholics. She rejected these “musty, turgid” substitutes for grappling with divine realities.
Étienne Gilson’s books gave O’Connor a historical overview of philosophy. Gilson defended western Christendom’s Thomist philosophy, which was supplanted by the profane philosophies of – among others – Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Auguste Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach. Despite the skein of confident declarations, deep confusion was unleashed by these philosophies. O’Connor realised that they were anti-human because they were centred on humanity without God.
Moreover, Gilson aided O’Connor by championing the artist’s freedom to manipulate or reimagine nature to fulfil their artistic vision. Thus, fiction was free to explore the grotesque, the mythic, the poetic and other modes according to the artist’s talents and intentions. O’Connor knew she had the gift of portraying the comically grotesque. She used her gift well.
Key features of modernity
Guided by Guardini and Gilson, Fr. Ference examines four features of modernity that impacted O’Connor and affect us in our even more incoherent era:
The Self as the Centre of Existence
Fr. Ference summarised this characteristic: “…the full-blown absolutization of human nature – whereby the human being is taken to be the only personal reality in the universe and this subjectivity taken to be the origin and measure of meaning.” This is an expression of secular humanism.
Over time, it devolves into individualism running rampant, often contrary to family or community responsibilities, and hostile to established authorities.
A Disregard for Mystery
Gilson traced this truncating exclusion to Descartes’ elevation of mathematical, measurable certainties. Greater scientific knowledge was undoubtedly encouraged, but the elevation slumped into the denigration of spiritual realities and doubt about being, essences and purpose. This neglect of mysteries is still part of our culture, but not in the Church, which wisely enacts and protects mysteries. O’Connor wrote, “Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
Abetting this disregard for mysteries are the philosophies of naturalism and scientism, which posit that matter is all that exists, with all processes having a material basis. Scientism insists that the knowledge gained from research into matter is the only knowledge vital for humanity. This means that interior experience – thoughts, feelings,
intuitions, dreams and spiritual hunger – is impossible to integrate with the mechanistic external world. Man’s deepest personal needs and aspirations are doomed to remain
unsatisfied.
A General Distrust of the Concrete
Given man’s predicament, a flight from reality is one consequence. It’s a type of Gnosticism: ideas and fantasies are given more weight than troubling concrete realities. O’Connor rejected this Gnostic flight. She described herself as “a hillbilly Thomist”, agreeing with St. Thomas Aquinas that we apprehend reality via the senses, with God’s loving wisdom establishing a correspondence between our senses, our minds, and reality.
The Fall damaged this correspondence but did not annul it. In contrast, the Gnostic flight from reality leaves humanity adrift. As Fr. Ference states, “A philosophy that abandons the body as the way man naturally comes to know the world is a philosophy that essentially abandons humanity for a new conception of the ‘true self.’”
He elaborates, “Flannery O’Connor was convinced that any attempt to separate the spiritual world from the Anna Akhmatova material world is to meddle with our perception of reality in a way that causes harm, not only to one’s art, but also to the human person and hence the human community.”
The Subordination of Reason
O’Connor was alert to the attractions of sentimentality – that is, prioritising feelings over reason. She wrote about sentimentality, “It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”
Wise Blood – in an unwise culture
Fr. Ference’s final section presents O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (1952) as an “artistic rendering of O’Connor’s vision of modernity.” Wise Blood portrays the strange trajectory of a war veteran, Hazel Motes, who is obsessed, negatively, with Jesus. The story is set in the southern Bible Belt, where Motes interacts with his unbalanced disciple, with cops and conmen, and a seductive teenage girl.
His mission is to expose Jesus; instead, he is exposed as deluded. But he admits his delusion, enacts a severe self-imposed penance and ends his life as an exploited, oddball ascetic. Fr. Ference recounts the story with skill, showing how O’Connor explored, via dramatic action, the troubles that beset a dedicated modernist.
No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky is among the best books on Flannery O’Connor’s thought and on Wise Blood, her first novel. Fr. Ference’s essay rewards, and sometimes demands, slow, reflective reading. He does not highlight this point, but O’Connor’s art, her letters and her essay/lecture collection, Mystery and Manners (1957), demonstrate how gifted she was and how quickly her literary gifts matured.
Flannery O’Connor died aged 39, but her example and great art have been impacting people for over eighty years.