Christianity and Literature

Vol. 60, No.1 (Autumn 2010)

The Anagogical Imagination

of Flannery O'Connor
Peter M. Candler, Jr.

Abstract: This essay explores O'Connor's sense of the art of fiction

as an art of anagogical vision, which sees all things as instances of
participation in God. Such created things are, then, when read or "seen"
properly, fragmentary disclosures of the divine glory. To O'Connor, the
logic of anagogy implies that the visible realities of this world only take
on a fullness of meaning-indeed, they only become truly visible-when
seen in the paradoxical light of the unseen. The anagogical sense-the
final of the four senses of scripture according to Christian traditionrefers to a text's figurative signification in relation to eternal glory or
eschatological reality. This anagogical sensibility is often represented in
O'Connor's work by the recurring image ofthe sun at the close ofmany of
her stories. Therefore O'Connor's "anagogical imagination," operative in
so much of her work, is intended to lead one through the contemplation
offuture glory to the reimagination of temporal existence in light of the
Incarnation, and to enable one to see such existence as imbued with the
grace of divine creation and ordered towards its consummation. That is
to say, when seen in the light ofthe yet-to-be-fully-disclosed divine glory,
the world-including most especially humanity-becomes more truly
visible for what it is.

The story has by now almost the status of legend: Flannery O'Connor
was in New York visiting with friends and a couple of what she called "Big
Intellectuals" when
toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I,
being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater
said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the

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Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" member of the Trinity;now

she thought of it as a symboland implied that it was a pretty good one.
I then said, in a very shakyvoice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it:'
That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize that this is all I
will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the
center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. (Habit of
Being 124-25)

It is O'Connor's sense of the story, the art of fiction, as an art of

anagogical vision that I aim to explore in this essay. I will proceed in two
stages: first by reading O'Connor's own account, as put forth in her letters
and essays, of fiction as an art of anagogical vision that sees all things as
instances of participation in God which, read properly, are fragmentary
disclosures of the divine glory; and second by a reading of the role of vision
and visibility in several of her stories. I suggest that for O'Connor the logic
of anagogy implies that the visible realities of this world only take on a
fullness of meaning-indeed, they only become truly visible-when seen in
the paradoxical light of the unseen.
The anagogical sense-the final of the four senses of scripture according
to Christian tradition-refers to a text's figurative signification in relation
to eternal glory or eschatological reality. "In its most general and abstract
conception;' writes Henri de Lubac, "the anagogical sense is that which leads
the thought of the exegete 'upwards" (Medieval Exegesis 2: 180).1 According
to the patristic and medieval traditions of interpretation, the anagogical
sense is that "through which speech is borne over to the invisible things to
come." This anagogical sensibility is often represented in O'Connor's work
by the recurring image of the sun at the close of many of her stories. Therefore
O'Connor's "anagogical imagination;' operative in so much of her work, is
not intended to remove the individual from this world so as to make him "so
heavenly minded" that he is "no earthly good" (Cash). On the contrary, the
anagogical sense leads one through the contemplation of future glory to the
reimagination of temporal existence in light of the Incarnation, as imbued
with the grace of divine creation and ordered towards its consummation.
That is to say, when seen in the light of the yet-to-be-fully-disclosed divine
glory, the world-including most especially humanity-becomes more
truly visible for what it is.
The ahistorical modern self is for O'Connor nothing to be praised, and
for this reason she saw in the South, where one could not so easily pretend
to be in just any place, an implicit rejection of this. She rejects as a Gnostic

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13

illusion the concept of the hero in the modern novel, that of the alienated,
rootless outsider for whom the "borders of his country are the sides of his
skull" (Mystery and Manners 200). Above all, O'Connor saw the modern
condition as basically Manichean, a world of dualistic oppositions between
nature and grace, form and content, story and meaning, body and soul.
Fiction no less than theology is "infected" with this heresy. For O'Connor,
this is particularly insidious because fiction is "so very much an incarnational
art" (Mystery 68). She frequently reprimanded aspiring young writers that
to try and write fiction which is more immediately concerned with grand
ideas than with the more mundane details of human life is not only to be
condemned to a life of writing badly but also a matter of infidelity. "Fiction
is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn
getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand
enough job for you" (Mystery 68).
But it is O'Connor's understanding of the incarnational character of art
generally, and of fiction in particular, that prevents her from collapsing into
a fetishization of the human over against the divine, or of the visible over
against the invisible (Srigley). It is the invisible which, for O'Connor, renders
anything visible to begin with. Of a piece with this is her understanding of
vision as basically sacramental. This sacramental vision is, contra many of
her critics in her own time, not what prohibits clarity of vision, but rather that
which enables it.3 To see the world rightly is to see it anagogically, to see it in
terms of "the Divine life and our participation in it" (Mystery 72). Reading
anagogically is not just a function of biblical exegesis; it is a way of reading
the entirety of creation as teleologically ordered to its consummation in its
Triune creator. The anagogical vision, then, she understood as basic to the
fiction writer as such-even the writer who rejects the Christian evangel,
for the ends of art transcend the intentions of the author.vlhus O'Connor's
work is fraught with the symbolic, although not in the sense of a "sort of
literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated:' Nor is the meaning of
a story simply the aggregate of symbolic codes that must be deciphered in
order for "meaning" to be discovered. Rather, the symbols that the fiction
writer uses are those which are already to hand. Symbols do not have to be
assigned significance or reference by the imposition of an authorial will;
instead, they have "their essential place in the literary level" but "operate
in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction"
(Mystery 71). Meaning, then, once "found;' "cannot be drained off and used
as a substitute" for a story. As the American poet John Peale Bishop once

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said, "You can't say Cezanne painted apples and a tablecloth and have said
what Cezanne painted" (qtd. in O'Connor, Mystery 75).
With this in mind, it does not seem quite adequate to O'Connor's own
sense of this way of seeing to reduce the anagogical to a multiplicity of
"levels" of reference, as some commentators are prone to do. To cite one
such example, Lucretia B. Yaghjian writes:
If the first level of O'Connor's anagogical vision consists in a literal
reading of the story, with all of its specificity of concrete detail, and
subsequent levelsinvite the accumulation, intensification, and symbolic
ordering of that detail into configurations of deeper, more pervasive
meaning, the end of this anagogical process in O'Connor's fiction is the
reader's experience of "mystery;' or an experience of transcendence.
(274)

A generic "experience of transcendence" is not, it seems to me, what

O'Connor understands anagogy to be intended to effect. Rather, she
appears to presuppose the anagogic not as a species of a more general mode
of "symbolic reference" but more in the terms of the ancient practice of
reading scripture according to the four senses: the literal, the allegorical,
the moral, and the anagogical.' In this sense, O'Connor's affinity is more
with the ressourcement school in the mid-twentieth century (figures such
as Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou) and associated thinkers of the lay neoThomistic revival (such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson) than
with figures such as Roger Haight and the early David Tracy, with whom
Yaghjihan relates her. 6A classic expression of the fourfold sense is found
in the first question of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, which
O'Connor no doubt knew:
Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For as the Apostle says
(Heb. 10:1) the Old Law is a figure of the New Law, and Dionysius says
(Coe!. Hier. i) "the New Law itself is a figure of future glory:' Again, in
the New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type of what we ought
to do. Therefore, so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things
of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done
in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what
we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what
relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense (Summa Iheologiae
Ia.Ll O,

resp.).

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15

No writer did more in the twentieth century to rehabilitate the ancient

and medieval practice of the four senses of scripture than de Lubac,
particularly through his four-volume work Exegese medievale: les quatre
sensde l'Ecriture? which appeared during the last decade of O'Connor's life.
Although O'Connor did not read this text, she was no doubt well-acquainted
with the tradition of the four senses, as shown in "The Nature and Aim of
Fiction":
The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning
in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in
which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or
moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called
anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation
in it. Although this was a method applied to biblical exegesis, it was
also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature
which included most possibilities .... (Mystery 72-73)H

This passage displays a deep understanding of the four senses-which are

not Simply "layers" of meaning but which constitute a means of the soul's
"manuduction" into the inter-trinitarian life (Candler). It constitutes not
just a way of reading the book of scripture, but also what the same medievals
called the "book of nature,"? What is more, O'Connor astutely grasps that
the three "spiritual" senses are contained within the literal sense (Desmond).
They are not a dispensable superstructure erected on top of the letter; rather
they are somehow included within it, as Aquinas says:
Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded
on one-the literal-from which alone can any argument be drawn,
and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epis. 48).
Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this,
since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense
which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.
(Summa Theologiae, Ia.Ll O, ad 1; Cf. Holcomb 60-80)

In the same way, for O'Connor, the literal in some sense already "contains"
the figurative. Far from being a level of meaning superadded to the literal
sense, the "spiritual sense" is already inherent in any attempt to render
something artistically. ''A good story:' she wrote, "is literal in the same
sense that a child's drawing is literal" (Mystery 113). It is not a deliberate
act of abstraction but an unconscious act of distortion; and it is a kind

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of distortion which does not destroy but reveals.'? Distortion is not only
inevitable insofar as the writer writes with the whole personality, but it is
also an effect of the mystery which already inchoately inheres in any created
object. In this sense, she understands the "anagogical way of seeing" (Habit
180) to be prophetic (Srigley 37-54).11 It is "a matter of seeing near things
with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up:' The
prophet, therefore, is what she calls a "realist of distances" (Mystery 44). For
O'Connor, this kind of realism "does not hesitate to distort appearances in
order to show a hidden truth" (179).
Though their particular approaches are quite different, O'Connor
and Thomas Aquinas are both, in some sense, "realists of distances:' For
example, in a discussion of the nature of prophecy in Question XII of the
De Veritate, a section often referred to by O'Connor, Thomas Aquinas says,
As is said in the Gloss, Prophecy is called sight, and the prophet is
called seer. Still, not every sight can be called prophecy, but only the
sight of those things which are far beyond our ordinary knowledge.
As a result, the prophet is said to be not only one who speaksfrom afar
(proculfans), that is, one who announces, but also one who seesfrom
afar (procul videns), from the Greek phanos, which is an appearing:'
(Truth 1, resp., p. 105)

O'Connor was clearly familiar with Henri de Lubac; and though she
most definitely did not read his Surnaturel, her conception of the relation
between the natural and the supernatural bears a strong affinity with de
Lubacs claim, made in Surnaturel, that the idea of "pure nature" is at root
a modern chimera, the product of a centuries-long tradition of misreading
St. Thomas. Her own thought is in deep sympathy with de Lubacs claim
that "It is always within the real world whose supernatural finality is not
hypothetical but fact, and not by following any supposition that takes us out
of the world, that we must seek an explanation of the supernatural" (Mystery
of the Supernatural 80). With de Lubac, O'Connor suggests that modernity
in its basic constitution is Manichean-and this is no less true of the average
Catholic than of the enlightened literary critic. "By separating nature and
grace as much as possible, [the average Catholic reader] has reduced his
conception of the supernatural to a pious cliche and has become able to
recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the
obscene" (Mystery 147). Bauerschmidt aptly summarizes the implications
of this separation:

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17

In losing that which is beyond our nature, we lose our nature. The
difficulty in the culture of nihilism is at root not the loss of a sense of
grace, but the loss of nature. Just as modern culture wants its mystery
without manners, so too it wants its grace without nature. Or, more
precisely,it understands nature as an emptiness that is entirely subject to
human manipulation; human nature is the object of self-actualization.
For O'Connor, this spells death for nature. Cut off from grace, it cannot
reach its destiny; cut off from its creator, it cannot even exist. (176)

In spite of her reading of (or at the very least acquaintance with)

figures such as de Lubac, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Karl Rahner,
Romano Guardini, Louis Bouyer, Jean Danielou, Frederick Copleston,
Anton C. Pegis, Josef Pieper, Edith Stein, Karl Adam, Charles Peguy, Henri
Daniel-Rops, Baron von Hugel, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Charles Iournet,
Jean Mouroux, Yves Congar, Gabriel Marcel, and many others (to name a
few), she did not regard her age as one of "great Catholic theology" (Habit
306),12 at least not in the sense in which she viewed the Protestant "crisis"
theologians of the same period (preeminently Karl Barth, whom she held
in high regard) in terms of their alertness and creativity. What she did
not learn directly from either Gilson or de Lubac, however, she no doubt
imbibed vicariously through conversations and letters and through these
other authors. Despite the extent of her reading of these figures, there has
been no attempt in O'Connor scholarship to understand her fiction with
respect to her theological thought as it developed in relation to fa nouvelle
theologie, even though this was the body of writing more influential than
any other upon her theology.
Apart, that is from Aquinas himself, whose Summa Theologiae she read
before bed every night. She wrote:
If my mother were to come in during this process and say,"Turn off that
light. It's late;' I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression,
would reply, "On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal and
limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes;' or some such thing. In
any case, I feel I can personally guarantee that St. Thomas loved God
because for the life of me I cannot help loving St. Thomas. His brothers
didn't want him to waste himself being a Dominican and so locked
him up in a tower and introduced a prostitute into his apartment; her
he ran out with a red-hot poker. It would be fashionable today to be
in sympathy with the woman, but I am in sympathy with St. Thomas.
(Habit 93-94)

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O'Connor famously described herself as a "hillbilly Thomist," whose

particular form of Thomism is, as Bauerschmidt writes, "the broad
Thomistic humanism that was the shared inheritance of the Church from
the doctor communis" (165). Her favorite reference to the Summa is from
Question 57 of the Prima Secundae, on whether prudence is distinct from
art, where Thomas argues that the good of an art is found in the goodness of
the thing made. Consequently art (like prophecy) does not require rectitude
of the appetite but depends upon God's gracious giving of a gift. Following
Aquinas, O'Connor calls art "reason in making:' The consequence of the
modern Manichean dualism of matter and spirit and its cognate separation
of nature and grace is that "imagination and reason have been separated,
and this always means an end to art" (Mystery 82).
Seeing and making are therefore one activity of the "habit of art:' To see
the world truthfully is already to draw it, like the child, anagogically. Thus
"reading the world" is a function of the whole personality, and therefore the
writing of fiction is essentially an act of justice. Thus, as Rowan Williams
points out, writing is a matter of "doing justice" to the world (99). In
O'Connor's own words, "[tjhe basis of art is truth, both in matter and in
mode. The person who aims after art aims after truth, in an imaginative
sense, no more and no less" (Mystery 65). This explains why the modus
of comedy is particularly suited to seeing anagogically, as Denise Askin
notes: O'Connor "points us not to a rhetorical formulation but to the form
of the work itself, a form that makes manifest the all-surrounding order of
existence. If comedy, through its ordering of the unreasonable, allows the
underlying reason to emerge, it becomes a fitting vehicle for the anagogical
vision" (50). Thus for the writer, "everything has its testing point in the eyes,
an organ which involves the whole personality and as much of the world as
can be got into it:' For O'Connor's fiction is concerned with "what-is:' for
this is all the fiction writer has to work with. In this sense, as Williams rightly
shows, O'Connor gives a particular centrality to visibility: "[tjhe tightrope
the Catholic writer is to walk is to forget nothing of the visually, morally,
humanly sordid world, making nothing easy for the reader, while doing so
in the name of a radical conviction that sees the world being interrupted
and transfigured by revelation" (99-100).
As she writes to "A:' in 1956, "I suppose when I say that the moral basis
of Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God, I mean about the
same thing that Conrad meant when he said that his aim as an artist was
to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe. For me the

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19

visible universe is a reflection of the invisible universe" (Habit 128). Thus no

independent thing is capable of its own determination as a thing; rather to
understand fiction as an incarnational art is to recognize that all things are
meaningful only insofar as they all are by virtue of their participation in the
divine life and as an expression of the divine glory. Such is the sacramental
"reason in making" which constitutes the anagogical imagination, which
reveals every visible as a register of the invisible. It is therefore not only as
an eschatological reality that creation will be made whole in Christ, it is
the beginning of true vision to see the creation groaning now towards its
consummation. Sight begins with a blurred vision of men as if they were
trees, but nevertheless walking (Mystery 50), in the same way that the child's
grotesque drawing "sees the lines that create motion" (113).
For example, in "A View of the Woods;' Mr. Fortune, an old man who
"never let a cow pasture get in the way of progress" (O'Connor, Collected Works
525), deeds his front lawn to a local entrepreneur in order to demonstrate
his power over his despised son-in-law, Pitts. Fortune's granddaughter, and
Pitts' daughter, Mary Fortune-the only one of Fortune's progeny in whom
he can recognize his own image-persistently protests the sale, because it
will mean she will no longer be able to see the woods from the front porch
of their house. Fortune's power of Sight is strictly literal:
Several times during the afternoon, he got up from his bed and looked
out the window across the "lawn" to the line of woods she said they
wouldn't be able to see anymore. Every time he saw the same thing:
woods-not a mountain, not a waterfall, not any kind of planted bush
or flower, just woods.... A pine trunk is just a pine trunk, he said to
himself. (538)
It is only when Fortune has destroyed the sole reflection of himself that he
begins to see with the child's eyes, that is, anagogically. All that remains is
"his conquered image:' Feeling himself as tugged through the woods, he
imagines that he spies an opening through which he can escape the trees:

He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the white
skywas reflected in the water. It grew as he ran toward it until suddenly
the whole lake opened up before him, riding majestically in little
corrugated folds toward his feet. He realizedsuddenly that he could not
swim and that he had not brought the boat. On both sides of him he
saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files that
were marching across the water and awayinto the distance. (546)

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Finally, Fortune looks around to find someone to help him, but he sees only
a deserted expanse, but for "one huge yellow monster which sat to the side,
as stationary as he was, gorging itself on clay" (546). According to Richard
Giannone, this is precisely an instance of the anagogical "recovery of vision:'
''Atlast, Mr. Fortune's optic nerve, damaged by demonic pressure, is restored
by divine justice so that he sees his personal evil in punching down Mary
Fortune, who is perceived as the monster to his side" (215).
But such restoration does not come so easily for Fortune. It is perhaps
no accident that the name of "Pitts" is the very thing Fortune cannot abide,
much less be sullied with. "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me:' he declares
upon having murdered his granddaughter. The converse of this is that there
maybe an ounce of Fortune in the Pit, as O'Connor subtly plays upon the
language of Sheol in the Old Testament, particularly that of Job and the
Psalms. In English this is often rendered "pit": for example, in Psalm 88, the
psalmist writes, "I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am
as a man that hath no strength" (Ps. 88:4). Indeed, this is the very language
O'Connor uses at the beginning of ''A View of the Woods" to describe the
hole the big machine is digging in the erstwhile cow pasture: "She sat on the
hood, looking down into the red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet
gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and
a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up" (Works 525).
At the other end of the story, Fortune, not unlike the psalmist, recognizes
his frailty-this time in his inability to swim, and he is powerless to resist
the inexorable pull of the lake. Moreover, the long line of trees on either side
of him that has thickened into "mysterious dark files" resembles the walls of
a tomb that have grown up around him. The only "person" he then sees is a
backhoe, "gorging itself on clay:' as if digging the pit for Fortune himself. In
this particularly eschatological vision, Fortune is presented with his destiny,
but it is a kind of anti-anagogical image insofar as he sees a future which
is beset by death on all sides. The living world is constituted by motion; it
is Fortune and the backhoe-the very incarnation of his mechanistic view
of the universe-that are "stationary" (Desmond 72-73). It is not in the
light of eternal glory but its opposite that Fortune comes to some kind of
recognition of his own desperate fate. "But thou, 0 God, shalt bring them
down into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out
half their days" (Ps. 55:23). The extent of Fortune's desperation is indicated
by the fact that not only can he not see truly, but, perhaps more importantly,
he cannot be seen. In his final act of treachery, the face of the child he has

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21

just murdered does not return his gaze; it "appeared to pay him not the
slightest attention" (Works 545). "The eyes had rolled back down and were
set in a fixed glare that did not take him in" (546). The story concludes in
an act of reciprocal non-vision: Fortune neither sees nor is seen. And yet
the possibility of his redemption abides in this singular privation whereby
the vision of himself and his cosmos under the sign of a negation opens up
the only possible site for his transformation. Thus he is consumed both by
the "convulsive motion" (546) of his expanding heart, and surrounded by
a similarly moving world in which the trees march toward and across the
water of the lake that is steadily advancing towards his feet.
To cite another example, in Wise Blood, Hazel Motes is the self-appointed
founding prophet of the "Church Without Christ:' whose only pulpit is the
top of a forty-dollar Essex sedan, whose gospel is that the only truth is that
there is no truth (Works 93), and that "no man with a good car needs to
be justified:' But the instrument of Haze's justification becomes that of his
condemnation when he runs down Solace Layfield with the Essex. His flight
from guilt ends when he is pulled over by a state trooper. After a fairly icy
exchange between the two, the trooper cons Motes into perching the Essex
on the precipice of an embankment so that he can ostensibly have a better
view of the horizon. As the car unceremoniously tumbles to its death, the
patrolman remarks:
"Them that don't have a car, don't need a license:' the patrolman
said, dusting his hands on his pants.
Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face
seemedto reflect the entire distance acrossthe clearingand on beyond,
the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank grey sky
that went on, depth after depth, into space. His knees bent under him
and he sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feet hanging
over. (117-18)
Hazel Motes' vision only becomes truthful when it becomes an extension
of the sky itself, that is, when it sees in terms of participation in the divine
and when it becomes absorbed into it. "Motes:' writes Ralph Wood, "comes
to the truth by means of silence and vision. With his Essex gone, he can at
last see that there is a more habitable place than the suffocating confines of
his sinful ego" (Flannery O'Connor 169). The tumbling Essex transforms the
panoptic observation of a neutral space into the enactment of a scene, from
a partly burnt pasture and a scrub cow to the perception of "depth after
depth" (llS).

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For O'Connor, VISIOn takes account of reality in its appearing as

inexhaustible, as it always paradoxically discloses that which is not
immediately available to sight. In other words, to see anagogically is to
perceive in the world a plenitude that is nevertheless not properly an object
of sight. It is, therefore, to anticipate, in vision, that beatific vision "when
all you see will be God" (Habit 124). Thus the union, in her stories, of the
revelation of the invisible through the objects of Sight and the ordering of
desire, which, for O'Connor is the task of a painful mortification of the
wrongly ordered passions for self-mastery. Her metaphor for this is the
terrestrial source of light itself, the sun, which not only illumines but also
burns. To share in the light of the Son is to endure, as in the sacrament of
baptism, a death. To see "sacramentally" thus refers to the transformative
burial and resurrection of sight itself. As such, her account of anagogical
vision assumes that participation in Christ's death is as much a physical
event as a "spiritual" one. Indeed, to separate the two would be to "find
yourself a Manichean without knowing how it happened" (Habit 173).
Just as there is no diremption of the soul and the body, there can be no
light without heat. To see truthfully, to see visible reality as pregnant with
the invisible is to be subject to a kind of burning. For light must travel in a
body, and for O'Connor it is the freaks, the Misfit, and the conniving Bible
salesman, who are the bodies that are the unwitting sites of illumination.
In the twenty-fourth of John Cassians Conferences, "On Mortification;'
Abba Abraham, commenting on Matt. II: 12 ("the kingdom of heaven
suffers force, and the violent bear it away")," says, "These violent persons
who forcibly prevent their own ruin are certainly praiseworthy.... Our ruin
is delight in the present life and-by way of expressing it more clearly-the
carrying out of our own desires and will. If a person removes these from
his soul and mortifies them, he certainly prevents forcibly, in glorious and
beneficial fashion, his own ruin, to the extent that he denies it its most
pleasant desires" (850).
The redemption of the characters in O'Connor's fiction is often
mediated through the violent, who unwittingly "warn the children of
God of the terrible speed of mercy" -characters who, like most of us, are
never quite unambiguously on the side of either good or evil. It is often
they, and not ourselves, who forcibly prevent our own ruin. And the
prevention of that ruin is frequently accompanied with death, whether at
the hand of an escaped convict on the loose in the backwoods of Georgia
or by an unbridled bull. There are those who die violently but their deaths

THE ANAGOGICAL IMAGINATION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

23

correspond to an analogous violence of the paradoxical beginning of sight,

the partial and blurred foretaste of the beatific vision.It The story is perhaps
legend, but nonetheless true, but O'Connor was once asked why so many
of the characters in her stories were getting killed. She is supposed to have
replied, "A lot of my characters get killed, but no one gets hurt"
In her 1954 story "The Displaced Person;' O'Connor tells the tale of
a Polish immigrant fleeing the Holocaust called Mr. Guizac, who, at the
assistance of the local Catholic priest-a man who "spoke in a foreign way
himself, English but as ifhe had a throatful of hay" (Works 288-89)-arrives
on the farm of Mrs. McIntyre, an obstinate and frugal old widow, whose
husbands are all either dead, locked up in the nuthouse, or drunk in
some Florida motel room (309). While initially suspicious of the demonic
European provenance of this new foreigner, eventually her suspicion
becomes outright fear-driven hostility, and she resolves to fire Mr. Guizac.
In the meantime, Father Flynn, the wry and somewhat dull priest, comes
to visit her regularly to sit on her porch sipping ginger ale and to offer her
unbidden instruction in Catholic doctrine. At one point she interrupts
him: "Listen!" she said, "I'm not theological. I'm practical! I want to talk to
you about something practical!" (316). Flynn responds with his customary
unintelligible grunt, and then prepares to "make his escape:' In defense of
her recalcitrance,
She smiled angrily and said, "1 didn't create his situation, of course:'
The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached
the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his
neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering
timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold
haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs.
McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man.
"Christ will come like that!" he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his
hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.
Mrs. Mcintyre's face assumed a set puritanical expression and she
reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had
her mother. "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to
go:' she said. "1 don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in
the world:'
The old man didn't seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on
the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the
spread tail. "The Transfiguration:' he murmured.
She had no idea what he was talking about. "Mr Guizac didn't have

24

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

to come here in the first place;' she said, giving him a hard look.
The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.
"He didn't haveto come in the first place;' she repeated, emphasizing
each word.
The old man smiled absently. "He came to redeem us;' he said and
blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go. (317)
This is of course a deeply ironic interchange: in saying, "He came to redeem
us;' of whom is Father Flynn speaking? It is, of course, a double entendre: he
means both Mr. Guizac and Christ-not in the sense of two separate agents
of redemption, but the first as the "type" of the second. Some time later,
though, Father Flynn returns to Mrs. Mcintyre's place, and in the middle of
his customary catechesis, she interrupts:
"Father Flynn!" she said in a voice that made him jump. "I want to
talk to you about something serious!"
The skin under the old man's right eye flinched.
''As far as I'm concerned;' she said and glared at him fiercely, "Christ
wasjust another D.P:'
He raised his hands slightlyand let them drop on his knees as if he
were considering this. (320)
In the penultimate scene in the story, Mr. Guizac is crushed to death under
the wheels of Mrs. Mclntyres tractor while she looks on, frozen. As his body
is carried away, she watches "like a stranger:' Later that evening, one by one
her farmhands desert her, leaving her alone on her farm. Mrs. McIntyre
develops a "nervous affliction" and her health begins slowly to decline, as
she loses her eyesight, feeling in her extremities, and finally, her voice.
Mrs. McIntyre-much like Dmitri in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov-is not "technically" guilty ofmurder, at least not in a legal sense.
Mrs. Mclntyres guilt is theological, and therefore all the more real. She is
guilty of a kind of "collusion" of inaction in failing to warn the Displaced
Person of the approaching tractor. Of course, for O'Connor, Christ isn't just
another displaced person, but Mrs. Mcintyre's inability to recognize Guizac
as genuinely and tragically expatriated is a function of her failure to grasp
the exceptionality of Christ's displaced-ness. Her failure to "see" Christ
makes her also incapable of seeing Mr. Guizac for what he is too: not just
another "D.P:'
Linda Munk has astutely drawn attention to the deeply typological
resonances of this story, which are often missed by critics. As for Guizac, he

THE ANAGOGICAL IMAGINATION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

25

is often read as an allegory for Christ, but in Munk's view he is more properly
an anti-type of Israel. His very name contains a reference to this: "What no
one has remarked is the fact that the name 'izac' or Isaac is hidden/disguised
within Mr. Guizac's name. As Saul is to St Paul, Izak is to Guizak: in both cases
the Christian antitype includes and fulfills its figural counterparts" (Munk
248-49). In this sense he is a "figure" of Christ, but understood anagogically.
Seen from the perspective of what he figures-Christ in glory-he is seen in
his fullness. His particularity, one might say,only becomes truly apparent in
the refracted light of the glorified Jew, who is not just "another D.P;' but the
only true Displaced Person in whose light every other "D.P:' is visible in his
own terms. This is the paradox of anagogical vision: we can only be seen in
our own right when we are seen sub specie aeternitatis. This does not efface
particularity; on the contrary, in the Jewish flesh of Jesus (which typology
helps to elucidate but not dissolve) the old is made new but not different.
The new creation, which is the referent of anagogy, is not an annihilation but
an elevation; as O'Connor knew so well, grace does not destroy but perfects
and elevates nature. IS Mrs. Mcintyre's final blindness is reminiscent of the
blindness of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King or the ironic blindness
of the prophet Teiresias in the same play and in several other instances
within Greek epic and tragedy, in which the blind prophet or king is the
one who alone sees truly. But here there is something more: Mrs. McIntyre
loses not just her sight, but all feeling whatsoever. And most importantly,
she loses her voice, which has been for her the agent of her resistance to
Father Flynn. Hence her demise is, like Lear's, her utter kenosis, her selfemptying. She is moreover the object of an inverse displacement: through
the death of Guizac she is abandoned to utter solitude, with the exception of
the peacocks and Fr. Flynn, who alone remembers her (Giannone 126-43).16
There is now no possibility of her response to his continued teaching, she
cannot interrupt him with pleas for the practical or self-justifying appeals
to "reality:' She can only lay in bed and listen. Hence the story concludes
with the ever-patient priest feeding the peacocks, and then feeding Mrs.
Mclntyres soul, by calmly, deliberately, unsentimentally instructing her in
the dogma of the church. The conclusion brings McIntyre to the edge of
the abyss of her own soul: it may not be what she thought she wanted, but
for O'Connor it is the very thing she needs. It is all he has to offer, but it is
everything. I?
In a final example from "Revelation;' in which, alas, no one gets killed,
a group of women are sitting in a doctor's waiting room exchanging

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

pleasantries. One of them, Ruby Turpin, fancies herself genuinely blessed

by God because she was born neither black nor white trash nor ugly.
She even considers her own hogs to be the cleanest and smartest in the
county. The action comes to a climax when one of the women's daughters, a
college student at an enlightened Northern liberal arts college, becomes so
infuriated with the ladies' polite condescension that she hurls a book at Mrs.
Turpin's head and calls her a "wart hog from hell:'
In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue.
The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green and the streak of
highway had turned lavender....
The color of everything, field and crimson sky,burned for a moment
with a transparent intensity....
Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her
muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared,
returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road.
Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly
and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig
parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old
sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared
to pant with a secret life.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin
remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing
some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There
was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson
and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk.
She raised her head from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and
profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a
vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of
living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.
There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in
their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of
freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And
bringing up the end of the procession there was a tribe of people whom
she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always
had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She
leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the
other with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good
order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on
key.Yetshe could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their
virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped

THE ANAGOGICAL IMAGINATION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

27

the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what
lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she
was, immobile. (Works 653-54)

This is perhaps O'Connor's most poignant instance of anagogical vision:

for Mrs. Turpin, "revelation" comes in the transformation of her own
inadequate conception of beauty as it is rent asunder by a vision of the divine.
Her failure to discern the disclosure of God's glory in the most rejected
and scorned members of her society is a function of this. One might even
say that Turpin's vision is insufficiently anagogical because insufficiently
Christological-her Christ is not the scorned and rejected Jew, but a welldressed savior with perfect pitch. This occlusion of her vision renders her
conception of society and its hierarchical order distorted: perhaps she does
not grasp the radical nature of a properly Christian view of social order
as determined by Christ's claim that the first shall be last, and the last first
(Mark 10:31). The problem is not that her view of social order is hierarchical
per se, but that it is a perverse hierarchy. As Ralph C. Wood writes, the fact
that Mrs. Turpin's "hierarchy is humanly constructed rather than divinely
revealed makes it potentially fascist" (Flannery O'Connor 261).
Nonetheless, despite all its overwhelming silence, Mrs. Turpin's
is a vision which also speaks, which returns her own audacity to her as
judgment. And as a result, she sees that her own claim that "there'll still
be a top and bottom" fulfills itself, but in the form of a radical subversion
of her own power of sight. There is still much for her to learn, to be sure;
but it is clear that henceforth she must see her world in a new light. This
"Visionary light" is the light of anagogy, by which one may come to behold
an intimation of the divine glory. The ending of "Revelation" is perhaps the
most explicitly eschatological conclusion to any of O'Connor's stories, and
the fact that it is so closely connected with the transformation of the power
of vision illustrates that it is not primarily physical but intellectual vision
that must be transformed if we are to see the world truthfully.
For the novelist, as much, I might add, for the theologian, "To look at
the worst will be ... no more than an act of trust in God" (Mystery 148).
For O'Connor, if one is incapable of seeing in the pig parlor an anagoge of
the Incarnation, one is therefore not entitled to see it in the more pristine
exemplars of divine revelation. On the other hand, if one is not capable
of seeing in the mundane elements of the Eucharistic rite the instance of
sharing in the Triune life of God, one is not entitled to see it in the pig parlor
either. It is the vision of the elevated host, above all, which for O'Connor

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

is that which renders all other visions intelligible as glimpses, however

cloudy and confused, of the already-graced character of creation. It is a
vision that not only perceives but that marks, which is both audible as a
call and sensible as a burning wound. The beginning of all knowledge is in
the sensible intellect, but to know sensibles as in themselves "sensible" is a
function of the light of grace. But to see in this way requires, for O'Connor,
a kind of violent upheaval of desire in vision. She writes:
For me, it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which
are the true lawsof the fleshand the physical.Death, decay, destruction
are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis
the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise
but the body, glorified. I have alwaysthought that purity was the most
mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have
entered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not
to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and
spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. (Habit 100)
The same could be said for her understanding of vision. This "looking
forward" to the resurrection is not simply a disposition of the emotions,
but a "habit of art" that is practiced in all the lesser seeings of Christian life.
For O'Connor, it is, finally, the beatific vision that renders all other visions
possible, and indeed, significant. It is toward this which "the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain" (Rom. 8:22) even now, like Mrs. Turpin's
hogs, panting with a "secret life:'
Baylor University

NOTES
IDe Lubac notes, '1\s the philologists are wont to observe, the term anagogia
is a barbarism. It did not usually replace the simple transliteration anagoge till
rather late. Thus one can scarcely explain it by a confusion made by the Latin
translator between two Greek words anagogia and anagoge. It rather results from
a deformation caused by the influence of the other words of the series: historia,
allegoria,tropologia... For it is certain that, in the bad Latin of some of our authors,
this word anagogia, canonized by association, is intended to translate the Greek
term anagoge. The translator takes this word in the meaning that had become
normal in the first centuries of our era and that the Neoplatonic school would
settle upon ... not in the sense of a 'trip' or 'passing through' as it had among the
ancient Pythagoreans, but in the sense of a 'climb' or an 'ascent'. The etymology

THE ANAGOGICAL IMAGINATION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

29

bruited about would be explained by its equivalent 'sursumductio': it comes, as they

say, 'from ana, which is sursum' (upward) 'and agoge, which is ductio' (leading)"
(Medieval Exegesis 180).
2(anagogen sonat, per quam ad invisibilia ac futura sermo transfertur ... ) John
Cassian, Collatio decima quarta. De spiritali scientia, in J.P. Migne, Patrologia Latina
XLIX, 965A (qtd. in de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis 180).
3Itseems to me to be incorrect to say only that anagogy "should be understood as
an interpretive concept, and, therefore, directly dependent for its validity upon the
tools of critical analysis" (Wynne 34). "Sacramentality" is an interpretive concept,
but it is more basically a theological and metaphysical one. Its validity does not
depend upon the tools of critical analysis but upon the theological understanding
of what constitutes a sacrament. Such misunderstanding may stem in part from
the sensibility according to which this author can bafflingly describe O'Connor's
Christianity as "fundamentalist, albeit Catholic" (35).
"O'Connor's understanding of atheism is quite possibly linked to Henri de
Lubacs own account in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, a copy of which she
possessed (Getz 102).
SMany commentators on O'Connor's work seem to pass over this fact in silence.
There is a recurrent tendency to treat "anagogy" and "analogy" as generically literary
principles applicable to any text whatsoever, as functions of a medieval "literary
theory:' Rather, anagogy is indeed a literary practice but only insofar as the particular
text of scripture has God as its author (and this is not to be understood in any
puerile "literalist" or "fundamentalist" sense). The concept of anagogy (and analogy,
for that matter) in Christian tradition is intelligible in its relation to the Incarnation
of the Second Person of the Trinity, which is the ontological priniciple rendering
intelligible the created order-an order, to wit, that is, in Christian thought, created
in and through the Son of God. Hence talk of O'Connor's "incarnational art" in
abstraction from the hypostatic union in Christ sometimes results in unhelpful
interpretations of her work insofar as the latter engage Christian thought. For
example: "Through word play and irony O'Connor consistently tests the limits of
our abused and fallen discourse as though to distinguish between the Word and
our words. She turns our mortal language inside out-with the view to making us
see. In so doing, she practices an incarnational art, which, as we have suggested,
is an essentially masculinist aesthetic, calling for an essentially male perspective
or gaze. Not surprisingly, O'Connor adopted the anagogical vision, espoused by
the patriarchal Church, and embodied that belief in her art" (Gordon 133). The
implication ofthis claim is that O'Connor found in the "anagogical vision" a method
ready-made to her allegedly pre-established blind allegiance to a patriarchal Church.
Despite Sarah Gordon's nearly exhaustive knowledge of the O'Connor corpus,
from which I have learned a great deal indeed, her account seems to me to trade
on rather dated notions of patriarchy and feminism. O'Connor, I think, did not
regard "Roman Catholicism" (which Gordon appears to treat as an abstract cipher

30

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

for everything misogynistic and retrograde) primarily as an institution but as a

community of faith of apostolic provenance with a particular tradition. The range
of O'Connor's reading in contemporary Catholic theology would bear this out,
even despite an incontrovertible and excitable obsession among her commentators
with the figure-however badly misunderstood-of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
S. J.
60'Connor's debt to Maritain and Gilson is well-known: see Habit of Being
230-31. Though she appears not to have read Danielou or de Lubac or other
representatives of the "nouvelle theologie" extensively, she read widely in many of
the figures in the generation preceding these authors, such as Leon Bloy, Georges
Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Romano Guardini, Karl Adam, and others. The role
of the controverted figure of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is particularly difficult to
unravel, especially given how, at least according to Henri de Lubac, his project was
repeatedly misunderstood. If de Lubac is correct, then a re-appraisal of Teilhard's
project and legacy would seem to be indispensable for an estimation of his influence
on O'Connor. For his part, Gilson could never really forgive de Lubac for his longsuffering defense of his fellow Jesuit. In a 1967 letter, Gilson exclaimed to de Lubac,
'Td a hundred times rather be a Lutheran than a Teilhardian" (de Lubac, Letters of
Etienne Gilson 136). On Guardini see Edmondson 71-72, and passim.
"The first volume in English translation did not appear until 1998; thus far the
first three volumes have been translated.
"Her source-possibly in addition to Aquinas himself-may well have been
William F. Lynch, S. J., Christ and Apollo. See David Bentley Hart's excellent review
of the 2004 reprint.
"See Turner: "That creation in its own character as creation has a quasisacramental form is there in Hugh of St. Victor, who concedes a certain general
sense in which the words of Scripture, but also all creation, being in both cases
'signs of something sacred: may be called 'sacraments: It is there in Bonaventure,
for whom Christ's human nature, being the resume of all creation, and so a minor
mundus incorporating all the meaning and reality of the maior mundus, is the
explicit 'sacrament' of the world's implicit created sacramentality. But it is there in
a form most significant for the purposes of my argument in Thomas, who argues
that anything at all in the sensible world is a sign of something sacred, and so in a
general sense is a 'sacrament' even if, other than in the cases of the seven sacraments
of the Christian dispensation, they lack the character of a sacrament in the strict
sense, for only those seven are 'causes' of our sanctification.... The connection of
thoughts between creation's power to disclose God and its possessing in a general
sense the form of the sacramental is in Thomas incontestable" (224-25). On the
"two books;' see Harrison.
"See Williams 93-105 and Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted
South, and The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four
American Novelists. No one has more thoroughly and brilliantly treated the paradox

THE ANAGOGICAL IMAGINATION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

31

of grace as both "destructive" and "therapeutic" (in the fullest sense of Gregory of
Nazianzus' axiom, to gar aproslepton atherapeuton ("what is not assumed is not
healed"), than Ralph C. Wood.
"Srigley gives a particularly compelling account of the extent of O'Connor's
debt to Thomas Aquinas' account of prophecy.
12This is partly attributable to the limited availability, at least in 1958, of English
translations of these authors.
13The source, obviously, of the title of O'Connor's second novel.
140'Connor's notion of paradox was certainly not uninfluenced by Henri de
Lubacs Further Paradoxes, which she held in her personal library, and evidently
reviewed at some point (Getz 102,209).
15The relationship between the Iewishness of Jesus and the Polishness, as it
were, of Guizac is far too rich and complex a topic for me to enter into here. One
could extend the range of such a question to other stories such as "The Artificial
Nigger:' Over against a recurring tendency to sentimentalize Christ to the point
of irrelevance, to understand Christ properly is for O'Connor to imagine him
precisely as a "nigger" in the sense of that term common to O'Connor's time and
milieu. Jesus Christ is despised, rejected, scorned, and lynched; but it is somehow in
the fractured humanity of the weak and unjustly condemned that divine revelation
is disclosed. This is, of course, an extremely delicate matter fraught with many
dangers which should be handled with great care-no less than the paradox of the
revelation of the Christian mystery in the crucifixion of the incarnate Logos.
"This of course also suggests the Eucharistic anamnesis, in which the body of
Christ is remembered, and as such the whole body of Christ, extended through
time and space, both future and past, is present in the sacrament (Cavanaugh).
171n the context of "The Displaced Person;' Sarah Gordon claims that O'Connor's
"refusal as an artist to engage in any sort of social or political commentary leads
her to use the Holocaust as a metaphor to further her Christian vision" (187).
It is curious when literary critics appear to look everywhere else than literature
itself for "social or political commentary" or a "commitment to act on behalf of
social or political justice;' as if the only legitimate form of such political or social
resistance consisted in participating in protest marches. The fact that the latter may
be indulged in for entirely self-serving and egotistical and not truly just reasons is
one lesson-of social commentary, no less-that can be learned from O'Connor.
Moreover, to read "The Displaced Person" as devoid of such cultural critique is
superficial, if not grotesquely myopic. Gordon's grossly generalized claims on the
same page about "the Catholic Church" are perhaps the broken lens through which
she views this alleged failure on O'Connor's part. She writes that O'Connor, "as a
dutiful daughter of the traditional Church, is prevented from seeing the logical
outcome of her own argument-that even the Church is capable of refusing to see
the whole of humanity; instead, it sees from its own 'infallible' and condescending
position. Thus in 'The Displaced Person' O'Connor can take Mrs. McIntyre to task,

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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

but O'Connor seems never to have questioned the authority of her own Church and
the diminishment of others that results from the Church's unbending assertion of
infallibility" (187). What Gordon means by "the Church" is unclear, although her use
of it partakes of a popular journalistic sentiment according to which "the Church"
is regularly conflated with the pronouncement of some particular Vatican dicastery
or other, or even the pope (in either case this would be a mistake). Even if one were
to grant the premise here that O'Connor is insufficiently critical of "authority" (the
presupposition behind Gordon's understanding of what constitutes "obedience"),
this does not necessarily follow from the fact that she is "a dutiful daughter of the
traditional Church" -as if "duty" necessarily leads to blindness. Moreover, it is well
known that the doctrine of infallibility is of very precise definition and limited
application; it does not apply to everything "the Church" (even in Gordon's vague
sense) does or says. Ultimately, the lack of theological precision on such matters
renders Gordon's use of the term "Church" as an unhelpful abstraction.

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