Flannery O'Connor: Mystery and Manners

   I adore her. She challenges me, requires something of me, and invites me to listen to the world and the happenings of the heart.

   The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.

   It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. 

   It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. 

   For the last few centuries we have lived in a world which has been increasingly convinced that the reaches of reality end very close to the surface, that there is not ultimate divine source, that the things of the world do not pour forth from God in a double way, or at all.

   For nearly two centuries, the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man.

   In twentieth century fiction, it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.

    We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern.

   Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental. When Emerson decided, in 1832, that he could not longer celebrate the Lord's Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America was taken, and the spirit of that step has continued apace. When the physical fact is separated from the spiritual reality, the dissolution of belief is eventually inevitable.

   Today's reader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift.

   Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

   The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common – a distrust of the abstract, a respect for boundaries, a desire to penetrate the surface of reality and to find in each thing the spirit which makes it itself and holds the world together. But I don't believe that we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society. Until that time, the novelist will have to do the best he can in travail with the world he has. He may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition, and through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by. This is a modest achievement, but perhaps a necessary one.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor