On Tuesday, the Catholic Society hosted the second in a series of three lectures on theology and literature. The talk, given by Jesuit priest Brian Van Hove, S.J., was titled “Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Being” and focused on the mid-20th century southern Catholic author Mary Flannery O’Connor.
Van Hove is currently the chaplain for the Religious Sisters of Mercy in Alma, Mich., and holds a master’s in French literature from Saint Louis University, Licentiate of Sacred Theology degree from University of Toronto, and a doctorate in church history from the Catholic University of America.
Van Hove began by describing the life of O’Connor, starting with her childhood in Savannah, Ga., her early diagnosis with the debilitating disease lupus, which eventually took her life, and her life in seclusion on a farm due to her sickness.
O’Connor’s work reflected her life a great deal. All of her characters were the kind of people that she grew up with in the old south of religious and racial tensions – white, protestant southerners dominate her works. She used these characters to illustrate the Catholic beliefs that she grew up with and the theology she read as an adult.
“O’Connor’s work was spicy, odorous, racy, repugnant – anything but boring,” Van Hove said. “But it had the same truth as the dry, manualist Thomist theologians that she was reading.”
For O’Connor, the grotesque was a way to reach deeper truth by making people question the surface of things. Her stories were so harsh and unaesthetic – she called them “opus nauseous” – that she often had trouble getting published, accepting offers from pulp magazines in order to get her work in print.
Despite these difficulties, she was a great writer and a deep perfectionist who would rewrite scenes repeatedly until she was completely satisfied, and was always working to improve her writing and offering advice to friends and admirers.
Van Hove said at the heart of all her writing was a deep Catholic sacramental worldview that embraced the radical union of spirit and matter – a one reality that all of humanity gropes for. Her stories feature characters who have rejected this sacramental reality in favor of a kind of purely spiritual gnosticism.
These characters undergo sometimes horrifying events that act as a sort of catalyst to deeper understanding and conversion.
After Vatican II, a lot of the most prominent Catholic writers from before the council were left behind. During the `70s and `80s many of their works were brought back to the forefront, but only bits and pieces were rescued.
While she’s faded from her former prominence in the Catholic mind, a recent biography and continued scholarship have made her still relevant.
“She just doesn’t go away,” Van Hove said.
