This year marks the sixty-second anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s death. The great “hillbilly Thomist” and writer is most famous for her gothic short stories and novels such as “Good Country People,” A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Wiseblood. A hidden gem of O’Connor’s corpus, however, is her own thought on the vocation of the fiction writer, a vocation animated by an almost Benedictine spirit of stability. In a post-modern milieu where genius is associated with madness and those who pursue writing, art, music, or poetry are characterized by eccentricity, reading O’Connor’s thoughts in conversation with The Rule of St. Benedict, reveal a different model for the Catholic creative and intellectual.
The Vocation of the Fiction Writer
There is no shortage of pop culture examples associating genius with madness, particularly in cinema. Movies in the last forty years such as A Beautiful Mind, Pollock, Camille, Maestro, and Last Call all depict real-life examples of creatives who suffered mental health issues, had exacting personalities, or had habits and practices that were eccentric. Moreover, that association—between genius and madness—has roots in the Classical tradition, as seen in works such as Plato’s Phaedrus where he speaks of “divine madness” in relation to beauty. Implicitly or explicitly, our culture seems to take that correlation and think of it as causation; to be a good intellectual and creative, one must have a touch of madness or eccentricity. The popular phrase misattributed to Hemingway, “Write drunk, edit sober,” reflects this view.
O’Connor’s vision of the creative occupations, specifically fiction writing, is different. For O’Connor, fiction writing is a vocation and thinks that one hears the call to become a fiction writer by recognizing the gifts within him or herself. As she says in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.” Having recognized these gifts, the vocation of fiction writing is one ordered towards elucidating truth “both in matter and in mode . . . in an imaginative sense.” The fiction writer’s vocation is to mediate truth through story, a distinct task from elucidating truth as such, something proper to the role of the philosopher or theologian.
“It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”
Aiming at truth “in an imaginative sense” means that the writer takes an incarnational view of all reality, dealing neither in pure spirit nor pure matter. Rather, echoing Aristotle and Aquinas, O’Connor believes the artist knows firstly through his senses and recognizes that the created things in this world reflect in some way the goodness of the Creator. As O’Connor says in her essay “Novelist and Believer,” “The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality.” As anyone who has read O’Connor’s short stories knows, however, this incarnational view does not blind the writer to human frailty, evil, or any other privation of the good. Rather, as O’Connor explains, it “sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good, does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.” O’Connor’s openness to recognizing humanity’s pitfalls and the presence of evil in her own writing led many to accuse O’Connor of being nihilistic. However, O’Connor recognized that in the midst of evil, grace is always at play. The vocation of the fiction writer is one directed toward recognizing the interplay between nature and grace and the latter’s operation amidst human brokenness.
Implicit in O’Connor’s overall vision of the fiction writer’s vocation is a disposition of stability. Without it, the writer risks losing his or her keen powers of observation that allow for the incarnational view of all reality and the recognition of the interplay of nature and grace. Seeing reality clearly requires taking a long view of things, and a writer living a frenetic life is not disposed to taking that view. Those wanting a deeper understanding of the kind of stability O’Connor implies can find it in a much older source: The Rule of St. Benedict by St. Benedict of Nursia.
Stability in the Rule of St. Benedict
The Rule of St. Benedict was devised by St. Benedict for his monastic communities, the Benedictines, sometime after 530 AD, after he had founded the Abbey of Monte Cassino. Fundamentally, following The Rule involves giving up one’s own will to follow the will of God. The life of Benedictine monks is ordered around work and prayer, or ora et labora, and The Rule integrates those two tenets into a consistent pattern of life. Hence, The Rule prescribes that monks pray seven times a day, do spiritual readings, and perform manual labor each day.
Undergirding all of The Rule is stability. Stability is a prerequisite for discerning the monastic vocation and is one of the three vows The Rule prescribes for monks, along with fidelity to monastic life and obedience. The degree to which monks embrace stability, St. Benedict believes, is also an indication of a monk’s virtue. In the very first chapter of his Rule, St. Benedict explains that there are four kinds of monks: the cenobites, who live in a monastery guided by a rule and an abbot; the anchorites, who live as hermits in imitation of the Desert Fathers; the sarabaites, who are the “most detestable kind of monks” because of their weak character and worldliness; and lastly, the gyrovagues, the monks St. Benedict finds even worse than the sarabaites. St. Benedict describes gyrovagues as those “who spend their entire lives drifting from region to region, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries. Always on the move, they never settle down and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.” For St. Benedict, the gyrovagues are so odious because they fail to heed the basic tenet of monastic life: stability of place, the commitment to live out one’s vocation at a particular monastery for the entirety of one’s life.
Stability for St. Benedict also refers to one’s interior life, as in the constant raising of the heart and mind to God aided by a routine of prayer and work. Indeed, St. Benedict thinks it is foundational for performing good Christian works. In chapter four of The Rule, St. Benedict delineates these works at length, starting with obeying the Ten Commandments, then the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and then moving to other admonitions, such as “Live in fear of judgment day” and “never lose hope in God’s mercy.” He concludes by saying, “The workshop where we are to toil faithfully at all these tasks is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community” (emphasis added).
Though O’Connor does not explicitly cite The Rule of St. Benedict in her essays on the vocation of the fiction writer, O’Connor’s own lived example as a fiction writer and her thoughts outlined above make The Rule an appropriate source to flesh out O’Connor’s understanding of a good fiction writer. O’Connor’s daily writing routine shared some aspects of the monastic life: She writes in a letter to a longtime anonymous correspondent known as “A” that she says “Prime in the morning” and “sometimes . . . Compline at night,” two of the daily monastic hours of prayer. She had a consistent routine of theological reading, explaining in another letter to A that she reads St. Thomas’s Summa theologiae for twenty minutes every night. Her writing routine was also consistent. She wrote for two hours each morning and would then spend her afternoon writing correspondence or seeing visitors. And furthermore, O’Connor was familiar with manual labor, living with her mom on their small farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia.
For O’Connor, as for St. Benedict, stability is not only a stability of place, but also a stability of the interior life.
O’Connor also criticizes her own version of St. Benedict’s gyrovagues when she assails those would‑be writers who are caught up in their own emotion. She writes in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”:
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility” (emphasis added).
For O’Connor, as for St. Benedict, stability is not only a stability of place, but also a stability of the interior life.
Though The Rule of St. Benedict has a particular monastic context, the lay fiction writer can nonetheless draw wisdom from those Benedictine tenets of stability, prayer, and work. By giving a fixed order to one’s life—when to eat, when to pray, when to work, when to recreate—one is not distracted by figuring out the practicals of constituting one’s day and can focus instead on sharpening one’s incarnational vision. For those aspiring to live the writing vocation O’Connor describes, St. Benedict’s Rule suggests the following five practices:
1. Write consistently from a fixed geographic location but also a fixed place within it.
St. Benedict teaches us that in order to penetrate deeply into reality, we need to limit the number of changes we have in our experience of the outside world. Writing from a fixed location focuses the mind away from new experiences of scenery and brings it to attention on deeper human experiences. Indeed, Flannery O’Connor herself said that most of a writer’s good material came from his or her childhood, not from adult travels.
2. Write only for a set amount of time during a set time of day.
Taking an incarnational view of reality and ordering one’s day accordingly means avoiding having intellectual work that is totalizing or all-consuming. Setting fixed start and end times for writing ensures this.
3. Have some kind of craft or physical activity that complements the writing each day.
This goes toward the work element of the Benedictine rule.
4. Set aside time to welcome friends or correspond with guests.
In the Benedictine tradition, encountering the other is an opportunity to encounter Christ. On the natural level, it also draws a person out of himself, helping him avoid being caught up in his own head.
5. And lastly and most importantly, root your day in prayer, recognizing that the reality from which you’re observing is governed by God, the author of reality itself.
Aside from the obvious good of giving thanks and praise to God, prayer is another way of drawing a person outside of himself—something important for the writer as he or she seeks to avoid the sentimentality that comes from indulging one’s ego.
Ultimately, St. Benedict’s Rule and Flannery O’Connor’s vocational vision point towards a different model for the Catholic creative and intellectual. While popular culture and even high culture suggest that a spark of madness and eccentricity is necessary in order to be a genius, O’Connor advocates for the stable genius. For the writing vocation, this means one whose disposition of stability allows him or her to see reality in all its beauty and messiness.