“The Puttiest View You Ever Did See”
Some years ago, my wife and I took our four children to Six Flags Over Georgia with those so-called “rides,” best understood as modern day adaptations of Kafka’s torture and execution device in his short story “In the Penal Colony.” At Six Flags, several of these mechanisms are ominously named “Georgia Scorcher,” “The Great American Scream Machine,” “Superman: Ultimate Flight,” and “The Riddler Mindbender.”
It was there I made the worst decision of my parenting career. My oldest daughter wanted to bring a friend, but I said, “This is a family trip.” I then gallantly added, “Listen. I will ride anything you want to ride.”
The lines were often long. What seemed less horrifying, but more unsettling, were the TVs mounted in trees at strategic locations on the long paths leading to the most popular rides. No chance of getting bored! I don’t need to talk to my daughter! Doctors’ offices and restaurants have become just as considerate. And now, the greatest invention of all, the “smart” phone, is making us dumb and dumber. It offers an endless supply of wondrous games, mindless conversations, superficial news, and hilarious cat videos, all guaranteed, as progressive rock band Pink Floyd anticipated, to render us “Comfortably Numb.”
We live in a frenetic world in which we are protected from ourselves, from healthy introspection, and the opportunity to hear God’s still, quiet voice, as did Elijah (see 1 Kings 19:11–13). We now seem to embrace something we might call an “amusement imperative.” I have a right to be entertained! I am entitled to endless distraction! Addiction to social media is pandemic. If we ever needed the habit of a contemplative life, we need it now, before we are pulled any further into the swirling cyber vortex.
For those seeking a life of contemplation in our hypermedia world, whether as a religious or a layperson, Aristotle offers a fuller explanation of the contemplative habit than even St. Thomas Aquinas does, and certain elements of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction enrich our understanding of the contemplative tradition.
If we ever needed the habit of a contemplative life, we need it now, before we are pulled any further into the swirling cyber vortex.
Considerable attention has been paid to St. Thomas Aquinas’ influence on Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, but not until Fr. Damian Ference’s excellent Understanding The Hillbilly Thomist has this subject been treated thoroughly, systematically, and convincingly. Less attention has been paid to the influence of Aristotle—whom Aquinas simply called “the Philosopher”—on O’Connor. Given that Aquinas spent his life integrating Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, it’s fair to say that anyone who claims Thomas Aquinas’ influence is also tacitly acknowledging Aristotle’s influence.
O’Connor’s exposure to Aristotle seems to have come from at least two different directions. Though a compendium of his works resides in her personal library, it doesn’t appear to have been handled much; more likely she absorbed some of his thought by reviewing several of Eric Voegelin’s works—not the easiest way to learn Aristotle!
In addition, following her residency at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, she started living with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, the latter being the renowned classicist and translator of Greek and Latin works. O’Connor reported in correspondence, “I am living in the country with some people named Fitzgerald. . . . He teaches Aristotle and St. Thomas at Sarah Lawrence College and has a lot of books which I am getting to read.”
As her health degraded, O’Connor wrote to Betty Hester, her most significant correspondent, “I am learning to walk on crutches and I feel like a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no cause to be thinking of St. Thomas or Aristotle; however, you are making me more of a Thomist than I ever was before and an Aristotelian where I never was before.”
Aristotle explains that “living blessedly” means a life of “theoria” (θεορια) or contemplation. Theoria has as its most familiar cognate, “theory,” which refers to an idea that is acknowledged a priori; proof by induction may follow but may not be necessary for credence. Theoria, in this context however, is better understood in reference to another cognate, “theater.”
In classical Greek performance, the theatron (θέατρον) was the seating area for those attending a comedy or a tragedy. Theoria, then, refers to the experience of beholding something worthy of attention, something noble. Even more, as Aristotle explains in his Poetics, it was expected that those attending a tragedy of Euripides or Sophocles, or even a comedy of Aristophanes, were, in surrogate fashion, participating in the performance insofar as their passions would be stirred, which would in turn lead to moral improvement. Theoria, then, offers an ennoblement of the soul.
Aristotle speculates, “If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us.” “It will further be our natural ruler and guide,” he writes, “which directs us to take thought of things noble and divine.” We have the potential at this point to move toward what he calls “perfect happiness,” which, he concludes, is “contemplation.” He reiterates, “Happiness . . . must be some form of contemplation.”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Aristotle’s concept of contemplation is that it is the noblest state for human beings because men and women share in God’s own state of being: God himself is in a state of contemplation. At first this may seem strange—what is it that God needs to contemplate? Contemplation, however, is not so much an activity as it is a serene state of being, a deep apprehension of the truth; it stands to reason, then, that it is where human beings find ultimate happiness, or to use Aristotle’s term, eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). Accordingly, where else would God himself be than in a contemplative state? Aristotle writes: “God’s state of being, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.”
Aristotle, then, first taught us the possibility of a contemplative life and O’Connor, from time to time, gives us a ringside seat to see what that life may look like. O’Connor’s literary device of abrupt, forceful grace often takes her characters to a kind of contemplative state. That “work around” moves her protagonists beyond superficial and worldly preoccupations, beyond time, and takes them to a vision of the truth, the truth about themselves and the truth about God. They experience the timeless dimension in which God himself resides—namely, eternity.
Where else would God himself be than in a contemplative state?
In the final sections of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, Hazel “Haze” Motes is aided in reaching a contemplative state by God’s grace in uniform, in the guise of a highway patrolman. When Haze cannot produce a driver’s license, the officer invites him to drive his car to the top of the next hill because “I want you to see the view from up there, puttiest view you ever did see.” Haze shrugs but obeys, and then gets out of the car because the patrolman explains he can’t see the view if he doesn’t.
As the patrolman pushed Haze’s car off the embankment (“Them that don’t have a license, don’t need a car.”), it cascaded down to the bottom of the hill, and “the car landed on its top, with the three wheels that stayed on, spinning.” In so doing, he rid Haze of the object of his security, of his consuming preoccupation. Haze had earlier declared, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” The effect on Motes is dramatic as his universe has suddenly expanded: “Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space.” In correspondence, O’Connor explained that Hazel Motes “was a mystic,” and the encounter with the patrolman is his first step toward that state.
In the short story “Greenleaf,” the self-righteous Mrs. May is, by a dispensation of grace, gored by Mr. Greenleaf’s bull. O’Connor had earlier described Mr. Greenleaf as having a face “in the shape of a chalice,” a description that anticipates the source of the grace that will intrude into Mrs. May’s life. O’Connor describes Mrs. May’s final moments: “She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.”
Contemplation is a state of being, not an activity; Sally Fitzgerald shrewdly entitled O’Connor’s collected correspondence The Habit of Being. But does reaching such a “habit of being” require the violence that O’Connor often inflicts on her characters? Hopefully not—it’s important to remember that O’Connor, by her own description, used the literary method of the “grotesque”: She employs distorted, exaggerated techniques to seize the reader’s attention, and to show just how resistant human beings may be to the introduction of grace in their lives, especially as it bestows the truth of self-knowledge, which, in itself, may bring serenity. No more avoiding self-reflection, no more pretending. As Psalm 19:12 says, “But who can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults.”
St. Thomas Aquinas explains the more “ordinary” psychology of moving to a contemplative state that doesn’t necessarily rely on bulls or patrolmen. He explains that over a lifetime, we must endeavor to acquire the discipline and habit of a contemplative life, an ongoing process in which we cultivate the virtues at our disposal: moral, intellectual, and theological, all the while training the will to cooperate with God’s grace, which makes it all possible. As Aristotelian Josef Pieper explains, contemplation does not mean passivity; its acquisition and enjoyment requires an active, forward leaning posture. We need time, space, and energy—elements that, ironically, seem to be in short supply in the modern age. Taking the TVs out of the trees and putting the dumbphones away are the first steps.