What may prove to be the most important book written on Flannery O’Connor in decades was released only a few months ago.
Many will agree that Ralph C. Wood, professor emeritus of theology and literature at Baylor University, is the preeminent Flannery O’Connor scholar today. Those of us who know Ralph understand that although he is not Roman Catholic himself, he is more deeply educated in Catholic theology, philosophy, history, and literature than most Catholics; even more, he holds the Church in profound reverence. Indeed, in Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible: A Revolutionary Witness for the Sake of the Gospel, Wood calls not only on Dietrich Bonhoeffer but also on Benedict XVI to introduce his thesis. That thesis, as the title suggests, is that the Christian church in America is no longer “visible”—that is, the contemporary church is not the witness that it should, and must, be. The fault is not with America; the fault is with the Christian church that has, over its short American history, enjoyed a comfortable existence. The church has become irrelevant, marginalized, and has allowed the surrounding culture to impose its stamp of individualism and subjectivism. As O’Connor once stated sternly, in America, Christian holiness has become “vaporized.”
Literature and Spirituality
Wood looks to American literature for help in the hope of renewing the vitality of American Christianity and finds it in the work of Flannery O’Connor. He writes, “This book is devoted to the life and work of Flannery O’Connor as America’s strongest literary witness to radical Christian faith.” “O’Connor is,” Wood asserts, “the most important twentieth-century American Catholic writer.”
Although this book is about O’Connor, Wood imaginatively finds support from a couple of unlikely sources. One is Emily Dickinson—though she was not an orthodox believer—because, he argues, she nursed a spiritual longing. He brings the reader’s attention to “Number 373,” “This World Is Not Conclusion,” a lovely poem by which, Wood asserts, Dickinson “sets forth an arrestingly perceptive understanding of the relation between faith and doubt.” Wood also discusses Willa Cather and finds in her a soul who, in some of her work, seems to anticipate O’Connor’s use of peripeteia (περιπέτεια), or the reversal of circumstances first employed by the Greek tragedians. The clearest example of the affinity between Cather and O’Connor is The Professor’s House (1925), which follows an O’Connor-esque template.
The church has become irrelevant, marginalized, and has allowed the surrounding culture to impose its stamp of individualism and subjectivism.
Perhaps even more intriguing is Wood’s chapter 8, “Living and Dying Upon Dogma: The Dogmatic Witness of Flannery O’Connor and John Henry Newman to a Post-Christian Culture.” Wood concedes that the two seem miles apart but states that they meet at the intersection of dogma. Dogma may be antithetical to the spirit of the contemporary age, but it is nonetheless essential. It is reflexive to associate Newman with dogma, but it takes O’Connor explaining that it is essential to her own writing. Wood notes that, in correspondence, O’Connor revealed, “My stories have been watered and fed by Dogma.” Elsewhere she added, “Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that guards and respects mystery.” Wood explains,
Dogmas are not statements about empirically verifiable facts made in the manner of customary claims about objects. Nor are they purely theoretical truths that can be divorced from their liturgical setting. On the contrary, dogmas serve a virtually sacramental function. They convey grace.
O’Connor explained, more than once, that her stories are about grace. Wood notes that dogma provides the framework and foundation for the operation of grace, which for O’Connor is often precipitated by an unwitting devil.
The Nature of Evil
One need not read O’Connor very long to know that she believes in the devil; indeed, this is an important element of her theological artistry, even if he remains in the background. In one of her essays, she wrote, “To insure our sense of mystery . . . we need a sense of evil which sees the devil as a real spirit who must be made to name himself, and not simply to name himself as vague evil, but to name himself with his specific personality for every occasion.” She added in correspondence, “I want to be certain that the Devil gets identified as the Devil and not simply taken for this or that psychological tendency.” The devil is not just “simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy.” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a student of Wood’s at Baylor, pursues this theme in her 2017 Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Activity in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky. But far from having an unhealthy preoccupation with evil, O’Connor observed that one need not focus on evil because a “working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.” No more is needed for the average individual.
Wood explains that one of the devil’s most effective strategies over the last century, in O’Connor’s view, is the cultural and spiritual phenomenon of nihilism. She declared, “If you live today, you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe.” (Indeed, if I may say so, this is the thesis of my own first book on O’Connor: Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism (2005).)
O’Connor, however, does not focus on evil; quite the contrary, as she explains, “More than in the Devil, I am interested in the indication of Grace, the moment when you know that Grace has been offered and accepted.” O’Connor at times employs evil in her fiction instrumentally, to set up the opportunity for grace. Wood pursues this theme in his chapter 5, “Baptizing and Prophesying: The Fierce Struggle of Good and Evil in The Violent Bear It Away.” This is O’Connor’s second novel, and, although it is not as transparent as her first, Wise Blood, Wood provides one of the most illuminating treatments of the novel to be found.
Wood begins by considering the title, taken from the Douay-Rheims translation of Matthew 11:12:
And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away.
Wood explains that there are various interpretations of the Scripture: Some see it as a reference to heretics who would seize and destroy the Church; others suggest it refers to the Jewish Zealots who, insurgent style, sought to make the Romans miserable enough to leave Israel. In my view, the Scripture refers to the uncompromising “violence” by which the individual Christian must oppose his own sinfulness and anything that would draw him away from his faith commitment. Wood adopts this interpretation but adds another—namely, that those who would violently attack the kingdom are Satan and his dominion. He writes, “My purpose here is to demonstrate that both interpretations of the assaults on the Kingdom of God—both the satanic and the holy—are at work in The Violent Bear It Away.”
It is the “satanic” interpretation of Matthew 11:12 that occupies most of the chapter. In this pursuit, Wood begins with three ambitious objectives—namely, to address “(1) the waning American regard for the demonic; (2) the proper Christian understanding of evil as Nothingness; and (3) the anti-Christian estimate of the satanic as symbolic at best.” This leads Wood into an engaging discussion of St. Augustine, C. S. Lewis, and even the work of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as Wood provides his astute exegesis of the The Violent Bear It Away.
Race, Grace, and Redemption
“O’Connor’s Politics” (chapter 6) are “thoroughly Augustinian,” by which Wood means that O’Connor did not confuse the Church with America, and certainly not America with the Church—but neither did she advocate a “wall of separation” between the two that excluded the role of religion in the public square. For her it was a matter of ranking, of subsidiarity: Everything in its proper sphere began and ended with the Church.
In chapter 9, “Flannery O’Connor’s Black Characters: Race Revisited,” Wood addresses the occasional question that arises—especially since the George Floyd riots—of O’Connor’s regard toward Black Americans. In 2020, Loyola University in Baltimore thoughtlessly removed her name from a dormitory lest it give offense. This, of course, put her in the rather elite company of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Christopher Columbus, St. Junípero Serra, and, just for good measure, the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt in New York City.
Wood demonstrates the dignity with which O’Connor portrays the Black men and women in her stories and how her white Southern counterparts often compare unfavorably. No one has undertaken this analysis as comprehensively and persuasively as Wood has done; indeed, few have even tried. Wood includes “The Artificial Nigger” but also convincingly demonstrates O’Connor’s genuine and sincere regard for the Black race in “Revelation,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and her first published story, “The Geranium.”
“The Artificial Nigger” was first published in The Kenyon Review in 1955 and later that year was included in O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The publisher of The Kenyon Review asked O’Connor if she might choose another title. She refused. Even more, she called this her favorite story, and it is indeed elegant and soul-stirring. The title refers to the plaster statuettes, once common in the South, of a Black figure in the pose of a young farmhand or a stable boy. Some colloquially referred to these inanimate characters with the ugly phrase that O’Connor chose as the title of the story, but the phrase underscores the misery of Black American suffering.
Far from being a racist tale, in “The Artificial Nigger,” O’Connor pays the African American race the highest possible compliment: Out of their tragedy, O’Connor finds the opportunity for redemption. She identifies their misery with the sufferings of Christ, and their wretched history releases “an action of grace,” as the author once explained. To bring the thesis full circle, the recipients of that grace in the story are a comically portentous white man and his estranged grandson. O’Connor’s theology follows the lead of the apostle Paul, who told the Colossians, “I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Col. 1:24).
Salt and Its Savor
Although he did not include it, Wood might very well have added the well-known passage from Matthew chapter 5, which underscores—and restates—the thesis of this valuable book.
You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
What is so arresting about Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible is Wood’s argument that it is precisely O’Connor’s writing, more than any other American author, that is instrumental in fulfilling this admonition from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Ralph Wood is a gifted writer and a towering intellectual. His prose is elegant and his vocabulary rich; most importantly, he offers a vital window into Flannery O’Connor’s life and work. This year, 2025, is the one hundredth anniversary of O’Connor’s birth, and her work is being widely celebrated nationally and internationally. I believe O’Connor’s star is still on the rise, and her importance will only grow in the days to come. The last time I checked, there were over forty translations of her work and an Arabic translation was underway. In his span of eighty-two years, Ralph Wood has rightfully enjoyed the informal title of “dean of O’Connor studies,” a title confirmed with this new release, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible.