Hillbilly Thomism

                                               ​by Brother Dominicus

​I have been intrigued by the work of Flannery O'Connor for a very
long time. I also have been puzzled by her claims that her work is
thoroughly Christian, even Thomistic. After all, Thomas is the supremely
confident, holy thinker who serenely seeks truth. A well-ordered man who seems to be the textbook example of the notion that grace can perfect the fertile ground of the natural virtues he pursues. Her stories, however, are gory and graphic, and very few of the characters seem to have any
redeeming qualities (let alone virtues). They kill, cheat, deceive. They are,
in general, not nice Christian folks. Nevertheless, they are extremely well-
written and seem to embody the South. But they did not leave me feeling
that they were "watered and fed by Dogma."

Recently, I relented and finally bought the book Thinking Through
Aquinas, Essays on God, Humanity and Christ by Frederick Bauerschmidt.
It is a good book with several excellent essays. I warmly recommend it.
After years of being befuddled, his essay on O'Connor gave me personally,
a satisfactory handle on her.

She is a self-conscious modernist writer in the Southern Grotesque
style. She is aware that her readers in modern-day America are not
religiously inclined. She knows that "If you live today, you breathe in
nihilism". We live in an age in which "the moral sense has been bred off
sections of the population like the wings of certain chickens to produce
white meat on them".

O'Connor knows that for more and more people in our time, God is
dead. She does not write like Thomas for a general religious people. So,
how do you reach modern non-religious people? In her stories, the random
violence committed by her characters (who certainly do not strive for
natural virtues) is often accompanied by unexpected revelations.
Bauerschmidt suggests that "Perhaps she hopes that if goodness and
beauty cannot themselves be perceived they might be glimpsed in their
shadows—the evil and ugliness of which the modern world seems so
enamored". In her work this is the way she tries to speak (preach?) to the
people, ad gentes not just against the people, contra gentes. Something at
the heart of the Dominican vocation!

Bauerschmidt’s essay gave me the key to understand her work
and her Thomism in this paragraph (22):

          As O’Connor said, a hillbilly Thomist is likely to be mistaken for
          a hillbilly nihilist precisely because she seeks a way of proclaiming the
          Gospel through the guileful use of the nihilist’s own idiom of distortion.
          But in robbing the modern world of its smug certainties, one might be
          seen offering the abyss of nothingness rather than the abyss of faith.
          She seeks to show that the human will cannot master the void, or even
          play safely within it, in order to open up the possibility that the void has
          already been mastered. She induces an awareness of lostness so that
          we may recognize ourselves as found.


Frederick Bauerschmidt, Thinking Through Aquinas, Essays on God,
Humanity and Christ, Word on Fire Academic, 2024

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