A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O'Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

Studies in Theology and the Arts

by Michael Mears Bruner

Conference on Christianity and Literature (CCL) 2020 Book of the Year - Literary Criticism.
The good news of Jesus Christ is a subversive gospel, and following Jesus is a subversive act. These notions were embodied in the literary work of American author Flannery O'Connor, whose writing was deeply informed by both her Southern context and her Christian faith. In this volume in IVP Academic's Studies in Theology and the Arts series, theologian Michael Bruner explores O'Connor's theological aesthetic and argues that she reveals what discipleship to Christ entails by subverting the traditional understandings of beauty, truth, and goodness through her fiction. In addition, Bruner challenges recent scholarship by exploring the little-known influence of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian, on her work. Bruner's study thus serves as a guide for those who enjoy reading O'Connor and―even more so―those who, like O'Connor herself, follow the subversive path of the crucified and risen one.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Theology, Biography, Biography Memoir, Religion, Academic

Audio CD

Published June 9, 2020

Reviews

[Mackey · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can read more on my blog at https://wordpress.com/macsbooks311.wo...

At university I floundered, no wait, I explored.... several academic degrees before (finally) graduating with a double major, double minor. I actually had enough hours in literature to add an addition minor in lit and it was due entirely to Flannery O'Connor. I followed her through American Literature, Great Female Writers, Southern Literature and more. I simply could not get enough of Flannery O'Connor and her eclectic writing style. Imagine how exited I was when I discovered A Subversive Gospel, a new look at O'Connor's writing and the influence that her devout Catholicism played on her writing and her characters.

In A Subversive Gospel, a very readable academic book, Bruner examines O'Connor's works through the microscope of her religion and asks that you, the reader, do the same. He points out that much of O'Connor's work was heavily influenced by Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Thomas Aquinas  - and it was - as well as by her own devotion to the Catholic church and her fascination with the Catholic saints. Bruner then suggests that O'Connor's writing shows the reader God's grace through the ugly, malformed and the sinner which is far more great a grace than one seen through the eyes of the saint. It is an interesting premise for which he has much research and scholarly backing. It is a well written and thoughtful book. However...

After studying O'Connor as much as I have done over the years and loving her and her characters as I have, I must add that it was O'Connor's writing that led me to leave the church entirely. Through her eyes and her writing I saw the church and the South as it truly was - a place not filled with beauty but of underlying darkness. O'Connor struggled with illness throughout her adult life, as have I. She was devout, as was I, and through her writing I often saw a woman, much like myself, who knew what we were supposed to believe but knew there was an underbelly of something else lying there. She showed her readers that underbelly, the darkness, the cruelty, the ugliness that was the church, the south, its people. IF you are a very religious person and you want to see a very religious, devout woman, then that is what you will see in her work - I suppose - as Bruner has done. IF you are a woman, raised in the South, raised in a community of misogyny, of racism, in a world where anyone who is not white, male and perfect is condemned, then I suspect that, as I did, you will think this book is an interesting read but full of rubbish. O'Connor was a strong woman who was marching against her time, against her culture and through her work she still is. I will not reduce her to a religious paradigm. She was far too talented for that. 

Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: Proposes that the grotesque and violent character of Flannery O'Connor's work reflects her understanding of the subversive character of the gospel and the challenge of awakening people in the Christ-haunted South to the beauty, goodness, and truth of the gospel.

A number of years ago our book group decided to read the collected works of Flannery O'Connor. It was a challenge. The stories involved everything from a stolen wooden leg to a rape to the murder of a whole family. The word "grotesque" is often used to describe her work. The question arises, why did this single Catholic woman, who lived on her parents' farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, suffering and ultimately dying of lupus, write such strange stories?

Michael Mears Bruner explores this question in his contribution to the Studies in Theology and the Arts series.  His discussion focuses particularly around the novel The Violent Bear It Away (an allusion to Matthew 11:12 in the Douay-Rheims version) and a statement about the main character, Francis Tarwater, about whom O'Connor says:

"His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf."

Bruner's thesis is "that through the medium of her art, Flannery O'Connor showed her readers how following Christ is a commitment to follow in his shadow, which becomes a subversive act aesthetically ("bleeding"), ethically ("stinking"), and intellectually ("mad")." Elsewhere, and repeatedly in the text, he refers to the "terrible beauty, violent goodness and foolish truth of God." Bruner helps us realize that O'Connor writes in a Southern context that has been effectively innoculated against the Christian gospel--grown so comfortable with Christian language that it is impervious to the radical and startling claims of the Christian faith--the beauty of God's love revealed in suffering, the goodness and righteousness of God revealed in the violent death of Jesus, and the foolishness of a message wiser than human wisdom. The grotesque and the violent in O'Connor's stories startle us awake to realities to which we've grown too accustomed.

Bruner begins with tracing the development of O'Connor's writing from the earlier to the later works which reflect a theological turn that he attributes to the influence of Baron von Hugel's thought. He then looks at the moral and theological vision that shapes her work as a Roman Catholic in the fundamentalist south. He connects her dramatic vision with her subversive aesthetic and then goes deeper into how her work subverts the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth. Finally he applies this approach to her last novel, The Violent Bear It Away. A brief conclusion is followed by a liturgical celebration of the Eucharist using O'Connor's work.

The body of this work consists of dense literary analysis, and it is helpful to have recently read and have a copy of O'Connor's work handy. In the process, Bruner joins O'Connor in challenging the nostrums and platitudes of Christian faith with the subversive character of O'Connor's work. One example is this passage:

"Yet this hardly settles the matter regarding the notion that God might indeed be terrible, and so what do we do with this component of O'Connor's fierce theology? She refuses to placate us with religious euphemisms and spiritual jargon, preferring instead to 'shout' and 'draw large and startling figures" in our faces" (p. 154).

O'Connor wrote to disturb the comfortable, and Bruner demonstrates just how subversive she was in her story writing. He also helps us understand the theological turn in her writing and the influences other critics have noted briefly or not at all. He helps those of us disenchanted with enculturated, saccharine versions of Christianity who ask, "is that all there is?" to see that O'Conner writes out a more bracing vision, one we might even need to brace ourselves against. She defies all our conventions of beauty, goodness, and truth, Bruner argues, because that is what the gospel does. She bids us ask the dangerous question of whether this is in fact the gospel we've believed--as dangerous a question as a Flannery O'Connor story.

[Schuyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been giving myself a personal crash course in Flannery O'Connor before going to see the movie Wildcat. Bruner's fascinating book (based on his doctoral thesis) dives deep into O'Connor's use of violence and Christianity in her short stories through the categories of terrible beauty, violent goodness, and foolish truth. While I appreciated it, it frequently went over my head and required a knowledge of her longer novels I didn't have. I listened to it in audiobook form, and I think it would have been easier to read in print with annotations and underlining due to its depth. If you're looking for a more general exploration of O'Connor for beginners (like I was) this might be one to save for later. I'd like to revisit it though, as it explores O'Connor through theology and aesthetics, often referencing her connections with Aquinas since she describes herself as a "hillbilly Thomist." I'm going to look into Ralph C. Wood's book on O'Connor next. 

[Michael Philliber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t even recall how or why it came about, but around twenty years ago I tripped across Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and was hooked! Since then I have read most of her writings and a few works by others analyzing her style and stories. Recently Michael Mears Bruner, associate professor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific University in California, and ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), has presented his own examination of O’Connor in a 260 page softback, “A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth,” which is part of IVP Academic’s “Studies in Theology and the Arts” series. This well-written volume is ideal for O’Connor aficionados, amateurs and interested authors.

The author, beyond the introduction and conclusion, works through five lengthy chapters that evaluate O’Connor’s literary and spiritual formation that shaped and colored her stories. Bruner shows how the primary shapers of her moral and dramatic vision were Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Thomas Aquinas via Jacques Maritain, her tussle with debilitating illness and her Southern habitation. Yet, in the end, the moral and dramatic vision were genuinely hers; “through her fiction, Flannery O’Connor subverted the conventional notions of truth, goodness, and beauty, not merely from a position of Christian dogma but out of an aesthetic impulse” (1). Bruner spends his time in “A Subversive Gospel” encouraging O’Connor readers to “apply a kind of crucifix hermeneutic to her fiction – a kind of crosshairs reading that alerts us to the fact that when something violent happens in her stories, or someone is or says or does something foolish, or something terrible or awful appears, there is a decent chance that O’Connor is actually trying to show us something good, true, or beautiful, respectively” (2).

Bruner points out that in her fictions O’Connor “showed her readers how following Christ is a commitment to follow in his shadow, which becomes a subversive act aesthetically…, ethically…, and intellectually….” (9). Further, “that redemption is hard because life is hard, and life is hard because we are sinners who resist redemption with every fiber of our being, preferring the easy stroll to the arduous pilgrimage, a pilgrimage fraught with dragons at the side of the road waiting to devour us” (73). In fact, the author asserts, in many of O’Connor’s tales “it is not the devil…but God who is the greatest offense, and his terrible mercy is often more painful than the devil’s wickedness” (153). One way this shows up is in her prophets who find that being burned is an occupational hazard, since “burning functions as a trope in O’Connor’s material and is used to indicate when a true subversion (read conversion) is taking place. God’s mercy burns to salvific effect. There is a cost to following Christ in his “bleeding stinking mad shadow”” (162). This is so because O’Connor “was interested in portraying her characters’ struggles with redemption, not with damnation” (183). Indeed, a cruciform shadow lurks through her narratives.

“A Subversive Gospel” gives due credence to O’Connor’s loyalty to the Catholic Church and Catholic dogma, and that the dogma didn’t stifle O’Connor but gave her real liberty, since the “greatest art represents firmly fixed boundaries within which artistic expression is free to roam and reign” (83). And so her stories “express a fierce dogmatism because the church at its best has insisted on dogmatic ferocity in its commitment to Scripture and tradition, and O’Connor founded her very existence in the church” (142). One aspect where her dogmatism surfaces is in the recognition that grace and nature often dance together, and “that grace and nature are separated only at our peril.” Therefor in her works demonic violence “seeks to separate grace from nature, and by so doing objectifies nature” whereas divine violence “refuses to separate grace from nature and, in such refusal, thereby grants the recipient of such violence access to redemptive truth, goodness, and beauty” (150-1). Truly, there is a cruciform shadow lurking in her stories!

“A Subversive Gospel” was an enjoyable, reflective volume. O’Connor fans should obtain a copy with speed. But also, Christian fiction writers need to pour over these pages thoughtfully and consider their own style. Finally, literature classes in Christian schools and colleges ought to make it required reading followed by heavy discussion. I happily and highly recommend the book. It may just be that once you’ve tackled it, you will see with fresh eyes and notice the cruciform shadow haunting her stories.

Thanks to IVP Academic for providing, upon my request, the free copy of the book used for this review. The assessments are mine given without restrictions or requirements (as per Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255).

[Amy Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Flannery O'Connor and I love theology so this book was a hit for me. Michael Bruner is a friend and I was privileged to hear him talk about his love of Flannery O’Connor and his work on her for his dissertation among other projects prior to this book coming out. His ability to connect his love of film, literature, even and especially difficult stories like those O’Connor writes, with theology is as instructive as it is a joy to hear - and now read- from him. I highly recommend reading O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away along with Bruner's book. It made my experience of her (and his) work so much richer.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 3 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

I’ve only read a handful of things by O’Connor but they have always greatly intrigued and mystified me. Thus I have probably read as much about her as by her. But there is a lot of diversity out there about what she was doing. This book has made the most sense of anything I’ve read thus far about her. Here’s a few quotes:

This book makes the argument that, through her fiction, Flannery O’Connor subverted the conventional notions of truth, goodness, and beauty, not merely from a position of Christian dogma but out of an aesthetic impulse. O’Connor loved God and loved literature, and through her unique expression of this dual affection, her stories serve as a dual critique—a call to arms, really—against both the weak-kneed sentiments of conventional religion and what she termed the “domesticated despair” of contemporary culture’s narrative.1 One of O’Connor’s essential points is, in fact, that devotion to Jesus Christ is as much a matter of aesthetic commitment as it is of religious devotion. (1)

O’Connor’s stories, and especially her characters, were a strange combination—indeed, many argued, a contradiction—of the holy and the grotesque, of faith and violence, of divine wisdom mixed with hillbilly superstition. Beyond this consent, however, the unanimity fell apart. Though most reviewers agreed that her stories were odd, some found them disturbing and offensive to the point that they either dismissed her as a hack or castigated her for being such a misanthrope, while others found in them a profound and beautiful truth creatively wrought by a budding genius. (22)

O’Connor’s God was mainline liberal Christianity’s worst nightmare, a God you could not control, one who was neither respectable nor tame. This was a ferocious deity to match O’Connor’s ferocious stories. (76)

What I am calling “Flannery’s frame” had, like the frame of a picture, four sides—that is, four limitations—that, when taken together, conspired to give her stories their peculiar artistic vitality and theological resonance: her effective confinement in Milledgeville, Georgia; her protracted, fourteen-year struggle with lupus; her rigorous commitment to the habit of art; her dogmatic but deeply personal Catholic faith. These four sides that make up O’Connor’s frame act not only as boundaries that marked her limitations as a writer but also as bridges to the possibilities of her art. (82)

O’Connor apparently did not believe, neither for her characters nor for her friends, that salvation was only possible within the Roman Church. (99)

“The fundamentalist Protestants, as far as doctrine goes, are closer to their traditional enemy, the Church of Rome, than they are to the advanced elements in Protestantism.
(100)

O’Connor believed that “the universe of the Catholic fiction writer is one that is founded on the theological truths of the Faith, but particularly on three of them—the Fall (or Sin), the Redemption, and the Judgment”—which, together, also formed the theological vision of her southern neighbors: “I accept the same fundamental doctrines of sin and redemption and judgment that they do.” (106)

O’Connor did not write for mere shock value. She intended her reader to be confronted, and not simply by the text, but more importantly, by the God who stood behind the text.
(115)

This impulse to distort in order to show a truth had its most profound effect, I believe, on O’Connor’s treatment of the transcendentals, understood historically and within the Christian tradition as the divine attributes of beauty, goodness, and truth. O’Connor, of course, did not invent such subversions. She was, in many respects, merely recovering a biblical tradition. In Scripture, divine violence is often a subversive means of redemption, as when Adam and Eve are banished from paradise for their own sake. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, or Jacob’s wrestling match with God at the shores of Peniel, where he is left a cripple, are examples of God’s subversive goodness. (123)

O’Connor’s fiction serves as a particularly apt subject for studying the severity of divine grace and its necessarily subversive effects on the transcendentals, given that her stories typically center on a violent action (subverted goodness) in confrontation with varyingly grotesque characters (subverted beauty) who do, say, and believe foolish things (subverted truth). (139)

O’Connor was perhaps the most deeply religious and theologically astute of major American fiction writers, certainly of the twentieth century, and she adopted her notion of severe grace from Scripture and from the center of the church’s long theological tradition. She also intuited such notions out of her own experience. What makes O’Connor’s contribution to American letters all the more remarkable, however, was her unwavering commitment to her craft. She was a careful artist and discerning theologian and held to the essential symbiosis of one’s religious and artistic visions, believing that both operated at the deepest reaches of mystery while being bordered on all sides by generative constraints. This combination of mystery within constraints (mystery and manners), a tension she spoke much of in her letters and essays, lent to her writing a peculiar, dark resplendence that is her signature style, and it formed an approach she called Christian Realism. (140)

Flannery O’Connor’s stories are shocking because the gospel that informed and inspired her stories is shocking. They shock and offend because Scripture shocks and offends. They subvert normal categories because Scripture subverts normal categories.
(142)

More often than has been recognized, the terrible things that happen in O’Connor’s stories happen at God’s behest, not the devil’s. The direct role of divine providence in the goring of Mrs. May in “Greenleaf,” for example, or the drowning of Bevel in “The River,” or Nelson’s and his grandfather’s difficult and jarring epiphany in “The Artificial Nigger,” or Ruby Turpin’s damning vision at the end of “Revelation,” are all instances of divine intrusion. … Young Tarwater’s “friend” in The Violent Bear It Away is the most obvious example of the devil’s being an “unwilling instrument of grace” (Rufus Johnson in “The Lame Shall Enter First” is another). Suffice it to say that in O’Connor’s fictional universe, where the devil begins and God leaves off, is not always an obvious demarcation.
A large difference rests here on a subtle distinction. It is one thing to say that a violent action happens at the devil’s behest, but then God makes something good come out of it. It is entirely another to suggest that a violent action is directly willed by God, and though the devil may be involved, he is—by necessity as much as by divine fiat—an unwilling participant. In many instances of violence in her stories, O’Connor claimed for herself the second option: .. to make stories ‘work,’ I have discovered what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been an unwilling instrument of grace. (146)

We are left with but one conclusion: the action was willed by God, though it may have come at the hands of the devil. The distinction between the divine violence of God and the demonic violence of the devil in O’Connor’s fiction is crucial for the purposes of interpretation. Both types of violence are in her stories because both are in her theology (and both are in Scripture), but she understood only the first—divine violence—to be wholly redemptive, though terrible, which only adds to the confusion as to which terror is operative in any given scene in her stories. (146)

In many of O’Connor’s stories it is not the devil, then, but God who is the great offense, and his terrible mercy is often more painful than the devil’s wickedness. (This is the “costingness” of belief that O’Connor associates with von Hügel in her review of his Letters.) Of course, there is violence wrought from evil in her stories, but even then such violence often ends up being the unwitting material of God’s gracious and merciful purposes, but more often than not, the violence so often assumed to be evil in nature … finds its in the inscrutable will of God. … I am arguing that the violence that is perpetrated is not a violence that was meant for evil but God turned to good (Gen.50:20), but a violence that itself was God’s will (Ex 21:12-13). (153)

A cost is paid in any personal encounter with the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who calls his people to obedience and suffering, which is the way of joy in the divine economy. Moses, Noah, Jonah, Jacob, the prophets: all found the divine summons terrible in their exactitude and severity, and God marked them indelibly and painfully—every one of them—lest they mistake the summons for a spiritual vision of merely allegorical significance, or a ruse of the devil, or a case of the worms. Indeed (O’Connor seems to imply), if this is the God who sent his own Son to die a ghastly death at Golgotha, how can those caught up in the same plan for salvation avoid a similar fate? (179-180)

O’Connor’s subversive theo-literary approach … has an unmistakably purgatorial effect: God’s beauty shocks, terrorizes, and offends; God’s goodness ruins, defeats, and destroys; and God’s truth burns, condemns, and shames, all for the sake of redemption, both for her characters as well as for her readers. (218)

O’Connor: A God you could understand would be less than yourself. (226)

[Cara Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps instead of reading about Flannery O’Connor, I should just pick up the collection of essays written by her and come up with my own analysis.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor” a very good and in-depth look at Flannery O’Connor and her writings. If you are the “Christian” in the pew experience this read as a audio book. If you are a “Christian” scholar experiencing this book as a physical read. Either way the references and bibliography are great and can lead you into other avenues of exploring and understanding Flannery O’Connor. This is my second book searching for an understanding of Flannery O’Connor and her writing for determining if I will read her 3 novels. In my humble opinion and not being a “Christian” scholar, I feel the author, Michael Bruner, has researched and presented a very “on the level” presentation of Flannery O’Connor, her life, her Catholic/Christian understanding, and writing perspective in providing the reader with how we are affected by “God” thru his teachings (Bible) and our fellow humans, “created in the image of God”. Highly recommend! Experienced as an Audio book

[Adam Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short Review: I have decided to read all of O'Connor's fiction this year. I have previously read only her A Good Man is Hard to Find and her Prayer Journal. And A Subversive Gospel is oriented toward someone that is pretty familiar with her work. There are lots of references to her work. I stopped about 2/3 the way through to listen to the audiobook of Wise Blood to get a sense of how she wrote a novel.

This is the type of book that I would like to read more of. It is oriented toward making the reader a better reader of both O'Connor and a better reader more generally. If you wanted to be a lit major but never were, this is probably a good book for you.

I will probably go back and re-read the whole book, or major sections of it once I finish reading all of O'Connor's fiction.

my longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/subversive-gospel/

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a wonderful analysis of O'Connor's theology as displayed in her work and serves as a much-needed reminder of what the author calls "the subversive nature of belief itself." While there's certainly a place for warmth and light in Christian writing, a robust theology also requires that flowery sentimentalism be stripped away in light of the gritty reality of the narrow way: "Prophets generally do not escape the wrath they preach to others...A cost is paid in any personal encounter with the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who calls his people to obedience and suffering, which is the way of joy in the divine economy." Heartily recommended, but only for those who are already on solid footing with O'Connor's work.

[Joe Natali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bruner provides a solid insight into O’Connor’s work. Of particular note is his ability to explicate O’Connor’s use of violence in her stories and novels. That being said, Bruner’s exegesis too frequently smacks of the sort of overly academic stretches for symbolic meaning that O’Connor herself often lampooned.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Makes some good points but ultimately is unclear where it breaks new ground and rehearses standard O’Connor interpretation where it is clear. A fine introduction, but I personally prefer Jonathan Rogers intro to O’Connor.

[Willie Krischke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book. I'll be back in a few days with a better review, but wanted to record that I did, in fact, finish this in 2017, as I set out to do.

[C.N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. If you want to know what Flannery's purpose in her writing is, this is a book that will help you understand.

[Aubrianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful.