[In the following essay, Russell maintains that O'Connor's ideas about race were profoundly influenced by her Catholic faith.]

Flannery O'Connor's thoughts on race are more informed by her Christian faith than by her geographic roots. American critics have long acknowledged the importance of her statements about being a Catholic writer in the South, but the dismal failure of the American church to communicate orthodox Catholic teaching since the 1960s has obscured to many what such a commitment implies. To be an intellectual Catholic like O'Connor meant engaging serious theologians and philosophers who labored to tease out the implications of Church dogma for yet another new era. So earnest was O'Connor about the necessity for an educated faith that she quixotically attempted to direct the readers of her diocesan newspaper to the riches of mid-century Catholic writing by reviewing major books. Thus she demonstrated her citizenship in another world, populated densely by French, Italian, and German philosophers with complex arguments about the way to reconstitute social relations after the disasters of totalitarian socialisms had tattered confidence in scientific and rationalistic solutions. Her views on race should be seen within the richer context of this debate.

In an essay to be found in O'Connor's library, “Christian Humanism,” Jacques Maritain contemplates the conditions for a just social order in Europe, writing that a

new age of Christendom, if it is to come, will be an age … in which temporal things, philosophical and scientific reason, and civil society, will enjoy their autonomy and at the same time recognize the quickening and inspiring role that spiritual things, religious faith, and the Church play from a higher plane. Then a Christian philosophy of life would guide a community vitally, not decoratively, Christian … in which men belonging to diverse racial stocks … would work at a temporal common task.

(164)

The issues of race are here framed by the demands of a spiritual order, not by a secular polity.

In another essay “The Democratic Charter” that uses the language of cultural rather than racial integration, Maritain warns that the

effort toward integration must not only be brought about on the level of personality and private life: it is essential to culture itself and [to] the life of the community as a whole, on the condition that it tends toward real cultural integration, that is, toward an integration which does not depend on legal enforcement, but on spiritual and freely accepted inspiration.

(121)

In “The Fiction Writer and His Country” O'Connor makes an analogous point about the artist's free, if initially unconscious, acceptance of the manners and mysteries of the country in which he learns to dwell:

When we talk about the writer's country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country that is, it is inside as well as outside him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the inner and outer worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.

(MM [Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose] 35)

Adjustment that integrates the inner and outer worlds must be freely undertaken by the artist and by every exile from what Boethius calls the “true country.” If the manners of a country or a culture are lived on the level of sensibility (as O'Connor suggests), then those manners cannot be changed by swift, legal fiat without generating a welter of lies at the deepest core of life—a cure worse than the disease.

The intellectuals whom O'Connor engaged argued that a Christian society is the result of an integration of the material, intellectual and spiritual riches of life as well as the free acceptance of others within the culture. Post-Enlightenment history has been seen as the story of the disintegration of the spiritual and the intellectual, as literary witnesses from Alexander Pope to Walker Percy make clear. More specifically, questions of the racial integration of colonized or previously enslaved peoples, especially after World War II, came to be framed by Catholic intellectuals within a larger dilemma of societal integration. With so much of the Western world sundered from its Christian intellectual roots, so much of its behavior lived according to (at the least) agnostic norms, a question naturally arose as to what further disintegration was tolerable and on what basis? Should a Catholic attempt legally to re-impose a religious conception of laws on divorce, extra-marital sexuality, contraception, or pornography? Apparently not—the social body would not accept such laws with “spiritual and freely accepted inspiration,” as Maritain wrote. Then should the federal government solve America's long racial shame with a set of integrationist fiats? For Flannery O'Connor, the answer, unlike that of many of her fellow Americans, was again, apparently not. Her community had its own cultural integration, to which forced racial integration seemed fatal.

This stance of O'Connor outside the Civil Rights Movement has caused many of her admirers to feel a certain amount of pain, but the stance grows less out of Georgia than out of a conception of society as intimately involved in the body of Christ. Such involvement cannot be forced on a culture or on a person even though it is precisely the function of law to institutionalize moral norms. One might well allow the question of just why, when so much in our society is anti-Christian, the federal power should legislate that racial issues must follow a Christian ideal, like that of equality. Yet clearly racial justice is a demand of Christian spirituality. In “Christian Humanism” Maritain's vision specifically condemns racism, as he condemns both Socialist and National Socialist theories: “Racism, on its irrational and biological basis, rejects all universalism and breaks even the natural unity of the human race, so as to impose the hegemony of a so-called higher racial culture” (192). He was writing, of course, about biological theories of race, but his comments are applicable to sociological theories as well.

O'Connor, like her European contemporaries, was not sanguine about the norms a state would be likely to use in regulating morality in a secular age. The experiences to date had not been promising; their most obvious fruits were totalitarianism and World War II. The dangers of an imperial democracy were not emotionally apparent to Americans, even as their own government became ever larger, swelling into a global power with a large and permanent presence in their lives. In a tired historical irony the government that conquered statist regimes would come partly to resemble what it had defeated. As America turned increasingly to social engineering on the grand scale, O'Connor's thoughts were informed by thinkers like Gabriel Marcel and Jacques Maritain, who had seen freedom crushed and horror unleashed by states devoted to visions of rationalized social perfection. Marcel's and Maritain's counter-visions of government were based on the action of the holy spirit in history, with all the inefficiency of personal choice and conversion of the heart which the spirit implies. But Marcel warned that one should not be optimistic about such a development:

The totalitarian catastrophe which has unleashed its hell on Europe bears witness to the immense gravity of this historical phenomenon. If the true city of human rights, the true democracy, does not succeed in disengaging itself from the false, and in triumphing at the same time over antidemocratic enslavement, if in the ordeal of fire and blood a radical purification is not accomplished, then Western civilization risks entering upon an endless night.

(The Mystery of Being 19)

Radical perfectionism, whether advocated by totalitarian or more genial democratic elites, promised to lead to a similar enslavement of the spirit.

Thus O'Connor found herself in thoughtful opposition to her fellow American intellectuals on the issue, not of race, but of a civil rights movement that hoped to trigger federal intervention to impose a racial solution on a deeply ambiguous situation. In some ways the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect product for America after the war, for two incompatible strains of thinking have always dwelt in the house of the American psyche. One is a fierce millenialism born of Edenic myths of America; the second is an imperturbable pragmatism. Americans seldom ask themselves whether X agrees with their foundational principles. They ask themselves, “Does it work? Does it solve the problem?” If policy X helps ameliorate an undesirable situation, then X must be good, regardless of its unintended consequences or its cost to other principles. The Civil Rights ideal both satisfied a millennial hunger to make the world just and offered convenient solutions to hundreds of years of prejudice, thousands of years of human nature.

O'Connor's opposition to the Civil Rights Movement seems based on two beliefs. One was the aforementioned conviction that social life is bound up in a spiritual unity, not merely a legal one. Such ideas point toward a gradualist, organic model of social change, not to massive legal reshuffling. This belief is one basis of her many statements of attachment to the culture, the manners, the ways of her Southern community. A second conviction was her deep personal distrust of the social reformer as she knew him or her, including pre-eminently her friend Maryat Lee, to whom most of her racial comments are written in verbal sparring that lasted for years. What is perfectly clear is that O'Connor did not trust a social conscience divorced from Christian principles. For her, virtue in the public sector was necessarily accompanied by humility in the private. Her letters make it clear that she sensed a lack of such humility in James Baldwin and the whites who made civil rights a cause, and even sometimes in Martin Luther King. The social reformers of her later stories, unlike the genial liberals of her Iowa thesis fiction, are uniformly grotesque. These “progressives” range from the nihilistic Joy/Hulga Hopewell of “Good Country People” and Mary Grace of “Revelation” to the agnostic Sheppard of “The Lame Shall Enter First” and his more developed counterpart Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away. But the more specifically manipulative defenders of Negro rights like Asbury Fox of “The Enduring Chill” and Julian in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” as well as the Machiavellian racial game players—Walter Tilman and Oona Gibbs of the unfinished novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?—all demonstrate a cynical pride that turns the sins of others into an occasion for self-gratification and self-congratulation.

It is difficult to know to what degree O'Connor anticipated that the moral claims of the Civil Rights Movement would grow into the entitlement claims of the Great Society. Certainly the transition between battling for equal voting rights and school desegregation to defending the status of welfare clients now seems very short. It took little genius to perceive the pattern of grievance and governmental programs used as a means for attaining power and wealth. Mrs. May's portrait of O. T. and E. T., the Greenleaf “boys,” is a prophetic satire of the welfare state as it developed in white America after World War II:

They had both managed to get wounded and now they both had pensions. Further, as soon as they were released from the army, they took advantage of all the benefits and went to the school of agriculture at the university—the taxpayers meanwhile supporting their French wives. The two of them were living now about two miles down the highway on a piece of land that the government had helped them to buy and in a brick duplex that the government had helped to build and pay for.

(CS [The Complete Stories] 318)

While it is true that the Greenleaf boys did fight for their country and are far less immediately unsavory than Mrs. May's sons, they remain nameless men with interchangeable faces, so far removed from civil behavior that they will allow a deadly bull to run wild for three days and then leave the shooting of the animal to their father, even though he feels he is betraying their prosperity. Their taciturn and sullen children are bilingual, and their cows give milk that need never be touched by human hands. Mrs. Greenleaf prays to Jesus in wild agonies of love, but her sons seem to love only the material symbols of the modern world.

.....

The deeper question of O'Connor's views on race, rather than on the Civil Rights Movement, has been examined in many useful ways by Ralph Wood in his essay “Where Is the Voice Coming From? Flannery O'Connor on Race.” He posits that O'Connor was never a racist in her convictions but was so in her personal opinions, suggesting that “opinions are often quickly formed and quickly abandoned. … Convictions, by contrast, are slowly acquired and firmly maintained” (96). Wood clearly demonstrates, however, that O'Connor's stories support the dignity and humanity of black people at almost every turn even when, like most of her whites, the characters are acting sinfully.

At the risk of “straining the soup too thin,” I would posit that the distinction between personal opinion and conviction does not quite explain O'Connor's much quoted statement that she “is an integrationist by conviction, but a segregationist by sensibility.” O'Connor was not racist in either opinion or conviction, but she clearly understood herself to have a sensibility attuned to race as it had become a part of the manners of her region. In a distinction that O'Connor would have known from her own copy of The Mystery of Being, Marcel argues that “opinion is a seeming which tends to become a claiming.” In other words, opinion is a reaction of the senses that claims to be knowledge. To believe is more forceful still; it is to “assert that I have come to the conclusion, once and for all.” Marcel goes on to note that opinions may be related “only to the immutability of my interior disposition” but a belief is a “judgement arbitrary or not, which bears on the object itself.” He calls this judgmental sort of belief a “belief that.” Yet beyond either opinion or “belief that” is faith, which is a belief in, “which absorbs most fully all the power of your being” (78). Wood seems to use the word opinion in a way that resembles most closely Marcel's term “belief that,” thus implying that O'Connor's racial comments are a judgment, and a rather arbitrary one, on the material being of black folk, even though she realized that these judgments contradicted what she believed spiritually. Marcel's subtler distinctions, on the contrary, imply that much of what we call racism is neither opinion (a sense phenomenon elevated to a claim) nor judgment (“belief that”), but something more akin to an unrationalized defect of the senses.

It is disturbing but true that all groups seem to have some instinctive, unreasonable sense of superiority to another group. While we can clothe this instinct in phrases such as “a compulsion to marginalize the other” or “valorization of one's own group,” all such jargon really says is that we dislike what is not us, or worse, that we despise what is too much like us and seems not very pleasant. One is shocked to read in one of her letters that O'Connor claims she does not like Negroes or to see her tell a racial joke. But it comes as no radical claim to say that O'Connor did not much like white people either. She loved them instead, a much harder task. Using Marcel's terms, one cannot say that Flannery O'Connor had racist opinions. Her racial statements are not “seemings” that she wished to claim as true. She knew her feelings about race occasionally rubbed against her faith and her opinions on right and wrong. In such cases she did not try to defend the validity of her responses; they were simply her reactions. Perhaps this honesty about one's sensibilities rather than one's opinions is part of what she is referring to in “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” when she writes,

though the good is the ultimate reality, the ultimate reality has been weakened in human beings as a result of the Fall, and it is this weakened life that we see. And it is wrong, moreover, to assume that the writer chooses what he will see and what he will not. What one sees is given by circumstances and the nature of one's particular kind of perception.

(MM 179)

The academy's desire for a racially edifying novelist whose sensibilities always match her opinions and beliefs may prove to be as elusive and naive as the 1950s desire for an “edifying” Catholic novelist, a desire that O'Connor mightily resisted. Like religious orthodoxy, racial orthodoxy may make the mistake of pursuing the “sentimental,” which “wishes to circumvent our slow participation in Christ's death” and instead arrives “at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite,” as O'Connor noted in “The Church and the Fiction Writer” (MM 148). Demands that O'Connor should have “spoken out” on the racial question ring strangely hollow in a time when so few are speaking out about why the fruits of Civil Rights and the Great Society include the murder of more young black men on ghetto streets and more black babies in abortion mills than avid Klan mobs could conceive of in their most apocalyptic dreams.

O'Connor's life and fiction go beyond a human distaste for the exterior of the “other” and see into the worth that Christ sees and seeks. She is not sensitive; she is charitable. Her “feelings” or “opinions” on race should be viewed—and I think that she so viewed them—as analogous to the same kind of defective sense that impedes belief in the mystery of the Eucharist. The contradictions between one's sense, one's opinions, and one's convictions are familiar to every Catholic who confronts the Real Presence of Christ's body and blood in the apparent bread and wine of the Eucharist. It is a disjunction to which the Catholic becomes accustomed and about which he ceases to worry. The senses are not, after all, our masters but our servants. No guilt inheres in seeing bread or wine upon the altar. There is no necessity to attempt to make oneself believe one sees or tastes what one does not. It is enough to know that the Host is the blood and the body; it is helpful but not necessary to believe it at every moment. In similu modo, one may have sensible reactions to skin color or cultural markers, reactions formed deep in the manners and bones of a self formed before one knows oneself, and it is foolish and pathological to lie about such things. One needs only to know that the other person is the son or daughter of God.

Looking at O'Connor by this standard may explain better why she could allow herself the use of locutions that we find out of place. O'Connor did not feel that she was making any situation worse, just as she would not believe that avoidance of the word nigger makes better any soul's evaluation of dark-skinned people. Her comments varied with the occasion and her mood. O'Connor was not judging black people morally, existentially, or essentially in her sensible reactions any more than she was judging Shriners, old ladies in funny hats, or newspapermen. These are simply lived reactions of flawed being. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O'Connor is quite specific about this distance between sense and thought. Here she writes,

[Y]ou don't write fiction with assumptions. The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all, and the South impresses its image on us from the moment we are able to distinguish one sound from another. By the time we are able to use our imaginations for fiction, we find that our senses have responded irrevocably to a certain reality. This discovery of being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work into real human perspective for him.

(MM 197)

In O'Connor's fiction, her faith comes clear. Her stories are written from the position neither of “opinion” or “belief that,” but “belief in,” which demands total surrender. Here words from Marcel, which are also resonant of O'Connor, help us again:

As I really contemplate the landscape a certain togetherness grows up between the landscape and me. But this is the point where we can get a better grasp of that regathering or regrouping process … is this state of in-gatheredness not, in fact, the very means by which I am able to transcend the opposition of my inner and outer world?

(128)

Marcel continues, “Ingatheredness is not a state of abstraction from anything,” but is rather, “essentially a state in which one is drawing nearer something, without abandoning anything” (128). At this level of ingathering, at this true source of the convergence of which O'Connor writes, the Christian writer separates “belief in” from the reaction of the passions. There, for the believer, racism is not permissible. At this same place of ingathering, Marcel writes that a man is forced to ask himself, “Who am I to condemn others? Do I really possess the inner qualifications that would make such condemnation legitimate?” (128).

At this point it might be helpful to examine briefly the practical consideration of whether the “racial” comments made by O'Connor in her correspondence with Maryat Lee justify full and separate publication, as some scholars desire. Having read all of the O'Connor-Lee correspondence available in the excellent collection of O'Connor materials in the Ina Dillard Russell Library at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, I find that in some ways this is a dreary exchange since Lee was herself almost a caricature of the resentful Southern socialite turned perverse artiste. Lee's side of the correspondence is a drone of bohemian imitations and delusions about her efforts and talent. Many of O'Connor's most withering phrases are part of a long-term attempt to puncture Lee's sanctimony about matters artistic, racial, social, and religious. More damaging to a fair analysis of the evidence is the fact that Lee's letters vanish from the record just as the national situation begins to turn more confrontational and O'Connor's last responses, more specific. Thus we do not know to what provocations a sick and dying O'Connor was responding.

What becomes most striking about the correspondence and the recent debate about race in O'Connor is that almost every time the occasional negative racial remark appears—for example, O'Connor's reaction to James Baldwin—Sally Fitzgerald has already included the letter in The Habit of Being. This includes O'Connor's important statement: “My question is usually, would this person be endurable if white? If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute” (580). Indeed, almost all of O'Connor's statements on race are in that volume already. But what happens is that such references become part of a vast web of concerns, comments, loves, and sacrifices that O'Connor pours forth from her home in Georgia. Because there is no lurid spotlight heightening her every phrase—as if race is all she thinks about or worries about—her comments look lucid, tart, usually fair, and quite consistent with all that we know about her.

I visited Milledgeville convinced that, whatever the response to it, the lovers of O'Connor deserved a book that examined the race issue, put forth all the relevant letters, and laid out the evidence for all to use, even though the word racism is frequently employed with McCarthyite irresponsibility in much modem criticism. I now believe that separate publication would be a grave and foolish mistake. True, we all wish for a somewhat expanded version of Sally Fitzgerald's collection, but that is only because her magnificent job has made us want more. To quell uninformed speculation it would certainly be helpful if the very few unpublished racial references could be included in a revised edition of The Habit of Being, just as Fitzgerald has given us all the others, within a full context of the author's many concerns and ideas, not blown out of proportion for the sake of academic contentiousness.

Beyond this practical matter it seems more important to stress that what is needed is a far more European and Catholic appreciation of O'Connor's ideas on race, nationalism, society, and church. Thinkers who disagreed, such as Gilson, Maritain, Guardini, Bernanos, Bloy, Voegelin, Aquinas, and even Chardin, Rahner and Küng, formed a larger part of her mental landscape than American politics. “We shall overcome” is a fine phrase, but O'Connor's reaction to it needs to be examined, as she might have examined it, in the light of more complex formulations of Marcel, such as this reflection on freedom:

What I call true political emancipation is the philosophy and the social and political practice (and the corresponding emotional orchestration) based on the true manner of understanding the conquest of freedom; and it is not to a myth that it leads, but to a concrete historical ideal and to a patient labor of forming and educating the human substance.

The misfortune, in the eyes of the philosopher of culture, is the fact that the great democratic movements of modern times, especially those in Europe, have most often sought true political emancipation under the standards of false political emancipation, that is, under the standards of a general philosophy forgetful of Gospel inspiration, from which the democratic élan proceeds and from which it is in reality unseparable.

(The Mystery of Being 18)

Flannery O'Connor lived in a world vastly larger than Georgia or New York. Her views were formed, as has been truly noted, by her region, by the manners and the habits of the South. But she was a citizen of a world of ideas far beyond these local concerns. She believed that her fellow Georgians should read the social, political, and religious thinkers she reviewed; certainly we should take her seriously enough to read them in order better to appreciate her.

Works Cited

Marcel, Gabriel. “Reflection and Mystery.” The Mystery of Being. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950. 2 vols.

Maritain, Jacques. The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain. Eds. Joseph W. Evans and Leo R. Ward. NY: Scribner's, 1955.

O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1987.

———. The Habit of Being. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1979.

———. Mystery and Manners. Eds. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1957.

Wood, Ralph. “Where Is the Voice Coming From? Flannery O'Connor on Race.” Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 22 (1993-4) 90-118.