SOURCE: Desmond, John F. “Flannery O'Connor and the Idolatrous Mind.” Christianity and Literature 46, 1 (autumn 1996): 25-35.

[In the following essay, Desmond investigates O'Connor's view of the modern idolatrous mind through an analysis of her story “An Artificial Nigger.”]

It was Flannery O'Connor's fellow Southern-Catholic writer Walker Percy who defined central features of the modern idolatrous mind in his essay “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World.” Speaking of our present-day diminished religious capacities, Percy said:

The question is not whether the Good News is no longer relevant, but rather whether it is possible that man is presently undergoing a tempestuous restructuring of his consciousness which does not presently allow him to take account of the Good News. For what has happened is not merely the technological transformation of the world but something psychologically even more portentous. It is the absorption by the layman not of the scientific method but rather of the magical aura of science, whose credentials he accepts for all sectors of reality. Thus in the lay culture of a scientific society nothing is easier than to fall prey to a kind of seduction which sunders one's very self from itself into an all-transcending ‘objective’ consciousness and a consumer self with a list of ‘needs’ to be satisfied. … Such a man could not take account of God, the devil, and the angels if they were standing before him, because he has already peopled the universe with his own hierarchies.

(113)

Percy's references here to science and the “magical aura of science” should not be understood in any narrow disciplinary sense. What he means by these references is the modes of thinking that came to dominate Western consciousness in the aftermath of the Copernican revolution—that is, a way of seeing the world and human experience from a fundamentally empirical-instrumentalist viewpoint, or what Percy calls “an all-transcending ‘objective’ consciousness.” Such a view precludes seeing the world and the self's relation to it in sacramental terms. The mind which, to use Percy's phrasing, has “peopled the universe with [its] own hierarchies” is a mind that has created its own idols to bow down before and worship, and its self-absorption with these idols makes hearing the Good News virtually impossible.

That O'Connor shared Percy's view of the modern idolatrous mind is evident from her fiction, her letters, and her many statements about her artistic intentions. In her essay “The Regional Writer,” O'Connor describes a distinctive feature of her region as follows: “In the South, we have, in however tenuated a form, a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols” (MM [Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose] 59). Her statement both contemporizes the problem of idolatrous vision—they are our idols—and suggests an antithetical vision that must be registered by shock and violence. Her business as a writer, then, was to “pulverize” the idolatrous minds of her characters and readers through force. If she could not entirely restructure the modern idolatrous mind, she would at least open it to new ways of seeing by shattering the many false hierarchies her culture had given itself over to. My aim here is to provide a conceptual grounding for understanding O'Connor's presentation of the idolatrous mind, and to show her method of shattering idols through one representative action from “The Artificial Nigger.” But to grasp O'Connor's strategy requires some understanding of the nature and history of idol-making itself.

I

Owen Barfield, in his classic study Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, bases his understanding of idolatry on the twofold principle of participation and representation. He defines participation as the “extra-sensory relation between man and phenomena” (40). Participation is the fundamental nature of all reality, according to Barfield; stated differently, he argues that a spiritual or extrasensory bond exists among all things. Second, he argues that “the world is a series of collective representations” (18). These representations or appearances are created by the human mind as it penetrates the phenomenal world to discover the truth of reality and name it. The principles of participation and representation affirm our subjective as well as objective relationship to the world, contrary to the presumption of detached objectivity that Percy finds characteristic of the modern secular mind. Consequently, the existence of phenomena in the world depends upon our participation in them and our capacity to represent them in image and language. Given these two principles, one definition Barfield gives of an idol is that it is a representation taken to be independent of the human mind. Another definition of an idol is that it is a “representation collectively mistaken for an ultimate truth” (62). Not only is the idol mistakenly thought to be independent of the human mind, but also the relation between the mind and phenomena is taken to be only sensible (62-63). Barfield summarizes as follows:

Idolatry may be defined as the valuing of images or representations in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons; and an idol, as an image so valued. More particularly, idolatry is the effective tendency to abstract the sense-content from the whole representation and seek that for its own sake, transmuting the admired image into a desired object.

(110-11)

In tracing the historical evolution of idolatry in Western culture, Barfield focuses upon several turning points. One is the experience of the Jews and their attacks on the idolatry practiced by their Gentile neighbors. In the original forms of idolatry, the worshipers believed that the idol contained a spiritual force which was of the same nature as the worshiper (42-43). The Jews, as Barfield notes, attacked this notion vigorously. “Their idols, the Psalmist insisted, were not filled with anything. They were mere hollow pretenses of life. They had no ‘within’” (111). In rejecting this idolatry, the Jews seemed to reject the notion of participation itself. But in fact they replaced this original participation, which they saw as idolatrous, with a deeper form of participation or identification with the divine. For them God had only one name—I AM—and not many iconic representations, and that Name was “participated by every being who had eyes that saw and ears that heard and who spoke through the throat.” As Rabbi Maimonides wrote, it was “‘that name in which there is no participation between the Creator and any thing else’” (114).

The Jews, Barfield argues, transformed the experience of participation into an experience of inwardness and self-consciousness:

[They] tore the phenomena from their setting of original participation and made them inward, with the intent to reutter them from within as word. They cultivated the inwardness of the represented. They pinpointed participation to the Divine Name, the I AM spoken only from within, and it was the logic of their whole development that the cosmos of wisdom should henceforth have its perennial source, not without, and behind the appearances, but within the consciousness of man; not in front of the senses and figuration, but behind them.

(155)

The Jews' rejection of idolatry opened the way for the experience of the divine both as other—not represented in any thing—and as within, or as an inward experience of the Divine Name and Divine Presence (158). Barfield argues that the Jewish experience prefigured a second crucial turning point in the evolution of idolatry: the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the person of Jesus. This is for Barfield, and I would claim for O'Connor also, the principal turning point in the history of idol-making in the world. What is its significance in terms of a genealogy of idolatry?

Barfield describes the Christian Incarnation as an action, an event, opening the path to what he calls final participation. That is, in Jesus' complete identification with his Creator-Father, he sees the fulfillment in one man of the “inwardness” of “the Divine Name.” It is “the final participation, whereby man's Creator speaks from within man himself. … The Word has been made flesh.” Barfield then links this realization of final participation, as indeed O'Connor does, to the mystery and sacrament of the Eucharist. As he states, “All who partake of the Eucharist first acknowledge that the man who was born in Bethlehem was ‘of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made’; and then they take that substance into themselves, together with its representations named bread and wine” (170).

Notable here in Barfield's view is his linking of the Holy Eucharist and eucharistic action to the evolution of phenomena in the world—that is, to the notion that the phenomena of the world reach their ultimate fulfillment of being through the action of the Eucharist. If we accept this view, as I believe O'Connor certainly did, then it seems to me impossible to view her as possessed of a “medieval” mind, as some have argued, as if her thought were a throwback in some simplistic way to a premodern mentality. On the contrary, given her commitment to the Eucharist, she was in fact forward-looking, moving her characters toward final participation by shocking encounters with the real. Any notion of “medievalism” is incompatible with a genuine sense of eucharistic action going on in the world, a sense that I think O'Connor deeply possessed and represented in her fiction. What she was about was the ultimate saving of appearances through the hard process of redemption.

But both the rejection of idolatry by the Jews and the incarnational vision of participation that developed within Christianity were contravened by the new idolatry that grew out of the scientific revolution, the root of our present-day idolatrous mind. Barfield traces this modern idolatry to the rejection of the concept of participation during the medieval age and the confusion over the meaning of the literal that subsequently developed. For St. Thomas Aquinas and those of a participatory mind, the literal was not the thing or object itself but what it represents. For example, in the image of a “sword” as a representation of “power,” the literal is the power represented by the sword, not the sword itself. The true literal is that which is represented by the object, not the object itself.

The idolatrous mind that emerged from the scientific revolution fell victim to a fundamental confusion in which the object itself was taken to be the literal; hence, Barfield sees literalism as the besetting idolatry of our day. The identification of the literal with the object itself is a basic flaw in the scientific viewpoint, going back to the time of Copernicus. It is the root of the problem Percy identified in the earlier quotation I cited as the idolatry of scientism in the modern mind. One way to see the action in O'Connor's stories, as I shall exemplify later, is to see it as a struggle over the meaning of the literal, a struggle over the meaning of representations or appearances—of things such as peacocks, tattoos, stray bulls, automobiles, woods and treelines, sunset, wooden legs, and so on. This is a struggle over vision, over how to “see” (and read) the meaning of the world of representations, for both her characters and her readers. Much of O'Connor's strategy is to shatter the dominant literalism and open her characters and readers to new ways of seeing.

What O'Connor wants to represent is the invisible true literal expressed through things. In her essay on “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” she distinguishes this sense of the literal from the naturalism that is the bias of the scientific mind: “In a work of art we can be extremely literal, without being in the least naturalistic. Art is selective, and its truthfulness is the truthfulness of the essential that creates movement” (MM 70).

The metaphysical and theological basis of O'Connor's view of the literal can be found mainly in Aquinas, one of her favorite thinkers. Her whole treatment of idols and the idolatrous mind flows from this basis. To the mind imbued with a participatory view of reality, both the phenomena and their names are understood as representations. Barfield explains Aquinas's thought here:

On the one hand, ‘the word conceived in the mind is representative of the whole of that which is realized in thought. …’ (Summa Ia, Q.34, a.3). But on the other hand the phenomenon itself only achieves full reality (actus) in the moment of being ‘named’ by man; that is, when that in nature which it represents is united with that in man which the name represents. Such naming, however, need not involve vocal utterance. For the name or word is not mere sound, or mere ink. For Aquinas, as for Augustine, there are, anterior to the uttered word, the intellect-word, the heart-word, and memory-word (verbum intellectus, verbum cordis, verbum memoriae). The human word proceeds from the memory, as the Divine Word proceeds from the Father. Proceeds from it, yet remains one with it. For the world is the thought of God realized through His Word. Thus, the Divine Word is forma exemplaris; the phenomena are its representations; as the human word is the representation of intellectus in actu. But, once again, the phenomenon itself only achieves its full reality (actus) in being named or thought by man; for thinking in act is the thing thought, in act; just as the senses in act, are the things sensed, in act.

(85)

Crucial to an understanding of this metaphysic of representation and its implications for idolatry is the belief in God as Pure Act, the one Pure Being who is the antecedent source of all representation. O'Connor acknowledges this in her essay “Novelist and Believer,” following Sts. Thomas and Augustine in saying that “the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the mind of angels and physically into the world of things” (MM 157). Barfield reinforces the philosophical basis of this view:

Being is potential existence; existence actualizes being. Yet, in the universe, actus precedes potentia; for out of potentiality a being cannot be brought except by a being that is actual. The being of God is wholly actual, and is at the same time His existence; but, for creatures, it is only their existence which actualizes—actualizes not their own being, but the being of God, which they participate. Everywhere around us we must see creatures in a state of potentia being raised to actus; yet behind the appearances, the actus is already there.

(88; my emphasis)

In other words, given O'Connor's participatory theology of representation, idolatry involves taking the object itself both as literal and as independent of any ultimate source of being—of God as actus. But in order to do this, the idolator first has to see himself as independent of the source of being; he has to make of himself an idol before becoming an idol-maker. As Psalm 135:15-18 says:

The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of man's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like unto them: so is everyone that trusteth in them.

So also the prophet Isaiah: “They that make a graven image are all of them vanity. … They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes that they cannot see; and their hearts that they cannot understand” (44:9, 18; qtd. in Barfield 176-77). Think of Hulga Hopewell in this regard, with her idolatrous act of self-naming and her mental identification of her soul with the literal object, her artificial leg, making both herself and the object into idols. Yet against Hulga's idolatrous mind stands O'Connor's creative intellect, rooted in a participatory theology, systematically smashing the idols to bring the things of the world and those who would create idols back into true relationship with the source of being.

II

O'Connor's fiction is replete with characters possessed of an idolatrous mind. The idols they create take many forms—dilapidated automobiles, artificial legs and corrective shoes, purple hats, tattoos, the land itself, and of course, most of all, the idolatrous self-images that her characters create and worship until the shattering force of revelation is leveled against them. But to underscore the process by which O'Connor reveals and pulverizes this idolatrous mind, both in her characters and in her readers, I want to concentrate on one exemplary action: Mr. Head and Nelson's encounter with the statue of the Negro in “The Artificial Nigger.”

By the time Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson reach the white suburb near the end of the story, the old man's arrogant self-righteousness has been thoroughly exposed. Earlier, on the train, Mr. Head revealed his idolatrous view of Negroes when he chided young Nelson for not recognizing them as he did, and then objectified them with the remark, “They rope them off” (CW [Collected Works] 217). His false literalization of the Negro—reducing the living human mystery of a person to the sense data of skin color—is the typical action of an idolatrous mind. Yet such an act flows inevitably from the antecedent idolatrous act: Mr. Head's self-conceived image of himself as both superior to and detached from (“roped off”) from the world of the Negroes. At this point Mr. Head feels no inward bond, no participatory union, with such people.

But such “objectifying” is not to be sustained, and O'Connor begins to undermine it when Mr. Head and Nelson become lost in the city and are led to seek directions from a huge black woman in what Mr. Head refers to sarcastically as “this nigger heaven” (CW 222). Mr. Head is loathe to ask for help, of course. Such an act would be an admission of need, of dependence, and of human bondedness. Under these circumstances the woman is not someone who can be objectified and controlled by his mind. So Mr. Head keeps his distance. At the same time her true, literal mystery—irreducible to a matter of color—attracts and enfolds Nelson. And when Nelson does get directions from the woman, Mr. Head must have his revenge. Getting lost in the city is the action that begins to undermine the exalted idol he has made of himself, and he does not like it. It threatens to bring him closer to the inner truth of human contingency that he has tried to deny since the beginning of the story.

Because he is too cowardly to avenge himself directly against the black woman for his diminished status, he transfers his resentment to Nelson, making him the object of scorn. “And standing there grinning like a chim-pan-zee while a nigger woman gives you directions. Great Gawd!” (CW 224), he exclaims. His scorn and scapegoating of Nelson are the overt manifestation of the inner anguish he is beginning to feel as his self-image starts to crumble. In an attempt to revive it, Mr. Head will subject Nelson to the same aloneness he himself now feels by temporarily abandoning the youngster when he falls asleep. As justification he claims the moral need to teach a lesson to a child who “is always reasserting his position with some new impudence” (CW 225). Of course it is his own position that he really wishes to reassert. But his attempted reassertion rebounds against him when he denies any kinship with Nelson after the boy awakens and then accidentally knocks a woman down on the sidewalk.

Having “objectified” and denied Negroes earlier in the story, he now objectifies and denies Nelson in turn by claiming that the youngster is no kin to him. And so the inexorable logic of justice unfolds as Mr. Head himself is then objectified and denied when Nelson subsequently refuses to admit connection with him. Kinship denied, followed by forgiveness denied, projects the old man into the hell of isolation. Mr. Head now experiences the isolated awareness of the modern idolator turned inward upon itself, what Percy saw as the predicament of the modern consciousness separated from a sense of participatory communion with the world and with the order of being. And all evolved from Mr. Head's initial act of erecting himself as an idol of righteousness and then reducing the world outside himself—especially Negroes—to the status of inert, reflecting images of his own superiority.

Now that his claimed superiority has been exposed as a hollow image, Mr. Head begins to suffer, and hence to live. Suffering is the hard road back to participation. After denying Nelson, the old man is “lost” more profoundly than any simple sense of missed directions can suggest. “He knew that he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end” (CW 228). Yet he has begun to recognize his lostness, and so has begun to see himself and the world in a truer light: “He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation” (CW 229). What he needs, and what O'Connor gives us, is a way to show this new understanding and to acknowledge his bondedness with the world in a non-idolatrous way. What is needed is an image that reveals the truth of human suffering and rejection which Mr. Head now feels himself to be a part of, an image through which he can acknowledge his own and others' capacity for destructive idolization. Such an image is presented in the statue of the artificial Negro.

Mr. Head may now recognize the hollowness of his own once-proud self-image, but he needs help from Nelson to overcome his isolation and reconcile him to God, humankind, and the true order of being. He must acknowledge his link to the experience of suffering and loss undergone by the Negroes. Having recovered directions to the train, but not the connection with his grandson, Mr. Head suddenly confronts the mysterious statue, which “was meant to look happy because the mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead” (CW 229). Grandfather and grandson stand “staring at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy” (CW 230).

The statue of the artificial Negro is a perverse idol created by whites. It is a hollowed-out, despiritualized image of the Negro fashioned by whites according to their own idolatrous imaginings. As such, it reflects back their own spiritual hollowness. As the Psalmist says, “They that make them are like unto them.” In a sense O'Connor summed up the whole moral history of race relations in America in the statue of the artificial Negro. But for Mr. Head (and the reader) O'Connor shatters the idol these whites intended to create. The statue's “wild look of misery” conveys the truth of Negroes' suffering and, beyond that, the mystery of that suffering's power to heal and save. It touches the deeper mystery of mercy, which Mr. Head and Nelson are now capable of experiencing together.

Having known suffering and rejection and the need for reconciliation themselves, Mr. Head and Nelson participate in the true experience of the Negroes. In some mysterious way they are united with the agony intimated by the “wild look of misery” on the Negro's face. Mr. Head now senses that in his racism he too had created an idol of black people, “roping them off” in his mind as surely as he had seen and approved their segregation from whites on the train. He was the maker of the statue. For like the white suburbanites' iconic statue, Mr. Head's idolization of black people is a shadow image of the real idol he worshipped—his image of himself.

But Mr. Head also sees the hollowness of the suburbanites' statue, sees that it is a false representation of the experience. The idol they have constructed is a perverse diminishment of the reality—the inwardness—of the Negroes' suffering, endurance, and capacity for grace. All this is recognized intuitively and summed up in his apt remark, “They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one” (CW 230). With this remark Mr. Head separates himself from the false idol. But as for all O'Connor's protagonists, it has been a difficult road to recognition, one traveled only with pain and humiliation.

Idolatrous consciousness is the real target of O'Connor's use of violence in her stories. She assaults the idolatrous mind to shatter it, yet she implicitly affirms the human capacity for true self-knowledge and conversion. This spiritual violence she enacts, like the parables of Jesus, is an affront to the idolatrous vision of both her characters and often her audience. The reason, as Barfield notes, is the inner connection between idolatry and “a certain hardness of heart,” the idolator's resistance to deeper illumination. As Barfield says, “An attempt is being made, of which he is dimly aware, to undermine his idols, and his feet are being invited to the beginning of a long road, which in the end must lead him to self-knowledge, with all the unacceptable humiliations that involves. Instinctively he does not like it” (163). The idolator resists, in other words, that repentance of which St. Paul spoke, and to which O'Connor pointed when she observed that most of her characters were so hardened in their ways that only some shattering violence could begin to change them. Fortunately, Mr. Head has had the self-conceived idol, the artificial statue of his own false self, pulverized into a thousand pieces.

Barfield argues that in the evolution of mind there is no escaping our need to create representations, to participate in creating the world we imagine and inhabit. The question is how we do it: as idolatrous self-worshipers who act presumptuously, as if we were autonomous, objective minds; or as self-conscious shapers and savers of the appearances, recognizing our participatory roles in an invisible order of creation authored and sustained by God. O'Connor witnessed to both possibilities, using her art like a two-handed sword to shatter the idols and to clear a path toward liberating the images and their meaning in the light of the Divine Word.

Works Cited

Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. 1957. Rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1965.

O'Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Library of America, 1988; abbreviated CW in text.

———. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1969; abbreviated MM in text.

Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, 1975.