Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [152]
But these near-contemporary theologians, along with William Lynch, Erik Langkjaer’s teacher at Fordham, whose concept of a “theology of creativity” O’Connor singled out in a review in the summer of 1959, or the neo-Thomism of Etienne Gilson, in Painting and Reality, were just bits and pieces of a vision she finally saw synthesized in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. In her first mention of Teilhard, in a February 1960 review of The Phenomenon of Man, O’Connor announced to the small circulation of readers of the Bulletin that the name, which she spelled out phonetically for them, “Tay-ahr,” was one that “future generations will know better than we do.” She went on, “The scientist and the theologian will perhaps require a long time to sift his thought and accept it, but the poet, whose sight is essentially prophetic, will at once recognize in this immense vision his own.” At the center of this vision, she explained, was “convergence.”
A careful reviewer, O’Connor quickly and intuitively hit on a characterization of Teilhard as poet and visionary that kept her in good stead as his posthumous writings were attacked by both scientists, for ascribing consciousness to matter, and theologians, for ignoring original sin, or contradicting the creation story in Genesis. But at Christmastime 1959, she had come across a “lucky find” in a commentary on a passage of St. Thomas Aquinas. “St. T. says that prophetic vision is dependent on the imagination of the prophet, not his moral life,” she wrote Betty. Not only did this discovery make official her own kinship with Tarwater, but she could apply these same terms to Teilhard. Like her, he was a writer tilling the fields of language and imagination, meant to be judged by the power of his “prophetic” vision, rather than specific moral or scientific ideas.
At the heart of Teilhard’s vision were formulations that obviously spoke to Flannery and created a strong resonance for her with the content as well as the poetic style of his writings. Particularly appealing was The Divine Milieu, an intimate, personal meditation, the second of his books, published in America in 1960 and described by her in the Bulletin as “giving a new face to Christian spirituality.” She drew marginal lines in her copy next to Teilhard’s concept of the Incarnation as “a single event . . . developing in the world”; a cosmic presence in local material lay behind her own arguing for regional writing. But the quieter concept that she kept mulling and returning to privately was “passive diminishments,” Teilhard’s unusual term for significant suffering, which she obviously applied to her own disease. As she wrote a friend: “Pere Teilhard talks about ‘passive diminishments’ in THE DIVINE MILIEU. He means those afflictions that you can’t get rid of and have to bear. Those that you can get rid of he believes you must bend every effort to get rid of. I think he was a very great man.”
Flannery proselytized avidly for this “great mystic . . . if there were errors in his thought, there were none in his heart,” recommending him to a long list of friends, including Ted Spivey, Betty Hester, the Cheneys, Cecil Dawkins, Robert Fitzgerald, and Father McCown. Spivey’s response disappointed her, as he found in Teilhard merely a “Jesuit mind.” She shot back, “Some of the severest criticism I have read about it has come from other Jesuits,” and she even pandered to Spivey a bit, by detecting in their evolutionary views “parallels between Jung and Teilhard that are striking.” More to her liking was Brainard Cheney’s confirmation that “his work is, I think, the most important philosophical statement for Christianity since the Summa.” When the American Scholar, a periodical of the Phi Beta Kappa Society,