The Touchstone articles below have been intended to encourage you as you consider your impending collegiate future. We want you to be armed with wisdom so you are not led astray by the many smooth words you'll hear in many a lecture hall. As I was thinking about the Spirit of the Age (the World) vs God's Spirit, I remembered a touching yet heart-wrenching episode in the life of Flannery O'Connor, which I believe shows the gravity of what we've been discussing. I hope this following passage speaks warning and wisdom . . . winsomely, as it gets to the heart of the difference between moderns and Christians.
In addition to her literary insights, O’Connor was an insightful prophetess, capable of fingering the pulse of a dying western world, effectively diagnosing its religio-philosophic ills. In her day, secular humanism, what she termed “positivism” and therefore “nihilism,” was “the gas you breathe.” To her late tragic friend, Betty Hester (publicly known as “A”), O’Connor declared, “If I hadn’t had the Church to fight [nihilism] with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now” (CW 949). In a touching appeal to help heal Hester’s overwhelming past—strewn with witnessing her mother’s suicide and receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Army for a sexual indiscretion— O’Connor wrote, “Where you are wrong is in saying that you ‘are a history of horror’; the meaning of the Redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history” (qtd. in Enniss). Sadly, even with Hester’s brief communicative detour through the halls of the Catholic Church, it seems nihilism’s noxious gas eventually overwhelmed the oxygen supply of the Church, snuffing out Hester’s life by suicide in 1998. This heart-rending appeal for Hester to live in the light of a mystery larger than the small shadow of her past echoes O’Connor’s appeal to her audience in all her fiction.
To further prepare for your Final Essay on modernism and to continue those echoes, begin reading this rather helpful piece on what the Faith means in response to Modernism/Postmodernism: "Imaginative Orthodoxy." Mills identifies so many modern/postmodern tenets and critiques of them, which will help you immensely on your final essay.
Modernism (20th Century) - link
Modern Stories
- "The Destructors"
- "Once upon a Time"
- "Eveline"
- "The Open Window"
- "The Rocking-Horse Winner"
- "The Monkey's Paw" or this one, different link
Quo Vadis? (critiques of modernism)
- On Jane Austen, voting, feminism, and Mr. Wickham - Chesterton
- "Austen's Powers" - on Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff
- (Schwager) "A Geography of Kind" - on subtle beauties
- (Reno) "Over Our Dead Bodies" - on the glory of man
- "Polonius's Lie"
- "Imaginative Orthodoxy"
