Instruments of Grace
Flannery O’Connor & the Pantocrator
Flannery O’Connor had more than a passing interest in the icon of Christ Pantocrator that looks down from the central dome of Orthodox churches, signifying that he and no other is the Ruler of all things. She made it the basis of her celebrated self-portrait, albeit in complex fashion. And in “Parker’s Back” she put it to powerful fictional use. This is not only her last finished story before her death at age 39 in 1964 but one of her funniest as well.
Obadiah Elihue Parker has covered his body with tattoos of sexual power and predation: “a tiger and a panther on each shoulder, a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest.” Thus does he fashion himself as a tattooed conqueror of women: “He had never yet met a woman who was not attracted to them.” Not, that is, until he meets Bible-quoting, image-despising Sarah Ruth, a fundamentalist who has nothing but contempt for them: “It’s a heap of vanity,” she snorts, “Vanity of vanities.” And when Parker seeks to demonstrate that he is no sort of a Christian by flinging forth a string of curses, she silences him by whacking him mercilessly with a broom.
The God whom Sarah Ruth has encased in her gnostic box is the same God whom O. E. Parker has spent his life seeking to escape. He hilariously fails to flee the Hound of Heaven when he crashes his tractor into the single and easily avoidable tree standing at the center of the field he is mowing. The collision sets the tree ablaze and throws Parker shoeless to the ground, Moses-like. That the God-fleeing Parker finally finds God in a cow pasture strikes the reader as funny, of course, but Parker is far from cheered. He hardly pauses before heading straight for a tattoo parlor.
O’Connor again amuses her readers by having Parker locate this most solemn of Christian images—Christ Pantocrator—among the most saccharine pictures in the tattooist’s catalogue: “The Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus, Jesus the Physicians’ Friend.” As he ponders them, Parker hears a voice commanding him to “GO BACK.” And so he returns to the singular image he cannot ignore: “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.” Painfully but patiently Parker has his back—the only portion of his body he cannot vaingloriously behold—incised with a figure of the Lord whom he has unforgettably met. At last, Parker believes, he has found the image that will satisfy his hyper-Christian wife.
Far from it. In a scene at once comic and sad, Sarah Ruth greets Parker’s return with contempt for his new tattoo. When Parker demands that she look at the Pantocrator, whose bearer he has now permanently become, she confesses (far more truly than she understands), “It ain’t anybody I know.” “God don’t look like that,” she adds. “He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.” The hard-eyed Sarah Ruth thus drives Parker out of their house by thrashing him again with a broom, knocking him senseless and raising large welts on the face of the tattooed Christ. Thus is the story brought full circle back to its beginning, as Christ is crucified afresh and a believer is made to take up his own cross, as it shall be until the end of time.
An Opposite Beauty
Flannery O’Connor would have known little if anything about the venerable icon tradition that stretches back to the early Christian centuries. Nor is there any indication that she would have shared the estimate of icons that I attempt to describe. Even so, we need to set her use of the Mt. Sinai Pantocrator in the context of the inexhaustibly rich canons and practices of icon-making, even if she knew nothing of them.
In teaching and lecturing on the icon tradition, these are the essential truths about it that I have gathered from numerous sources. “Beauty will save the world,” declares the narrator in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. This is no Keatsian claim that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It is, instead, an Orthodox theological claim rooted in icons. In that same novel, we also hear it said that “there is only one face in the whole world which is absolutely beautiful” and that “the Incarnation [is] the epiphany of the Beautiful One.”
Icons thus seek to portray the beauty of God in Jesus Christ and his saints. What the gospel proclaims to us by words, declared the Council of Constantinople (869–870), the icon proclaims and renders present for us by color. Icons are built, therefore, on a theology of spiritual presence rather than natural representation. They are not images we behold in order to discern an earthly rendering of the Holy. Rather does God’s own splendor radiate through them, filling those who rightly venerate them with life-transforming Reality. Thus do icons behold us.
They are not an expression of the artists’ subjective perspective on the world, an attempt to portray or reflect the visible universe as they see it. Icons are the product of a long Tradition that has little to do with artists’ own genius or ideas, their intuitions or emotions, their creativity or imagination—although they are free to make small variations on the chief iconic themes, events, persons, and so forth. Icons are based on carefully proportioned geometric lines, on symbolic gestures, on fixed color correspondences—all of which have been elaborately laid down over centuries of practice. These sacred canons serve as guides and safeguards to guarantee both spiritual continuity and doctrinal unity. As the Council of Nicaea decreed in 787: “Only the technical aspect of the work depends on the [iconographer]; its design, its disposition, its composition depend quite clearly on the Holy Fathers [i.e., the theologians and bishops of the church].”
Iconographers are not servile copyists; they seek rather to perfect the established art forms by giving carefully crafted attention to all the details of the artistic process. Seeking no fame for themselves, they do not sign their names to their icons—or at most they inscribe them as “by the hand of.” Icons are often said to be written rather than painted. Anonymity is the great goal. Icons elicit prayer and adoration and exaltation, without making us ask, “Who made this?” Icons thus belong in churches and homes, where they serve as indispensable means of devotion, rather than in museums to be exhibited for aesthetic purposes apart from worship.
A Purified Gaze
The icon operates on its beholders objectively and without great feeling. It arrests their attention, claiming and calling them to their own deification—theosis—full participation in the life of God (cf. 2 Pet. 1:4). As Paul Evdokimov declares, the icon is a summons to die in order to live, rather than (as is usually the case) living in order to die. Hence this bracing affirmation voiced in the Orthodox Paschal Liturgy: “Christ is risen from the dead, by death trampling down death, and to those in the tombs granting life!”
To our unspiritual and earthly eyes, icons disclose the invisible and spiritual reality of the eternal world that everywhere envelops and transcends us. In the iconic effort to spiritualize the human world, realistic proportions and perspectives are abandoned. The size of icon-figures is usually determined by their importance and significance. A person standing in the background can thus be larger than a person in the foreground. Heads and haloes often overlap, for depth has no real importance. The Incarnation has overthrown all ordinary dimensions and perspectives. Indeed, everything in the two-dimensional icon takes place in the forefront.
The modern notion of perspective, rather than transforming nature, seeks often to replicate it. The vanishing point of a “realistic” painting is situated behind the picture, as our eyes are drawn forward so as to master the whole scene. In an Eastern icon, by contrast, the disappearing point is situated in front of the icon in an inverse perspective. The focus point thus moves out and away from the icon toward the beholder, as the image comes forth to meet the viewer. “The result is an opening,” declares Michel Quenot, “a radiating forth, while the vanishing point in an ordinary painting results in a convergence that closes up.”
John of Damascus declares that an icon, far from being an imitation or reproduction of the physical world, is an apocalypse, a revelation of what is otherwise hidden. “Its power,” writes Paul Evdokimov, “is maximal by reason of its opening upon the transcendent that has no image. The gaze thus purified and made attentive can descend, scrutinize and reveal the interior of the soul.” Physical beauty as commonly conceived has no import in Eastern icons; in fact, the human body almost disappears. It is the human face that matters, for it reflects the indestructible image of God in us, our free capacity to become ever more like God by participating in his triune life.
For the Eastern Church, our souls are made evident in our faces. In a frightening prophecy, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Nicholai Gogol declared, “When souls start to break down, then faces also degenerate.” This admonition exposes the alarming vacancy of the human visage in our time, as it is made all the emptier by manifold piercings and appendages. The aim of icons is to reveal, by contrast, the truly human face. The iconic faces of Christ and the saints are given a full frontal and unimproved rendering. Only those who have not attained holiness are shown in profile, and such malefactors as Judas are often shown in a ghastly silhouette. “As the visual center of the body, the face dominates everything else,” notes Quenot. “[Ancient] Greeks,” he adds, “called a slave aprosopos, i.e., he who has no face. So by assuming the features of a human face, God restored to us a face in His own image, chained as we were like slaves without faces—aprosopos—because of sin.”
Suffering & Illumination
An ascetic solemnity prevails in icons. The joy of the Kingdom that they announce must also take into account the sin and tragedy of human life, the darkness and suffering which the Light must overcome. There are virtually no shadows in icons, for the illumination of darkness is their essential aim.
The eyes of an icon-figure are often unnaturally large, to signify the great glory they have seen. Sometimes the eyes are lusterless so as to signify that saints see the spiritual and not primarily the physical world. More often they burn with intensity and confidence, revealing the great dynamism of their interior life. This often makes them frighteningly fierce. The forehead—even of the infant Christ—is usually convex and quite high, bulging with great spiritual wisdom and power. The cheeks and foreheads of most icon faces are marked with deep crevices of the suffering that yields wisdom. The iconic nose is always thin and elongated, giving nobility to the face, indicating that the saint no longer breathes the scents of this world but instead the fragrant odors of Christ and the life-giving Spirit. The mouth, as the most sensuous of organs, is always finely and geometrically drawn to eliminate all sensuality. The lips remain closed in the silence of contemplative wordlessness. The ears are often invisible because they no longer hear the siren summons of the world but are wholly attuned to the commands of God.
These qualities become especially evident in icons of Mother Mary Hope of the Perishing. She does not cradle the infant Jesus but holds the Child Christ in her arms. The Greek letters indicate that she is Theotokos, the God-bearer, the very Mother of the Incarnate God, and that he is Jesus the Christ. Her eyes are bagged with the suffering announced by Simeon when she presented her Son in the temple: “Behold, this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against (yes, a sword will pierce your soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34–35). Thus are the Child’s eyes already darkened with proleptic suffering as he looks up to her, sweetly stroking her chin.
Icons are not images of a disincarnate world, it follows, but revelations of a physical world transformed, transfigured, rendered both transparent and transcendent by a spiritualization that embraces the entire cosmos. Hence the invitation of Abba Bessarion, a desert saint who lived at the end of the fifth century, to see in a drastically new way—to behold the world not with mere optical sight that scans visible surfaces but with transcendent vision that penetrates invisible distances and depths. “Although blind toward the end of his life,” Quenot writes of Bessarion, “his eyes seemed to be extremely large and transparent. Shortly before dying, he told a young novice who had come for spiritual direction that a monk ought to become like the cherubim and seraphim: Holos ophthalmos: All eye!”
O’Connor & Pantocrator
Pantocrator, by most common reckonings, is a compound formed from pas, the Greek word for “all,” and the verb krateo, “to have power, to rule.” The word Pantocrator in the Septuagint and the Book of Revelation is commonly translated as “Almighty,” the Hebrew for “Lord of Hosts,” rendered Kyrios Pantocrator, the Lord Almighty. The most famous icon of Christ Pantocrator is the sixth-century version found at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai.
It cannot be denied that the Mt. Sinai Pantocrator is based on Roman imperial portraits. Yet this is no domineering emperor; this is the rightly ruling Christ. The fingers of his right hand offer blessing in the Byzantine fashion: the first two fingers joined and raised to recall both his human and his divine nature, the other two fingers joined to the thumb in the sign of the Trinity. In his left hand he grasps a thick papyrus codex, probably the Gospel of John, the one that most boldly announces the Incarnation: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (1:14). The eyes of this most ancient Christ Pantocrator are noticeably asymmetrical. His right eye grips the beholder with commanding clarity, looking straight ahead, glowing with mercy. His other eye is cast slightly leftward, darkened with the judgment that must accompany all mercy, as the slightly arched brow may suggest. The Pantocrator’s head is not crowned with a halo of holiness, but surrounded by a nimbus of the Radiance that bursts forth from it.
I contend that Flannery O’Connor likely patterned her self-portrait after the Christ Pantocrator of Mt. Sinai. This is not for a moment to suggest that she held a copy beside her as she painted. She declared in a letter to Janet McKane from 1963 that she had drawn her self-image ten years earlier, after a very acute siege of lupus. I was taking cortisone which gives you what they call a moon face and my hair had fallen out to a large extent from the high fever, so I looked pretty much like the portrait. When I painted it I didn’t look either at myself or at the bird. I knew what we both looked like.
O’Connor makes no mention of Christ Pantocrator, but the resemblances become patent when they are set alongside each other. Like his, her eyes are willfully askew. One eyebrow is slightly raised. Her ears can hardly be seen. Her lips are almost balefully unsmiling. And her yellow straw hat virtually replicates his golden nimbus.
Yet here the resemblances end, for in place of the Gospel, she is cradling, not one of her beloved peafowl, but a pheasant cock, the fiercest of its kind. Its black eyes seem ready to spot potential prey, its yellow beak ready to dig into their flesh. “I like very much the look of the pheasant cock,” O’Connor wrote.” “He has horns and a face like the Devil.”
It should be evident that she is not depicting herself as being in league with this demonic figure. The 28-year-old O’Connor embraces the demonic pheasant cock as a symbol of her peculiar evangelical vocation, I believe, in a subtle confession that she puts the demonic in her own employ so as to deceive the Deceiver—and thus to undeceive her characters about his operations. For there can be no encounter with incarnate Goodness without also wrestling with discarnate Evil, “our ancient foe” who seeks “to work us woe,” as Martin Luther names him in “A Mighty Fortress.” “Christ fights with the devil in a curious way,” Luther adds; “the devil [fights] with great numbers, cleverness, and steadfastness, and Christ with few people, with weakness, simplicity, and contempt—and yet Christ wins.” As we shall see, O’Connor’s ironic, humorous, and droll fiction is also imbued with a fierce struggle against the primordial Enemy.
Deceiving the Devil
Surely the subtlest of the Serpent’s wiles, O’Connor said, is to convince us that he does not exist. She is determined to expose him. “To ensure our sense of mystery,” she wrote, “we need a sense of evil which sees the devil as a real spirit who must name himself, and not simply to name himself as vague evil, but to name himself with his specific personality for every occasion.” “I want to be certain,” she also declared, “that the Devil gets identified as the Devil and not taken for this or that psychological tendency.”
Flannery O’Connor did not harbor mere individualist notions of the demonic. Luciferian deceptions are social and cultural before they are personal and individual. The latter are manifestations of the former. He is “an evil intelligence,” she said, “determined on [his] own supremacy.” He seeks nothing less than cosmic domination. Thus did she honor the stark biblical claim that Satan is the ruler of this realm (cf. John 14:30). “My work,” she confessed, “is addressed to a world that is pretty much the Devil’s territory.”
In Eastern and Western traditions alike, evil has been understood to have no proper existence of its own. It is privatio boni, the absence, the twisting, the perversion of the Good. Yet precisely because it is Nothing—i.e., a no-thing—it can assume innumerable forms. The devil’s chief guise, according to Flannery O’Connor, is nihilism. “If you live today,” she declared in 1955, “you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it,” she wittily confessed, “I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw.” Nihilism, for Flannery O’Connor, entails the claim that life has no transcendent meaning, no objective purpose, no ultimate origin or telos—nothing but the subjective “values” we impose on it, so that the strong may dominate the weak. In her terms, it’s all a matter of demonic power.
Devil Most Tortured
Nowhere does she expose these satanic machinations more tellingly (and humorously) than in “Good Country People.” This story features Joy Hopewell, the lines of whose life have fallen, alas, in unpleasant places. She limps about on a wooden leg and has a serious heart ailment as well. With a doctorate in philosophy from a German university, she justifiably chafes at the smug and cramped world she is forced to inhabit. She rebels, therefore, in every way that will offend her prim, lady-like mother—by wearing childish clothes, by slouching in her chair, and finally by an act of willful self-construction, as she gives herself an ominous new name: Hulga.
The allegedly all-seeing Joy-Hulga boasts that she has no illusions. She has “seen through” the world’s scrim to discern, like the Heidegger whom she quotes, that there is nothing before or behind it; there is nothing but Nothing. Even so, she is not content to dwell alone in the wilderness of her nihilism. Hulga determines, therefore, to convert a naïve Bible salesman named Manley Pointer so as to make him her companion in the Void. This thirty-year-old, previously unkissed virgin will seduce the stupid Bible-thumper by showing him that sexual congress is nothing but a meaningless physical act.
In one of the funniest, most macabre, yet wrenching scenes in all of O’Connor’s fiction, Pointer proves himself to be not an innocent naïf but a countrified nihilist. He does not violate Hulga’s virginity. Instead, he profanes the secular temple of her embittered nihilist life. “She was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private, and almost with her own eyes turned away.” Pointer thus persuades Hulga to show him where her wooden leg joins to her torso—and then he makes off with it!
As Pointer descends the hayloft where the annihilated nihilist remains helplessly stranded, he pronounces a final if also hilariously apt judgment on her: “I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going! And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga, you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”
“The devil is most tortured,” O’Connor declared, “to call his own name.” Here she has made him do so. He is Abaddon, Destroyer, “the angel of the abyss” (Rev. 9:11). Pointer has destroyed Hulga, but he is powerless to fill her with the grace she so clamantly needs. “The devil teaches us the most important lessons,” O’Connor said, but only as we learn his deceits. Thus does he become, as she also said, “the unwilling instrument of grace.”
The Devilry of Our Time
Were she living at this hour, where might Flannery O’Connor locate the deadliest deceptions of the Prince of Darkness? They are to be found, I believe, in the ever-increasing instrumentalizing of human life. When human beings are reduced to things, to be manipulated like figures on a chessboard, they can be made to serve whatever pernicious purposes their masters desire. Ever less are they regarded as having intrinsic, irreplaceable, much less sacred worth. O’Connor marked this steady shrinkage of human worth upon learning that a technique had been devised for breeding the wings off chickens, so as to create an abundance of tender white meat. She likened this “breakthrough” to the breeding of the moral sense out of “certain sections of the population.” “This is a generation of wingless chickens,” she added, “which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said that God was dead.”
We are now witnessing, I believe, a Luciferian attempt to re-invent human nature itself, to create a new species, not homo viator—man as pilgrim on the journey to God—but homo lupus lupini—man as wolf who would eventually devour himself. The human body is no longer regarded as a sacred gift so much as the site for radical reconstruction. Macabre surgical mutilations once regarded as unthinkable have become commonplace—the better to satisfy subjective desires untrammeled by any larger social or political or religious goods. Transgenderism has congealed into a full-orbed gnostic ideology. It is the poison being poured into our culture by the demonic principalities and powers.
If previous ages may have felt less than ours, O’Connor repeatedly iterated, they saw more. “Prophecy,” she wrote, “is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up.” Thus was she drawn to the biblical summons to envision the world through the lenses prescribed in 1 Peter 5:8: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”
A Bodily Temple
With such prophetic foresight of seeing far things close-up, Flannery O’Connor made this remarkable claim in 1955:
I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ.
These are not high-soaring theological abstractions. O’Connor earthed them in a stunning story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”
It’s the story of a brilliant pre-pubescent girl who delights in ridiculing the idiocies she discerns in everyone but herself. Yet this nameless young smartalice is no monster of presumption. She even dreams of becoming a martyr, “if they killed her quick.” She has no use for suffering. But neither will she tolerate the mockery of her hormone-driven teenaged cousins when they make howling fun of Sister Perpetua. She is the naïve nun who had taught the girls how to fend off the advances of groping boys. They were to employ a formula taken from 1 Corinthians 6: “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Against the sexy cousins’ wild hilarity at such a claim, the girl-child finds nothing ridiculous about it. She is gratefully astonished, instead, to learn that she is nothing less than the dwelling place of God. “It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.”
She learns what it means to be the bodily locus of God’s own Spirit when the sex-obsessed cousins report on a strange sight they had seen at the county fair: a grotesque freak, a hermaphrodite. He is not transgendered but double-sexed. According to the norms of our age, he is disabled in the worst way, robbed of all sexual satisfaction via a hideous blunder of nature. In our time, he would surely be sent away for sexual re-assignment surgery. Against all readerly expectation, however, O’Connor has the story’s nameless heroine offer a drastic alternative. She enters a dream-like state of transcendent vision, imagining the hermaphrodite graciously embracing rather than bitterly bemoaning his bodily deformity. She turns him into a country preacher leading his people in a litany of praise and acceptance:
“God done this to me and I praise him.”
“Amen. Amen.”
“He could strike you thisaway.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“Amen.”
“Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know? Don’t you know? God’s Spirit has a dwelling in you, don’t you know?”
Final Grace
“More than in the Devil,” Flannery O’Connor confessed, “I am interested in the indication of Grace, the moment when you know that Grace has been offered and accepted.” Such divine self-offering and such divinely enabled acceptance are the true means for keeping our species from demonically refashioning itself into something unimaginably perverse.
She was not arrogant but modest, therefore, in patterning her self-portrait after the Mt. Sinai Pantocrator. She models her own image after his, not that we might have faces like hers, but like his—finally sanctified, made fully whole, body and soul knit together in seamless unity.
Ralph C. Wood was, until his retirement, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His books include The Comedy of Redemption (University of Notre Dame Press), Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans), and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Baylor University Press).
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