The Habit of Being

Flannery O’Connor 

Mary Flannery O’Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and supposedly grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfection or difference of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, criminality, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.

Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

–Profile from Wikipedia [Mary Flannery O’Connor].

Pious Anxiety: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal (Excerpt)

Over a year her aspirations have shifted subtly but dramatically. Now her goal is to be a writer of a certain kind: not one whose work is permeated by Christian principles one who (as she put it later) “will look for the will of God first in the laws and limitations of his art and will hope that if he obeys these, other blessings will be added to his work.” Again it is her encounter with a Catholic book that accounts for the change. This time it was Art and Scholasticism, Maritain’s re-presentation of the medieval Thomist understanding of the nature of art. Art and Scholasticism offered an account of the nature of art—and of artistic inspiration—at once more sophisticated and more Catholic than any O’Connor had encountered. Drawing on Aquinas, Maritain—a French convert who was teaching at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton—makes the case that virtue, for the artist, consists in “the good of the thing made” more than in upright behavior or efforts at personal holiness. Art is “reason in making,” and good art is distinguished by “wholeness, harmony, and radiance.” The most direct way for the artist to live a good life is by making good art. To this task the artist must bring, not so much Christian principles, but the whole of his or her personality, including religious faith. A particular artist’s work begins with his or her distinct talents and preoccupations. Yet much of the self must be left behind in the act of making. Virtue, for the artist, involves subordinating the good of the self to the good of the thing made; and to do this, the artist must cultivate “the habit of art”—by developing skills and work habits and purifying the source of inspiration. There is service in this, even holiness; at the same time, there is freedom for the artist to put some of those scruples about everyday life aside. O’Connor read Maritain’s account of art in Iowa and embraced it enthusiastically. In the Prayer Journal, on April 14, 1947, she wrote: “I want to be the best artist I can possibly be, under God.” And that yearning was more than a desire for personal fulfillment. It carried obligations, because as she put it, “God has given me everything, all the tools, even instructions for their use, even a good brain to use them with, a creative brain to make them immediate for others.” It was a calling.

–Paul Elie [Pious Anxiety: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal].

Additional Flannery O’Connor Quotes

“For me a dogma is only a gateway to contemplation and is an instrument of freedom and not of restriction. It preserves mystery for the human mind.”

—Flannery O’Connor [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor].

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

–Flannery O’Connor [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor].

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

–Flannery O’Connor [Wise Blood].

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”

–Flannery O’Connor [Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose].

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

–Flannery O’Connor [Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose].

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .”

–Flannery O’Connor [Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose].

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