Flannery O’Connor is a guide for the Catholic who seeks to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to live the life of faith in the modern world. O’Connor describes herself as a Catholic burdened by the modern consciousness which the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung views as “unhistorical, solitary, and guilty.” Ann Hartle understands O’Connor’s fiction as her confrontation with this specifically modern form of consciousness. The seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal helps us to experience the meaning of O’Connor’s fiction because Pascal confronted that same consciousness in its origins in Montaigne’s philosophy. O’Connor recognizes in Pascal a truly Catholic modern philosopher who speaks to the experience of the searching mind of modern man.

Flannery O'Connor and Blaise Pascal approaches O’Connor’s fiction from a philosophical perspective rather than the perspective of a literary critic. The goal of this volume is to deepen the experience of the meaning of her stories insofar as they are addressed to a specifically modern audience burdened with the form of consciousness that is highly skeptical of the historical reality of the Christian mystery.

Hartle's argument is that modern consciousness rests on the “spiritualization” of the Incarnation. Both Montaigne and Jung abstract a purely human meaning from the historical embodied reality of the Incarnation and place that meaning in the service of modern man’s attempt at self-creation and self-redemption. O’Connor presents us with an especially vivid picture of Jung’s truly modern individual in Hazel Motes, Hulga Hopewell, George Rayber, and The Misfit. In her comic art, O’Connor brings out the possibility of grace against the background of the pervasive psychological attitude toward human conduct. She shows us how the modern distortions of the human personality can be addressed in a specifically Catholic way, that is, through the meaning of the Catholic sacramental view of life and the Catholic principle of mutual interdependence.

Ann Hartle is emeritus professor of philosophy at Emory University.