From a letter in the Library of America collection of Flannery O’Connor’s works (page 953):
To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of those laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that 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 the 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. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.
It’s nice to occasionally run into a modern thinker who gives us thoughts worth commenting upon. Miss O’Connor hit the nail on the head though she bent it a little. Maybe I’ve bent that nail a little less. In any case, I’ll assume so and will give some corrections to her wording of some good insights. Miss O’Connor does have an earthier way of expressing matters than I do. And I should acknowledge that she wrote the above passage when she was about 20 years younger than I currently am and without having enough background in modern sciences to realize how good a foundation Thomistic principles (though not all his use of those principles) can provide for understanding modern empirical knowledge. I’ll move on to some specific comments about Miss O’Connor’s words:
-
She’s right that:
To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt.
Yet, we should be careful to go from “reasons to doubt” to the difficulty of believing a hard truth. A reason to doubt is but one side of the coin. On the other side lies a question which has risen which allows for an enrichment and deepening of human knowledge. There are no guarantees our faith will survive even if we have the courage and the simple child-like curiosity to pursue that question, but we refuse to be images of God when we willfully turn away from these questions under the delusion that we protect our faith in the true God by refusing to adapt our inherited traditions to new knowledge of God’s work as Creator. If we have the courage and the faith in the Creator that allows us to honestly address these reasons for doubt — not just by repeating old answers, we will find better reasons to believe than earlier generations had.
-
In knowing the true laws of the flesh and the physical, we don’t know what God is in His transcendence, His necessary Being, but we do know what thoughts He manifested in bringing this particular Creation into being. We do know the role that God chose to play and even the limitations He voluntarily took upon Himself in order to play that specific role in a highly peculiar Creation.
-
I try to reserve the term ‘spirit’ for writing or speaking about our direct and conscious relationship to God. In place of Miss O’Connor’s words, “flesh and spirit united in peace,” I would write instead, something like: “flesh resurrected in a form where it has spiritual characteristics.” Still better is my occasional claim that we can speak of body as being frozen soul. In the world of the resurrected, our bodies will be unfrozen and no longer subject to the decay found in a cooling universe.
So far as I know, Miss O’Connor read regularly in the Summa Theologicae of Aquinas but had no access to the work I recommend to those wishing to see his basic insights in a clearer and less ‘systematic’ form — his commentary on 1 Corinthians, where he gives us the following two bits of advice:
-
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… (St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians.)
-
[T]he wisdom which attains to God through the things of this world is not the wisdom of this world [in the sense denounced by St. Paul] but the wisdom of God… (St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians.)
Georgia farm-girl she was, but quite capable of penetrating the Medieval style of Aquinas to realize he was a better empiricist than nearly any modern scientist or historian or Biblical scholar. I would even say she’s the best I know of at teaching Thomism and a coherently empirical view of Creation to those of a more literary than technical cast of mind. At least I think she would be if, for example, Catholic teachers realized she teaches hard truths unsoftened by human sentimentality and affectations of concern about “man’s inhumanity to man” or of worries about “bad things happening to good people.” More than that, her willingness to see the comedy (classical sense and not “Three Stooges” sense) in a harsh world can appeal even to those who do enjoy studying technical knowledge.