Aquinas and Apocalypse in Flannery O’Connor

This talk will propose that the work of celebrated 20th century American novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor “shows” what Thomas Aquinas “tells” regarding God’s nature and the operation of Grace in creation.

O’Connor’s work is characterized by its use of violence amid the grotesquerie of the American South, so much so that it was initially mistaken as a literary nihilism and O’Connor a “hillbilly nihilist.” O’Connor herself, however, wished to be understood as a “hillbilly Thomist” whose stories were as they were “the only way to make people see.”

In describing her own work, O’Connor was known to say often that while her stories are violent, and her characters often killed, nevertheless, “no one gets hurt.” This is because in her work violence is in service to apocalypse: God breaks through to perfect her characters one way or another. In this way, O’Connor’s apocalyptic vision reveals the fundamental insight of Aquinas about Grace’s restorative (rather than destructive