Damian Ference (Wiseblood Books, 2025)
For many, an encounter with Flannery O’Connor’s fiction leaves an impression of shocked weirdness. Characters who seem both odd and strangely familiar embroil themselves in lies, seductions, and violence. The violence especially tends to leave the reader wondering “What just happened?” There’s a sense of disorientation, a ringing in the ears, so-to-speak, as O’Connor’s “shout” awakens something that is often difficult to put one’s finger on. One needs a calibrated lens to help see the “depth on depth” of meaning inherent in her stories. No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky: Flannery O’Connor and Modernity by Damian Ference serves such a purpose. As part of the series “Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture,” the book draws on the rich intellectual heritage of the Catholic tradition and serves as a hermeneutical key to O’Connor’s body of work.
Ference situates O’Connor’s fiction in the context of modernity’s break from incarnated reality. Initiated by French philosopher René Descartes, the focus on cogito (one’s mind or consciousness) created a philosophical rupture between mind and matter that ultimately led to an impoverished understanding of reality. As Ference explains, when modernity alienated the source of all being from the world, and thus relativized God alongside classical ontology, the concrete retreated into the abstract and the intellect became subjugated to the will. Thus, modernity “bred out” (O’Connor’s terms) man’s ability to see what “is” in the concrete reality of day-to-day life. Ference’s aim is to account for how O’Connor’s Catholic-Thomistic worldview, grounded in metaphysics as the “first science” and an epistemology that integrates the senses, reclaims the concrete as integral to a vision of reality as a whole. The title of Ference’s book is taken from a line in O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood. In the scene, O’Connor describes a beautiful night sky “underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.” The townspeople, meanwhile, scurry about oblivious to the transcendent beauty, the “vast construction work,” above their heads: “No one was paying any attention to the sky.” They were, in effect, blind to “the whole order of the universe.” Ferrence takes this idea of seeing reality’s wholeness as thematic for O’Connor’s work, a key to the depths of meaning in her fiction.
Though not a philosopher herself, O’Connor understood philosophy’s implications, how it affects one’s view of the cosmos and one’s place in it. “Flannery O’Connor was exceptionally well read,” Ference notes, “so it would be difficult if not impossible to cite every source that informed her critique of modernity; however, Romano Guardini and Étienne Gilson are certainly two of O’Connor’s most important philosophical influences in this regard.” Other major philosophical influences on O’Connor are explored in Ference’s earlier work, the award-winning Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art (Word on Fire, 2023). No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky builds on that foundation and focuses on the influence of these two twentieth century thinkers.
O’Connor’s characteristic use of an abrupt, disconcerting event—a shout to the hard of hearing— serves as a provisional opening to an encounter with grace.
Romano Guardini (1885–1968), German priest, theologian, and philosopher, taught O’Connor how to embrace Augustinian insights into man’s alienation (and a path toward integration) as “connatural with her instinctive respect for Thomism.” It was Guardini who helped her see reality as a whole. “Flannery O’Connor was convinced,” Ference writes, “that any attempt to separate the spiritual world from the material world is to meddle with our perception of reality in a way that causes harm, not only to one’s art, but also to the human person, and hence the human community.” This was one reason O’Connor pushed back so hard. Guardini convinced her that “to live in the modern world as a Catholic, one must be grounded in the depth of a reality that is not bound by time and space but which must be constantly re-discovered and re-presented in every time and space.” It was O’Connor’s desire, Ference argues, to “be humble in the face of what-is,” to present eternal realities in creative, engaging, non-didactic ways.
Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), French Catholic, philosopher and historian, led O’Connor through the history of philosophy. Ference believes Gilson likely convinced her that a return to metaphysics might serve as an antidote to modernity’s philosophical pitfalls. “Man is not a mind that thinks,” Gilson states in his The Unity of Philosophical Experience, “but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful.” Gilson taught O’Connor what it means to be human: not a disembodied abstraction that ultimately ends in frustration and loneliness, but a rational creature with the ability to love. For O’Connor, real love meant being willing to sacrifice for the good of the other, especially when that went against one’s own emotions and desires. Modernity preached a different view, but Guardini and Gilson gave O’Connor the confidence to engage it with the vigor of an Old Testament prophet.
Presenting excerpts from O’Connor’s letters, book reviews, and marginalia from her personal library, Ference shows how Guardini and Gilson helped O’Connor understand the challenges facing the modern world (and for us, the post-modern world). These challenges, or “knots” as Ference calls them, are identified as four major themes: (1) the self as the center of existence; (2) a disregard for mystery; (3) a general distrust of the concrete (material); and (4) the subordination of reason. Each of these themes represents an obstacle, or blinder, to perceiving the depths of reality. Ference draws from O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood to illustrate how O’Connor tears off those blinders and helps her readers see and untie the knots.
The protagonist of Wise Blood is Hazel Motes, a young soldier returning from war. His “wise blood” refers to his prophetic call to serve the Lord like his grandfather, an itinerant preacher who drove into a town “as if he were just in time to save them all from Hell, and he was shouting before he had the car door open.” But unlike his grandfather, Motes denies his wise blood and even goes so far as to establish an anti-Church, a Church without Christ. Rather than serving the Lord, Motes alienates himself. “I’m going to preach [my truth] to whoever’ll listen at whatever place,” Motes declares. This, in philosophical terms, is modernity’s equivalent of the “turn to subject,” a turning inwards towards an autonomous self.
When one replaces God with oneself, the second knot of modern philosophy is made manifest: the disregard for mystery. Motes denies Christ and preaches that “there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two.” Motes shrinks into a world where there is no mystery, “where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” At this point, Ference draws our attention to another key character in Wise Blood, Enoch Emery, whose name is significant. The biblical Enoch walks with God, but this Enoch crawls around in the bushes intending to catch a glimpse of sunbathing women. He is satisfying his animal instincts rather than treating them as persons with dignity. “There is no mistaking what O’Connor is doing with Enoch Emery,” Ference states. “[H]is character reveals what humanity becomes in modernity when God and the mystery of the human person (as created in God’s image and likeness), are rejected.” Enoch devolves into an animal, and to emphasize this point, O’Connor depicts him murdering an actor, stealing the man’s gorilla suit, and running off into the woods to live his best gorilla life. But that is only after he presents Motes with a “new jesus” for his Church without Christ: a stolen mummy. Ference draws our attention to the irony: “The mystery of God and the mystery of the Incarnation are rejected completely, and what is embraced is an ancient corpse; symbolically it is humanity without a soul.” Disregarding how matter and form are integrated contributes to a distrust of the concrete and material. Ference points to O’Connor’s use of the mummy to address this third knot of modernity.
When Motes’s girlfriend begins to rock the mummy like a baby—with a dark humor few but O’Connor can pull off—Motes snaps. He snatches the mummy from her and throws it against the wall. “The head popped,” O’Connor narrates, “and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust.” The dust of man is no longer an abstract idea but has become an embodied symbol of modernity’s new god. Motes is forced to experience death with his senses, forced (violently) to confront death as a concrete rather than abstract idea. O’Connor’s characteristic use of an abrupt, disconcerting event—a shout to the hard of hearing— serves as a provisional opening to an encounter with grace. “It was this reality of mystery, the experience of some great thing beyond what the hard sciences are capable of measuring,” Ference writes, “that O’Connor wants to present in her narrative art.” The concrete is integral to mystery: mystery through manners, grace through nature; the fullness of reality revealed in the incarnate Christ.
Ference ties the fourth knot, modernity’s subordination of reason, to O’Connor’s well-known disdain for sentimentality, which she too viewed as a distortion of reality. “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” she wrote to a friend. As a Thomist, O’Connor knew feelings, emotions and passions are part of what it means to be human, Ference explains, but “they are always subordinate to the intellect, for the intellect is the higher power and it is responsible for controlling and directing its subordinates.” However, modernity’s attempt to shift priority to the individual’s subjective sentiment over the intellect (guided by knowledge) led to a questioning of knowledge itself.
In one of the most interesting moves of his essay, Ference—quoting Guardini—connects the resulting restlessness to modernity’s prioritization of Ethos over Logos:
This presumption is guilty of having put modern man into the position of a blind person groping his way in the dark, because the fundamental force upon which it has based life—the will—is blind. The will can function and produce, but cannot see. From this is derived the restlessness which nowhere finds tranquility.
O’Connor wanted the blind to see, not for sight’s sake, but for love’s sake. Love is not simply an emotion but an act of the will: to will the good of the other. But to know what is good involves the intellect. And to choose to love, the intellect must inform the act—especially when love involves a willingness to suffer for the good of the other (“There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” John 15:13). O’Connor’s experience with suffering, especially her physical sufferings from lupus (which eventually took her life) drove that reality home. She knew personally the redemptive value of the cross. Though she did not fully understand it, her faith helped her give her assent; she knew God’s love as Truth. This insight—the relationship between love and suffering—goes beyond reason, not subordinating it, but bringing the intellect to a higher level. It is in this context that Ference has us consider Hazel Motes’s final act of mortification as an embrace of the contemplative life—a choice that annoys his landlady: “He might as well be one of them monks, she thought, he might as well be in a monkery.” And that is the point, Ference contends, that O’Connor is making. “O’Connor is out to show her readers that the highest form of living is not one driven by emotions, or actions, or the will, but the intellect in contemplation.” This is no Gnostic contemplation, but a foretaste of the beatific vision to be experienced in our resurrected bodies. By the end of the novel, Motes is living like a Catholic contemplative monk; he has right-ordered his life, and though physically blinded, he can now see the depths of reality.
No One Was Paying Attention to the Sky reveals how O’Connor’s Catholic vision of reality, one of unity and right order, one where “matter matters,” enables her to depict the implications of modernity’s alienation and disorder so effectively in her art. Ference’s engaging, illuminating, and ultimately hope-filled little book unlocks the depths of meaning inherent in O’Connor’s outwardly-troubling, often-violent prose.
Theresa Pihl teaches history at Blue Mountain Community College, Oregon, and recently
received her MFA in creative writing from the University of St. Thomas, Houston.