Flannery O'Connor's "Yahwist" Fundamentalism

After reading Phillip Rieff (and his idea of personality arising only from a humble relationship with the absolute), I found what Robert Brinkmeyer said in The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor most interesting (at p. 29):

"Herbert N. Schneidau, in Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition, argues that a profoundly skeptical and self-critical approach to reality characterizes the vision of the Bible and its prophets. Scheidau terms this vision Yahwist and says its central tenet is that an absolute gulf separates humanity from an all-powerful God. Quoting from Henri Frankfort, "Every finite reality is shriveled to nothingness before the absolute value which was God."

According to Brinkmeyer, O'Connor's vision of Christ is essentially Yahwist, "the Son of God characteristically arriving not with outstretched hand but with swinging sword." Only God's violence, according to O'Connor, can penetrate the hubris and blindness of the modern soul. This is the only surgery that can heal us.

We started reading Revelation with Matt Pozen last week, and the first chapters do depict Christ with a sword in his mouth (though also later as a "lamb"). Matt offered a good interpretation of the double-nature of the sword: Christ worries the complacent and comforts the worried.

Life presents its banes and benefices. But we need to "worry ourselves" more than we often do in order to lay ourselves open to divine action, which is creative and healing.

In this regard I note that von Balthesar in TheoDrama (vol III at p. 208) quotes Revelation in connection with the possibility of becoming a person, i.e., the possibility of a "conscious subject to rise above his natural level to that of the ("super-natural") person." Balthasar says,

"In positive terms, this presupposes that the created spirit, man, can be an image (imago) of God; negatively, it implies that he is deficient and needs to be perfected and given a "likeness" (similitudo) to God; such a likeness can only be imparted by God, in Christ. This deepening or elevation of the conscious subject does not alienate the latter from himself but enables him to "come to himself", a view consistently put forward by the Fathers. . . . When a man comes to God, he truly comes to himself for the first time. Held by God, the prime Person, man becomes genuinely personal. The truth of human nature is the divine truth. Person is the "new name" by which God addresses me (Rev 2:17) and which comes from "the beginning of God's creation" (Rev 3:14); it always implies a task, namely to be "a pillar in the temple of my God." (Rev. 3:12).

Why the reference to Revelation? This book's "prophetic" attitude of skepticism toward one's merits, and a consequent beating of one's breast, shows the only workable attitude toward the Almighty, Christ included. Only an attitude of humble consciousness of our sinfulness can lay ourselves open to be raised up by Christ to personhood. This seems to be one of Revelation's messages.

So, it seems to me that we become persons in fear and trembling, not through the "I'm OK, you're OK" of high self-esteem. We're not OK! Unless we are in "the way" toward Heaven, i.e., toward becoming a person, we are on a path to perdition, to dissolution and death.

Sounds like good, orthodox fundamentalism to me!