Flannery O’Connor’s habit of being shows us what becoming a writer, saint, and mystic are all about.
A Habit of Being and Jacques Maritain
As I said in my last post–Dear God: Please Help Me Be an Artist (link)–writing about Flannery O’Connor is tough: partly because there’s so much to write about and also because in her letters she was pretty critical of writers. She was a hard critic, and had an eye for weak or lazy or incompetent writing.
I’m talking about her book of letters entitled The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, selected and edited by long-time friend Sally Fitzgerald, with whom Flannery lived for a number of years.
In the opening of the book, Sally Fitzgerald describes a copy of Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism that Flannery had left behind when she left the Fitzgerald’s house. Fitzgerald recalls misplacing the book, and thus sending Flannery a new copy only later to find the copy that had originally belonged to her. She recalls finding marginalia and various underlines scattered throughout the text. It was in this book that Flannery first learned about Maritain’s idea of the habit of art, not as a kind of mechanical ability, but rather “as an attitude or quality of mind, essential to the real artist as talent is.”
Fitzgerald quotes from Maritain as thus …
Operative habit resides chiefly in the mind or the will … Habits are interior growths of spontaneous life … and only the living (that is to say, minds which alone are perfectly alive) can acquire them, because they alone are capable of realising the level of their being by their own activity: they possess, in such an enrichment of their faculties, secondary motives to action, which they bring into play when they want … The object [the good of the work] in relation to which (the habit) perfects the subject is itself unchangeable–and it is upon this object that the quality developed in the subject catches. Such a habit is a virtue, that is to say a quality which triumphing over the original indetermination of the intellective faculty, at once sharpening and hardening the point of its activity, raises it in respect of a definite object to a maximum of perfection, and so of operative efficiency. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect (Jacques Maritain, as found in A Habit of Being, xvii).
Here we have Maritain writing about the ontological work of art, that is, the making of the object of art having an impact on the being, or becoming, of the subject namely the artist him or herself. That the “habit of art” is a way not only of perfecting the object of the work of art, but also that which “perfects the subject,” and through which “the quality developed in the subject catches.”
The Making of Art and Virtue
The work of creating art thus becomes the process of perfecting the life of the artist. The making of art thus becomes virtuous through ‘the becoming’ of the artist as him or herself.
It is no wonder that Thomas Merton wrote so much in his letters (link) about the more he wrote, the more he came closer to God and thus the more he became himself, and, thus, the more he became a saint.
Indeed Flannery had a similar understanding of it, I believe partly from her reading of Merton. Merton and Flannery had a mutual appreciation for one another, and knew about each other through their publisher and mutual friend Robert Giroux.
Nevertheless, Fizgerald saw this habit of art in Flannery, of course, but took the concept a bit further–or perhaps brought clarity to it–by calling it, again in Flannery’s case, a “habit of being.”
Fitzgerald believes the habit of being is distinct from the habit of art, but again, it seems that she is simply bringing more clarity to the same concept: namely that the habit of making art becomes integral to the nascent virtue within the artist him or herself. Nevertheless, here’s Fitzgerald:
Less deliberately perhaps, and only in the course of living in accordance with her formatived beliefs, as she consciously and profoundly wished to do, she acquired as well, I think, a second distinguished habit, which I have called “the habit of being”: an excellence not only of action but of interior disposition and activity that increasingly refected the object, the being, which specified it, and was itself reflected in what she did and said (A Habit of Being, xvii).
A Habit of Being … A Catholic
And I would say when reading Flannery’s Prayer Journal (link) and her letters, the habit of being, as even Fitzgerald tacitly notes, is deeply wedded to her Catholic faith (what Fitzgerald meagerly calls “formative beliefs”): her habit of attending liturgy everyday, the habit of prayer–deep, honest prayer–the habit of seeing her Catholic faith as something that set her apart as a writer, an artist, and the habit of seeking grace over and over again that it oozed out of her onto the page–even when it didn’t necessarily look that way to most readers.
In a letter to John Lynch, dated 6 November 1955, Flannery asserts …
[I] write the way I do because and only because I am Catholic. I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even enjoy anything. I am a born Catholic, went to Catholic schools in my early years, and have never left or wanted to leave the Church. I have never had the sense that being a Catholic is a limit to the freedom of the writer, but just the reverse. Mrs Tate told me that after she became a Catholic, she felt she could use her eyes and accept what she saw for the first time, she didn’t have to make a new universe for each book but could take the one she found. I feel myself that being a Catholic has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning to write (A Habit of Being, 114).
This habit of being, I believe, and based on Flannery’s letters and prayer journal, is wrapped up in her being a Catholic. Being a Catholic is being part of a mystical Church whose main ritual is partaking of Being Himself, namely Jesus Christ in the holy Eucharist. Thus Flannery’s habit of being is grounded in, flows out of, her loving union with Christ, the One Who Is, the One Who is Being Himself. And that eucharistic habitual life forms the point of departure, the Way, for her art making, for becoming an artist, which is her true self, or, in other words, a saint. This is truly a habit of Being.
A Habit of Being and the Eucharist
Her desire and need for the Eucharist comes out deeply in a statement she is rather famous for, even among those who know little more about Flannery …
Towards morning the conversation [with some friends] turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable (A Habit of Being, 125).
The holy Eucharist, the partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, the Incarnate Logos, the Being, the One Who Is, was for Flannery “the center of existence …” and over against which “all the rest of life is expendable.”
It was the desire of her heart, not to be just a writer, but a writer loved and inspired by God; to become fully alive and fully herself.
From A Prayer Journal …
What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that–make mystics out of cheeses. But why should He do it for an ingrate slothful and dirty creature like me. I can’t stay in the church to say a Thanksgiving even and as for preparing for Communion the night before–thoughts all else. The rosary is mere rote for me while I think of other and usually impious things. But I would like to be a mystic immediately. But dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. … God loves us, God needs us. My soul too. So then take it dear God becaus it knows that You are all it should want and if it were wise You would be all it would want and the times it thinks wise, You are all it does want, and it wants more and more to want You (A Prayer Journal, 18).
It is in her habit of being that Flannery O’Connor deeply inspires us as writers, poets, painters, sculptors: that we become art; that we become perfected through the object of our work, that through trial and suffering we bear our crosses that God has given us, that we, too, with Flannery, should become mystics–all for the glory of God.
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If you enjoy this kind of writing on creativity and Christian spiritual life, check out my book Creativity and Becoming: On Art, Writing, and Orthodox Spiritual Life (link).
