The Anagogical Imagination of Flannery O'Connor

Abstract

This essay explores O'Connor‘s sense of the art of fiction as an art of anagogical vision, which sees all things as instances of participation in God. Such created things are, then, when read or “seen” properly, fragmentary disclosures of the divine glory. To O'Connor, the logic of anagogy implies that the visible realities of this world only take on a fullness of meaning—indeed, they only become truly visible—when seen in the paradoxical light of the unseen. The anagogical sense—the final of the four senses of scripture according to Christian tradition—refers to a text's figurative signification in relation to eternal glory or eschatological reality. This anagogical sensibility is often represented in O'Connor's work by the recurring image of the sun at the close of many of her stories. Therefore O'Connor‘s “anagogical imagination,” operative in so much of her work, is intended to lead one through the contemplation of future glory to the reimagination of temporal existence in light of the Incarnation, and to enable one to see such existence as imbued with the grace of divine creation and ordered towards its consummation. That is to say, when seen in the light of the yet-to-be-fully-disclosed divine glory, the world—including most especially humanity—becomes more truly visible for what it is.