Flannery O’Connor, Benedict XVI, and the Divine Eros

The violence lying at the core of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction does not constitute, as it seems, a gross divine invasion of human autonomy. On the contrary, her work has a deep congruence with the theology of Benedict XVI and its claim that the natural order is never autonomous but always and already graced. Divine love is not only agape, therefore, but also eros: God is not only the self-giving Beloved but also the other-pursuing Lover. Thus do O’Connor’s characters find their graciously implanted (but sinfully suppressed) longings erupting within them, as their holy Lover seeks andfinds his own beloved.