My wife and I, in recent years, have taken to spending a day or so at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, during vacation. It’s not far from our home and we have a soft spot in our hearts for the president of the university, Father Scanlon, who has stood against abortion for as long as I can remember.

Being unapologetic bibliophiles, we take this opportunity to shop at the university’s bookstore and stock up on those theological works that will delight us in the winter months when the snow is falling, the ice is forming, and any desire to be “out” recedes into the innermost sanctums of our minds.

We have, on more than one occasion, stumbled across a delightful book or two, a “gem” if you will, and this year was no exception. Indeed, I found buried on the bottom row of one of the bookshelves a thin, little tome, not much more than an expanded essay, that I gathered up greedily because the title intrigued me: Flannery O’Connor: Unmasking the Devil!

Now I’m a sucker for anything by or about Ms. O’Connor. Over the years her charm, wit, and sagacity are the allures she has worked upon me, in the natural realm. But, her spirit, her soul, her unquenchable desire for Christ so brilliantly developed and detailed in her southern fashion -- her “grotesque” stories -- provide a spiritual nexus that describes a fallen world (modernity) defined not so much by its mortal or venial sins but by an unnatural and degenerative nihilism that portends the destruction of our era and the potential rebirth of man.

Dr. Martin, a man of letters, has written this work in a most engaging style, eschewing the argot commonly found in works by “specialists” in what-ever field, while maintaining the true and natural equilibrium between literature and theology that will satisfy, entertain, and educate even the most disengaged reader. The author explains that he intends the book to be “an act of homage to a writer and a human being whom I have long admired, and an attempt to awaken fresh interest in her writings among people for whom she is no longer a household name…” He has succeeded in the latter, and we trust he will succeed in the former.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural.” And, it was the body of her work that explored a myriad of possibilities found in her definition, a definition pregnant with all the conceivability revealed in the promise of the Incarnation. Flannery’s stories then were always supernatural; they always involved a spiritual reckoning. For her truth, the Truth of God was the ultimate objective. That’s why equality or freedom or sentimentality never played a significant role in her work; she examined life and her characters in their primordial condition with an eye on the quintessential “First Things;” salvation, redemption, and God’s grace.

And underlying her faith, indeed, an integral part of it was a spiritual and intuitive recognition of the personalization of evil: the Devil. “I have found, in short,” Flannery wrote, “from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil…” But, she also understood that the age in which she wrote had, long ago, during the Age of the Enlightenment, turned its back on God and began its long descent into the slough of nihilism, “I have also found,” she continues, “that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or in the devil.”

Professor Martin tells his readers of Flannery’s ability to depict the truly “fallen” nature of modern man in her first collection of short stories, “So many fictional lives spent in flagrant defiance of Almighty God, lived in arrant and repeated flight from His laws; then, all at once, startled and overtaken by a primitive violence divinely calculated to shake even the most hardened habitual sinner. It is the complacent heart, after all, the soul unmoved by its own misery, its own lack of love, the renders the creature most resistant to grace.”

It is God moving in His preferred “medium,” Martin tells us, and that medium is mystery! Alas, modernity rejects mystery out of hand. It is irrational, superstitious, and reminiscent of medieval times but it this union of mystery and grotesquerie that O’Connor mastered, one suspects through revelation.

“No matter what form the dragon (Satan) may take,” Flannery O’Connor wrote, “it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case it requires considerable courage at anytime, in any country, not to turn away from the story-teller.”

Regis Martin has produced a delightful study of America’s greatest novelist, a “gem” of a book that will fascinate those folks “of a certain age,” and lure new readers to the little lady of Andalusia whose first rule of abstract literary mathematics was, “two and two is always more than four.”

Flannery O'Connor: Unmasking the Devil is available on Amazon.com.

Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

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