A discussion of spiritual embodiment in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”
One half-century ago, Flannery O’Connor made dinner conversation with Mary McCarthy. The conversation turned on the Eucharist and Ms. McCarthy, who had left the Church at fifteen, said she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. Ms. O’Connor answered in a shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”[1] The writer thus declared her faith in the doctrine that Eucharistic bread becomes the real Body of Christ. In so doing, she simultaneously recalled another tenet of Catholic spirituality: the Incarnation, the belief that God became Man in the person of Jesus Christ. Both the Eucharist and the Incarnation (from incarnare, “to make flesh”) place special value on the physical expression of the divine and give rise to O’Connor’s view of spiritual embodiment. The story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (1954) develops this view of embodiment by linking it to language. Characters who use language more effectively better understand the role of the body in spiritual life. Through these characters, O’Connor critiques religious discourse that forgets about the body, at the same time that she expands a discourse that only connects the body with sex. By focusing on marginal figures who cannot have sex – children, nuns, and a hermaphrodite – O’Connor forwards a truth that is more universal than the sexual act. Spiritual embodiment holds that every body is holy, a locus where the sacred and the material converge.
Catholic thinking undergirds all of O’Connor’s writings, but “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is that rare story where Catholic rhetoric becomes an active variable. Joanne and Susan are fourteen years old and not especially pretty, built like string beans and blushing in purple patches when they laugh. They attend a convent school; otherwise, the story makes clear, they would do nothing but think about boys. Now they have come to stay for a weekend with their second cousin (whom O’Connor refers to simply as “the child”) and their aunt. Somehow they have adopted the habit of calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, and when asked to explain, the girls breathe out through a fit of giggles that Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy, has lectured them on the Holy Ghost. Sister said that if a young man should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile,” they should holler, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” and that would settle everything (238).[2] The child, unlike her cousins, does not react to the idea in hysterics. Instead she repeats the phrase to herself – I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost – and it pleases her. Her attraction to the mystery of sacred language contrasts sharply with her cousins’ vanity and “twaddle” (247). Eventually a couple of boys – short, thin boys, future preachers in the Church of God – come by the house and take Joanne and Susan to the carnival. When they return late at night, they wake the child and tell her what they saw: a “freak,” a hermaphrodite in a tent, calling out to the crowd, “God made me thisaway” (245). The child, mesmerized by the image, tries to meditate on it; and the next day, as she visits the convent and kneels before the Eucharist, she keeps on reciting the hermaphrodite’s refrain: “This is the way [God] wanted me to be” (248).
Now, in all of this, we see one truth and multiple interpretations of it. The truth of the story is its title, which calls the body a temple of the divine. O’Connor argues that this truth must be understood inextricably from the Catholic notions of the Incarnation and the Eucharist, since when God became Man, and gave His Body as food, He made the body a holy place and an indivisible component of identity. Both Catholic doctrines invoke themes of unity and self-sacrifice, and without these themes, the truth of the body is disfigured. O’Connor uses silly girls, their wiry beaux, and an old-fashioned nun to expose the ways in which the body becomes divorced from unity and self-sacrifice, and thus the ways in which spiritual embodiment is misunderstood. At the same time, she gives us a precocious child and a hermaphrodite to recover a deeper understanding of the “temple” truth. As O’Connor once said, “The Incarnation makes us see the grotesque as grotesque.”[3] Abject and marginal figures draw attention to their corporality, thereby offering an alternate discourse which prioritizes the role of the body in religious experience.
We can easily locate the origins of unity and self-sacrifice in the Catholic tradition. As to the latter, the Incarnation teaches that God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, as a sacrifice to atone for human sin. Christ’s death on the cross in turn is recalled in Eucharistic imagery (“an elevated Host drenched in blood” (248)), which appeals to the belief that God gives up His Body for His people. Indeed, churchgoers witness this theme of self-sacrifice during the Mass, when the events at Calvary are re-presented and God becomes so humble as to take the appearance of bread and wine. Then, when churchgoers receive the sacrament, they literally accept Christ into their bodies. The divine, in other words, enters into the human body and the human body is conformed to the divine. This picture of union mirrors the intimacy of the Incarnation, through which God united humanity and divinity, temporality and eternity. In both cases, the body stands as a locus for union and communion with the divine; it is not something that is supposed to be transcended or disjointed in the pursuit of a higher life.
When the ideals of unity and self-sacrifice fail, the ability to understand spiritual embodiment likewise falters. Intuition tells us that nuns and girls at a convent school and future preachers would be in a good position to understand these Catholic ideals. Yet these are the very characters O’Connor singles out for critique. Perhaps it is precisely because of their proximity to a religious framework that these characters are most in danger of misusing it. So when Joanne and Susan “put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and [walk] around in the high heels all over the house,” passing the mirror to look at their legs, they misappropriate a religious trope (236). Instead of using their Sunday attire to glorify God in church, they bedizen themselves to preen and admire their own reflections, creating a spectacle of self-glorification. They effectively breach the themes of unity and self-sacrifice that the Incarnation and the Eucharist demand. Unity fails because the girls have severed a material sign (Sunday attire) from its spiritual signification (humble respect), and self-sacrifice yields to self-satisfaction as bodies become, not gifts offered to God, but objects of vain amusement. In a similar misuse of religious tradition, Sister Perpetua quotes St. Paul’s injunction that the body is a temple of God as a defense mechanism against lusty men. For her, the Scripture invokes an ontology of sin, since to even mention the body is to suggest sex, and to suggest sex is to imply the possibility of sexual deviance. Like O’Connor, she acknowledges that the body is a sacred vessel, but unlike O’Connor, she renders this truth in a context of triviality and division. The nun’s language – she says to yell out “Stop sir!” at an unwanted advance – demeans a solemn truth, undermining the importance of the body by wrapping it in silly terms. What is more, Sister Perpetua emphasizes division over unity, using the idea that the body is a spiritual temple as a way to separate good and proper girls from their prurient suitors. This perspective misses O’Connor’s message of spiritual embodiment, which sees all bodies as holy and thus in union with each other.
Perhaps the problem for Sister Perpetua, and for the other characters who misconstrue embodiment, is a problem of translation. Michel Foucault says that the discursive impulse is what gives sexuality its power and meaning, and that language is bound up tightly with knowledge. By this logic, a misuse of language – or a bad translation – brings a heavy consequence, namely, impoverished knowledge. So when Sister Perpetua translates St. Paul into her own imperfect project, she obscures the path to truth. And Joanne and Susan, who giggle too often to even produce much language, are called “stupid” and “silly” time and again. In perhaps the most revealing example, their boy-friends Wendell and Cory appear as “big dumb Church of God ox[en]” when they mistake a Latin hymn for “Jew singing” (241). They cannot translate the foreign tongue and summarily miscategorize it. Their alternative is to make a hybrid rhetoric of their own, rejecting traditional music for “a hill-billy song that sound[s] half like a love song and half like a hymn” (240). O’Connor implicitly criticizes the boys’ inability to find power in language and renders their attempt at bridging the spiritual and the earthly a pathetic failure. The hybrid verse breaks the rule of unity and separates experience into parts. The boys assemble two genres in a piecemeal way, picking and choosing from each which elements (like emotive response) they will keep, and replacing a sacred hymn about the mystery of the Eucharist with a pastiche of religion and “dog-like loving” sentiment (240). Ultimately, they parse and interpret religion to serve their own ends, “keeping [their] head[s] tilted upward as if [they] were only interested in hearing [themselves]” (240). These characters have been clumsy with language and, in the absence of unity and self-sacrifice, their understanding of embodiment has suffered accordingly.
The connection between language and spiritual embodiment becomes clear in one description of the Incarnation. St. John writes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1; 14). Scripture puts divinity, language, and bodily presence into a fundamental relationship. Here, God is embodied in Holy Writ and the parts are inseparable: God, Word, flesh. Language plays a similarly vital role in the celebration of the Eucharist, for it is only by the action of the divine Word – the priest says some prayers proper to the Consecration – that the elements of bread and wine truly become the Body and Blood. Particular words, often from Scripture, possess an active principle. They make things happen and they assume a tangible form, “dwelling among us.” They are not merely symbols, just as the Eucharist, as O’Connor insisted to Mary McCarthy, is not simply a sign. Instead, holy words acquire a presence of their own; when used properly, they reinstate the importance of the body in experiencing the divine.
It is therefore unsurprising that O’Connor associates greater language facility with a deeper understanding of spiritual embodiment. As we have seen, unthinking boys and a wizened nun misappropriate religious language and in the process discard the themes of unity and self-sacrifice that are so important to the truth of the body. But if one discourse fails, an alternative discourse survives in the language of the child and the hermaphrodite and revives embodiment ideals. This alternative discourse privileges a literal and inclusive reading of Scripture. The hermaphrodite, for his/her part, insists that when St. Paul calls the body a temple of the Holy Ghost, the apostle is addressing everyone. Thus the hermaphrodite can say “This is the way [God] wanted me to be” (245) because his/her own body, although “freakish” in the popular discourse, is a holding-place for the divine. Indeed, the mystery of the hermaphrodite’s body – “the answer to a riddle that [is] more puzzling than the riddle itself” (245) – in some ways parallels the divine mysteries of the Eucharist and the Incarnation. After all, the hermaphrodite represents a form of union, joining male and female organs in one flesh. This hybridity differs from the hybridity of the song-making boys, since it is naturally ordained (“God made me thisaway” (245)) and preserves a sense of unity. The hermaphrodite is not described as “half-man/half-woman,” but as “a man and woman both” (245). The wholeness of his/her identity remains intact. In a similar way, the Eucharist conveys that Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of bread does not cause division. We cannot understand the hermaphrodite apart from unity and the hermaphrodite cannot understand his/her body apart from Scripture. Only holy language can accommodate his/her personhood, transforming the hermaphrodite from an “it” and a “you-know-what” (244) to an embodiment of divine will.
If the hermaphrodite uses Scripture to understand him-/herself, the child uses the hermaphrodite to understand Scripture. In particular, the hermaphrodite becomes a way for her to comprehend St. Paul’s message in a way that her cousins do not. The child absorbs the Biblical language in its deepest sense; she does not laugh over it or interpret it according to narrow personal whims. She takes the Bible at its word and understands that every body – including the hermaphrodite’s – must be holy. In general, her acceptance of holy language is simple, and this simplicity becomes a route to truth. When she sings the “Tantum Ergo,” she feels her “ugly thoughts” stop and begins to realize “that she [is] in the presence of God” (247). So again, a simple meditation on traditional religious language (in this case, a medieval hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas) leads to a greater sense of intimacy with the divine.
But the child does not only borrow language from existing sources. She also produces her own language and, in the process, recognizes a difference between good and bad discourse. When for instance she kneels before the Eucharist, she prays: “Hep me not to be so mean…. Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do” (247, emphasis added). In conversing with God, the child laments her tendency to “sass” her mother and speak unkindly. She wants to overcome “the sin of Pride” (243), and the way to do this, she thinks, is through changing her language. Therefore language becomes the subject and desire of her prayer. The child is unlike her chattering cousins and the lecturing nun in her very awareness of words. When she speaks, she orients her language toward God, not toward flirtations or warding off ungentlemanly boys in the backs of automobiles. In this way, she shares a vocabulary with the hermaphrodite, who also speaks in a language of prayer, invoking the name of God. In fact, the child and the hermaphrodite are linked in an imaginary dialogue, since the former hears the words of the latter and repeats them in her head. She even imagines a detailed conversation in which the hermaphrodite becomes a preacher-figure, espousing the truths of his body to a public chorus of “Amen” (246). O’Connor’s marginal characters co-create an alternative discourse centered on spiritual embodiment.
This alternative discourse invokes the old theme of self-sacrifice, consistent with the Catholic tradition. Dreaming about what she will be when she grows up, the child tosses aside the possibilities of doctor and engineer, instead exclaiming that she wants to be a saint and a martyr (243). Meanwhile, the hermaphrodite struggles to accept his/her grotesque biology and proclaims that, despite the difficulties, “I’m making the best of it” (245). The child fantasizes about giving up her body in a gesture of religious surrender; the hermaphrodite endures his/her body in deference to divine will. Both characters offer their bodies – and by extension, their selves – to serve a higher Power. O’Connor capitalizes on such self-surrender by giving neither the child nor the hermaphrodite a proper name. Unlike Joanne and Susan and Wendell and Cory, the child and the hermaphrodite move beyond themselves. In advancing an alternative discourse, they also adopt alter(native) egos, or rather, anti-egos, to which no names can be attached.
Leo Bersani appears to embrace a similar premise in his notion of self-shattering. He identifies the ego as the source of power struggles and advocates for freedom by way of self-destruction. For Bersani, self-shattering is a way to experience the fullness of pain and pleasure. It is in a sense a masochistic variety of self-sacrifice which finds its primary expression in the sexual act. By this view, bodily sensations become the pure and ultimate goal and any concept of the person as a whole entity is lost. But O’Connor’s Catholic perspective complicates Bersani’s theory. While the body remains important, sensations of pleasure and pain cannot be ends in themselves; for after all, the body coexists with and derives meaning from the spirit. Sometimes, bodily sensations cease to function at all. As the lyrics of “Tantum Ergo” suggest, sensuum defectui: senses fail in the face of a holy and self-sacrificial mystery. Pleasure and pain are mere shadows of an encounter with the divine; they are like faulty symbols trying to express the ineffable. For O’Connor, self-sacrifice does not mean a spatial and anonymous narcissism, as Bersani would have it. Rather, self-sacrifice is a special encounter with intimacy whereby the self – body and spirit – is deeply valued, not discarded. When Jesus gives his Body in the Mass, he makes of Himself a gift of love. And when the child hears that she is a Temple of the Holy Ghost, it makes her feel “as if somebody had given her a present” (238). The body is linked with the joy of giving and receiving in love. Spiritual embodiment is self-giving, not self-obliterating.
Bersani’s view of self-shattering depends on the sexual act. But O’Connor’s spiritual embodiment extends the value of the body beyond sex per se. In fact, O’Connor does not write a single married couple into “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Instead, she populates her narrative with people who cannot have sex for one reason or another. So what happens to the sexual act? The child’s sensual experience of the Eucharist, in which she sees the sun as a Host drenched in blood and sinking out of sight, recalls a vision of the saints. In the mystic tradition, saints have used sexual language to describe the relationship between the soul and God. Bernini’s famous sculpture of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa suggests that sexual energies can be sublimated toward a purpose other than sexual intercourse and procreation. In the stories of the saints, a sexual tradition emanates from people who are almost exclusively celibate. Likewise, in O’Connor’s story, a celibate child provides a sexual language, rich in images of “smother[ing]” hugs (248) and sleeping with lions (243) and “muscle[s] strained” in the effort to understand a divine mystery (245). The physical body has a sublime expression apart from the act of sex and a celibate lifestyle can ably accommodate this expression in its discourse.
Celibacy might in fact even be a necessity for the production of good language. O’Connor once remarked in a letter: “There is a great deal that has to either be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work. There seem to be other conditions in life that demand celibacy besides the priesthood.”[4] In this understanding, celibacy is a discipline and a sacrifice uniquely tied to the act of writing. When we consider that “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” is narrated, if indirectly, from the child’s point of view, we might see the child’s celibacy as a necessary condition for her linguistic prowess. Perhaps celibacy, in O’Connor’s view, enables the virtue of purity (an inversion of Bersani’s theory that sex keeps the body “clean” of power struggles). When applied to language, purity strips utterances to their most powerful essence, driving away frivolity and unwarranted interpretations. Hence do we see the child and the hermaphrodite embracing a simple discourse. They do not embellish, but accept fully the statement that “You are a Temple of the Holy Ghost.”
Celibacy, however, poses a problem. It inspires the anxiety of reproduction. O’Connor’s story oddly coheres with Lee Edelman’s discourse on a queer sexuality, insofar as it tries to separate the value of the body from the capacity to procreate. By including the hermaphrodite as a proto-queer archetype, O’Connor also opens “bodily discourse” to people on the margins, just as Edelman writes on behalf of homosexuals. But O’Connor, unlike Edelman, does not try to define sex as a chiefly pleasurable act. Nor does sex become her primary concern. Instead, O’Connor tries to define the body as important and holy without reference to sexual intercourse. Moreover, she does not agree with Edelman’s conclusion that the child-figure should be killed. Indeed, “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” endorses quite the opposite view, depicting as it does an exemplary child. O’Connor’s protagonist, who is “about a million times smarter” than her cousins (245) and deeply aware of sacred language, affirms Peter Coviello’s notion of a smart and capable youth. Surely the child has received some measure of Wisdom, which, according to the Bible, is a Gift of the Holy Ghost. And as a writer, she might even be said to reproduce. If words become flesh, then narration becomes a way to incarnate without the mediation of sex. Thus the child-narrator embodies characters and ideas via her language. Killing the child per Edelman’s advice would necessarily kill the body, not in an act of self-surrender to the divine, but in a coercive drive to extinguish and condemn. To kill the child would undermine the whole point of O’Connor’s story, defiling the physical and bringing disunion. The Incarnation and the Eucharist give every person a value, irrespective of age or creed or sexual orientation. This value is inextricable from the body, which exists in relationship to God and which is, indeed, a Temple of the Holy Ghost.
[1] From a letter written by O’Connor to a friend. As recorded in Yardley, Jonathan. “The Writer Who Was Full of Grace.” Washington Post 6 July 2005.
[2] Parenthetical references in this paper will refer to the story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” as published in Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
[3] As remembered in a lunchtime lecture at a Jesuit university in San Francisco, given by Archbishop George Niederauer.
[4] As referenced in Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America. Ed. Harriet Pollack. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995.