Grotesque Sublimity

In City of God, Augustine asks a rather startling

question: at the resurrection, when this world gives way to

a Heaven better still than the Paradise lost, when bodies

rise newly glorious and bring all kinds of wonderful

philosophical puzzles with them, will there still be women,

or will everyone be resurrected male?

In his answer, Augustine parts from the philosophical

tradition declaring the superiority of the male in every

respect, declaring:

While all defects will be removed from those bodies, their essential nature will be preserved. Now a woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. … However, the female organswill not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder—there will be no lust in that life—but will arouse the praises of god for his wisdom and compassion, that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created. (22.17)

All sorts of interesting things are going on in this

very full paragraph, but I would like to draw our attention

first to the insistence upon beauty, and the role of that

beauty, which arouses not lust, but praise; and to suggest

that there are some remarkable possibilities in Augustine’s

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descriptions of these bodies. These possibilities are at

once dissonant with Augustine’s more usually classical

aesthetic sensibility, and at the same time oddly hopeful.

To see why the question of beauty is so important, we

need first to see the excessiveness of glorified or

resurrected bodies. City of God describes several modes of

what we might call corporeal excess—and in the passages on

bodies, even more than in the rest of the text, Augustine

seems unable to restrain the urge to go on and on, to make

extensive lists that nonetheless cannot be exhaustive, as

the bodies spill beyond the order in which he tries to

contain them.

Thus we find pages and pages, chapter after chapter,

describing bodies that go beyond the “normal” boundaries of

fallen human nature, whether by proportion (as in the case

of giants), duration (longevity associated with gigantism),

type (the various forms of “monstrosity” Augustine

discusses), or will (unusual abilities to control various

parts of the body, or, on the flipside of this, the capacity

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of the body to rebel against the will, or the inadequacy of

the will to control the body).

In his discussions and descriptions of body, we are led

into Augustine’s (never quite successful) efforts to

reincorporate and reinscribe excess, to reintegrate it into

a properly contained text, a neatly-bounded body, a whole

clearly and neatly distinguishable from a collection of

fragments. In particular, the resurrected or glorified body—

the body most closely modeled upon God’s own risen flesh—

appears repeatedly as the body restored to order, freed from

excess as from fragmentation, perfect in its size and in its

proportions.1 But this is only half the story; this freeing,

as we shall see, not only fails, it actually leads at once

1 Thus Carolyn Walker Bynum asserts that for Augustine “resurrection is restoration both of bodily material and of bodily wholeness or integrity, with incorruption (which includes—for the blessed—beauty, weightlessness, and impassibility) added on.” She charges him with “a profound fear of development and process” that results in a view of “salvation as the crystalline hardness not only of stasis but of the impossibility of non-stasis.” Admitting that “Augustine’s insistence on keeping minute details of the heavenly body close to the earthly one” isquite striking, she notes again that he does so “while adding (a crucialaddition of course!) stasis” (The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 [New York: Columbia, 1995], 95, 97, 99]. We question, however,whether “add stasis, and stir” is a formula that adequately captures Augustine’s approach, as if he were thereby seeking a recipe for balancebetween Neoplatonic transcendentalism and Christian incarnationalism.

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to a deeper breakage and a more dramatic spilling-over. Even

the beauty and desirability of bodies can be regarded as

exceeding necessity—in this very excess beyond what is

necessary lies their capacity to lead us into temptation.

To understand what I’m talking about in making this

claim for excessiveness, we may begin with the case of

bodies that go beyond the limits apparently set by nature.

Antediluvian humanity, Augustine assures us, was both

longer-lived and larger than the present version. Taking his

first evidence from Virgil’s Aeneid, he also cites the

evidence of “bones of incredible size” and enormous human

molars uncovered in tombs (15.9). He argues that even when

humans in general were larger (as he assumes they once

were), there were exceptions, giants among them, just as

there are humans today who are giant in comparison to most.

Similarly, while he is uncertain about the nature and status

of the “sons of God” who are said in Genesis 6 to have mated

with human women, he is not perturbed by claims about their

giant offspring, saying to those who doubt them: “There had

been giants on earth when the sons of God took as wives the

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daughters of men… It is true that giants were also born

after this happened…Thus there were giants both before and

after that time” (15.23).

These humans who take up an exceptional amount of space

are also credited with taking up an exceptional amount of

time. Granting that material evidence cannot prove duration

as it can size, Augustine nonetheless declares, “we should

not for that reason call in question the reliability of the

sacred narrative,” adding that “Pliny also states that there

is to this day a nation where men live for two hundred

years” (15.9). He goes on to give numerous examples of

long-lived Biblical figures, noting minor discrepancies in

the reporting of their ages but deciding that these are not

significant and do not affect the truth of the claim that

people once lived very long lives.

In addition to these long-lived giants of both past and

present, there is among humans a multiplicity of corporeal

types that can only be called excessive. Ostensibly

concerned with the relatively succinct point that anything

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human is a descendent of Adam, Augustine here cannot resist

the multiplication of examples, and I cannot resist quoting

him:

There are accounts in pagan history of certain monstrous races of men. … Some of these monsters are said to have only one eye…; others have the soles of their feet turned backwards behind their legs; others have the characteristics of both sexes… Then there are men without mouths, who live only by inhaling through their nostrils; there are others whose height is only acubit… We are told in another place that there are females who conceive at the age of five and do not livebeyond their eighth year. There is also a story of a race who have a single leg attached to their feet; theycannot bend their knee, and yet have a remarkable turn of speed. … There are some men without necks, and with their eyes in their shoulders… (16.8)

Nor does he stop here,2 though these examples should

suffice to the point. It is hard not to be drawn into his

2 What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog’s head and actual barkingprove them to be animals rather than men? The text overflows: “At Hippo Zaritus there is a man with feet shaped like a crescent, with onlytwo toes on each, and his hands are similarly shaped. …As for Androgynes, also called Hermaphrodites, they are certainly very rare, and yet it is difficult to find periods when there are no examples….Some years ago, but certainly in my time, a man was born in the East with a double set of upper parts, but a single set of the lower limbs. …And he lived long enough for the news of his case to attract many sightseers” (16.8).

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obsession with the wholly unnecessary, utterly fascinating

variability of human phenotypes, even if we don’t quite

share his credulity. Similarly, it is difficult to the point

of impossibility not to be drawn into his enthusiastic

descriptions of peculiar bodily abilities, excessive both in

sheer number and in going so far beyond utility.

Some people can even move their ears, either one at a time or both together. Others without moving the head can bring the whole scalp…down toward the forehead and bring it back again at will. Some can swallow an incredible number of various articles and then with a slight contraction of the diaphragm, can produce, as ifout of a bag, any article they please, in perfect condition. There are others who imitate the cries of birds and beasts and the voices of any other men, reproducing them so accurately as to be quite indistinguishable from the originals, unless they are seen. A number of people produce at will such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that they seem to be singing from that region. I know from my ownexperience of a man who used to sweat whenever he chose; and it is a well-known fact that some people canweep at will and shed floods of tears. (14.24)

And, again, there’s more.

Besides proving too much for our words, the flesh also

exceeds the will—both God’s will and ours, disobeying our

very own commands. This disobedience, the split of the body

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from its perfect harmony with will, is for Augustine the

consequence of an original disobedience, better known, of

course, as original sin. In this prototypical and

consequential misbehavior, humans willfully disobey God in a

fleshly act (eating) that manifests the split between human

and divine wills. They, tempted by a subtle serpent, want to

eat the fruit; God doesn’t want them to. The people eat, and

find in partial consequence that their own flesh, formerly

altogether docile to will, becomes disobedient, not only to

God, but even to their own intentions. Disobedience

multiplies: “Who can list all the multitude of things that

man wishes to do and cannot, while he is disobedient to

himself, that is, while his very mind and even his lower

element, his flesh, do not submit to his will?” (14.15) As

a result, humans find themselves driven by contradictory and

unsatisfiable desires. The Augustinian ideal is desire

reunified such that it is solely directed to God. The will

thus reintegrated would harmonize not only with itself and

with God’s will but with the flesh as well. Such is the

ideal of the glorified body, the body after its resurrection

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as it returns to, though it will also exceed, the body

before its fall.

In Augustine’s attempts at a conceptual reintegration

of our not-so-docile bodies, his attempts to get them to

make sense, their excessiveness actually becomes still more

evident. Here too we may begin with the phenomenon of very

large bodies. The effort to reintegrate excessive size comes

about indirectly, in the discussion of a problem that arises

for many thinkers, from Tertullian onward, in considering

the resurrection of the body, to wit: what about the

leftover bits?

The problem of the leftover bits is this: if our bodies

are raised whole (as Augustine claims), what becomes of all

those parts—he mentions toenail clippings and cut hair—that

once belonged to a given body?3 Do they simply disappear? 3 It appears to be Tertullian who first interpolated hair and nails intoDeut. 29:4, when he asserted that “the clothing and shoes of the children of Israel remained unworn and unwasted during the course of forty years; and that in their own bodies a just measure of aptness and propriety arrested the uninhibited growth of nails and hair, lest their unusual length be considered as some corruption” (Res. 58.6). Jerome reproduces the reading in his treatise against John of Jerusalem, notingthat barbers (not to mention manicurists) would be out of work in heaven. David Satran suggests that two factors are at work for Tertullian: first, his awareness that hair and nails continue to grow after death, a potential problem for the argument that soul and body are

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Are we resurrected into our glorified bodies with yard-long

toenails? What happens?

Augustine’s solution is, like many of his solutions,

weird, but elegant. He declares:

All that is required is that the whole pot should be re-made out of the whole lump, that is, that all the clay should go back into the whole pot, with nothing left over.Now the hair has been cut, and the nails have been pared, again and again. And if the restoration of what has been cut would disfigure the body, then it will notbe restored. But that does not mean that anything will ‘perish’ from the person at the resurrection. Such constituents will be returned to the same body, to taketheir place in its structure, undergoing a change of substance to make them suitable for the parts in which they are used. (22.19)

necessarily separated at the moment of death (Soul 51.2); and, second, his interest in the debased figure of Nebuchadnezzar who performed penance by living in squalor for seven years, “his nails wild in the manner of a lion, his hair unkempt like that of an eagle” (Pen. 12.7-8).Satran concludes: “These simple features of human anatomy become criteria of ‘humanity’ itself. Untempered, uncontrolled, they reduce man to the condition of a beast; held in check, mastered, they render him angelic” (“Fingernails and Hair: Anatomy and Exegesis in Tertullian,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 40 (1989) 116-120, citation at 120). Clearly Augustine is standing in this tradition when he asks, “Now, what reply am I to make about the hair and the nails?” Yet he chooses to cite a different biblical passage, namely Luke 21:18—“not onehair of your head will perish”—to marshal a rather different argument. According to Augustine, the excesses of physical growth are not held in check but incorporated in the resurrection. Note also that he has dislodged his argument from an exegetical context that might have confined the issue to hair and nails by his resort to a scriptural passage that refers only to hair. If he’s added nails to the list, why not other bodily products?

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In other words, as long as all the “stuff” that was ever of

the body is gathered, it needn’t retain exactly the form it

once had. This regathering, we have to assume, would make

all of us enormous—if, not insignificantly, well-

proportioned—though we’re going to have to hold on to the

question of just what that last part might mean. In our

resurrected, glorified bodies, with all of the matter of our

lifetimes back, we will all be giants.

Or maybe not. Having presented this intriguing

solution, Augustine seems less certain of it in the text’s

next section, where he writes that

…in the resurrection of the body for eternal life the body will have the size and dimensions which it had attained, or was to attain, at maturity, …with its appropriate beauty preserved also in the proportions ofall the parts. If, in order to preserve this beauty, something has been taken from a part displeasing by excessive size, and if this is dispersed throughout thewhole body, in such a way that this material is not lost, while the congruence of the parts is kept, then there is no absurdity in believing that there may be some addition to the stature of the body as a result ofthis. … On the other hand, if it is maintained that every person is to rise again with the precise stature he had when he departed this life, there is no occasionfor violent opposition to such an opinion…. (22.20)

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Faced with the potential excessiveness of risen bodies,

Augustine does not so much backtrack as multiply his

options. Perhaps we are all to be giants. Perhaps we rise

the same size as we lived, but better-proportioned (with the

added matter of our too-big bits redistributed—if we were

too large overall, whatever that might mean, would we become

unusually dense, excessive in weight but not in volume?).

That we might have the stature we would have attained at

maturity is also startling: evidently a body may acquire,

not merely all the matter it ever had, but matter that it

never got around to incorporating. Resurrected bodies must

take account not only of the material accumulation of the

past but of the material potential of the future. Even if we

allow multiple possible answers to the problem of size,

however, a few puzzles remain.

First, while we might prefer to join him in not

thinking about it, it does seem problematic that Augustine

gives little consideration to waste matter. There is an

indirect mention of waste in the discussion of cannibalism,

where Augustine writes, “Now surely no one is going to

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maintain, with any show of truth or reason, that the whole

of a body so eaten passes straight through the intestinal

tract without any change or conversion into flesh of the

eater” (22.20). Presumably waste matter is what does pass

through the body without becoming a part of it as the rest

of one’s food does. Are we then to exclude from reassemblage

everything within us that was, or could without harm have

been, eliminated from us? And how would we know just what

that would be? After all, it was a part of us for a while,

so which while counts in determining the state of the body

worthy of resurrection? The puzzle of waste raises the

puzzle of boundaries, of what counts as body, of what is

properly internal.

The issue of cannibalism raises other puzzles, as

bodies overlap, overflow into each other. Augustine grants

eternal “possession” of the body’s meat to the one whose

body it first was, rather than to the one who is nourished

by consuming that body (22.20). This leaves unaddressed the

question of the body of the one who ate human flesh and

gained mass by so doing: is such a person resurrected as

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smaller, thinner, or less dense? Cannibalism is admittedly

rare, but (though Augustine does not mention it in this

context) we do ingest one another, from the time that we are

infants at the breast (cf. Conf. 1.6). Again, the flesh

exceeds; our bodies overflow and forget their bounds. This

confusion is not merely spatial but temporal; his analysis

of cannibalism suggests that I get the flesh if it was mine

first, but it is not at all clear whether mothers’ milk,

safely exuded, would be resurrected with mother or child.4

It becomes impossible to figure out just what can be, or

what ought to be, contained “within” the body. The very

insistence on bodily integrity, on re-incorporating

everything that was ever of the body, runs into multiplicity

(matter shared among multiple bodies); the boundaries of

interiority and exteriority do not hold, in space or in

time. It becomes difficult to say what is broken or whole,

excessive or insufficient.5

4 Consider also the puzzle of the eucharist: what becomes of the ingested bread and wine, particularly if we consider them, as Augustine surely did, to be the body and blood of Christ? Problems beyond those of cannibalism are created here by the unusual temporality of the body of Christ and by its unusual spatiality in eucharistic multi-location.5

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Time is a central question in boundary issues, as

Augustine struggles with first possession of matter, matter

once possessed and later discarded, and matter that would at

some future point have come into one’s possession. Certainly

there is something unusual in the time of resurrected

bodies. They seem to reintegrate extreme longevity by

making even longer everlasting lives the bodily norm. Just

as we will all be giants (maybe), so too we will all live a

long time—so long that length of time will cease to make

sense (if we lived forever, would we still keep count?).

Time is more shareable than space: each body can take up all

that remains of time in a way that it can’t take up all of

space. But the very time of that heavenly, infinitely-

extended “future,” the fleshly living-again, is excessive;

again, it takes up the paradisiacal past (before sin earned

its wage of death) yet goes beyond it to a mysteriously

? This may be a case in point: a second problem that occurs to us is that of oral sex and the ingestion of bodily fluids, even we don’t add the Augustinian notion that the matter for the making of the human body is all contained within sperm. Like mother’s milk, this seems to be a non-damaging fluid exchange in which it is unclear to whom the matter ultimately “belongs.” [NB: Virginia and I were very proud of this, I’m afraid. We refer to it as “the soon to be famous oral sex footnote.”]

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greater glory. All of time’s sweep seems to be not merely

unfolded here, but infolded, gathered—as in eternity—not

only because that prelapsarian paradise is taken up and

transfigured, but because, as we’ve seen, the very matter of

the body must be very strangely regathered from its various

distributions across time, when its various pieces were and

were not its own.

The beauty of these eternal bodies has already been

emphasized in the necessity that they be well-proportioned

and ornamentally-sexed. It plays another, slightly

different, role in Augustine’s effort to explain the

monstrous multiplicity of forms that we find in the human

bodies of this world.

For God is the creator of all, and he himself knows where and when any creature should be created or shouldhave been created. He has the wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent parts, in their likeness and diversity. The observer who cannot view the whole is offended by what seems thedeformity of a part since he does not know how it fits in. (16.8)

The argument here is of a familiar form, a variant on the

argument from the greater good, which holds that what from a

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particular perspective seems evil, wrong, or bad (even

aesthetically) turns out to be good or beautiful if we can

take a greater perspective. In this case, Augustine argues,

the apparently monstrous multiplicity of types actually

contributes to the beauty of the world. He does not, to be

sure, precisely clarify how—but perhaps such clarity can

only be attained from the perspective of God. Yet this

argument, dependent upon the whole, demands multiplicity,

declaring it necessary to God’s design for goodness. The

whole, however constructed, cannot be a totality, nor

singular, nor seamless, any more than a body can.

Beauty as an argument continues to appear in

Augustine’s efforts to reintegrate bodily excesses. It is

not merely the case that beauty is a characteristic of the

resurrected body; it is a characteristic by which that body

is distinguished from, by which it in fact transforms, the

mortal flesh: we will all be well-proportioned. There is a

kind of excess to the very fact of beauty, which goes beyond

practical necessity. Augustine is himself often suspicious

of beauty, not least because it provokes an often-

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distracting desire—indeed, thinkers from Socrates on have

found beauty and desire inseparable. Even Kant, who

Germanically insists upon removing “interest” from aesthetic

sensation, insists equally that the response to beauty must

be a kind of desire.6 So what happens to desire in the

resurrection?

To consider this, we can return to the discussion

regarding the startling range of human ability. Far from

being a difficulty for which Augustine must account, this

range is presented as evidence in favor of the hope that

humanity might someday find its collective will in harmony

with that of God. This hope is presented in a curious

parallel to humanity’s Edenic obedience:

We observe then that the body, even under present conditions, is an obedient servant to some people in a remarkable fashion beyond the normal limitations of nature; this is shown in many kinds of movements and feelings, and it happens even in men who are living this present troubled life in the corruptible flesh. Ifthis is so, is there any reason why we should not believe that before the sin of disobedience and its punishment of corruptibility, the members of a man’s

6 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing, 1987).

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body could have been the servants of man’s will withoutany lust, for the procreation of children? (14.24)

The maximum of bodily control by the will in the present

world gestures back toward the perfect obedience of Eden and

forward to the perfect harmony of the world redeemed.

Perhaps, in the kingdom to come, as our bodies harmonize

with our wills as with God’s, we shall all be able to wiggle

our ears.

This nostalgically-recalled (or creatively invented)

capacity of the will to control the body is in contrast to

the body’s current, persistent capacity to exceed the will—

that is, to our hereditary somatic disobedience, the

incapacity of the will and body to harmonize perfectly. The

paradigmatically disobedient flesh of the genitals (that

which most often inconveniences us by countering our good

intentions, and where, presumably, “disturbance” was first

felt) is re-integrated, once again by beauty, into the

resurrected and glorified body, becoming only another source

of beauty that draws forth praise.

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At this point we should pause to note some curious

claims about this new beauty. The resurrected body is free

from necessity as imposed by use-value (no longer

disobedient, the genitals are no longer useful either), free

from distracting desire (that is, any desire that might turn

us away from the divine), and so beautiful that it arouses

in the viewer the praises of God. Contrary to his reputation

for hostility to the somatic, Augustine insists upon the

beauty of even mortal bodies, of which he says that “one

would be at a loss to say whether utility or beauty is the

major consideration in their creation.” What functions well

and harmoniously is beautiful, but beauty is not itself

functional. Some of the body is simply aesthetic and

impractical, he argues, “for example, the nipples on a man’s

chest, and the beard on his face….” In resurrected bodies,

however, beauty clearly trumps use value: “For practical

needs are, of course, transitory; and a time will come when

we shall enjoy one another’s beauty for itself alone,

without any lust. And this above all is a motive for the

praise of the Creator … [Ps. 104.1, LXX]” (22.24). These are

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the bodies that most nearly approach the body of God, not

only in their form, but in their speaking, as they praise

the world, seeing that it is good. What is immortal in

bodies, startlingly enough, is beauty. (Intriguingly, one of

the few other people I know to’ve made that claim is Wallace

Stevens. But I digress.)

Granted that form need not follow function, we may

nonetheless come to suspect something odd in the insistence

upon the unnecessary beauty of risen bodies. Without

necessity it is hard to figure out what counts as

proportion; it is hard to see where or why anything

unnecessary would stop, how its proper and proportionate

place could be defined or determined. This sense of excess

in beauty is intensified by its connection with desire.

Desire is not self-limiting; it may be cut short by

satisfaction, but on its own it often tends to excess, most

of all when it desires the divine—that is, when its object

is infinite too.

Desire, suggests Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, seeks at

once beauty and immortality, an interaction with beauty that

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will allow one’s connection to the beautiful, one’s

enjoyment of the beautiful, to extend everlastingly. Beauty

and desire feed back upon one another, ideally forever. And

beauty does create for Augustine a particular kind of

desire: the desire to praise. But praise itself is excessive

speech, already full to bursting. As any reader of Confessions

knows, praise bursts forth sensuously, repetitively, not

always voluntarily, often in fragments rather than

sentences, often in sentences that keep on going. It imparts

no information and performatively accomplishes no deed. If

beauty’s “function” is to draw forth praise, it is most

excessive of all, as Augustine himself suggests. In City of

God, having finished his recitation of all of the beauties

and utilities of creation, he adds: “I have here made a

kind of compressed pile of blessings. If I decided to take

them singly, to unwrap each one, as it were, and to examine

it, with all the detailed blessings contained within it,

what a time it would take! And these are all the

consolations of humanity under condemnation, not the rewards

of the blessed…” (22.24). The praise of God for the

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blessings of the resurrected life would surely push language

to its limits, and then past them.

The ugly, the grotesque, and the disproportionate are

taken up in resurrection, but they are not made useful: they

are made beautiful—purely enjoyable. But this is a grotesque

beauty, refusing all the constraints of the beautiful; even

its obedience to the will becomes not self-restraint but a

marvelously unconstrained and wild multiplication of

capability.

The effect of Augustine’s discussion is to emphasize

the surprisingly un-classical beauty and glory of multiple

and divergent bodies, uncontainable bodies, bodies in which

beauty just might be defined not be regimented standards but

precisely by the joy taken in them: beauty is known in

delight. I find this engaging enough on aesthetic grounds,

but the potential, as O’Connor will show us, may go even

further.

For those unfamiliar with O’Connor’s “Revelation,” the

story begins in a doctor’s waiting room, to which Ruby

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Turpin has accompanied her husband, Claud, who was kicked by

a cow and needs to have his sore leg examined. Mrs. Turpin

talks to people and she prays to Jesus, and most of her

prayers seem to be prayers of gratitude, which you’d think

would make us appreciate her; people who are grateful for

their good fortune, or even just aware that they’re

fortunate, are often sympathetic and even humble. But her

gratitude has a peculiar character—it’s both self-satisfied

and disturbingly comparative. In fact, it depends upon

comparison. Here’s a representative instance:

“If there’s one thing I am,’” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, Ijust feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different.” For one thing, somebody else could have gotClaud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. (499)

Like many of O’Connor’s characters, Mrs. Turpin has a

clear sense of the order of the world and her own high place

in it, a sense to which the world frequently declines to

correspond. But I don’t want to join many of the critics

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I’ve read in simply and easily condemning her as a woman

guilty of pride and social injustice—not because she isn’t,

but because, horrid as she is, she nonetheless attributes

what she sees as good to god and not simply to herself,

which means that hers is a religious sense founded in

gratitude as she understands it, even if she doesn’t

understand it very well. “Whenever she counted her

blessings,” we’re told, “she felt as buoyant as if she

weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one

hundred and eighty.” (497)

The ugly side of this, of course, is that the world she

so gratefully attributes to God is a rigidly and smugly

hierarchical one, and she likes it that way; O’Connor writes

“Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the

classes of people.”(491) It’s interesting that her efforts

to sort out these classes get a little bit tangled; she’s

sure they exist, but they can be hard to determine. O’Connor

is too smart an author to be setting us up for a simplistic

“the last shall be first” reversal; some of the story’s

underprivileged characters are just as unlikeable as Mrs.

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Turpin. For instance, a woman in the waiting room who’s

immediately defined by Mrs. Turpin as white trash reveals

herself as a contemptuous racist, and she too is grateful

for her place in the world, not just racially, but when she

remarks, for instance, “I thank Gawd…I ain’t a lunatic.”

(502) Such characters, who praise the world they enjoy,

would seem to dwell in a glorious state already. But they

don’t see their worlds very well, and their praise is, in

consequence, both fragile and weirdly constrained.

As is also typical of O’Connor’s stories, the lack of

correspondence between Mrs. Turpin’s self-satisfaction and a

more external perspective on her is brought to her attention

with violent suddenness. An “ugly girl” in the waiting room—

a girl, not incidentally, named Mary Grace—has left off her

reading to stare at Mrs. Turpin, making strange faces while

Mrs. Turpin has an ostensibly pleasant conversation with the

girl’s mother. Of course, that conversation has taken a turn

to criticism of the girl’s surly disposition. Abruptly, the

girl reacts, throwing her book at Mrs. Turpin’s head and

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leaping forward to attack her. (499) After the ensuing chaos

has been controlled,

“Mrs. Turpin’s head cleared and her power of motion returned. She leaned forward until she was looking directly into the fierce brilliant eyes. There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, know her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. ‘Whatyou got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.

The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog,’ she whispered.” (500)

After all those assembled in the waiting room have

agreed that the girl is insane, Mrs. Turpin goes home with

Claud, and she spends most of the rest of the story in a

state of irritable agitation, which finally gives way to

anger that “she had been singled out for the message, though

there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have

been applied.” (502) (One of Mrs. Turpin’s greatest points

of gratitude is that she isn’t trash.) Eventually the

tension is too much for her. Standing outside their hog pen,

she lays into God, demanding, “What do you send me a message

like that for? … How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved

and from hell too?” (506) Mrs. Turpin is not so good at

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complexity. “If you like trash better,” she snaps, “go get

yourself some trash then. …If trash is what you wanted why

didn’t you make me trash?...I could quit working and take it

easy and be filthy.” (507) Finally,

“Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! …Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!” [Mrs. Turpin, we notice, believes veryfirmly in order. Nothing overflows its place, nothing shifts, even if it might appear to.]

A garbled echo returned to her. A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do

you think you are?” The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned

for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer frombeyond the wood. (507-8)

The answer is the return of the question: who do you

think you are? What in the world have you been praising; how

much of the world have you had to shut out, in order to

praise? After this, Mrs. Turpin looks at the hogs “as if

through the very heart of mystery”; “as if she were

absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.” (508) And

finally, as she looks at “a purple streak in the sky,” “a

visionary light settled in her eyes,” and this is what she

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sees (I should warn you that the description is as Mrs.

Turpin sees it, and some of its language is offensive):

… a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the endof the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always hada little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision fadedbut she remained where she was, immobile.

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In thewoods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbingupward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (508-9)

And the story ends here. It’s after her stunned and

stunning revelation that we can really start to see, not

just that something is wrong with Mrs. Turpin’s form of

gratitude and praise, but what is wrong with it. For

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Augustine, the proliferation of human types is itself a

delight, cause for praise—for language drawn out so

irresistibly that it is as if it came against one’s will,

but of course it is precisely so accordant with will as to

meet no barrier at all.

For Mrs.Turpin, the joy of that multiplicity is

negative. That is, much of humanity provides the contrast by

which she can be praised—and so to see such humanity, clean

and white-robed, leading, getting into heaven ahead of her,

is just about too much. The freaks and lunatics are scarcely

even human; like the Augustinian multiplicity, they seem

half-animal, frog-like—and utterly, joyously right, fully in

accordance with their own wills as they leap and rumble

heavenward. The only discord is in the joyless dignity—or

more exactly, in an important correction, the joylessness

passing for dignity—of Mrs.Turpin’s own kind. This kind is

characterized by order, by everything being neat, in its

place. Her people are characterized by the absence of

excess, by virtue of that moderation now being burned away.

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Early in the story, while she’s still sitting in the

doctor’s waiting room, Mrs. Turpin, scanning the other

patients, hums along with a gospel song on the radio:

She had seen from the first that the child belonged with the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat—kind of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get up. … The gospel hymn playing was “When I looked up and He looked down,” and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.” (490)

In her doomsday vision, it’s people like the patient,

quiet old woman and sickly child who do indeed seem to’ve

been called to get up, not so much transformed into beauty

as shown to be beautiful in an incomprehensible revelation.

The revelation undoes Mrs. Turpin’s sense of the beautiful.

Hers is a repressive corporeality, its beauties all defined

negatively, closing-off instead of opening-infinitely, such

that she is prevented from seeing beauty at all: in anyone

unlike her, in the ugly girl named Mary Grace, but also in

the sudden streaking sunset. Even her love of Claud is a

negative—she isn’t joyful that she has Claud; she’s glad

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nobody else does. Her smug self-satisfaction is finally

ripped open by Grace, who perversely awakens her to the

world’s beauty by showing her her own ugliness. Mrs. Turpin

is a hog and her both, is saved and from hell too—and so,

O’Connor suggests, are all human beings. She is in a

salvific delight of praise and joy, and a hellish exclusion

from their fullness. The problem is that while she directs

her praises up to her God, she’s been looking down on

everyone and everything, with no real celebration at all.

The world redeemed, demanding praise, rushing toward

heaven is sublimely, and grotesquely, indiscriminate. It

glorifies not by exclusion and contrast, not by gratitude

for what it is not or for who did not get one’s gifts, but

by a downright terrifying measure of inclusion.

This is no classical beauty, with its proportions given

in advance by mathematical measure; but this is, at the same

time, what beauty is: it is excessive, it is unnecessary; it

is defined by its absence of function, by serving only

enjoyment, motivating and expressing only praise and

delight. It serves neither to order the world nor to secure

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any place in it, whether that place is Mrs. Turpin’s or that

of the top and bottom rails of the hog pen. To elicit praise

is not a function, because praise itself has no utility.

We can’t even claim some overarching beauty by which

this chaos is re-collected into order, into a kind of

harmony that makes a oneness out of difference. The beauty

of the resurrected is not that of those who are, alone, on

key—if only one person, or group, or instrument is on key,

then there is no longer a key on which to be; that is, it or

they must be as much in dissonance as everyone else. The

song of praise that fills O’Connor’s heaven is not a

singular plainchant; it is not even a harmony. It is a

glorious dissonance, the shocking chorus of Gesualdo

responsoria, the bent note of a blues song, a disproportion

that shouldn’t work, but does—excessive in the manner of

immeasurably-exceeding grace. The song, like the bodies, is

in some mysterious way well-proportioned, even perfectly

proportioned, but that proportionality is governed by no

regularity of recognizable law, and the beauty it offers is

not comforting. Like grace, it exceeds comprehensible law.

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Overflowing, breaking, reconfiguring, the bodies and their

voices shock us with their perfection nonetheless, the song

of praise stopping us with its disturbing and grotesque

beauty.

Mrs. Turpin’s gratitude for the beauty of the world is

wrongly conceived because it takes in too little of the

world; she thinks that everyone must sing in her key.

Though he hasn’t followed his own line of thought all the

way, Augustine has described for us a glorified world in

which beauty is exemplified by human bodies, while those

bodies are marked by their overflow, their fragmentation,

and their uncertain boundaries. If their song of praise

bears any correspondence to the beauty it praises, the

beauty of its proportions is also disproportionate,

unpredictable. As I’ve said, this seems to me a promising

way to think of the beauty of bodies: to think of taking joy

in them, a joy necessarily multiform, and not to see beauty

only in conforming to some current somatic fashion; to link,

as Augustine does, beauty to delight—and Neoplatonically, to

the very fact of being. If beauty is known in taking

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delight, perhaps we can usefully reconceive the pleasure of

it. “Delight orders the soul,” (DM VI.II.29) Augustine

declares, but his own reflections argue against the tidiness

he assigns to this order, and so open up the possibility of

a great—an astonishingly great—range of joys. “Beauty is

nothing but the beginning of terror,” says Rilke, but

entangled in that terror, in its overwhelming overabundance,

is the beginning of jubilation too.

Given who our writers are here, we must also realize

that this beauty has religious significance—it is a sign of

glory and a source of glorification. Beauty is linked to

praise and to desire and to joy, while disabling our ability

to insist upon tidy limits for the praiseworthy, the

desirable, the delightful. Both Augustine, perhaps not-

quite-consciously, and O’Connor, very self-awarely,

recognize that Christianity has always had dissonance in its

beauty, the abysmal abandonment of the crucifixion in its

Easter, as well as the sheer astonishing impossible overflow

of materiality in its glorified and resurrected flesh. It is

this ineluctable trace of the grotesque, this overfull and

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fragmentary delight, that grants it whatever possibility it

may have of being, like its bodies both human and divine,

likewise beautiful. Divinity, too, overflows.

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