2
The reader should be warned: this paper is an experiment. In it, I try to
bring together Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Friedrich Nietzsche. One
of these people, the reader will immediately note, is not like the others. While
Nietzsche was certainly raised in a Christ-haunted world, he championed
honest atheism. Why then attempt to bring these three figures together?
I seek to bring these three figures together because I think there is a link,
even if a tenuous one, between O’Connor’s incarnational art, Percy’s ‘Bad
Catholicism’ and Nietzsche’s ‘immanent mysticism.’
1
The link is shown in the
way each addresses the ‘syndrome’ Percy’s Thomas More calls “angelism-
bestialism.” It is this syndrome that is central to my paper, as it is this
syndrome that I think is central to modern life. As I shall explain, the problem
of angelism-bestialism is that of an experientially abstract naturalism which
dominates modern thought and seems to deny the possibility of both good and
evil and values beyond good and evil.
Walker Percy and the Problem of Angelism-Bestialism
Tom More, in Percy’s Love in the Ruins, diagnoses the “the modern Black
Death” (LR, 383).
2
Modern human beings suffer from “chronic angelism-
bestialism” (LR, 383). Angelism is the “excessive abstraction of the self from
itself” (LR, 37). Bestialism, a term not meant pejoratively, “promotes
adjustment to the environment” (LR, 23). But the two ‘isms’ are often
experienced simultaneously. “A man, for example, can feel at one and the
same time extremely abstracted and inordinately lustful toward lovely young
women who may be perfect strangers” (LR, 23).
In a sense, angelism-bestialism describes the human condition. Man
has always suffered from his divided nature. But it also describes a condition
of self-alienation that is more common today than ever, because it is
thoroughly encouraged by modern life. Modern life, with its public
1
The term “immanent mysticism” is Eric Voegelin’s, discussed below.
Convention