A CT review of a new book on Flannery O’Connor

The context of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, as Edmondson makes clear, was “the threat of nihilism to human civilization.” As the title intimates, where Friedrich Nietzsche sought to take humanity “beyond good and evil” to a world without God or morality, Flannery O’Connor hoped to return the reader to a created cosmos with transcendent standards of right and wrong. Following Jacques Maritain, O’Connor believed that after the Enlightenment replaced faith with reason, men soon lost faith in reason itself. For O’Connor, reason “loses its footing” when one excludes God. This paved the way for nihilism, which spurred much of her literary energies.