Returning to the sacramental world.

Walsh, Patrick J.

Eudora Welty and Walker Percy: The Concept of Home in Their Lives and Literature, by Marion Montgomery, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2004. v + 214 pp.

MONTGOMERY'S BOOKS, which are not strictly literary criticism, incorporate a wide body of theology, philosophy and poetry. Many enlightening statements from these sources reflect and play off one another like light through a multifaceted crystal. Professor Montgomery's primary concern is the impoverished consciousness of our time and the deconstruction of reality that has made a wasteland of Western civilization. The crisis of Western civilization stems primarily from a false conception of man and what constitutes reality. Montgomery has explored this theme before most thoroughly in his out-of-print trilogy, a neglected classic work of our time: Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), and Why Hawthorne was Melancholy (1984). These volumes explored the prophetic aspect of the writer and suggest a possible recovery from our wasteland that would rescue the person and the community. Montgomery's work provides a kind of third testament for those wishing to see clearly through the maelstrom of modernity.

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In his current book, Montgomery, a Southerner, looks at two Southern writers--"two superb craftsmen as makers of fiction" who held their tether on the reality of human existence "by a feeding of intellectual wonder out of love." Montgomery believes this to be the "first principle" of life and art. Examining these two writers' vision provides a reality check on our unreal civilization.

Eudora Welty and Walker Percy believe our age has a myopic view of human existence without any sense of wonder. Our vast media, from comic strips to PBS, unceasingly broadcast that there is no mystery to things and that everything can be explained by modern science. This consensus of our times propagates the belief that man will solve the problems of human existence through the application of science and technology. Montgomery states that our age assumes that order is sustained by the human intellect "imposing order out of its own authority." In short, modern man believes that he is his own god and that through the accumulation of information he can gain power over all things.

How profoundly different Eudora Welty's reverent approach to the complexity of things--one of awe and wonder! Or Walker Percy's piety, that "faith is a form of knowledge. It is different from scientific knowledge, but it is a form of knowledge. And, further, "the world is a sacrament and a mystery."

In his drive toward autonomous power, modern man disowns the past and the real experience of peoples who have lived before. The accumulated heritage of civilization, religion, literature, history, law, are ignored or ridiculed as mere superstition of those not as "advanced" as we are. Thus people today are lost because they do not know who they are, where they are going, or where they have been. Percy saw them as nomads of science. These rootless beings have given up their personalities and souls to "experts" who daily broadcast new information from pseudo-scientific studies that purport to inform them who they are and what they should be.

People from real places who cultivate traditions and strong families know who they are. The South had always been a bastion in this regard. Identification with a place is important for the development of the family and person. This is why there is a strong political movement afoot to destroy fundamentals like marriage and family and even to reconstruct language so as to recreate reality. "Gay marriage" is the latest nominalist slogan. Flannery O'Connor recognized that "modern man comes from nowhere." The experts of the new nominalist order would like everyone to be a kind of "nowhere man" or "stupid white man" malleable to every emotive suggestion from the media.

Eudora Welty as an artist abhorred such abstractions. Her words and work point to real things. "Abstraction always being the enemy of art," her fiction rests in "particulars" and in particular things as experienced in reality. "Never the general." Reality, Montgomery says, cannot be reduced to a formula as the gnostic manipulators suppose.

Likewise in his fiction Walker Percy diagnosed and sought a cure to this modern dementia, what he termed--"The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind." Percy's fiction is at times disturbing to the reader. He seems to suffer along with his characters. One senses he was almost driven to intellectual despair till he found serenity as a convert to reason and revelation represented in the Roman Catholic Church.

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Percy, a trained doctor, was immersed in science and modern ideas and more uneasy about the dangers posed by modernity than was Eudora Welty. In age, she was Percy's senior but she was also more settled and felt herself a member of the community--even though she could see it rapidly decaying around her. Montgomery refers to Welty's peaceful state of mind as "natural Augustinian." She had an "intuitive vision of things" paralleling St. Augustine's vision of a "deep grained habit of love." "In consequence, Welty could be comfortably even serenely, at home--in place, to the wonder of the early Walker Percy, till his better understanding at last revealed in his late essay, 'The Holiness of the Ordinary.'"

Montgomery says: "Percy initially saw himself as a diagnostician, as opposed to metaphysician or poet, he develops an intense dramatic concern for the endemic sickness of mind inherited and spread by the triumph of Modernist philosophy, that philosophy having itself become servant to science, especially to Positivism. In that combination (philosophy subservient to Positivistic science) the intellectual ground had been prepared over a few centuries, whereby science becomes at last scienticism, as he recognized. Scienticism is quasi-science, he will argue, and as such it becomes for Percy a principal antagonist as an idea in his fiction."

In Percy's Love In The Ruins, a character named Dr. Thomas More has invented a lapsometer, a mechanical device to cure modern man of his insanity. Percy like Dr. More knows that scientific theories of life have "so abstracted man from himself that he sees concrete things as theories and himself as a shadow so that he cannot reenter the lovely ordinary world." His lapsometer would bring man back to himself. Dr. More says it is "the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous mathematician Descartes ripped the body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts his own house." More believes he can cure the illness of the modern world and also win the Nobel Prize for his invention.

Percy believes two types of maladies rule modernity and stem from Descartes' sickness. On the one hand people are abstracted out of reality and have no common sense. Remember Jimmy Carter assembling experts for a conference on defining exactly what a family is! For these folk all reality needs redefinition. This warped method approaches all common things of life as if they were seen for the first time. Dr. More calls this "angelism"--disembodied thought. It is the Cartesian method of mind separated from body with the emphasis on abstract thinking. It is an attempt to define the color red as an abstraction instead of pointing to something that is red and saying, "this is red."

The other modern malady, Percy says, is "bestialism," which usually manifests itself in an overwhelming sexual appetite and seeks "sex with strangers." But the two can be mixed together in an "angelism-bestialism" strain. Percy once hilariously referred to people afflicted with this as "ghosts with erections." Both pathologies are in reality twin forms of despair and escapes from a real world where mind and body and soul are united. Both are forms of despair for those who have lost hope in a meaningful reality.

Percy engages in a lot of satirical fun in this novel. But at the end of the book, Dr. More comes back to his senses realizing that technology cannot cure our modern dementia. Man is not a machine that can be fine-tuned by technique. Man is a created being who must control himself as T.S. Eliot said through "prayer, discipline, thought and action." So, Dr. More returns to his Roman Catholic faith and no longer hopes for the Nobel Prize. More comes to accept his place in the world and himself as a fallen creature and not as a self-autonomous self. St. Thomas Aquinas also knew Man to be "homo viator"--on the way. Similarly, Percy describes man's position as a limited creature in between things--"a wanderer, lordly exile, worker, waiter and watcher."

Montgomery's new book provides a pathway out of modernity's dark wood. "The wood begins with Descartes and accelerates toward the Enlightenment's rationalism encouraging a wider wandering in the woods whose very darkness seems increasingly fascinating." Montgomery would lead us to a celebration of creation itself as sacramental, even that part of the world occupied by a popular spirit which finds itself no longer at home in place, having become, as Walker Percy wrote, "losangelized" and "lost in the cosmos of suburban wanderings."

PATRICK J. WALSH is a regular contributor to Modern Age: A Quarterly Review.