Several months ago, I found myself in small-town Georgia, listening to a career retrospective lecture by Sarah Gordon, one of the most important professors in Flannery O’Connor studies for her work establishing O’Connor’s archives. After interlacing the story of her discovery of O’Connor’s fiction with some of the southern Catholic author’s funniest one-liners, she made a surprising argument, not only to that academic, generally left-leaning audience (I say at the risk of redundancy), but to anyone who was aware of her career as a feminist literary critic. While she had generally attempted to focus simply on what interested her in O’Connor’s short stories and novels, she now argued that:

We simply cannot ignore O’Connor’s radical faith, a faith that honestly underlies everything she wrote and is evident in the harshness, the unrelenting and sardonic descriptions, often cataclysmic, of a fallen world. … We cannot teach or talk about O’Connor’s work without acknowledging the incredible faith that is the scaffolding of every bit of it.

It is of course not merely a hard thing to convince secular literary critics to teach O’Connor’s Catholicism, when orthodox Christianity is increasingly conflated with the newest phobia invented by the left. It’s harder knowing, with a tradition of over two thousand years of theology, liturgy, and culture, where to begin, especially if one doesn’t have the benefit of a classical Catholic education. Fr. Damian Ference’s new book Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist seeks to set out the traditional Catholic philosophical foundations for O’Connor’s fiction, outlining major tenets of Thomistic philosophy in a thoroughly readable fashion. Readers will come away with a greater appreciation for O’Connor’s Catholic faith, based on revelation and yet thoroughly reasonable as well.

Fr. Ference’s choice to focus on the philosophical background of O’Connor’s narrative art should prove especially useful, not only because, as he notes, philosophical interpreters are few and far between, but also because many young students will find the rational things in O’Connor’s Catholicism different from their own worldview. Contemporary America is rife with practices that obscure the philosophical understanding of nature and the human person presupposed by the Catholic Church. Will students easily maintain the Thomistic distinction between sensitive and rational animals in a world of “fur-babies” and “dog-moms”? Will they hold to the principle “all knowledge comes through the senses” when they’ve been taught from kindergarten that their knowledge of their “gender identity” is socially constructed? How foreign will O’Connor’s ethics seem, with its traditional understanding of sexuality and friendship, in a world where they are taught LGBTQ+ norms from kindergarten onwards in a perpetual Zoom school?

It is these aspects of the perennial philosophy, which Fr. Ference capably presents in a persuasive but not polemical way, that will shock some young people. They will not be shocked by a papacy, the institution of an authority constituted without their consent, comprised of one man encouraging them to exercise corporeal disciplines, for they have lived under the Fauci regime. Denying the flesh for the sake of the salvation of oneself and others is not a foreign concept to them. Recall the ineffective COVID masking rules that have guided their youth, which provided a way for young people to feel virtuous without the exercise of prudence which alone confirms true virtue. After all, our time is one where FBI field offices target traditional Catholics and graduates of elite PhD programs recklessly accuse natural law morality of “assault[ing] trans people.”

In reading O’Connor’s short stories, such young people will be provoked by fiction that embodies the rationality of a tradition which they have falsely been taught is bigoted and irrational. Fr. Ference makes explicit what is implicit in the stories, providing a gentle but firm challenge to the ideologies of the zeitgeist. But for those who have had the challenging luck to grow up with families and communities more old-fashioned than the religion du jour, they may find that far from just being hillbillies (or bitter clingers, or deplorables, or what have you), they are also hillbilly Thomists. Fr. Ference sets out to explain from works in O’Connor’s personal library or mentioned as favorites in her personal letters the perennial common sense of the Thomist and Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics—namely the study of what is, the study of knowledge, and the study of how we live as to be happy.

The genius of such a book being written by a man who has been a parish priest is that although his project began as a dissertation, Fr. Ference writes as if he hopes to be read by normal people who may have been puzzled by O’Connor’s darkly comic tales. While clearly aware of the tremendous amount of scholarship that exists, Fr. Ference alludes to such debates sparingly, focusing primarily in each chapter to achieve three tasks: to explain Thomistic philosophy by alluding to works O’Connor had plausibly read, then to show how O’Connor engaged in such thinking in her non-fiction writing, and finally to provide an intriguing interpretation of her short stories, such as “The River,” “Parker’s Back,” “Good Country People,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “The Comforts of Home,” and “The Displaced Person,” as well as brief examinations of her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.

Fr. Ference manages to cover almost every major topic in O’Connor scholarship, and this alone merits great appreciation from scholars and lovers of O’Connor’s fiction. He ranges from her use of the grotesque to how her fiction responds to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, from her curious interest in Teilhard de Chardin to her intellectual friendship with Betty Hester. What has become for secular critics on the left one of the major topics of discussion, Fr. Ference encloses in a footnote: O’Connor’s difficulty with racist sentiments.

There would surely be some on the left who would be upset about this literal marginalization of their pet issue—one of the academic interests of central concern most obviously since the riots of summer 2020, but more obliquely since the heirs to the student revolts of 1968 came to reign in academe. In June 2020, Paul Elie published what many scholars considered a dishonest hit piece in the New Yorker, in which Elie, in the words of James Matthew Wilson, “misrepresents O’Connor and attributes racist meanings to passages without evidence or warrant.” Elie’s criticism of O’Connor was based on private letters she wrote to her liberal friend Maryat Lee about her distaste for James Baldwin and her inability to see him in the segregated South, where she, a disabled woman living with her mother, would be liable to Klan retribution. Following Elie’s article, O’Connor was an attempted target of cancellation, her name taken down from a dorm named after her at Loyola University Maryland, despite a petition to reconsider the action signed by a number of O’Connor scholars as well as priests and academics who loved her work, including Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, who literally wrote the book on the subject. Jerome Foss wrote a good article responding to this controversy in this very publication, usefully noting that “O’Connor would have had as little patience for race-infused readings of her stories as she did for sex-infused interpretations.” So Fr. Ference’s placement of the race issue in a footnote is exactly right—as the Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai wrote, “misplaced emphasis” can harm just as well as deliberate falsehoods.

While Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist does not avowedly aim at providing a theological reading of O’Connor’s fiction, a great deal of O’Connor’s religious beliefs are presented by the examinations of her non-fiction. As O’Connor was not a professional philosopher, the philosophical foundations of her work were just that: foundations undergirding the spires and flying buttresses of her faith, more visible to the naked eye. By transitioning from the abstract principles of Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy which O’Connor knew primarily through mid-century Thomists such as Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and Anton Pegis to the concrete life O’Connor lived in her writing, Fr. Ference allows us to see what Wilson called her “unusual and bracing holiness.” Additionally, Fr. Ference shows that the tradition of philosophy O’Connor appreciated remains alive, aptly citing living philosophers and theologians adjacent to it such as Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Eleonore Stump, and Fr. Thomas Joseph White, who provides the foreword to the volume.

It is only within the work’s final pages that Fr. Ference announces his ambitious and salutary aim: while he accepts that in the academy today, a variety of “lenses” are applied to reading O’Connor’s fiction, he hopes that his work, far from providing another contested lens like Lacanian psychoanalysis or Foucauldian biopolitics, will be more like a necessary spade, allowing the readers willing to shoulder the effort, to “access the deepest meaning of her narrative art,” and ultimately, find themselves to be “Thomist[s] three times removed.” In calling herself such, O’Connor proves to be a friend to Plato and the tradition of political philosophy he inaugurated: his Socrates had argued that poets were three degrees from the truth, but she jokingly claims to be three degrees removed from Thomas, whose work she takes as seriously reasoning about the truth of things human and divine. Fr. Ference’s work indeed provides access to O’Connor’s radical faith and the philosophy it presupposes—one hopes it finds many friends, who will find in it a coherent argument, humor, and much wisdom.