Erin McAdams, on Flannery O'Connor's use of analogy

The anagogical image or moment is also of importance in its capacity to reveal the sacramental beyond its limited form.  Ronald Grimes elucidates O'Connor's use of anagogy quite aptly when he explains, "An anagogical action [functions] like a monad, a window on the universe.  Symbols in their anagogical phase are 'apocalyptic'; they have reached their imaginative limits.  The whole of things becomes condensed into a single action.  The world no longer contains a gesture; rather, a gesture contains the world" (Grimes 16).  Such anagogic moments should be understood quite simply as worlds within themselves, in which they are at once to be taken literally, but also seen as reflections not of our own existence, but that of God's existence.
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The anagogical vision operates in "The Lame Shall Enter First"through O'Connor's characters and their experiences, specifically the young boy Norton's hanging of himself that "launches his flight into space" at the end of the narrative.  For O'Connor, this death is necessary for Norton to be with his mother in heaven, for his father, Sheppard, to awaken to his separation from God and from his love for his son, and for the delinquent Rufus' aberrant prophecies to be revealed.  In addition, this self-enacted death by Rufus is somewhat reconcilable, as it can easily be interpreted as a selfless act, necessary for the redemptive outcome of the story.  Let us consider Norton's death in light of O'Connor's theology and further, as an anagogical moment that can touch the sense of mystery that O'Connor seeks in her art.

In "The Lame Shall Enter First," Sheppard is an unreligious, yet self-righteous and misguided man who neglects to love his own son, Norton, after the death of his wife.  Despite Sheppard's name, which suggests one who would care for the vulnerability of others, he is unable to show sympathy or care for his son and he simply believes his son to be morally depraved and beyond help.  O'Connor writes, "All he [Sheppard] wanted for the child was that he be good and unselfish and neither seemed likely" (The Complete Stories 445).  Ironically, Sheppard thinks this out of his own selfish inability to understand the emotional needs of his son.

Sheppard additionally thinks Norton is selfish when he cries in grief for his deceased mother.  Sheppard simply denies any grief for his wife, and instead of caring for his son's healing, Sheppard devotes his attention to mentoring a teenage petty criminal at the local reformatory, Rufus Johnson.  Sheppard attempts to mold Johnson into the perfect son in hopes that Johnson will fulfill Sheppard's expectations that Norton could not live up to.  Sheppard thinks to himself, "Johnson had a capacity for real response and had been deprived of everything from birth; Norton was average or below and had had every advantage" (449).  He finds that Johnson scored a 140 on his I.Q. test, and hopes that he can make him become an intelligent and upstanding young adult.  When Sheppard is telling Johnson of his plans, he says to Johnson, "There are a lot of things about yourself that I think I can explain to you" (450).  Sheppard foolishly believes that he can effect change in mentoring Johnson.  For O'Connor, Sheppard is a character so engrossed in his own vision for the world, that he cannot allow God's grace to work in his own life. As she explains in her letters, Sheppard is a character, who "thought he was good and was doing good when he wasn't" (Habit of Being 490).  Unfortunately, he becomes too swept away with his own misguided thoughts, forgetting to love the one person who is most in need of care and attention, his own son.

In O'Connor's theological schema of the world, Sheppard fits the mold of those individuals affected by one of the greatest problems of modernity: the proclivity to tend toward humanistic altruism without any root in religious faith.  He believes that he should do good, but only outside the real source of goodness, which can only come from God.  Because he is an atheist, he believes that the forces of God are fanciful non-truths, and that once one realizes this, one can actually flourish to the best of one's own might.  However, as O'Connor explains herself, this desire to do good comes from a confused sense of God's place in the world.  She writes of her character Sheppard, in Mystery and Manners, that he is one who "can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God" (159).  Because he convinces himself that God does not exist and that he is the only one who can make any success for himself in the world, he strives to bring about a similar worldview in the children around him.

So out of a distorted sense of goodness in the world, Sheppard attempts to create successful lives for Norton and Rufus Johnson.  This world that Sheppard hopes to create, however, is outside of a recognition of God, and so the success he wishes for the two boys is faulty. This secular idea of success derives from his own pride, just as Rufus denounces him: "he [Sheppard] thinks he's Jesus Christ!" (459).  So because of his secular worldview, through all his actions Sheppard reinforces the idea that he can mold Norton and Rufus Johnson into similar beings who can thrive in the same conception of a secular world apart from God.  Although his certain desires to help Norton and Rufus may at times seem caring and thoughtful, they are in fact disingenuous because they are rooted in Sheppard's own pride, and lead to terrifying outcomes that Sheppard certainly never intended.

O'Connor expounds upon this problem of a secular form of caring, or "tenderness," that is separated from faith in God.  She writes,
In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.  It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory.  When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.  It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
(Mystery and Manners 227)

As O'Connor rightly theorizes, it is when a sentiment of tenderness for another individual is manifested solely out of a secular altruism that the individual loses sight of the true reason for caring toward the other.  When this occurs, there is a complete denial of the true grace of God that is at work in the action, and the sense of human tenderness can easily be manipulated to become something that it is in fact the antithesis of tenderness and grace.  At this point, life is manipulated according to human standards, human beings are valued for their worth to society, and that initial tenderness for others may be lost completely.  When such a point is reached, senseless acts of violence can be undertaken in the name of achieving a perverse form of tenderness that weighs some human life as more valuable than another.  In O'Connor's example above, the outcome is the Nazi death camps.  In "The Lame Shall Enter First," Sheppard thinks that he is being tender toward his son and Norton, but in reality, he is valuing human life in terms of its success in the secular sense.  In turn, he denies his son's emotional and spiritual well-being, which leads to the loss of young Norton's own life.

For O'Connor, Rufus Johnson fits into her schema of modernity as emblematic of the problem of evil in the world.  Just as Maritain describes, love is the ultimate power that gives order to reality, yet one should still acknowledge the presence of the evil in the world that attempts to lead one away from the order of love.  When Sheppard first speaks with Johnson, Sheppard asks for an explanation for his criminal acts.  Johnson responds, "Satan. He has me in his power." (450). Sheppard does not believe in any presence of good or evil, so he refuses to believe Johnson, thinking that "he isn't evil, just morally confused" (480).  Yet Johnson is completely resistant to all of Sheppard's attempts to cure him of his social problems.  Sheppard even attempts to help fix his limp foot, buying him special boots for his ailment.  Johnson still insults Sheppard in all his efforts, and continues to engage in criminal acts, having to be brought home by the police three times.  Further, despite his outward signs of moral depravity, Johnson is ironically the person who introduces Norton to the Bible. He is familiar with passages from the Bible, telling Norton about the presence of Heaven and Hell.  Johnson even tells Norton that his mother is "saved" if she believed in Jesus while on Earth.  So through these characteristics, O'Connor shows that there is the possibility of redemption for Johnson.  However, because of his depraved state and unfruitful guidance from Sheppard, the state of Johnson's soul is not hopeful.

O'Connor is able to illustrate the state of her characters' souls through the pointed use of food imagery.  In such a strategy, O'Connor uses Lynch's theology of penetrating the physical world so as to write of a deeper spiritual mystery.  Without stating outright that she is writing of Norton's spiritual grief over the loss of his mother, she can do so through the description of his persistent hunger throughout the story that he satisfies through the consumption of unwholesome food.  In the same way, she is able to describe Sheppard's spiritual gluttony, not as a problem with his consumption of food, but his excessive pride and proclivity to fill himself with the lies of secular modernity.  So O'Connor follows Lynch's thesis faithfully when she approaches the world through the concrete limited image to explain the spiritual state of her characters.  Without explicitly stating it, then, O'Connor is able to write implicitly of Christ's statement that "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth in me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).  Because her readers may be unaware of such a theological idea, she indirectly writes about the same concept while still showing her meaning, as she does with Sheppard.  We can first see this in O'Connor's description of Norton and his father at breakfast at the beginning of the story.  Sheppard is eating "mechanically," indicating that eating now holds no joy for him (445).  In contrast, when his wife was alive, the family "had often eaten outside, even breakfast, on the grass," showing that eating was a special moment for him them, before he had hardened his heart to the pleasures of life (446).

In contrast, O'Connor shows in the character of Norton someone whose eating habits depict his dire need for spiritual nourishment.  At the beginning of the story, she tells us that he is still in mourning for his mother who died a year previous, and yet his father, Sheppard, believes that "This was not a normal grief.  It was all part of his selfishness.  She had been dead for over a year and a child's grief should not last so long" (447).  However, Sheppard chooses to ignore this obvious grief, just as he ignores Norton's literal eating habits.  Norton chooses for himself a grotesque breakfast of chocolate cake coated with peanut butter and ketchup because of his obvious lack of maternal influence.  Rather than correct his young son's behavior, Sheppard chooses to lecture his son on the fact that the young delinquent Rufus Johnson is having nothing to eat.  He says of Rufus, "He was in an alley, and he had his hand in a garbage can.  He was trying to get something to eat out of it…He was hungry" (445-446).  So Sheppard attempts to make his young son feel guilty in his childish wastefulness, while at the same time, congratulating himself on his own compassion for the young delinquent.  Sheppard thinks to himself, "I can't see a child eating out of garbage cans," yet, he refuses to see that his own son, Norton, is eating garbage right in front of him (446). After ingesting Sheppard's lecture on the necessity of helping the delinquent Rufus, Norton vomits up everything he had just eaten.  "Everything came up, the cake, the peanut butter, the ketchup…and he waited with his mouth open over his plate as if he expected his heart to come up next" (448).  This literal regurgitation is a reflection of his own rejection of Sheppard's lecturing of him and refusal to offer him any spiritual nourishment.

Ironically, the juvenile delinquent Rufus Johnson offers Norton more spiritual fulfillment than his own father.  He tells Norton that his father Sheppard is "contradicting Jesus," and that his mother who died is in fact in heaven.  Through Norton's introduction to the Bible and the hope that his mother is in heaven, O'Connor depicts a change that gradually builds within Norton's soul until the end of the story.  Sheppard notices that Norton is intently reading the Bible.  O'Connor writes, "The child's face was bright and there was an excited sheen to his eyes. The change that had come over the boy struck him for the first time...There was a strange new life in him" (478).  Norton is truly being affected by the message he reads in Scripture, allowing grace to penetrate his sorrowful heart.

The turning point for Norton in the story occurs in the penultimate scene, when all three characters are seated down at dinner.  Rufus coaxes Norton and Sheppard with the notion that they must repent to be saved by Christ.  He picks up the Bible, and Sheppard demands that he put the Bible away, saying "That book is something for you to hide behind.  It's for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and figure things out for themselves" (477).  Still, Sheppard rejects the Christian message, and Norton is deeply affected by his denial and Rufus Johnson's efforts to enlighten the young boy with the truth.  Johnson is enraged upon hearing Sheppard's outright denial, and he says to Sheppard, "Satan has you in his power. Not only you, me too" (477).  In a dramatic moment, Rufus Johnson rips the pages from the Bible and eats them.  O'Connor describes that as he does, "His eyes widened as if a vision of splendor were opening up before him" (477).  Indeed, a vision of splendor is occurring, as Rufus does realize the gravity of the action he is performing to young Norton and to himself.  Rufus says to the two, "I've eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth...I've eaten it like Ezekiel and I don't want none of your food after it no more ever" (477).

In this light, Rufus literally rejects the psychological nourishment of Sheppard in favor of Christ's spiritual food.  Tony Magistrale argues that O'Connor sketches this scene as a parody of the Last Supper, in which "unlike the apostles, who partake in Christ's offering of bread and wine, Rufus Johnson spurns Sheppard's dinner in favor of a page from the Bible" (60).  Johnson then leaves the house, and after engaging in more criminal misbehavior, he is sent to the police station.  Sheppard fails in his attempts to "save" Johnson, unable to mold him into the son he imagined for himself.  Ironically, this is the moment when Sheppard realizes his neglect for his own son.

O'Connor depicts Sheppard's redemptive moment in light of his realization of his mistakes in attempting to change Johnson, and his failing to care for his real son.  He is struck by the image of Norton, and thinks that "He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton.  He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself" (481).  O'Connor uses the same food imagery to illustrate Sheppard's gluttonous acts of pride in neglecting his son's spiritual needs.  In a "rush of agonizing love," he promises to make it up to his son, to "be mother and father" (482).  However, rushing to see his son, "to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him, that he would never fail him again," Sheppard is met with agony and loss (482).  As Sheppard looks into the room, he sees Norton, "hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his flight into space" (482).  Longing for the love of his mother, Norton had hanged himself in order to be with her in the heaven that Johnson had described to him.

In this true style of O'Connor, the moment of redemption is also the moment of great suffering and loss.  The anagogical moment gives us the terrifying death of Norton, but it also reveals God's work through Norton's father.  Sheppard has accepted the grace of God into his heart through the realization that he did indeed love his son.  So her conclusion does conform to Maritain's conception of art as the reflection of God's beauty.  Here, it is shown through His saving grace in the souls of Sheppard and Norton.  This grace, however, must be shown through that which is realistic and true to human life.  For O'Connor, salvation may be met with loss, yet this renders the art true in its depiction of the human world.

As a Catholic, O'Connor of course recognizes that the act of suicide constitutes a mortal sin, and thus, separation from God, by the Church's standards.  Yet, paradoxically, it is in this moment of self-enacted death that Norton is able to be with God and his mother in heaven.  Such an action is truly anagogic for O'Connor, and it is because of this fundamental paradox that it is unable to be explained in merely human terms.  It touches part of the mystery as described above, the mystery that is understandable only in its divine nature.  The act of suicide is of course sinful in nature, but at the same time, it allows for both the salvation of Norton and his father.  So, his death is not merely selfish in nature.  In fact, in dying, Norton imitates Christ's death to some extent. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we learn that Christ's sacrifice is "the source of eternal salvation" and that because of His death we will gain life in heaven after we die. (617)  Because of this selflessness, then, we as humans are able to achieve personal salvation.  Additionally, we will eventually be united with our own bodies in the final Resurrection, just as Christ was resurrected in the Paschal mystery.  So His death was fundamentally selfless, and not merely important in and of itself, but in the good that would come because of it.  In a similar way, Norton's suicide cannot be considered solely in the nature of his death, but it also must be considered in terms of its outcome. The end of O'Connor's short story is not merely tragic, but it is also salvific.

O'Connor applies Lynch's theology in this dramatic end to her narrative.  She is truly penetrating the physical world as Lynch describes in his texts, and she also does so in a way that would sufficiently "shock" her secular readers so as to make them realize the gravity of this action.  Furthermore, we do well to remember that the character of Norton in this story is not one who is fully aware of the operations of the world around him.  He is much like the idiot child Bishop, who we will meet in the next story.  Norton is described by his father as "below average," and so, he is unable to fully understand the world in general.  He is also one who acts as a recipient of the teachings of those around him: first from his father, and then from the delinquent Rufus and his aberrant prophecies.  Norton is truly the one who is manipulated by others, vulnerable to abuse and open to attack. While Rufus is the one with the club foot, it is Norton who is first described as being lame, when he answers his father "lamely."  Later it is he who takes "the hobbled step" toward his father to ask him if his mother is in hell.  So Norton is indeed the one who is lame in reference to the title.  In turn, it is clearly Norton who shall enter first.4  For O'Connor, then, the only way she can realize this conclusion is in Norton's own self-enacted death that effects the conversion of his father as well.  By the end of the story, we are affirmed of Norton's eternal union with his mother in heaven, and additionally, we are affirmed of the delinquent Rufus Johnson's realization of the truth which is Christ, yet the state of Rufus's soul is uncertain. The most salvific outcome from this death, though, is Sheppard's realization of the great love he feels for his son that can only come from Christ. 

Note 4: O'Connor's title rebuts the Old Testament belief that the lame or crippled were disallowed from entering the temple to make sacrifice to God.  "And the Lord said to Moses, 'Tell Aaron that any of his descendants from generation to generation who have any bodily defect may not offer the sacrifices to God. For instance, if a man is blind or lame, or has a broken nose or any extra fingers or toes…he shall not go behind the veil, nor come near the altar, because of the physical defect; this would defile my sanctuary'" (Leviticus 21: 16-18, 23).