Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”

Posted on May 7th, 2010

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (CS 236-48) invites readers to consider carefully what O’Connor referred to elsewhere as our “inburnt knowledge of [our] human limitations [and] sense of mystery” within the modern world (MM 59).

When the story opens, a twelve-year-old girl (not named in the story) and her mother are playing host to two fourteen-year-old second cousins during their weekend break from Mount St. Scholastica, a Catholic boarding school. The two older girls “were [laughingly] calling each other Temple One and Temple Two” in mocking response to a warning from a nun at the school: “[I]f a young man should ‘behave in an ungentlemanly manner with [the girls] in the back of an automobile,’ [. . .the girls] were to say, ‘Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!’ and that would put an end to it.”

Unconcerned and unaware of the implications of the nun’s cautionary advice, Temple One and Temple Two spend Saturday evening at the local fair, and later tell their twelve-year-old second cousin about the “freak with a particular name,” which they could not recall, who made a peculiar presentation to audiences separated by gender, with men and women segregated in partitioned portions of a tent. The “freak” would then say, “‘I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way[. . . .] God made me thisaway and if you laught He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I’m making the best of it. I don’t dispute hit.’” The younger girl, when hearing her cousins’ tale, wonders, “‘You mean it had two heads?’” One of her older cousins answers, “‘No [. . .] it was a man and woman both. It pulled up its dress and showed us. It had on a blue dress.’”

At this point in the story, the reader—like the girls—might understandably be puzzled; however, O’Connor—as is her style—does little to explain but allows her fiction to continue “speaking with character and action, and not about character and action” (MM 75); thus, the reader must continue to follow the characters and actions, which—by the end of the story—lead to the key to one way of understanding “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”

When the older girls return to school, the younger girl and her mother join them (and the students and nuns at Mount St. Scholastic) in the chapel for mass. During the younger girl’s not-so-devout prayerful observation of all that occurs, she experiences an epiphany: she makes a tenuous connection between what happens when “the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it [. . . and] the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, ‘I don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be.’” The connection she makes will be reinforced in an equally significant scene at the end during which the sun is displayed as “a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood.”

With sudden and deft precision, O’Connor brings all of the characters and action to the key moments, not providing what the author would consider an instant answer but something instead that “leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery” (MM 184). Throughout the story—until the end—O’Connor has been satirizing “vapid Catholicism” and “the novena-rosary tradition” of some Catholics who “know nothing of the world and have a kind of hot-house innocence which is of very little help to anyone who has to be thrown into the problems of the modern world” (HB 330). She invites readers—through her presentation of characters and action, and the young girl’s unsophisticated connection between the Host and the freak—to consider that Christ is the central unifying force for all this is either obvious or inexplicable in the universe.

The smug and obnoxious behaviors of the three girls throughout the story further underscore O’Connor’s impatience with what she considered “repulsive” Catholics because “they don’t really have a faith but a kind of false certainty” (HB 231); moreover, O’Connor would remind readers—through “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”—that “one’s faith must be continually probing and searching out other perspectives of reality—and in turn being pressured and challenged by these—rather than retreating from and ignoring them” (Brinkmeyer 24).

Finally, returning to the opening of this critique, the story—when carefully considered—challenges readers to consider what it really means to acknowledge that we ‘have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery” (MM 59). So, O’Connor asks you—through the three girls, through the hermaphrodite at the fair, and through the elevated Host—what are your limitations, what are the limitations of others, and with what mysteries must you grapple?

Works Cited

Brinkmeyer, Robert H. Jr. The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge, 1989.

The Complete Stories. New York, 1971.

The Habit of Being: Letters. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York, 1969.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York, 1969.

Tags: Audiences, Boarding School, Cautionary Advice, Flannery O Connor, Freak, Ghost Story, Ladies And Gentlemen, Man And Woman, Old Girl, Older Girls, Saturday Evening, Second Cousin, Second Cousins, Short Story, St Scholastica, Temple Of The Holy Ghost, Two Heads, Weekend Break, Young Man, Younger Girl
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