The Violent Bear It Away

“From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”

By using this epigraph taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible, O’Connor introduces the concept of violence within a religious context. While the most common Biblical interpretation of this verse is that believers must be violent in their faith, it takes on a somewhat different meaning here. In this book and across O’Connor’s body of work, moments of spiritual revelation are accompanied or preceded by acts of seemingly senseless violence. By bringing characters close to death or their own hearts of darkness, violence thus creates fertile ground for revelation to occur.

“The boy sensed that this was the heart of his great-uncle’s madness, this hunger, and what he was secretly afraid of was that it might be passed down, might be hidden in the blood and might strike some day in him and then he would be torn by hunger like the old man, the bottom split out of his stomach so that nothing would heal or fill it but the bread of life.”

The need for some holy communion with the Lord is repeatedly characterized as a hunger. For Mason, this hunger is the divine marker of the prophet. For Rayber, it is a mental illness he fears inheriting. Tarwater, meanwhile, is conflicted about the matter until the end of the book, when he accepts the fate for which his great uncle prepared him and realizes his insatiable hunger can only be fed with spiritual nourishment.

“He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance. I ain’t denying the old man was a good one, his new friend said, but like you said: you can’t be any poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch, of fire or anything else.” 

The introduction of the friend—a literal embodiment of Satan, according to O’Connor—is initially characterized as a part of Tarwater’s personality which until the death of