Prophetic Voices: Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor

This study juxtaposes Simone Weil's exposition of God's invitation to know and love the good through the divine signature of beauty stamped on the order of the world and Flannery O'Connor's depiction of a society whose oppressive order allows some characters to oppose outright a divine order or to live under the illusion that the divine invitation is irrelevant because they, in their egoism and materialist values, are the centre of the universe. An examination of O'Connor's and Weil's ideas on order and beauty, grace and decreation, within the disorders of their contexts, reveals both writers' skills in pointing prophetically through disorder to divine order, thus, disclosing bridges of revelation.