By Walt Garlington
III. The South: A People Without a Religion
In Serbia, the nation fell at Kosovo because of the corruption of the aristocratic elements of the country. Here is how St Nikolai explained it via an imagined dialogue between Tsar Lazar and an angel: ‘As is the case with individuals, O Prince, so it is also with a group of related individuals—i.e., with nations. Your state has already grown old, and must fall. It has not fallen because of a chronological old age, but because of the poison that it has been taking accumulating in itself. This poison has worn it out and caused it to wrinkle. For the feudal lords of Serbia, the country has outgrown the soul. Therefore the Spirit of God has abandoned them and has withdrawn into the soul of the people. The smoke of passion . . . has even begun to spread among the people. . . . It was in order to save your people spiritually, therefore, that your state had to fall (‘The Tsar’s Testament’, Mystery and Meaning, pgs. 67-8).
The Confederacy, on the other hand, as Rev Dabney remarked above, fell because the people at large had become corrupted. The soldiers of the Confederacy, it seems, became the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit as He left the greater part of the Southrons. About this the Reverend wrote, ‘The strange spectacle was now presented, of a people among whom the active religious life seemed to be transferred from the churches at home—the customary seats of piety—to the army; which, among other nations, has always been dreaded as the school of vice and infidelity.’ ‘[T]his new marvel’ he called it, ‘an army made the home and source of the religious life of a nation’ (Life and Campaigns, p. 657). These were the men whose thoughts were stopped by the War and its loss ‘as an earthquake stops a clock’, in the words of Walter Hines Page (quoted in Southern Tradition at Bay, p. 356); these, the men who had to be moved aside so that many of their Southern brethren could go about creating the ‘New South’ in the image of the Yankee North – politically, economically, and religiously.
But the fall of the Confederacy and of the antebellum Southern religious orthodoxy that fell with her (A Consuming Fire, p. 87) has opened a door of the greatest significance and blessing that otherwise would have remained closed. For the dominant Protestant faith, as Allen Tate wrote in 1930, was in unseen opposition to the Southerners’ settled, agrarian way of life; it was more in line with the restless Yankee commercial spirit. The South, as he put it, lacked ‘its appropriate religion’: ‘Its religious impulse was inarticulate simply because it tried to encompass its destiny within the terms of Protestantism, in origin, a non-agrarian and trading religion [‘aggressive and materialistic’ he also calls it in an earlier passage – W.G.]. . . . Because the South never created a fitting religion, the social structure of the South began grievously to break down two generations after the Civil War; for the social structure depends on the economic structure, and economic conviction is the secular image of religion. No nation is ever simply and unequivocally beaten in war; nor was the South. But the South shows signs of defeat, and this is due to its lack of a religion which would make her special secular system the inevitable and permanently valuable one’ (‘Remarks on the Southern Religion’, I’ll Take My Stand, pgs. 167 & 168).
Thus the extraordinary depth of God’s mercy is revealed to the South: Though she would not live up to the mainly Protestant standards of holiness demanded of her and was allowed to be conquered, the Lord, using this fall, has shown her the shortcomings of that faith. Now, in these latter days, she is free to embrace the fulness of the Faith found in the Holy Orthodox Church, of which she knew scarcely anything for so much of her life and to which she might have remained altogether antagonistic or apathetic to this day had she won her independence and retained her confidence in her old religious order.
Rightly did the Reverend James S. Vance speak in 1897 when he said, ‘The period of struggle was the period of discipline. It was providence placing the idle ore in flame and forge. God said, “Go up and die,” but already the South has learned that the summons to death was a summons to live. It was a call to transformation rather than to a grave, and so, lying down on the rugged summit of her defeat and despair, the South is awakening to an inheritance that eclipses her past’ (quoted in Southern Tradition at Bay, p. 337).
Yes, a transformation from Protestantism to the unbroken tradition of the Faith kept without error from the Apostles to today in the Orthodox Church. Truly, an inheritance of the deepest and widest and broadest treasures that will amaze her, that will ‘eclipse her past’!
But one might object, ‘What about Roman Catholicism? Does it not offer a goodly home for the religiously wandering South?’ The answer, regrettably, must be in the negative, for Roman Catholicism is itself protestant, the original rebellion against the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church a thousand years ago. But to understand this, we must step back even further in history to the fall of ancient Rome. The nineteenth century Orthodox Russian philosopher and theologian Ivan Kireevsky wrote, ‘The living ruins that had survived the destruction of ancient Roman civilization had an all-embracing influence on the newly emerging civilization of the West. . . . If we were to describe the dominant feature of the Roman civilization in one general formula, we would not go far wrong if we said that the distinctive cast of the Roman mind consisted in the predominance of superficial rationality over the inner essence of things’ (‘On the Nature of European Culture and on Its Relationship to Russian Culture’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 200). ‘In . . . all the characteristics of the Romans, . . . we find the same common trait: that the superficial harmony of their logical concepts was more essential to them than the very essence of the concepts, and that the internal equilibrium of their being, as it were, consisted for them solely in the balance of rationalistic ideas and of external, formal activity’ (p. 201).
This character penetrated every aspect of life in Western Europe, ‘shaping and transforming all other influences to a greater or lesser degree in conformity to its dominant trend’ (p. 200). ‘This special fondness of the Roman world for formal coherence of ideas represented a pitfall for Roman theologians even at a time . . . when the shared consciousness of the entire Orthodox world maintained a reasonable balance between all special traits’ (p. 202).
He mentions the break of Rome with the Orthodox Church, the fruit of Rome’s insistence on adding the Filioque clause to the Nicene Creed without consulting the whole Church. On what may have inspired Rome’s decision in this matter, Kireevsky added ‘ . . . what is not open to doubt is the actual pretext for defection—the new addition of a dogma to the earlier creed, an addition that, contrary to the ancient tradition and shared consciousness of the church, was justified only by the logical deductions of the Western theologians.
‘We make special mention of this fact because, better than any other, it helps to explain the character of Western civilization, where, from the ninth century on, the isolated rationality of Rome penetrated into the very teaching of the theologians, destroying with its one-sidedness the harmony and wholeness of their inner speculation.
‘ . . . In this way, having subordinated faith to the logical conclusions of rationalistic understanding, the Western Church, already in the ninth century, sowed within itself the inescapable seed of the Reformation, which later summoned it before the court of that very abstract reason that it had itself elevated above the shared consciousness of the Universal Church . . . ’ (p. 203).
Aleksei Khomiakov, another Orthodox Russian philosopher-theologian of the nineteenth century, said on this point, ‘What was the inevitable logical consequence of this usurpation? . . . [A] protestant anarchy was established in practice. Every diocese could appropriate vis-à-vis the Western patriarchate the right that the latter appropriated vis-à-vis the totality of the Church; every parish could appropriate this right vis-à-vis the diocese; every individual could appropriate it vis-à-vis all other individuals’ (‘Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 68).
And from the resulting nightmare of conflicting and distorted dogmas of the Roman protestants and the Northern European protestants has come many of the troubles that afflict us today, such as the Scholastic nominalism that has given quantity the victory over quality, and matter over spirit (Tate, ‘Remarks’, I’ll Take My Stand, pgs. 164-6), or the apathy toward and unbelief in any unchanging truth (Kireevsky, ‘On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 239).
Summing up the two churches of the West, Khomiakov said, ‘An external unity, which rejects freedom and is therefore not a real unity—that is Romanism. An external freedom, which does not bestow unity and which is therefore not real freedom—that is Protestantism’ (‘Some More Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of Several Latin and Protestant Religious Publications’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 127).
For these reasons, then, neither the Roman Catholic nor the Protestant confessions will serve the South well as her religious foundation.
In saying the foregoing, however, the Orthodox Church does not say that Catholics and Protestants are without salvation: She does not seek to limit the mercy of God. Nor does she say the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of these sects are devoid of grace: only that ‘From Tradition alone, or from Scripture or works, people can receive only external and incomplete knowledge, which contain truth for it issues from truth, but is at the same time necessarily false, because it is not complete’ (Khomiakov, ‘The Church Is One’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 35).
Nor, further, does she wish for the destruction of European culture (and by extension Southern culture), bur rather the permeation of ‘the beliefs of all estates and strata’ of it by ‘the principles of life that are preserved in the doctrine of the Holy Orthodox Church’, ‘that these lofty principles . . . should . . . embrace it in their fullness, thus granting it a higher meaning and bringing it to its ultimate development’ (Kireevsky, ‘On the Nature’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 232).
The acceptance of Orthodox Christianity would be the crowning achievement for the South in her religious life, which is the only true life of a nation or of an individual man or woman. From it would come the full flowering of Southern culture, as the darkness of error gave way to the light of the Truth in every heart and mind and soul.
From Pentecost to the Battle of Kosovo to the Battle of Chancellorsville and beyond, the call to choose the Kingdom of Heaven has sounded forth. Ye faithful sons and daughters of the South, accept with joy and humility the invitation given to you by Our Most Merciful Lord Jesus Christ, the invitation to join His One True Body, ‘the pillar and ground of the truth’ (I Timothy 3:15), the Holy Orthodox Church.
‘Freedom and unity—these are the two forces upon which was worthily bestowed the mystery of human freedom in Christ, saving and justifying the creature by His perfect union with it. The result of these forces is, by the grace of God, neither belief nor analytical knowledge but inner perfection and divine wisdom: it is faith that, in both its character and its principle, is unassailable by disbelief.
‘The West has rejected the fundamental doctrine of mutual love that alone constitutes the life of the Church. As a consequence of this error, the very principle of Christianity is subjected to judgment, as once was the man-God from whom Christianity originated . . . .
‘In the East, the Church, which is faithful to the whole apostolic doctrine, which embraces in an inner communion all the faithful of the present time and the elect of past ages, and which extends the beneficence of her prayers to future generations who will, in turn, pray for their predecessors—the Church summons into her bosom all the nations and awaits with hope the coming of her Savior’ (Khomiakov, ‘Some More Remarks . . . on the Occasion of Several Latin and Protestant Religious Publications’, p. 134).
And the Spirit and the bride say to the South, Come! (Revelation 22:17)
Works Cited:
- The Battle of Kosovo: Serbian Epic Poems. Matthias, John, and Vladeta Vuckovic, trans. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio UP, 1987. Accessed 17/30 July 2013. Retrieved at http://www.kosovo.net/history/battle_of_kosovo.html.
- Bradford, M.E. ‘First Fathers: The Colonial Origins of the Southern Tradition’. A Better Guide than Reason: Federalists and Anti-Federalists. New Brunswick, Nj.: Transaction, 1994 [1979].
- Dabney, Rev Robert Lewis. Life and Campaigns of Lieut. Gen. T.J. (Stonewall) Jackson. Harrisonburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1983 [1866].
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- Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, Ny.: Oxford UP, 1989.
- Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.
- Genovese, Eugene. A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South. Athens, Ga.: U of Georgia Press, 1998.
- Hewlett, Maurice Henry. The Song of the Plow: Being the English Chronicle. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1916. Accessed 17/30 July 2013. Retrieved at http://books.google.com/books?id=Us4kAAAAMAAJ.
- The Holy Bible. King James Version. Nashville, Tn.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1972.
- Johnson, Fr Matthew Raphael. Heavenly Serbia and the Medieval Idea. Deipara Press, 2009 [2007].
- Khomiakov, Aleksei. ‘Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris’. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans. Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998.
- –. ‘Some More Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of Several Latin and Protestant Religious Publications’. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans. Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998.
- –. ‘The Church Is One’. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans. Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998.
- Kireevsky, Ivan. ‘On the Nature of European Culture and on Its Relationship to Russian Culture’. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans. Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998.
- –. ‘On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy’. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans. Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998.
- Phillips, Fr Andrew. E-mail to author. 16 June 2013.
- Popovich, St Justin. ‘The Life of the Holy and Great Martyr Tsar Lazar of Serbia’. A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality, Vol. III: The Mystery and Meaning of the Battle of Kosovo. Skokie, Il.: Great Lakes Graphics Inc., 1999.
- Rogich, Father Daniel M. Great-Martyr Tsar Lazar of Serbia: His Life and Service. Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2001.
- Tate, Allen. ‘Remarks on the Southern Religion’. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2006 [1930].
- Velimirovich, St Nikolai. A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality, Vol. I: The Serbian People as a Servant of God. Micka, Fr Theodore, and Fr Steven Scott, trans. 1988. Accessed 17/30 July 2013. Retrieved at http://www.sv-luka.org/library/ServantOfGod.html.
- –. ‘The Tsar’s Testament’. A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality, Vol. III: The Mystery and Meaning of the Battle of Kosovo. Skokie, Il.: Great Lakes Graphics Inc., 1999.
- Weaver, Richard M. The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought. Eds. Core, George and M. E. Bradford. 1st ed. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989.
All images are sourced from “Abandoned Southeast: Preserving the Past | A Photoblog of Hundreds of Abandoned, Historic, and Forgotten Places.”
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
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