By Walt Garlington
Two important strands in the tapestry of Southern culture are the Greek and the Irish. Most of what Dixie took from each, unfortunately, was of a non-Christian nature. Her Greek teachers were mostly of the ancient, pre-Christian era – Homer, Aristotle, and so forth. From the Irish she has taken a certain ornery stubbornness, exemplified in characters like Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. Regrettably, she has never taken much notice of the great Orthodox saints of both peoples, whether a St. Basil the Great, or a St. Symeon the New Theologian; a St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, or a St. Ita of Killeedy. And this negatively affected how the mainly Protestant South developed her views of theology.
Central to that Southern view is the idea of rational knowledge. E. Brooks Holifield looks back at the antebellum town preachers and discerns a type that is still with her today (there is another type that we will touch on later). For the professional Southern clergyman, there “was one ideal: the personal embodiment of knowledge. A clerical professional was a man of ‘sound scholarship.’ He was ‘learned and accomplished,’ capable of scaling ‘heights of knowledge’ and possessed of ‘intellectual power.’ . . . Professionalism was not so much the refinement of technical skills as the mastery of a body of knowledge, whether scientific, legal, or theological, and of the foundational principles implicit in the application of the knowledge” (The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795-1860, Duke UP, Durham, N. C., 1978, p. 34).
A Christianity that is utterly reasonable and rational is what they proclaimed: “The ministers were confident that rational orthodoxy would commend itself to the educated and influential classes whom they found in the towns and cities. Therefore they proclaimed their scholastic gospel not only in polemical treatises and theological texts but also in innumerable sermons with such revealing titles as ‘The Reasonableness of Faith,’ ‘Trinitarians Rational,’ ‘The Reasonableness of Religion,’ and ‘The Credibility of the Gospel’ (Ibid., p. 72). The great Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney himself (a staunch Presbyterian) said plainly, “The claim which the Scripture addresses to us, to be the one authentic and authoritative revelation from God, is addressed to our reason. This is clear from the simple fact, that there are presented to the human race more than one professed revelation; and that they cannot be authoritative witnesses to their own authority prior to its admission. . . . The evidences of inspiration must, therefore, present themselves to man’s reason. . . . He who says he believes, when he sees no proof, is but pretending, or talking without meaning” (Ibid., pgs. 87-8).
This overemphasis on reason and rationality led to a sundering of Christ’s presence in the Southern churches. This may be seen especially in the Southern view of the Lord’s Supper. Most held that Christ was not truly present in the bread and the wine consumed by the Southern Christians. The influential Rev. Dabney shall again be our representative of Dixie’s general view: “As an orthodox Reformed theologian, Dabney had to affirm that the Lord’s Supper was a means of union with Christ. But he defined that union in such a way that eucharistic communion became little more than a didactic message designed to produce an inward comprehension of doctrinal truths with correspondingly appropriate emotional reactions. . . . The Lord’s Supper simply designated the divine promise that the elect would experience the blessings of faith and sanctification; it foreshadowed and produced a certain quality of inwardness, and this alone constituted sacramental communion with Christ. Dabney not only denied that the sacramental presence included the human nature of Christ, but he also disavowed the Calvinist teaching about a substantial, though spiritual, union between Christ and the believer in the sacramental rite itself” (Ibid., pgs. 181, 182).
Had the South listened to their Orthodox Irish forebears, they would have avoided such erroneous notions about the Holy Mysteries. The 11th-century Irish manuscript (which was before the Roman Catholic Norman conquest of Ireland in the 12th century that brought Ireland within the pale of the Great Schism from the Orthodox Church), “A Treatise on the Eucharist,” written by the monk Fr. Echtgus Ua Cuanáin of Ros Cré monastery, reveals that there is much more to the Lord’s Supper than empty symbols, analogies, and promises:
“56. Have you not heard of the act which the distinguished bishop Flagellus performed here on earth while he was offering Mass beside the relics of the holy angel Nin [St. Ninnius of Whithorn, Apostle of the Picts in southern Scotland—W.G.] in the eastern territory?
“57. His mind centered on this point, and in obstinate prayer he asked that he might see in its totality of limbs the body of the Child he had offered, . . .
“59. He prostrated himself fully on the ground, praying earnestly to God and giving him adoration until the angel said to him: ‘rise and observe that which you have sought’.
“60. When he lifted his head he saw—and what better could be seen—there on the angelic altar the King of heaven, whole and entire.
“61. You may be sure that the Boy was not missing from heaven even though he was clearly seen, whole and entire, on the altar. . . .
“63. He then . . . besought the Lord that he, who is both our father and our brother, should once more resume his normal appearance.
“64. At the close of this prayer, and having besought the Son of Mary, I declare, he really saw nothing but the host on the altar” (The Celtic Monk: Rules and Writings of Early Irish Monks, translated by Uinseann Ó Maidín, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, Mich., 1996, pgs. 152-3).
Two things are notable about this vision. First, it contradicts pure reason, which says two things cannot occupy the same space: The elements of the Lord’s Supper are either bread and wine or they are the Precious Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, but they cannot be both. But in Orthodox theology, as seen above, there is mystery, there is antinomy (two different things held together, just like Christ being both God and man in one Person). Following from this is a second thing: Man has a faculty outside of and above his discursive reason by which he is able to see spiritual mysteries like the one above (and others, like the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mt. Tabor, which the three Apostles witnessed). That faculty is the nous. The Irish recognized it; they called it “second sight”. Southern Christians, with their scholastic approach to their religion, completely lost sight of the nous and of mystery/antinomy, and thus denied themselves the experience of true union with their Lord, God, and Savior during the Eucharistic meal.
Because of such beliefs, Southerners looked to the Bible and to the natural world as the best and highest revelations of God. The Baptist pastor John Leadley Dagg will speak for the South this time: “He proposed to write his Manual of Theology (1857) by going ‘straight to Scripture,’ and he cautioned his readers about the need to restrain philosophy within due bounds. But from beginning to end his discussion of Christian doctrine made extensive use of Scottish methods and conclusions. . . . ‘The author of the Bible is the maker of the world, and the author of all truth; and his works and his word must harmonize, for Truth is always consistent.’ Dagg had confidence in the congruity between divine revelation and Scottish Realism, and he frequently used a method of analogy in which philosophy furnished the contents of the older Christian doctrines. . . . Dagg naturally believed that a God so amenable to analogical description had revealed himself ‘in universal nature,’ including both the moral and religious feelings and the external natural order. . . . Natural religion, however insufficient by itself, taught ‘the fundamental truths on which all religion is based’” (Holifield, pgs. 122, 124).
But the Orthodox Church says something different. As important as Holy Scripture and natural revelation are in the Christian life, they are not the highest revelation: Christ is, as the Holy Apostle Paul says at the beginning of his letter to the Hebrews (1:1-3). Thus, the Christian life is meant to transcend what can be seen and studied with the physical eyes and the reason; the ultimate end is not knowing about God but, rather, simply knowing God, through union with Him. That is why the Holy Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, is so important for the Christian life: It is the experience par excellence of man’s union with Christ. The Orthodox Irish certainly recognized this. Fr. Echtgus wrote in his same essay on the Eucharist, “He [Flagellus—W.G.] offered up the body, true wisdom, in the form customary to everyone” (Celtic Monk, p. 153, bolding added). Union with the Holy Trinity imparts the truest, highest, wisdom.
The Orthodox saints of Greece confirm what their Orthodox brothers and sisters in Ireland teach in this regard, despite the great distance between them in miles and in years, which is unsurprising, as both were recipients of the same treasure of Apostolic tradition which is given by God the Holy Ghost to the Orthodox Church in all ages, before, now, and after. St. Paisios of Mt. Athos (+1994), a Greek from Cappadocia, Asia Minor, says of this, “The goal of reading is the application, in our lives, of what we read. Not to learn it by heart, but to take it to heart. Not to practice using our tongues, but to be able to receive the tongues of fire and to live the mysteries of God. If one studies a great deal in order to acquire knowledge and to teach others, without living the things he teaches, he does no more than fill his head with hot air. At most he will manage to ascend to the moon using machines. The goal of the Christian is to rise to God without machines” (Herman Middleton, Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit: The Lives & Counsels of Contemporary Elders of Greece, 3rd edn., Protecting Veil, 2011, pgs. 11, 123).
Another Cappadocian Greek, but from a much earlier time, St. Gregory the Theologian (+389), says something very similar in one of his Orations: “Answering the Eunomians, who would presume to grasp God’s Essence through logical speculation, the saint declared that man perceives God when the mind and reason become godlike and divine, i.e. when the image ascends to its Archetype. (Or. 28:17).”
Up to now, we have been focusing on the rationalistic side of Southern religion, but as most may know, there is another side of it, the emotional, revivalistic side: “It seems self-evident that Southern churches have perennially assumed a special responsibility for inculcating feeling rather than thought, spontaneous affectivity rather than labored ratiocination. We hear from historians that the religion of the Southern people on the eve of the Civil War was ‘truly a faith,’ not a ‘reasoned orthodoxy’; that religious development in the Old South was a transition from Jeffersonian liberalism to revivalistic emotionalism; that the religious Southerner had no ambition ‘to perfect a system, or to tidy up a world doomed to remain forever deceptive, changeful, and evil’; that Southern faith was ‘almost totally’ from the heart, not the head; that strictly the Southerner had no mind, only temperament; that he did not think, he felt” (Holifield, p. 3). There is some exaggeration in such remarks, as Mr. Holifield points out, but there is also a lot of truth to it, and from the revivalistic strain of Southern Christianity we get the individualistic sort of fellow with loose allegiances to any particular denomination or creed, who navigates the Christian life relying nearly exclusively on his personal understanding of the Bible.
Here again, the Irish and Greek Fathers have a warning for the South. Both are adamant that a spiritual father (or soul friend, as the Irish would say) is essential for a Christian. From the Irish, in “The Rule of Comghall,” dated to the 7th-8th centuries, we find the following: “The advice of a devout sage is a great asset if one wishes to avoid punishment [i.e., avoid hell—W.G.]. No matter how much you esteem your strength of will, place yourself under the direction of another” (Celtic Monk, pgs. 29, 33). The Holy Elder Joseph the Hesychast (+1959), born on the Greek island of Paros, likewise affirms this: “ . . . as Dr. Constantine Cavarnos writes, Elder Joseph ‘emphasizes that, generally, a spiritual striver needs a wise and experienced guide, in order to tread safely and successfully the path that leads to purity and spiritual perfection’” (Middleton, pgs. 101; 120, note 9).
In writing these things, we do not wish to give the impression that there is no agreement between the South and the Orthodox Church. That simply is not the case, which most of the material of the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship shows. And in these three works we have referenced above, one will find agreement as well – for example, Southerners, Greeks, and Irish have plenty of criticism of flaunting displays of ostentation, while praising simplicity in dress, speech, and so forth. We simply want to make the point that Dixie, to the extent that she truly wishes to be Christian, will be able to do that best in the Orthodox Church.
So, as we look back at the feast days of great Greek and Irish saints like St. Basil the Great (1/14 Jan.) and St. Brigid of Kildare (1/14 Feb.), and look forward to those of St. Symeon the New Theologian (12/25 March) and St. Patrick, the Enlightener of Ireland (17/30 March), may all Southerners unite themselves to this wondrous choir by joining themselves – body, soul, and spirit – to the same spotless Body of which they are a part, the Orthodox Church, the one and only Bride of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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.
