From a friend's Facebook:

"A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution." -- Edmund Burke

Nowadays all you hear is that the West is dead, American is dying, all is lost. That may be very true, but it is too early to tell. Most of us would grant that our current course leads to death; the conclusion that death is inevitable, however, depends on us following out this course to the bitter end. That is possible, but by no means certain. In the days of Anno Domini, it is no longer a safe assumption that the path to death once entered upon must be pursued to the end. In this respect the civilizations of antiquity are an incomplete pattern.

"At the very moment when some [nations] seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature." - Edmund Burke, from Letters on a Regicide Peace.

"...The prophet is mindful that in their desperate straits God suddenly and wonderfully and beyond all hope succors the poor and almost lost; those wandering through the desert he protects from wild beasts and at last guides them back to the way; to the needy and hungry he supplies food; the prisoners he frees from loathsome dungeons and iron bands; the shipwrecked he leads back to port unharmed; the half dead he cures of disease; he burns the earth with eat and dryness, or makes it fertile with the secret watering of grace; he raises up the humblest from the crowd, or casts down the lofty from the high level fo their dignity." - Calvin, Institutes, I.V.8.

Here's the concluding paragraph of Jefferson Davis's 1858 speech before the Mississippi legislature:

Now, as in 1851, I hold separation from the Union by the State of Mississippi to be the last remedy—the final alternative. In the language of the venerated Calhoun I consider the disruption of the Union as a great though not the greatest calamity. I would cling tenaciously to our constitutional Gov­ernment, seeing as I do in the fraternal Union of equal States the benefit to all and the fulfillment of that high destiny which our fathers hoped for and left it for their sons to attain. I love the flag of my country with even more than a filial affection. Mississippi gave me in my boyhood to her military service. For many of the best years of my life I have followed that flag and upheld it on fields where if I had fallen it might have been claimed as my winding sheet. When I have seen it surrounded by the flags of foreign countries, the pulsations of my heart have beat quicker with every breeze which displayed its honored stripes and brilliant constellation. I have looked with venera­tion on those stripes as recording the original size of our po­litical family and with pride upon that constellation as mark­ing the family’s growth; I glory in the position which Missis­sippi’s star holds in the group; but sooner than see its lustre dimmed—sooner than see it degraded from its present equality—would tear it from its place to be set even on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi’s best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death.

I love this. First of all it's magnificent oratory--eloquent, but tight and pristine, and relying on a multitude of clear and concrete images. But it's also a model expression of conservative resolution: conservative, because he loves the union and wishes to maintain it as long as possible, but resolute, in that he realizes that the union is not an absolute entity, that there are only strict conditions on which it can be maintained, and that if he is pushed to it, he will fight for the principle over the form.

Southern literature

John L. Stewart offers a helpful summary of what makes Southern literature particularly Southern. It goes beyond mere "local color", and at bottom tends toward a certain "image of man" that is

at once essential and definitive and it constitutes the special contribution of contemporary Southern writing to American literature....it is stoutly anti-progressive, anti-rationalist, and anti-humanist, for it insists on the irreducible mystery in life, the all-pervasiveness of evil in human affairs, and the limitations of man's capacity to understand and control his environment and his own nature. Rejecting modern conceptions of evil as a finite and merely temporary absence of physical and psychical adjustment and ease, the writers of the Southern Renaissance present it in figures going back at last to the Old Testament, the doctrine of Original Sin, and the Protestant habit of searching the private heart....

In its conception of sin it bears similarities to the New England authors "from Woolman and Edwards to Hawthorne and Melville," but it is still distinctively Southern, in part (as Flannery O'Connor said) "because we lost the War."

[B]orn in a land that had undergone defeat in war, they had that special sense of the past possible only in people compelled to search the record of agony, humiliation, and loss asking "Why?"....Thus the image was projected not only in religious terms, but in historic as well. And the view of history was curiously bifocal: because of the mystery, the lack of human control, the ambiguity, life to them was a flux and blur of persistent change within time; yet life was also outside time and changeless because man, for whom progress was not possible, was always the same beneath the shifting, temporal surface. In short, their image of man was mythopoeic, and insofar as their writing embodies much or all of that image...one may call these writers...Southern.

(All quotes except the O'Connor tag are from John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 41-42.)

This description seems to match up pretty well with my own (very moderate) reading in Southern literature. But I think there is much more behind the unique Southern "sense of the past" than simply the War. While that certainly focused and intensified the glance backward, a strong feeling of history, tradition, and inheritance are major parts of the antebellum sensibility. In general, I am of the opinion that, except for the despair, the Southern writers came honestly by whatever made their writing peculiarly Southern. (But even their despair is rooted in Southern odes of thought: the acknowledgement of sin, the embrace of mankind's limits, etc.)

Anudder thing

I'm not presenting these thoughts as anything groundbreaking. They serve mostly as mental placeholders in case I want to return to a train of thought down the road. That's also the main reason I don't publicize this arena much.

To continue. I think it was in Weaver's Visions of Order that he observes that good rhetoric can really only show up in a culture in which nearly everybody holds the same beliefs. Dialectic, that is, argumentation from first principles, is necessary when you are arguing with a philosophical opponent. Rhetoric, however, depends upon prior agreement on first principles. The orator appeals to commonly held standards to make his point. This allows him much greater latitude in his use of language--he can rely on metaphors, reductios, comparisons, and, especially, the power of connotations and allusions to influence his audience in subtle and subconscious ways.

The ability to use these mysterious powers of language is critical for poetry, drama, and fiction as well as rhetoric: in fact, we are probably better off seeing each branch of literature as a member of the larger category of rhetoric. It follows from this that literature is not really possible except where there is a common worldview. (Imagine the trouble Dante would have had with the Commedia if, first, he had to establish the existence of God, then lay the groundwork for his cosmology, then explain the particular import of each figure--he would be writing dialectics, not poetry, and very boring it would all be.)

It was just such a common worldview that was lost in the twentieth century, and the sense of alienation and utter emptiness that followed is responsible for all the fragmentation and despair of modern literature. Artists felt, rightly, that enduring communication was a basic impossibility in their new and broken world. It was a curious problem, therefore, that faced the few Christian artists of the twentieth century: how does one write for an audience that no longer holds to a Christian cosmology? Flannery O'Connor had one answer, though certainly not the only one: to write larger than life, to draw pictures of the truth that shock and horrify in order to gain attention. (Actually I'm still trying to puzzle out what I think of her solution.)

Now to take a slight turn. Protestants get a bad rap, especially from Catholics, for their (supposed) inability to turn out good art. The gist of the criticism seems to be that Protestantism gives an essentially rationalist and materialist account of creation, reducing the supernatural to a bare-bones mechanism for linking up God and Man in strictly soteriological terms. Robbed of a sense of the pervasive presence of God in the world, the created and the concrete can sustain no analogies to the Divine. Therefore metaphor and symbol are impossible, and no created thing can be, or represent, anything beyond its strictly denoted natural properties. Furthermore, Protestant theology elevates Word, which is intellectual, over Image, which is physical and concrete. Thus Protestants have no basis for a visual and physical perceptions of the world. There occurred, in short, what twentieth century writers remark almost incessantly upon, the "dissociation of sensibility"; an antithesis between intellect and emotions, soul and body, image and word, body and intellect, faith and reason, science and art, truth and beauty, goodness and desirability, ad infinitum. The single literary form Protestantism can claim credit for is the allegory, a poor attempt to bridge the chasm between spiritual truths and the natural world, which by its stiff parallelism only further emphasizes the basic incompatibility of the two.

Hopefully it goes without saying that this is a gross caricature. It has much more affinity with Francis Bacon than John Calvin, and even if Bacon considered himself a Protestant, this kind of naturalism has no place in genuine Protestant theology. Moreover, the record will not bear out the Catholic charge of a poor artistic record. I do not think I am alone in reckoning Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and Austen, or Bach, or Handel, or Rembrandt as among the great artists of Christendom.

But the charge does begin to hold water in the English-speaking world by the 19th century or so, especially in America. It is a melancholy truth that theology in America has never been very rich (although piety certainly has), tending rather toward the rationalist, naturalist, subjective, sectarian, and pietist. A sorry record indeed. What art has arisen actually does tend toward this dissociation of sensibility. We define good art by its ability to replicate the world with precise, photographic realism (naturalism), or else by how well it conveys a "good moral" (art being nothing more than a vehicle to carry "spiritual" things, which are what really matter). Perhaps it was a curious synthesis of these two strains that emerged, philosophically in the pantheism of the Transcendentalists, or artistically in the paintings of the Hudson River School, which depicted sublime scenes of nature radiating unearthly light--also suspiciously pantheistic, and after all simply a less commercialized version of Thomas Kinkade.


...more later, if I don't lose my train of thought

Artists and the moral imagination

I mentioned in the post below that, whereas the gentleman was the highest exemplar of the moral imagination in Christendom, the artist has become his heir in post-Christendom. It occurs to me that the artist is doing on paper what the gentleman did on land--setting a part of the cosmos in order. Moral imagination has become the domain of the artist now because his art is not dependent on his economy: he does not need an orderly society and marketplace in order to write. Perhaps this explains the dramatic appearance of Southern literature shortly after the destruction of the Southern infrastructure.

Southern literature and the moral imagination

About a year ago I happened to read Russell Kirk's definition of the moral imagination. It went something like, "the apprehension of right order in the soul and in the commonwealth." This struck me at the time and has stayed with me ever since. Recent working through a lot of Southern Lit has brought this definition back to mind, and I have tried in what follows to put down some hazy thoughts, in an effort toward clarifying in my own mind what are some of the problems surrounding the destruction of the South in 1865 and its attendant cultural results.

As I take it, the moral imagination before the twentieth century was exhibited in its highest form by that old-fashioned species, the gentleman. (Since then it appears to have become the province of the artist and writer, albeit less concrete and certainly less lived out.) The gentlemen was heir to centuries of the western pursuit of "right order," and at the height of Protestant culture he could be said to have attained a fair degree of right order both in his soul and in the entire "commonwealth" that surrounded and supported him. In the South, which is my particular concern, this was most fully realized in the plantation--it was, said Richard Weaver, "a little cosmos in which things were arranged by a well understood principle giving coherence to the whole." (The Southern Tradition at Bay, pp. 33-34.) The gentleman of the South governed a small commonwealth of his own; the right order in his soul had come to maturity and now flowed out of him to give order to that part of the world that was given over to his care. In biblical terms, he was fulfilling the mandate given to Adam to live in fellowship with God and to arrange, cultivate, and give shape to his garden-kingdom.

In other words, the ideal of the gentleman is the condition in which his surroundings have been put in harmony with his own nature and purpose as a human being. The requirements of his moral nature have become consonant with the pressures of his environment.

Now slavery, it must be said, was one of the foundations of this way of life in the South (for good or ill; and we will not enter upon that discussion just now). The early difficulty of bringing right order to a society that now irrevocably comprehended a large, alien, and lately barbaric class of men, was solved by the institution of slavery. In the case of the South it truly was a domestic institution, not a commercial-imperial system as with the great European powers of the preceding centuries. Slaves in the South fulfilled more or less the role of the peasant classes of Europe--classes which depended on the right ordering of the gentlemen above them

All moral agents are also economic agents, and every institution with moral qualities must inevitably have economic qualities. Thus there is no necessary conflict between the economics and the ethics of slaveholding. The mere fact that bound labor was a source of wealth for the Southern planters does not mean the relationship was one-sided or exploitative.

I say all that as a lead-up to my next point, that the end of slavery unavoidably entailed the end of the gentleman. A fundamental principle of social order had been upended, and in the bloody Reconstruction that followed the War nothing less than a complete economic and political revolution was effected, with inevitable social and moral consequences. The South was now placed in the predicament of an Adam with no garden to tend. Without an economic basis for his moral identity, without the properly ordered environment in which to live out his given nature, Adam cannot be Adam. This must entail catastrophic psychic consequences, and it is more or less what happened in the South. Within a few generations of the fall, the inevitable train of events began to emerge.

In our modern society nearly every field in which the gentleman once exercised his task has been barred to him. He is now alienated from his environment, and if he remains true to his ideal his soul must be nearly rent in half, for his created nature demands one thing, but his environment demands another. He no longer has a garden to set in order; he is prisoner in a system that nearly forces him, if he wishes to survive, into actions that threaten to eventually destroy him.*

This is the tragical state of the South after 1865--a recapitulation, as it were, of the original fall, and a reliving of the psychic violence Adam suffered when he was driven from the Garden. The literary flowering of the South occurred just as it was passing out of the garden, harried by the angel with his flaming (or shall I say terrible swift) sword. Caught in the tension, men like Ransom, Faulkner, and Warren could not quite bring themselves to deny what their grandfathers stood for, but neither could they see their way to living out the principles they had inherited--so they stood in alienation and anguish, within sight of the garden but unable to attain it, haunted by Christ but somehow unable to lay hold of Him again.


*This is essentially the burden of Wendell Berry's writings.