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.

Tate on Agrarianism--and a bonus rant

A surprising number of people, including those who cherish similar cultural goals, find it convenient to dismiss the Southern Agrarians and their critique of industrialism as motivated by nostalgic fantasies about an imaginary antebellum utopia, or perhaps a naive, why-can't-we-go-back-to-simpler-times approach to economics. This kind of dismissal must surely result from a failure to actually read the Agrarians' work, because it bears no resemblance to what they stood for.

In fact, they are best seen as the Southern wing of a larger critique of modernity that began to show up in the early part of the twentieth century. Ransom, Tate, Lytle, et al., were collaborators and sometimes colleagues with men such as T. S. Eliot, Hilaire Belloc, W. H. Auden, and G. K. Chesterton. Their oustanding literary output, their attacks on industrialism and unfettered capitalism, their reflections on Christianity, myth, order, and the nature of culture, are indispensable parts of the impressive body of Christian cultural thought in the twentieth century.

To that end, here is a quote from Allan Tate reflecting on the Agrarian symposium I'll Take My Stand:

I never thought of Agrarianism as a restoration of anything in the Old South; I saw it as something to be created, as I think it will in the long run be created as the result of a profound change, not only in the South, but elsewhere, in the moral and religious outlook of western man. The South is still a region where an important phase of that change may take place; but the change will not, as I see it, be uniquely Southern; it will be greater than the South. What I had in mind twenty years ago, not too distinctly, I think I see more clearly now; that is, the possibility of the human life presupposes, with us, a moral order, the order of a unified Christendom. (Quoted in
Southern Renascence, "Allan Tate," p. 364.

If the symposium itself is any indication, Tate is not here maintaining that a new moral order would require a complete about-face from what the Old South stood for. He is only emphasizing the broader connections of the Southern tradition. He is saying that the work of the Agrarians was not an exercise in nostalgia, but a real effort at developing a new philosophy of culture out of certain principles at work in the Old South.

Now, however, that there are legitimate attempts to start building such cultures based on the achievements of the old Christendom, I think it is becoming equally important to emphasize a corollary to Tate's quote--the fact that a general revival in the West can only happen in particular instantiations. For each culture has its own nature. A wise reformer seeks to develop virtues out of the nature he has been given. Those working toward this goal in England, for instance, should ask how it can be achieved through historically English institutions and habits, and they ought to take as their model peculiarly English thinkers. And those in the South should be looking at peculiarly Southern modes of life.

One of my largest concerns with bringing reformation to the South today is the number of pastors and thinkers in the area who are now ignorant of the powerful, native traditions that are already in place. They preach and teach a worldview they have drawn largely from books about the New England Puritans (or maybe--hopefully--if we are luckier, C.S. Lewis). Now I do think these men can bring needed insights and correctives to the Southern tradition, but I can't help thinking we make a grave mistake when we try to transplant customs peculiar to other nations into the South and "make" them grow there, contrary to all nature. They will flourish only at the expense of what the South is. We will not have achieved not a reformation but a conquest.

Poems About God

So I had to hunt up the passage where John Crowe Ransom mentioned the poetical effect of the word "God." The reference is in a brilliant essay by Richard Weaver called "Agrarianism in Exile", quoting Ransom's preface to his Poems About God:

"The first three or four poems that I ever wrote were done in three or four different moods and with no systematic design. I was therefore duly surprised to find that each of them made considerable use of the term God. I studied the matter a little and came to the conclusion that this was the most poetic of all terms possible (pp. 33-34)."

Not to be missed is Weaver's discussion of this fact:

It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him values have a reality, and that he is capable of emotion on the subject of value. The entire corpus of the world's poetry rests upon a theory of universal analogy which teaches that all phenomena in some degree resemble each other. There is minimal truth in even the wildest metaphor simply because this world is, from one point of view, a unitary thing. and this amounts to saying that it is a creation. When in the Anglo-Saxon legend a vision appeared to Caedmon and told him to "sing creation," it was as if inspiration were pointing out to the poet his archetypal theme. Now if poetry is this system of universal analogy, and if the analogy mounts up toward that which most resembles everything else, or that which has the most universal being, it is true that all poetry is a form of worship. Poetry and religion have been too often conjoined in cultural history for the union to be fortuitous. It is with the symbol that we make the leap from what can be demonstrated rationally to what cannot, so that the poet as poet is a non-rationalist. And his post-rational demonstrations are about matters of value. Every comparison he makes has its implicative. The poet likens life now to a prosperous sea-voyage; again to the sere and yellow leaf. These do not end with mere description. They place the subject somewhere on this ladder of universal analogy, so that we gain an insight into its relationship to true being. Metaphor, the distinguishing gift of the poet, as Aristotle pointed out, is the bridge between the phenomenal and the noumenal world, and it is no accident that there hangs about the poet, despite his often chequered mundane career, a certain aura of consecration. The practice of poetry amounts in effect to a confession of faith in immanent reality, which is the gravest of all commitments. Poetry on any other assumption would be anomaly." (Southern Essays of Richard Weaver, "Agrarianism in Exile," 32-33.)

I am always astounded by how many powerful concepts Weaver can express in a few sentences. His reflections on myth, poetry, and reality tie in well with some of the profoundest work of Lewis, Tolkien, et al. His discussion of metaphor and creation is suggestive of some later work by Trinitarian theologians, and lastly he manages to bring up Aristotle, Caedmon, and Shakespeare, without even trying. If, however, one were to criticize Weaver for leaving some of his statements open to pantheistic and platonic interpretations, I would have to agree.

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord,"...

Here is a subject which deserves, and has almost certainly received, a closer examination than I am capable of giving, or am aware of existing. It is true of America as a whole that its speech has been influenced by the King James Bible. Especially in the South, however, the Bible, and liturgics in general, somehow became part of the "grammar" of the culture, even apart from the original meaning of the text. Blues and country songs use the word "Lord" (usually "Lord, Lord") the way Homer used stock epithets--as familiar words with a set rhythm that serve to fill space or complete a rhyme scheme. Many Southern sayings rely on biblical phrases; even tobacco auctioneers would borrow lines from the Bible or gospel songs to round out their cry; and the cry itself was developed from Gregorian chant. A great deal of the cultural furnishings of the South, both high and low, are drawn from the Bible, from liturgical phrases, or church music. Particles of religious language are strewn throughout their day-to-day speechmaking, proverbial sayings, economic dealings, and comments on the weather.

I recall reading somewhere that John Crowe Ransom once asked himself why Southern literature used the word "God" so much, even outside of religious usage. His answer was that, of all words in the human language, "God" was the most poetical. I think this answer gets pretty close to the heart of the matter. When the Allman Brothers sing, "Lord, I was born a ramblin' man" they are invoking, by instinct, the transcendent qualities of that Name, and, by contrast, deepening the pain of their song of earthly mutability. Richard Weaver mentioned a sense of incarnation as an important quality of Southern literature. By incarnation he meant a union of particularity and transcendence, evident in the ability of Faulkner, Warren, et al., to link their minute and concrete images to a strong sense of meaning and eternity. This same incarnational union obtains in the culture out of which this literature sprang, and I suspect something of the sort is going on when the Gregorian modes echo in the cry of a tobacco auctioneer, when a rockabilly singer calls on his Savior while his guitar moans for a lost Eden (which may or may not be a girl), when a redfaced sweating stump orator draws on biblical cadences to heighten his ethos.

This kind of religious saturation of a culture is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, perhaps best seen in Chaucer or in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novels of Poland, where almost every common utterance defaulted to a paternoster or an Ave or mimicked liturgical exchanges in the Divine Service. Perhaps this kinship lends support to the idea that the American South was the last traditional member of western Christendom.

Radical Midwest, Conservative West

I am almost ready to conclude that most of the radical doctrines that have sprung up in America in the come from, or at least have taken ready root in, Midwest soil: generally speaking, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, western Pennsylvania, and New York. (At the time of their settlement, of course, these areas were considered the "west"). This region, or rather the urban centers in this region, became the driving engine of the Progressive Era.

One of the early indications of all this was the nationalism and populism of Henry Clay and others, a sort of democratic-imperial spirit that influenced America's first experiment with dictatorship in the person of an Illinoisan named Abraham Lincoln. Around the same time they can also boast frontier revivalism, the free-soil movement, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, Joseph Smith and Mormonism, Robert Owen and the public school movement, and, of course, experiments with utopian communism.

Although the Midwest was, and remains, highly agricultural, they did not develop the same ideas of localism, decentralized government, and aristocratical society as did the other predominately agricultural region, the South. Sez Russell Kirk:

Although the West as at first agricultural, it had no desire to remain in that condition and was hardly second to the manufacturing interests of the Middle Atlantic States in the demand for stimulation of domestic industries. Then, too, the West was the home of belligerent nationalism; thence came most of the War Hawks, "the Grundys, Clays, and Seavers," that Randolph hated. Moreover, the West was the seat of radical egalitarianism, and the western state constitutions were anathema to Randolph. (John Randolph of Roanoke, 202-3.)

Perhaps to the surprise of Jefferson, freeholding farmers had no natural bent to virtue, humility, and self government--at least not in the abstract. His native Virginia was heir to centuries of restrained and orthodox Anglicanism, gentrified English taste, highly educated gentlemen with ideas of noblesse oblige, and a stable and tradition-loving peasant stock to round out society. In such conditions a wide distribution of modest freeholders could conduce to virtue; without this influence they were easy fodder for radical innovation. Indeed the Midwest landscape, vast, flat, and uniform, seemed tailor made for a cog in the great machine of industrialism. Carl Sandburg memorably depicts Chicago as a hellish marriage of industrialism and agriculture,

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

The midwest also, of course, oversaw the mechanization of agriculture to its present condition as a corporate venture requiring massive infusions of capital and technology, pushing it to ever greater economies of scale until Jefferson's ideal society of small, independent freeholders became a distant and derided memory.

Commensurate with these changes was a quiet but equally radical shift in the conception of man and his relation to society. As in commerce, so in politics, a man's first duty was to himself, and that chiefly consisted in "getting ahead" and "being somebody big." The great new cities of the Midwest were famously under the control of political machines (Wikipedia mentions Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, and St Louis as chief examples), a far cry from the Jeffersonian ideal of a decentralized structure in which small-scale freeholders actively participated in their government through local representatives. Although a fairly moderate example of the Midwest, it must not be forgotten that Harry Truman was given his start in politics by the Pendergast machine. Noteworthy too are his letters in early life proclaiming a burning ambition to become famous. Such self-interested domination was far cry from John Adams' "natural" aristocrats who assumed, in rotation, the onerous task of government, or John Randolph's actual aristocrats who considered their status, their wealth, and their education, to be given in trust, and administered on behalf of their constituents as a public duty, required by their station in life.

To be fair (or perhaps to spread the unfairness around a little) most of the Midwest's radicalism came from New England. Although Mormonism first took root in western New York, Ohio, and Missouri, both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were native Vermonters. The soil for their movement, the "burned over districts", was prepared by Charles Finney, a native of Connecticut. John Brown, prototypical Midwesterner and the first political terrorist, sprung from a tormented, hyper-Calvinist father who also hailed from Connecticut. Walt Whitman, prophet and examplar of the pushing, aggressive, skeptical naturalism of the rising West, was born on Long Island and spent his life in New York. Finally, Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott were all ex-Puritans from Massachussetts who greatly influenced the anarchical, experimental, and utopian bent of the territories.

Having said all that, I would not wish to include the American west proper in this denouncement. Once past the grain belt a far different character takes hold, and states such as Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and Idaho show intriguing potential to someday wield a contrary influence. The climate is difficult and remote, the people are tough and accustomed to handling their own affairs without bureaucratic interference. Most farms and ranches are still owned by families, often descended from the original settlers. From personal observation there seem to be large numbers of hardworking, mature men with families, experienced marksmen, and both community-minded but self-sufficient, scattered widely throughout even the most remote pieces of country. Perhaps most importantly, the spark is not wanting to light this tinder, for a distant national government has consistently overreached in its relations toward these mountain states, controlling the majority of land and water and tying it up with bizarre environmental regulations that threaten to destroy the livelihoods of many long-established ranchers. These cases form almost exact parallels to the distant tyranny of Britain over the American colonies, or the New England attempts to control Southern agriculture for its own benefit by means of enormous tariffs. Nullification movements have not been lacking, and I would not be surprised, in another generation, to see serious secession movements in these states. Unlike most of the other states in the Union, the mountain states may actually have the capacity for self-government if they declare independence.

A third interesting thing

In Russell Kirk's biography of John Randolph of Roanoke, I ran across a striking argument:

To grant non-freeholders the right to vote violates the principle of no taxation without representation. If propertyless men are allowed to participate in government, which unavoidably includes the power of taxation, then they have the power to impose burdens which can only benefit, and never burden, themselves. If untaxed men are given power to dispose of other men's money, we have set ourselves up for tyranny. It's a simple and obvious deduction.

Property was the traditional requirement for representation in government from mediaeval England up to the early decades of American independence, and I am a bit surprised how quickly it was abandoned, considering the generally conservative nature of American leadership from colonial times through the revolution. I'm curious whether the change to one man, one vote can be traced to some secular extension of Puritan ideas of priesthood and equality, or to simple Enlightenment doctrine, or Jacobinism, or the "frontier spirit" in the age of Jackson, or to some combination of these.

It also helps demonstrate how odd is our current notion of the "ontology of franchise," if you want to call it that--the somewhat hazy idea that the right to vote is what makes you fully human. (Recently the state of Washington allowed criminals serving time in jail the right to vote!)

Two interesting things

1) I recently discovered the difference between natural law and natural rights philosophies. Natural law is the morality and right order revealed through creation, accessible by reason, conscience, history, and experience. Its great advocates are Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and Hooker. It presupposes the existence of God (specifically the Christian God with Aquinas and Hooker). It requires an original and natural commonwealth among mankind, instituted by God at creation. Man is defined principally in terms of his duty toward the community and toward God, the final End for whom he was created.

The theory of natural rights, on the other hand, is based on the hypothesis that mankind is originally and naturally individual and autonomous. Any associations in which he participates, such as marriage or society, require a cession of some rights and a degree of autonomy, but every power not delegated is retained. Thus community is extraneous to his nature, and is simply arrangement of convenience. Man is defined principally in terms of his rights, and his rights are defined principally in opposition to other men. Its great advocates are the Enlightenment theorists: Locke, Hobbes, and Co.

Now put like this, there is a radical shift from the Christian to the Enlightenment understanding of Nature, and its implications for society. But James McClellan, in Liberty, Justice, and Virtue, observes that at the time of the American founding, the distinction was not fully appreciated, and much of the natural rights jargon used by certain Founding Fathers cannot accurately be read as endorsing a full-blown, radical revision of the Christian understanding.

2) I recently read a great article by Clyde Wilson (written all the way back in 1968).* In it he argued (among other things) that John Adams and other advocates of "checks and balances" in the Constitution were actually being radical and theoretical! But stay: he made some good points. According to Wilson, the thirteen colonies had, in the course of their joint history, evolved a comfortable set of mutual relations (admittedly, in need of adjustment and definition). In the Philadelphia convention, however, the old balance was upset in favor of a new (to America) and abstract system of checks and balances. He goes on to point out a number of very convincing historical proofs for the failure of the system to keep tyranny at bay. For instance, and I quote:

The chief concern of the Federalists within the polity was to check a rash majority by erecting powerful independent offices in the executive and judiciary. Some what short-sightedly, they believed that these centers of power would always be instruments of restraint. They failed to foresee the true course of events, i.e., that there was no natural reason why the executive and judiciary would remain conservative, and if ever once captured (as in the New Deal) by the passions of the mob or the spirit of rash innovation, the presidency and federal courts provided impregnable bastions for radical sorties upon the social order. The Federalists can thus be seen as tinkerers who sought to secure conservatism by means of abstractly conceived governmental machinery. Their tinkering has been largely responsible for the successes of anticonservative movements and the seemingly irreversible institutionalism of New Deal Liberalism in the federal courts and bureaucracy.

And more:

The Federalists’ political speculations (as have those of twentieth century liberals to opposite ends) tended to focus too much upon European society and not enough upon particular American conditions. The unrestrained majority which the Federalists feared was not, in America, a desperate, propertyless mob, but a restricted electorate of middle class property holders. The danger to the constitutional and federal republican polity in America has never come from the majority but rather from ambitious tyrants and alienated intellectual coteries for whom the strong presidency and judiciary are tailor-made fortresses.

So, according to Wilson, because of the stable and conservative condition of the American populace at large (far cry from the rootless and unpropertied agitators of the old world), the strong executive and judicial powers intended restrain the mob were not only unnecessary, but ended up playing into the hands of the much more present danger: aggressive reformers and disillusioned intellectuals.

This is really hard to argue with. But it's blowing my paradigm all to pieces, in a cool kind of way.



* http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2011/09/jeffersonian-conservative-tradition.html

Baptism and circumcision

Paul seems rather down on circumcision. In Romans 4 he makes a big deal of the fact that Abraham was given the promise of the Seed before he was circumcised, not after. Therefore, he argues, our justification comes through belief in the promised Seed, not in performing the law. Paul equates circumcision with the "law" (Romans 4:13), presumably because circumcision was a mark of the Jews, who had the Law; circumcision seems to anticipate the law that came 430 years later (Galatians 3:17).

In contrast to the legal character of circumcision is the coming of the Seed, and the work of His Spirit (Galatians 3:1-9). If we are members of Moses, we are bound to keep the law. If we are members of Christ, then we are members of Abraham, who was given the promise before the law, and therefore we are justified apart from works. There is a strong contrast between circumcision and membership in Christ.

We tend to equate baptism with circumcision, since they certainly fill similar covenantal functions. Thus we tend to transfer Paul's remarks on the futility of circumcision to our theology of baptism. But Paul is very "up" on baptism. Through Christ, of whom we are made a member through baptism (Romans 6), our sins are put to death, whereas through the law, of which we are made a member through circumcision (Romans 4, Galatians 3) our sins are provoked and made manifest (Romans 4:15).

The similarity between baptism and circumcision is real: both rituals join us to a covenant head. But the difference is also real: the covenant heads are different. Circumcision unites us to Moses, baptism unites us to Christ. Moses is bondage, Christ is freedom. Circumcision is efficacious to unite us to Moses, but Moses is futile to justify us. Baptism is efficacious to unite us to Christ, and Christ is powerful to justify us. So it is wrong for us to downplay baptism because Paul downplays circumcision. In both cases the ritual accomplishes covenantal union; in only one case does the covenant head accomplish salvation.

A "high" Reformed view of baptism (if rightly applied) cannot possibly be a return to the law, or a falling away from faith. The new covenant, the promise, the seed, the Spirit--Paul uses these terms to describe our new-found life apart from the law. If baptism is a "sacrament of the New Testament," as Westminster says, then it pertains to the Spirit and the freedom. One cannot possibly claim that this view is legalistic without making the New Covenant itself legalistic.

Here is where the great danger lies in making use of a facile division between "visible" and "invisible." There is an unstated equivocation of "invisible" with "spiritual" and "visible" with "fleshly" or "legal." Thus the new covenant, the promise, the Seed, the Spirit can only exist meaningfully apart from visible forms. By contrast things like sacraments are tangible and observable, and therefore do not partake of the free character of the new covenant. To connect "externals" in any way to the spiritual work of Christ is to fall into legalism.

But this is all messed up. The great division in the Bible is between Old and New, between the law and Christ, between the letter and the Spirit. Terms like inner and outer, in the Bible, describe the difference in power between the old and new covenants--not a division between the visible and invisible forms found in both covenants. In the new covenant we are given new hearts, and the grace transforms us beginning with our deepest inner man. This is a power the old covenant did not have; I believe this is what Paul meant by circumcision of the flesh in contrast to circumcision of the heart. Circumcision partook of the futile nature of the law; the cutting of the flesh had no effect on the heart. In the new covenant, however, baptism must partake of the spiritual, efficacious work of Christ. If it does not, if baptism is no better than circumcision, then the new covenant is no better than the old, and we might as well have remained under Moses.

An odd comment I ran across on the internet today:

"There is really no question that Lee tortured slaves, including slaves girls as young as 13. There is no question that he sold the infant children of those slave girls, hardly old enough even to have children. These children produced children, which Lee sold."

I will try hard to avoid decking this fellow with a paving stone, but I may not be successful.