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:
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The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/views-of-theology-southern-greek-and-irish/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
