Southerners
have often been mocked for their agrarian simplicity by Yankee-minded folks. We know the insults well by now: hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, and so on. But Dixie should not be ashamed of this. We ought rather to delight and exult in it.
Richard
Weaver gives us good ground for doing so in his contrast of the Northern/Yankee
and Southern types:
“Nowhere
has the Northern mind more clearly embraced the Faustian concept than in the
idea of progress. There is the constant out-reaching, the denial of limits, the
willingness to dissolve all into endless instrumental activity, to which even
some American philosophers have supplied theoretical support. Hence the
incessant urge to be doing, to be transforming, to effect some external change
between yesterday and today. The mood of the Americans, another French critic
of a century ago remarked, is that of an army on the march. The language of
conquest fills the air. They will ‘master nature’; they will ‘attack problems’;
they will ‘control energy’; they will ‘overcome space and time.’ The
endlessness of progress in these terms is the most generally accepted dogma.
And thus enchanted by the concept of an infinite expansion, they reject the
classical philosophy as too constricting.
“The
Southerner, to sum up the contrast, has tended to live in the finite, balanced,
and proportional world which Classical man conceived. In Cicero and Horace he
has found congenial counsellors about human life. The idea of stasis is not
abhorrent to him, because it affords a ground for the identity of things. Life
is not simply a linear progression, but a drama, with rise and fall. Happiness
may exist as much in contemplation as in activity. Experience alone is not
good; it has to be accompanied by the human commentary. From this, I believe,
has come the South’s great fertility in myth and anecdote. It is not so much a
sleeping South as a dreaming one, and out of dreams come creations that affect
the imagination” (“The
South and the American Union”).
It is a fine
historical, philosophical analysis, but the Christian South must go beyond
these for justification of her way of life.
Wendell Berry is helpful in this respect. Essays like the “The Gift of Good Land”
provide a Biblical grounding for a life of restraint, of proper limits to human
striving. But Mr. Berry is mostly
concerned with men and women being good stewards of the creation. This is by no means unimportant, yet it
nevertheless prevents him from fully developing a theological understanding of
the Yankee and Southern types.
There is a
man who can help us in this, however: an
exceptional teacher of the Holy Scriptures, Fr. Athanasios Mitilianaios,
an Orthodox priest who fell asleep in the Lord in 2006. In his exposition of verses from both Genesis
and Revelation, he shows with remarkable clarity the two essential types of
mankind to which the North and the South correspond.
In his
sermon on Revelation 9:1-12 (an overview of which may be viewed here;
all quotes from Fr. Athanosios are via that presentation), in which he
describes the meaning of the terrifying locusts, he says,
“Do you know
that a man who has no faith in God is terrified of the universe? . . .
Man is afraid of earthquakes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms, elements
which have really lost their balance and rhythm in these last decades, and
which create an impression of a dangerous and unfriendly universe for today’s
troubled man. All of things torment, in
the manner of locusts—as the text says—the man who has lost the purpose of his
existence, the man who has lost his faith or belief in God. Thus, the locusts of fury are already
terribly tormenting today’s man.”
Fallen man,
man separated from God, therefore, seeks out consolation for himself, something
to take his mind off the foreboding world around him. And he finds it in the unceasing development
of advanced, technological civilization:
“It is not
by mere coincidence that Cain and his descendants originally developed
civilization. Cain and his four children created civilization. According to
Hebraic tradition, his daughter invented the spinning wheel, using wool to make
threads and clothing. From this it becomes obvious that the generations of
Cain, and this is a very subtle detail, were primarily preoccupied with the
development of civilization… God had cursed Cain, so he needed to develop
something to lighten the burden of that curse. Thus, man became preoccupied
with the elements of civilization because the purpose of civilization is to
introduce consolation in man’s life.”
Here is the
basic outline of one type of man – the type of Cain, which corresponds to Yankee
man. But what of the second type?
“In
contrast, the descendants of Seth, who was born to serve as a replacement for
Abel who had been killed by Cain, focused on the worship of God and the
simplicity of life. To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh.
At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord (Genesis 4:26). He
trusted in the Lord. So Enoch, or Enosh (Enos in the Septuagint), trusted and
hoped in the name of the Lord and God.”
The second
type is Seth, satisfied with simple living and worshipping God. This corresponds to Dixie’s folk.
Fr.
Athanasios expands on these two types.
Of Cain’s type, he notes further:
. . .
The rest is
at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/yankee-cain-and-southern-seth/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
