A modern prophet from
England, Paul Kingsnorth, has made the comment in a number of his essays that he appreciates
how the ancient churches in England look as if they grew out of the soil itself
rather than were constructed by human hands.
If one looks into Southern life, he will find that our churches share a
strong resemblance to this description of his.
Mary Eastman opened her book Aunt
Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is, with this word-picture of a
church in Virginia:
‘The old Episcopal church,
standing at the entrance of the town, could not fail to be attractive from its
appearance of age; but from this alone.
No monuments adorn the churchyard; head-stones of all sizes meet the eye,
some worn and leaning against a shrub or tree for support, others new and
white, and glistening in the sunset.
Several family vaults, unpretending in their appearance, are perceived
on a closer scrutiny, to which the plants usually found in burial-grounds are
clinging, shadowed too by large trees.
The walls where they are visible are worn and discolored, but they are
almost covered with ivy, clad in summer’s deepest green. Many a stranger stopped his horse in passing
by to wonder at its look of other days; and some, it may be, to wish they were
sleeping in the shades of its mouldering walls’ (Lippincott, Grambo & Co.,
Philadelphia, 1852, Dodo Press reprint, p. 1).
Margaret Junkin Preston wrote
in her novel Silverwood: Book of
Memories,
‘Beautifully stood the
antique, moss-grown church, almost hidden on its sloping knoll, among giant,
white-branched sycamores, and stalwart oaks, and mountain ashes—the heroic
remnants of the primeval forest, which, like the race whose council-fires they may
have shaded, alone remained to give token of former glory. A stream of clear
water crossed the road, just at the foot of the knoll on which this old
structure, dating away back to colonial times, reared its venerable walls. A
steep roof, with wide, projecting eves, windows and doors scattered about with
not much reference to symmetry, an outside covered stairway, all combined to
make it a most quaint-looking pile’ (Derby & Jackson, New York, 1856, p.
100).
William Gilmore Simms
presents a similar image of forest and church merging in his poem ‘Sabbath in
the Forest’:
‘THE mighty and the massy of
the wood
Compel my worship: satisfied
I lie,
With naught in sight but
forest, earth, and sky,
And give sweet sustenance to
precious mood! —
'Tis thus from visible but
inanimate things,
We gather mortal
reverence. They declare
In silence, a persuasion we
must share,
Of hidden sources, spiritual
springs,
Fountains of deep
intelligence, and powers,
That man himself implores
not; and I grow
From wonder into worship, as
the show,
Majestic, but unvoiced,
through noteless hours,
Imposes on my soul, with
musings high,
That, like Jacob's Ladder,
lifts them to the sky!’
(Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary and
Contemplative, Vol. II, Redfield, New York, 1853, p. 12)
This way of seeing the world
has survived into modern times in Dixie, in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree,
for instance:
‘In his solitary wanderings,
hallucinations, and dream visions in the “cool green fire” of the mountains,
Suttree comes to look at “a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber
of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks…. He could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him” (286). Suttree, in effect, becomes a Southern
version of Yeats’s Mad Sweeney. He is
now the true Celtic gealt, the madman whose insanity allows him to see
and comprehend truths which the sane wish to avoid and are able to ignore. At the end of his immersion into this
“greenly phosphorescent” natural world, he comes to see “with a madman’s
clarity the perishability of his flesh” (287).
In other words, he reaches the humility of human finitude. The world Suttree has left is a world of
incredible cruelty, violations, and dispossessions. He enters a world of wonder. We now see Suttree “muttering along half
mindless, an aberrant journeyman in the trade of wonder” (290)’ (Dr James
Everett Kibler, Jr, The Classical Origins of Southern Literature,
Abbeville Institute Press, McClellanville, SC, 2017, p. 174).
Every culture has symbols
that are peculiarly their own. The
nature-church, or the green church as we shall call it, is one such belonging
to Dixie. It represents the sacramental
view of nature that traditional Southerner’s hold, that God is present in his
creation in a mysterious yet very real way.
Though it resembles the Romantics’ view of nature, it nevertheless does
not fall like them into pantheism: It
remains a Christian vision.
This symbol of ours is
related to a symbol found in England, the land of the South’s first
settlers: the green man, or the foliate
head. It appears on a number of old
churches there. While several theories
have been put forward to explain its presence on these churches, Josh Robinson
offers the most reasonable one in an essay
he wrote for The Symbolic World:
It is a pictorial representation of a story, ‘The Life of Adam,’ from
the medieval book The Golden Legend (13th century) –
. . .
The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/green-men-and-green-churches/.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
