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Tuesday, June 7, 2022

‘Echoes of Orthodox Holiness in the Southern Novel George Balcombe’

 

In her heyday, the beau ideal for Southerners was the Christian aristocratic planter and his wife – the gentleman and the lady.  Depictions of them are found throughout Southern literature, but one in particular offers an important insight into the Southern soul.  In the Virginian Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s novel, George Balcombe, published in 1836, the abilities of the titular character, Mr. Balcombe, display striking resemblances to those manifested by the saints of the Orthodox Church throughout her history.  Can it be that the tradition-loving South was and is grasping for something deeper, something beyond, the folkways she rightly cherishes?  Let us examine this in light of what we find in George Balcombe.

I.  Clairvoyance

George Balcombe throughout the novel manifests an astonishing intuition about people, knowing who is trustworthy and who is not, how people will react in certain situations, and so forth.  Partly this seems to be due to a natural faculty of his, and partly because of his practice of law.  A lawyer in Missouri named Shaler describes how the latter imparts a sort of second sight:

 

This may seem strange to you, as you have probably little idea of the keen insight into character, which the practice of our profession imparts.  . . . 

 

"We have to do with all sorts of people, sir," said he; "and, in this new country, inhabited by insulated individuals, no one of whom can stand sponsor for another, we must learn to know all sorts of people. Now there are some marks of the gentleman which he can never lose under any circumstances. The tones, the modulations and inflections of his voice, never can be mistaken. As to the candour you are pleased to compliment, I would not advise you to trust too much to that. A lawyer's eyes are like those of a cat. He is not obliged to keep his mouth shut; because he sees plainly, and knows that he is not seen" (Vol. I, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1836, pgs. 250, 251).

It is somewhat different with the saints.  Being healed from the effects of the Fall and united with God through His uncreated Grace through their intense ascetic efforts and the liturgical and sacramental life of the Orthodox Church, they behold things through the Holy Ghost, Who has made His abode in their hearts.  Hieromonk Damascene relates a short example from the life of St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco (+1966) in a talk he gave in 2002:

 

He was a clairvoyant reader of hearts, and one who could identify and name people he had never seen before. Enlightened by the Grace of God, he could hear and answer people's thoughts before they would express them. He also foretold the future, including the time of his own death. In this way, he was very much in the tradition of the great monastic elders of the past, especially the clairvoyant Russian elders such as those of Optina Monastery.

II.  Dispassion

Balcombe shows in several instances that he is not a slave of the fallen passions – his lack of fear during a duel, his unworry over the outcome of Napier’s inheritance struggle with Montague, and others.  This is due in part to his deep trust in God’s Providence:

 

"Oh, no more of that! 'Put not thy trust in princes nor in the sons of men.' 'The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.' Let us take care that each event has its due influence upon our own hearts, and if we do not suffer them to deceive us, our trust in Providence will not deceive us" (Vol. I, p. 265).

The actions of this Providence purify us, he says elsewhere:

 

But will you murmur at having been selected as a fit subject for a discipline that might but have been wasted upon them? or will you take merit to yourself for being a more hopeful pupil than they? Who made you to differ? Who endowed you with those qualities, which might have been spoiled by unchecked prosperity, but which, matured by the training of the last (and it may be of the next) five years, may qualify you to resume the rights of your fathers, with the capacity and disposition to be the protector, and guide, and comforter of your dependants, and not their luxurious, insolent, and heartless oppressor? My dear William, in the armory of God's displeasure against the vices and follies of mankind, there is not one shaft too many, nor is one of them misdirected (p. 262).

And through this action of God’s, he reaches the point of being unruffled by any uprising of the passions, which we see most clearly in the farewell kiss he gives to his former love interest, Miss Mary Scott:

 

When we were about to part Mrs. Balcombe kissed her tenderly, while Balcombe bade farewell to the major and his lady. Then turning to Mary, he folded her to his bosom, and kissing her forehead as usual, was about to leave her, when she held up her lips and said,

 

"Once more, dear George, This once; this last time."

 

And once more he impressed upon her lips the hallowed kiss of his pure and generous friendship.

 

"Thank God! thank God!" she exclaimed, in a tone of elevated enthusiasm. "Should we never meet again, that token of a brother's love I will carry to the grave" (Vol. II, pgs. 316-7).

We see the highest fulfilment of this once again in the lives of the saints.  The Orthodox priest Sulpicius Severus says of St Martin of Tours (+397), the great luminary of France and all the West,

‘No one ever saw him enraged, or excited, or lamenting, or laughing; he was always one and the same: displaying a kind of heavenly happiness in his countenance, he seemed to have passed the ordinary limits of human nature. Never was there any word on his lips but Christ, and never was there a feeling in his heart except piety, peace, and tender mercy’ (Ch. 27).

III.  Healer

There are a couple of significant moments in the novel when Balcombe revives people who have fallen into despair and other ailments, the most profound being his interaction with Howard, who had fallen into a fit of madness after losing a duel to Balcombe.  Here Tucker writes,

 

Indeed it was delightful to see how the mind of Howard calmed itself under the mild ministrations of Balcombe, and how the originality of his thoughts, and the vividness of his conceptions and language, took possession of the faculties of the patient, and wiled him away from all subjects of painful reflection. There was, indeed, a healthfulness in the action of Balcombe's mind, which seemed to impart itself to all he associated with, dispelling phantasies, and healing sickly sensibilities as if by magic (Vol. II, p. 245).

The ability to heal is present in the saints throughout the history of the Orthodox Church.  Fr. Damascene again speaks of St. John the Wonderworker:

‘He was a healer and miracle-worker, in the tradition of St. Martin of Tours, St. Nicholas of Myra in Lycia, and others. Through his prayers, he healed people of almost every imaginable malady; and he continues to do so after his repose.’

For more detailed accounts of healings by the saints, one may easily turn to the Life of St. Martin linked above by Fr. Sulpicius, or to recent saints like St. Nektarios of Aegina (+1920).

IV.  Guide to Repentance

It is not only physical healing that George Balcombe bequeaths to others; it is spiritual healing also.  At the very end of the story, we are told of the fate of the backwoods ruffian Keizer:

‘Keizer returned with Balcombe to Missouri, and has ever since lived uprightly and comfortably under his munificent patron’ (Vol. II, p. 318).

In the life of St. Anthony the Great of Egypt (+356), St. Athanasius the Great (+373) tells how simply seeing St. Anthony was enough to work repentance in the souls of onlookers, so great was the Grace of God that overflowed from his heart:

 

Who came in anger and was not converted to friendship? What poor and low-spirited man met him who, hearing him and looking upon him, did not despise wealth and console himself in his poverty? What monk, having being neglectful, came to him and became not all the stronger? What young man having come to the mountain and seen Antony, did not immediately deny himself pleasure and love temperance? (Ch. 87)

V.  In the Church the Fall Is Overcome

The Protestant mindset has imprinted itself deeply upon the Southern people.  Some good has come of this, but one of the unfortunate drawbacks of Protestantism is its tendency to constrict the horizon of human possibilities within the limits imposed on mankind and the rest of the creation as a result of the Fall (Fr. Josiah Trenham, Rock and Sand: An Orthodox Appraisal of the Protestant Reformers and Their Teachings, Columbia, Missouri, Newrome Press, 2015, pgs. 297-9).  Characters with super-human abilities like George Balcombe are an attempt by Southrons to reach beyond these frustrating limits.  However, it is precisely in the Orthodox Church where they can find very real, not merely fictional or imaginary, deliverance from that crippling iron yoke.  Fr. Dumitru Staniloae wonderfully expresses this when he writes,

 

Baptism is the personal Pentecost of each person who enters the Church, and through baptism each can begin a new road and has become a “new creature” in a movement of continuous growth:  “After Pentecost the time of the Church is oriented towards the novissima, the new things of the Kingdom . . . Christianity, in the radiant witness of its confessors, martyrs and saints is messianic, revolutionary, explosive.  The Gospel calls for the violence which seizes the Kingdom, tears open the heavens and transforms the old image of the world into the new creation . . . The salt of the earth and the light of the world, the saints appear as the obvious and hidden leaders of humanity, those who will assume responsibility for history and accomplish it . . . The saints take the torch from the martyrs and continue to illumine the world” (The Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 4: The Church: Communion in the Holy Spirit, Ioan Ionita, trans. and ed., Brookline, Mass., Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012, p. 77).

To those in the South who are willing, we say, ‘Come receive this transforming Light!’

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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