The South
came into being during the age in Western history when the idea of man’s
ability to participate directly in the life of the Holy Trinity, to know God
through an actual union with His divine energies, had been rejected (see Fr.
John Strickland’s very helpful book The Age of Division for an
elaboration of this time period in Church history). Nevertheless, since God Himself is, as St.
Dionysius the Areopagite (+1st century) says, Beauty Itself (The
Divine Names, chapter IV, section VII), man has a natural inclination
toward what is beautiful; he is drawn toward it and desires it, having an
intuitive sense that it is connected mystically to God, the Source of all being
and goodness (sections IX and X). But
because of Dixie’s ignorance of the reality of participation and union found in
the Orthodox Church, she, like the rest of the West after the separation from
the Orthodox, had to find a way to satisfy her natural hunger and longing for
beauty. She did this by trying to
capture beauty in an earthly container of some kind.
Southerners
found various ways to capture and express beauty: rhetoric, gardens, architecture,
literature. But the most potent
embodiment of beauty for Southerners by far is woman. Southern society has always been down-right
enchanted by them. From Alexander Meek
of Alabama’s chivalric antebellum poetry (“A Soldier’s Love Dream,” for
instance, pgs.
119-20), to Poe’s mixing of death and womanly beauty in his poem The
Raven (“The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe: Essays and Reviews,
Library of America, New York, 1984, pgs. 16-19), to the beauty pageants and cotillions
that still go on today in parts of the South, the fair and comely woman is at
the heart of Dixie’s culture.
Perhaps the
most beautiful of them all is Lucy Holcombe
Pickens, who has been called the “uncrowned queen of the Southern
Confederate States.” Born on 11 July
1832 in Tennessee, related to Austrian royalty through her Grandmother Holcombe,
nearly everything about her life breathed royalty, wealth, and virtue. It also intersects with the Orthodox Church,
as we shall see.
There was
jewelry, silverware, and travel along the Mississippi when growing up. A visit to the Mississippi State Legislature
with her family when she was 17 led to its adjournment: So many of the legislators felt it necessary
to escort her to the dock as she left for New Orleans that not enough were left
to gather a quorum.
Her first
love, a Lt. Crittendon, was killed in an attempt to begin a revolution in Cuba
to free the island from Spanish rule in 1851.
She wrote a well-received fictional novel describing the events, The
Free Flag of Cuba.
Her second
suitor appeared in 1858, Francis W. Pickens.
He was one of the South’s planter politicians, and had married twice,
only to have both wives die. He was
struck at once by her beauty, which was described by someone at this season of
her life as “[t]all, willowy, with titian hair said to resemble a woof of
sunbeams spinning out like a flower at the ends, with eyes to shade that two
men could never agree upon.” He was soon
asking Lucy’s father for permission to wed his daughter. She herself was agreeable to the proposal,
but asked Mr. Pickens, as some stories relate, to get an ambassadorship in a
foreign country out of a desire to see the wider world. He asked President Buchanan for such a one,
and was appointed ambassador to Russia.
. . .
The rest is
at https://southernorthodox.org/queen-lucy-queen-mary/.
--
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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