‘Green Men and Green Churches’

 

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 (13^th century) –

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The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/green-men-and-green-churches/.

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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!