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"What would (Southern Agrarians like) Donald Davidson or Allen Tate think about this?"

Well, none of us are on their intellectual level, so they would have considered us to be pretty amateurish. But I think that they probably would have had some appreciation for our lengthy discussions on various Greek and Latin words, what they mean, and how they were used in various works -- such as the discussion that Annalex, HarleyD and I have been having about the word "epiousios" in the Lord's Prayer.

I certainly think that John Crowe Ransom would have approved. Read "God without Thunder," and you will read someone who would have fit in on this thread very nicely. And I think that most of us would agree with Davidson's "intense disgust with the spiritual disorder of modern life...."

As to Tate, well, he would aloofly have intellectually eaten us all for lunch with room left over for dessert -- had he condescended to speak with us. But I think that had he dived in, he would have found, in the discussions between Orthodox Christians and Catholics and Protestants, some things of great interest, given the fact that he, perhaps more acutely than any of the Agrarians, saw the deep internal contractions and conflict in the Western European mind -- between scientific rationalism and Western forms of Christian dogma. As he wrote in "Religion and the Old South:" "This was the peril of the European mind and the medieval Church knew it." Tate saw that the "Russian or eastern European mind" was very different, but thought it was "quite simply supernaturalism."

Where Ransom's ultimate pulling back from any consideration of actually becoming Eastern Orthodox was based on a sort of cultural "abhorrence," (which is understandable since his only personal contact with Orthodox Christians were with non-English speaking immigrants in a Wyoming mining town -- yet for all that he said that he admired them and their religion) Tate's objections to the Eastern Church were, to put it bluntly, based on an inadequate understanding of how the Eastern -- that is to say, Orthodox -- mind works, and that mind is hardly devoid of reason.

Tate observed that "the Western Church established a system of quantity for the protection of quality, but there was always the danger that quantity would revolt from servitude and suppress its master..." Very perceptive. He notes that "the Eastern Church never had to ... construct a plausible rationality round the supernatural to make it acceptable; it has never had a philosophy, nor a dogma in our sense; it never needed one." Again, very perceptive, and I think he would have seen that contrast right here on this thread.

And there are further parallels: Tate observed that "the South could be ignorant of Europe because she *was* Europe... and the South could remain simple-minded because she had no use for the intellectual agility required to define its position... The Southern mind was simple, not top-heavy with learning it had no need of, unintellectual, and composed; it was personal and dramatic, rather than abstract and metaphysical..." I could go on and on from that particular essay.

Tate's self-described "irreligiosity" in his treatment of the Christianity he saw in the West in general and America in particular was not something he saw as being desirable -- but simply unavoidable given this clarity of vision. Tate saw not only the deep contradictions within the Western Christian mind, but specifically saw that the religion of the South was fundamentally flawed. He said that "the South would not have been defeated had she possessed a sufficient faith in her own kind of God. She would not have been defeated, in other words, had she been able to bring out a body of docrine setting forth her true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics. The setback of the war was of itself a very trivial one."

Fascinatingly, Davidson asks the question: "How may the Southerner [or I would say, the "agrarian" in general] take hold of his tradition? The answer is: by violence."

He says: "The Southerner is faced with this paradox: He must use an instrument, which is political, and so unrealistic and pretentious that he cannot believe in it, to re-establish a private, self-contained, and essentially spiritual life."

What I am slowly getting at is that there are a great many "agrarians" -- whether they would recognize themselves as such, or have read Tate and Davidson and Ransom or not -- who have taken a very different kind of "violence" (a distinctly non-political or apolitical violence) to re-establish these "private, self-contained, and essentially spiritual" lives for themselves and their families. They have gone beyond the cultural "abhorrence" and discovered a way not to be "defeated" by the modern world -- which world is simply a finely honed version of what "the world" has always been for those who have sought God from the time of Adam and Eve outside the gates of Paradise down to our own Christian day. These agrarians have become Orthodox... There are a fair number of us around FR.

Sorry to have nabbed your screen-name, but first-come, first-served. :-) And indeed, "long live the green fields of Our Lord." I'm going to ping a couple of people who I think might be interested, and invite them to ping any others who might enjoy this turn of conversation (there are no rules on this thread other than that one make modest attempts at civility)...

Nice to have someone around here who has read Tate, Davidson, et al -- all too many of them have left over the years, primarily because it is hard to be an agrarian and blindly cheer for anything the Republican party happens to do on a given day... I primarily hide out on the religion threads now, because it doesn't seem that there is anyone to talk to about that other stuff these days on FR, unlike my early days on FR when we would have long threads discussing Cato, Cicero, Russell Kirk, the Agrarians...

Maybe we can re-establish an Agrarian thread or two, and try not to get banned in the process.