Indeed, I am no Rhodes scholar. That they would appreciate the discussion (with the possible exception of Tate who could belittle even a brilliant writer like Andrew Lytle), I most certainly concur. After all, they weren't born with PhD’s, and the best of them never bothered taking one.
When reading the backgrounds and biographies of the fugitive group, what's most striking to me is the classical education and intellectual encouragement available to bright young minds in even the most rural parts of the South, before state schools triumphed over such frivolous pursuits. Before they were known or published, they were gathered in living rooms and arbors listening to their elders recite stories and poetry, and learning Greek and Latin from the widow.
Though these kinds of discussions are perhaps less frequent on FR than they used to be, the best argument for an open forum like this is that it allows worthwhile intellectual pursuit free of professional sanction. Save for a few discrete freepers, we're not trained academics; but I think some smart German said that leisure is the basis of culture.
I have attempted in vain for several years to find a copy of God without Thunder I can afford, and so must subsist on what I can glean from Ransom's essays in I'll Take my Stand, Who Owns America, and those portions of The World's Body I find at my level.
I know more about the agrarians' flirtations with Roman Catholicism than Eastern Orthodoxy, but a story has been passed to me about the very question, in which another somewhat-known southern lit. critic delivered his answer to a drawn-out discussion with an air of finality: "We're not from over there." (my html is off, so imagine italics in the appropriate places). A cruder version than your explanation, but both demonstrate on some level the intractability of culture and community in the practice of faith.
I believe "Remarks on the Southern Religion" was the essay in I'll Take My Stand that I found least satisfying (of those I read eagerly). Admittedly, my greatest difficulty was that I'm not sure I like where he's coming from at that particular moment. But I can't argue that in his South there was an intellectual contentment derived from certainty, which can be dramatically contrasted to the hyperactive experimentation of New England. There is strength and weakness in this. Strength of faith is a virtue, yet the South never could have born an Orestes Brownson or a G.K. Chesterton. The indispensable polemic is the special craft of the convert.
As a would-be agrarian, I can’t ignore that so many of my icons were adult converts and geographic wanderers. As a cradle Catholic, I tend to avoid deep theological debates knowing my rhetoric will be found lacking. This renders me an odd parasite, feeding on late arrivals (a true American capitalist?).
I am moved by one last point you quote from Davidson: "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."
I have spent far more of my life working in politics than any healthy, rational American should even consider. Without getting myself banned, I can’t begin to elaborate the complexities and contradictions I find inherent to my “vocation.” At its best and most noble, it is an attempt to carve out a space for “people like us” to live as we would, through means we find absurd. The greatest impediment is a growing conviction to live in accordance with belief. Increasingly, it occurs to me that the best we can do is to pull back, and faithfully tend to our own little corner(s) of the world. Struggling to decide if this is realistic, defeatist or perhaps both? Is that good?
One contemporary writer I’m going to give more time to is Rod Dreher. He’s no intellectual on the level of those you’ve mentioned, but he is trying to find practical ways for “people like us” to live in the world we find, consistent with our loftier notions.
You’ve given me much to think about, and little to disagree with, so rather than restate in my own words, I’ll draw mine to an over-due close with gratitude.
I couldn't agree more about the level of classical education in Old America in general, and in the South in general. I remember being in college and finding that the only person I knew who had taken Latin in high school (4 years, no less) was a kid from rural Kentucky with a country accent you could cut with a knife. My Greek and Latin are entirely self-taught, and accordingly poor. I've made sure that my kids got 4 years of Latin in high school, and they've picked up at least a little Greek just from being Orthodox.
My knowledge of "God Without Thunder" is restricted to the lengthy excerpts in the wonderful book "The Superfluous Men." It's worth getting. One of the essays collected in that book (I can't remember who is was by -- not a Southerner) made the point that the real value of knowing, really knowing Greek and Latin is that with a command of those two languages, one can follow the literature and development of thought from Homer through at least the Renaissance. One can learn to have the view, from primary original language sources, of history in terms of millenia, rather than mere centuries, let alone decades.
I know what you mean about Tate's "Religion in the Old South." I think it would have been highly disturbing for me as a Protestant and perhaps even more disturbing had I read it when I was in my Catholic/Anglo-Catholic phase of religious exploration, since he offers no hope from that direction, either. But from my Orthodox perspective, I find myself seeing him strangely eye to eye in that essay. The old Southerner was a bundle of intellectual, religious, and cultural contradictions. His genius was that he didn't examine any of it too closely, but rather lived "in the moment" of these loves of classicism, earthy agrarianism, and Bible-thumping Protestant religion.
It is interesting that you see "the indispensible polemic" of the convert. As a convert, I feel compelled to speak and respond, but every time I do it, I can't help but worry that I am, in the process destroying what I am trying to defend. Did Newman really understand Catholicism the way an Italian peasant did? Did Chesterton? I know I don't understand it the way that Greek and Russian yia-yia's/babushkas do.
Regarding "Increasingly, it occurs to me that the best we can do is to pull back, and faithfully tend to our own little corner(s) of the world. Struggling to decide if this is realistic, defeatist or perhaps both? Is that good?":
I have swung back and forth on that pendulum so many times that I am sea-sick. I always come back to the fact that I am profoundly grateful to those who are politically involved, at whatever level, defending the "permanent things."
The way I look at it is this: when a man becomes a priest, he risks losing his soul, because of the attacks and temptations of that job. He saves others, "but himself he cannot save" all too often. The grace of ordination/consecration is, I am convinced, as much given to help a man keep from losing his soul as it is to aid him in helping others save theirs.
The same is true of politics. Politics weakens and empties a man -- hollows him. It happens to all of us, at whatever little level, because of the compromises, the half-truths, and the exchange of money for favors. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is that one can help preserve at least some sanity in the world in the process. We Orthodox pray that we be able "to live quiet and godly lives, in all piety and honesty." And I believe that if a man goes into politics with the attitude of helping the average Joe have a chance to do just that -- if he approaches it with a prayer, and with the acute realization that he is in a place dangerous to his soul -- I think God honors that self-emptying, just as he honors the self-emptying of good priests, teachers, doctors, attorneys....
I think this is exemplified by the fact that Hebrew and Christian rulers were annointed -- we have a shadow and remnant still today with the "hand on the Bible." There was an acknowledgement that rulers needed special grace to do their jobs and hang on to their souls in the process.
Ultimately, I think that the cut-off point has to be when one knows he is in danger of losing his soul -- and when he knows that there is truly no hope (but is there ever truly no hope?) that things can be influenced for the better.
That we "faithfully tend to our own little corner(s) of the world" is the minimum. We must never stop doing that, for if we lose our own sanity, we can't help others keep theirs. We can't give to others something we don't ourselves have -- at least not for long. If one has the talent, opportunity, and strength to do more to help the rest of us by being involved in politics, the church, whatever... I think that it is a calling that God honors...