remarks on the Southern Religion

The Long View is, in brief, the Cosmopolitan destroyer of Tradition. Or, put otherwise, since the Christian myth is a vegetation rite, varying only in some details from countless other vegetative myths, there is no reason to prefer Christ to Adonis.

The Short View holds that the whole Christ and the whole Adonis are sufficiently differentiated in their respective qualities, and that our tradition compels us to choose more than that half of Christ which is Adonis and to take the whole, separate, and unique Christ.

Tradition is not simply a fact, but a fact that must be constantly defended. -162

It has always seemed a scandal to us that Scholasticism should try to make rational all those unique qualities of the horse which are spirits and myths and symbols.

By making Reason, Science, or Nature an instrument of defense for the protection of the other than reasonable, the other than natural, it [the Western Church] performed a tremendous feat of spiritual unity, and the only kind of unity that the Western mind is capable of.

The Western Church established a system of quantity for the protection of quality, but it was always the danger that quantity would revolt from servitude and suppress its master; the danger that it would apply its genius to a field more favorable to spectacular success.

Nature began to see the practical possibilities of knowing herself. The symbol and the myth meant that nature was largely an inviolable whole; once the symbol and the myth were proved to be not natural facts, but unnatural fictions that fitted into no logical series tolerable to the rational mind, nature became simply a workable half. -164

The South, as a political atmosphere formed by the eighteenth century, did not realize it's genius in time, but continued to defend itself on the political terms of the North; and thus, waiting too long, it let its powerful rival gain the ascendancy. Its religious impulse was inarticulate simply because it tried to encompass its destiny within the terms of Protestantism, in origin, a non-agrarian and trading religion; hardly a religion at all, but a result of secular ambition.

The Southern politicians could merely quote scripture to defend slavery, while they defended their society as a whole with the catchwords of eighteenth century politics. And that is why the South separated from the North too late, and thus lost its cause.

Because the South never created a fitting religion, the social structure of the south began grievously to break down two generations after the Civil War; for the social structure depends on the economic structure, and economic conviction is the secular image of religion. No nation is ever simply and unequivocally beaten in war, nor was the South. But the South shows signs of defeat, and this is due to its lack of a religion which would make her special secular system the inevitable and permanently natural one.

-Allen Tate, Remarks on the Southern Religion, from I'll Take My Stand