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 (13th century) –
‘“But all the days of Adam living here in earth amount to the sum of nine hundred and thirty years. And in the end of his life when he should die, it is said, but of none authority, that he sent Seth his son into Paradise to fetch the oil of mercy, where he received certain grains of the fruit of the tree of mercy by an angel. And when he came again he found his father Adam yet alive and told him what he had done. And then Adam laughed first and then died. And then he laid the grains of kernels under his father’s tongue and buried him in the vale of Hebron; and out of his mouth grew three trees of the three grains, of which trees the cross that our Lord suffered his passion on was made, by virtue of which he gat very mercy, and was brought out of darkness into very light of heaven. To the which he bring us that liveth and reigneth God, world without end.”
‘In this legend, Adam appears to us as a “green man” who is overtaken by time and foliage. As the account unfolds we see that upon Adam’s demise, his son Seth placed three kernels beneath his tongue, kernels that had sprung from the fruit of the tree of mercy (the Tree of Life). These three kernels later burgeoned into trees, one of which ultimately yielded the lumber for the True Cross. . . .’
The imagery shows the powerfully transformative nature of Christianity, its ability to destroy death and bring forth everlasting life:
‘The aforementioned author, Stephen Miller, also makes the observation that the Green Man is a Christian/Judaic–derived motif associated with The Golden Legend. He states:
‘“It is a Christian/Judaic–derived motif relating to the legends and medieval hagiographies of the Quest of Seth — the three twigs/seeds/kernels planted below the tongue of post-fall Adam by his son Seth (provided by the angel of mercy responsible for guarding Eden) shoot forth, bringing new life to humankind. So, a Christian motif for the head of the Church of England.”
‘This narrative, I believe, offers compelling explanatory power for the prevalence of Green Man depictions within ecclesiastical settings. It emerges as an icon directly tied to The Golden Legend, rather than an amalgamation of wild pagan deities. The Green Man manifests as a figure adorned in verdant foliage, with vines and tendrils typically sprouting from his mouth. Rather than a covert allowance for paganism to persist, the Green Man in British churches appears to symbolize the profound irony of paganism’s transformation through the power of the True Cross.’
Here we can make a more explicit connection between the green man figures of England and the green churches of Dixie: Both represent the same energetic burst of eternal life that the pagans seek intuitively yet incompletely in things like the Spring Equinox, but which Christians know fully in the Death and Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the God-man, through His Holy Cross.
For that, the Sacred Cross, is the end of history, not crackpot theories from Francis Fukuyama about Yankeefied American liberalism spreading over and conquering the whole globe. Wondrous is the Cross! It is the beginning of history – the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden – and the end of history – The Tree of Life restored to mankind as the Holy Cross on Golgotha that bore the Crucified Savior of the cosmos. A wonderful Church Father, St Ephraim the Syrian (+373), one of the most talented writers of spiritual poetry in all of Church history, versified this great and profound truth as follows:
‘Greatly saddened was the Tree of Life
when it beheld Adam stolen away from it;
it sank down into the virgin ground
and was hidden to burst forth and reappear on Golgotha….
Under the Old Covenant the Tree of Life
continued to remain hidden from humanity,
and it was only with the Crucifixion
that it was finally made manifest.’
Another book of profound theological poetry, The Lenten Triodion, ties all of our subjects together in the following lines:
‘The Church is revealed as a second Paradise,
having a tree of life, as the first Paradise of old:
by touching Thy Cross, O Lord,
we share in immortality!’
Green churches and green men are symbols of the Paradise we lost in Eden and have reacquired on Golgotha. The Cross is the ultimate symbol of this reunion of man and God, this reacquisition of Paradise. As Easterdæg (Old English, Easter Day) approaches here at the South, let us fix our eyes firmly upon the Beautiful Tree of the Cross, just as our ancestors did who emblazoned it upon Dixie’s flag, so that we will not be beguiled by the false promises of Paradise offered by the overly technified, Yankeefied, globalized world of satanic seduction, but remain instead faithful to Christ, faithful to the ways of our Christian forebears. There will be found rest and comfort and refreshment for the weary and jaded.
