Text and Talk: December 7, 2024

November 2, 2019

Contempt

The topic is a question with a background. Everybody has seen “Upstairs, Downstairs,” or “Downton Abbey,” or “The Shooting Party.” These have in common an image of an ordered life and they feature an interest in the serving classes as well as the served. The servants in these movies (it is to be presumed) have little or no education, yet they are valued appropriately and are never condescended to by the exclusionary upper class they serve. At least not by those with manners and at least not until a comparatively recent date. [Part of my affection for “The Shooting Party” derives from the unaffected way in which Sir Randolph develops a common cause with the eccentric animal rights protester, his care for the departing beater, and his daughter’s rebuttal to the visiting Hungarian count, who remarks that the beater was just a peasant, to which she replies simply, “But we knew him”].

Contrast this with contemporary attitudes toward the un-elite and the rural. It is plausible that some significant slice of the served class holds the children of the serving class in ill-concealed contempt. I am trying to describe the gentle contempt London proponents of Brexit feel for the inhabitants of a fishing village on the North Sea, sixty percent of whose citizens voted to leave. And this is imitated in the United States.

What happened?

This topic came up as recent events pressed in on me. I will mention two or three incidents, one of which will sail close to the no politics rule. Contempt, which means to scorn or hold of no account or value, flourishes in the terrain that lies beyond argument or the offering of reasons. Fruitful argument presupposes some common presuppositions. Contempt means the absence of such presuppositions.

So first, consider the contempt in which the president is held by the consortium of democrats, never-Trumpers, media news-persons and academics. Full employment and a rising stock market do not count in his favor because he is contemptible, unfit, unworthy, and wrong in the opinion of these constituencies. Driving someone from office who never should have been elected is a righteous work. One is tempted to go to the common answer: they are angry because he defeated them. But it is deeper. He represents something that is off the chart. He represents, in some strange way, the power of part of the population for whom high-school football, the Methodist Church, being saved, extended family, and success in business are important. These constitute a large and troublesome minority. Probably this large minority and the president resent the bureaucracy for different reasons. They stand between him and the realization of his political will. For ordinary folks, when the bureaucracy extends beyond Mary Jo at the tax office, they are just resented, sometimes mildly, sometimes vociferously. The bureaucracy and its allies consider both him and his voters contemptible, and someone just may have lost an election for saying so.

So to my second example. Austin, Texas, site of the legislature and the state university is a blue dot in a sea of red. The Austin public schools are instituting a sex education program that features teaching third graders about sodomy. Parents objected, one in particular shouted, you’re going too far. In various ways the parents were told to sit down and shut up, the experts knew best. Parental objections were contemptible. One characteristic of modern would-be authorities is their indefeasible Gnosticism. Like the gnostics of the second century they possess a body of knowledge, usually inaccessible to ordinary people, which allows them to hold the unenlightened in contempt. The education bunch is particularly likely to believe that there is such a thing as an expert in human nature, and that they are those experts. [Modernity plays right into their hands because many parents are, understandably, anxious to get the baby out of the house so they can get back to the office.]

My third example. The Pope. Very many things could be said about the Pope, but his management style assumes that any cautionary opposition to his attempted deconstruction of his office and of the Church is contemptible. When opposition surfaces, he ignores it or complains. He is particularly good at ignoring it. Synods are not intended to give voice to alternative views but to silence opposition, so that at the end of the synod he is likely to announce conclusions that have nothing to do with the substance of the meeting. After all, Francis knows best. He knows that the meaning of Christianity must be rethought in the face of triumphant secularism. He is particularly disapproving of American Catholics, some of whom have lots of money, something one supposes he understands.

To return now to the culture of “Upstairs, Downstairs.” The servants and those served were separated by miles of social custom. The servants were not educated; they had perhaps never attended the local Workingmen’s Institute. They were not to enter the house except through the servants’ entrance. In the period 1915 to 1935, although there were exceptions—Lord Halifax’s butler is supposed to have wakened guests with the question “Breakfast or Eucharist”—the upstairs folks were getting godless, but they still thought Christianity a good thing in general and probably saw to it that the servants got off to church somehow. In 1935 Prime Minister Baldwin thought the dominions, that’s Canada and Australia, would not put up with the twice-divorced Wallace Simpson as Queen; eighty years later the heir presumptive is married to a divorced woman, great-granddaughter, incidentally, of Edward VII’s special friend Mrs. Keppel, without raising an eyebrow.

Lord Bellamy certainly never thought, if his thought about it, that Mr. Hudson—the butler was always a Mr.—was contemptible. But it’s a safe bet that the anti-Brexit bureaucracy holds the inhabitants of all those Yorkshire villages in gentle contempt. They cannot have known what they were doing when they voted to leave the deliciously cosmopolitan European Union. Just so the smelly Walmart deplorables in their ignorance elected an outsider, whom the right-thinking hold in contempt. Something has happened, not least the practical destruction of the Church of England as a social influence, and simultaneously of ‘mainline’ Protestantism, and the weakening of Catholicism. Something else that happened is ‘science.’ Science cannot disprove the existence of God or his claim on our lives, but it can organize God out with an alternative system of knowledge that denies revelation while offering satisfaction and comfort. [The role of academic theology in creating godlessness cannot be emphasized too much. Remember that the goal of modernism is to meliorate the human condition while denying the existence of the supernatural.] James Burnham, among the founders of the National Review, prophesied: “Not only do I believe it meaningless to say that ‘socialism is inevitable’ and false that socialism is ‘the only alternative to capitalism’; I consider that on the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive society (which I call “managerial society”) is not only possible but is a more probable outcome of the present than socialism.” The managerial society, which claims comprehensive knowledge and power, is at home in the bureaucracy. Managers and experts are almost bound to consider others ignorant, and, if they presume to power, and if they lack humility, which is hard to come by when one knows the truth and has the figures, contemptible.

But politically, there is more to it than has been cited above. For the power elites the suspicion that God exists and that he cares is a grave existential threat. Conscience suppressed, habitual facility in lying to oneself and to others, invariably turns vicious. Sacrilege becomes comfortable. How would you feel if you thought there were ignorant, contemptible forces, dying but not quite dead, whose very principles would cause guilt, inhibit power, and frustrate your pleasure? These ideas and those who hold them would be contemptible. The academy, politicians of a certain caste, bureaucrats are not agnostics. At some level, one hopes unconscious, they hate Christianity, they hate God.

It remains to show that the existence of moral form exfoliates in every other form from knowledge to borders, which, if true, is enough cause to work for its destruction. The Brexit people like the Walmart folks, I will not say love God, but at least love the notion of God, or of somebody bigger than the state, with the consequence that they are likely to love everything finite, like England, or Texas, more than abstract cosmopolitanism The Earl of Gratham lived comfortably with Mr. Carson and Lord Bellamy with Mr. Hudson because they had the suspicion that they were all subjects of the great judge. That suspicion has ceased moderating behavior among the would-be elites.

 

Some reasons are obvious.  Civilization is better for a long life, not so short and brutish.  But there is always a question as to its salvific role.   Does civilization make mankind morally better?    While in a certain way civilization is self-preserving, there is little or no evidence that Christ considered it his mission to save any civilization.  And this relationship becomes especially challenging when Christianity is hooked up with politics.  

There is no philosophy of singulars.  Meaning requires context.  Civilization is the expression of a culture in religion, philosophy, morality, politics, ethics, art, music, literature, manners, dress, and almost everything else.   My thesis is that all of these things are or may be not expressions of individual choice or will but are at best expressions of the highest level of reality that we can know or intuit.   

Plato argued that there was a place or region where the forms lived, a place not geographical but intellectual and more than intellectual, and this idea itself has never died, although just how this is arranged and how it ‘works’ is a matter of dispute.   Of course Aristotle denied that the forms had a transcendent ground, insisting that they were engaged in things, but then he never explained where the forms were parked when they were not informing beings of some kind.   Plato had believed there to be a transcendent form for such things as the good, but it was Plotinus, through Augustine, who argued that there was in the “Supreme” an archetype of everything that existed or would exist.  The Hellenistic world had its convictions regarding a transcendent ground that gave form to existent being.   There would have been moral relativism in that world but not the kind of relativism that confuses genders.   

If one turns to the environment, Second Temple Judaism, within which the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew were written, there are only the faintest traces of something like Plato’s forms.   What one finds is a two-tiered universe—perhaps three if the underworld is counted—consisting of nature as it is, characterized by corruption, decay, and a world characterized by Glory, or, in Hebrew, shekinah, which in Greek becomes glory, which is always associated with weight, kavod, which would distinguish it from the ephemeral or subjective.    

Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote four books in which glory is a theme, said that the word could not be defined.  Perhaps, but it can be described,  The glory of God was present when the blind man was healed; he was afflicted not because of sin but so that the glory of God might be revealed (John 9).     Where God is there is glory.  Glory is not ephemeral but real; Paul writes that Christians will bear “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (II Corinthians  4:17).   It is glory that we will share and in which we will live when Christ returns.  Glory is the characteristic of the existence of Christ in His kingdom, which is shared by all those who love Him and who live in Him.

Glory is the teleology, the end, the fulfillment of creation, the end toward which creation and redeemed humankind are moving.    In one of Paul’s most moving and fruitful passages, the heart of his theological cosmology, he describes a world we know, subjected to sin not of its own choosing but by God who, after the great rebellion and because of it,  subjected nature and human nature in  the hope that these will be redeemed in glory (Romans 8:18-25).    Glory is the name of the perfection we glimpse beyond the objects and events of life, the perfection dimly apprehended that makes the imperfection of existence present even as it inspires hope of something better.    Glory is the realm of the good, beautiful and true dimly perceived by philosophers, by Plato, Plotinus, and Berkeley, often by poets, proclaimed by revelation as the true, supernatural cosmos for which the revealed name is glory, a realm of which the true center is Jesus, and the ultimate purpose of which is not simply to serve as the home of ideas but the reality of which is a divine-human person, who is “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation,” in whom “all things were created.”  “He is the first-born from the dead . . .  In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19–20).   In the short fifth chapter of Second Peter Christians will partake “in the glory that is to be revealed” and will “obtain the unfading crown of glory,” because God “calls them to his eternal glory in Christ.”       

The clues to the existence of the realm of glory are all around those in whom  wonder has not been subsumed into an obviousness that blinds the eye of the heart.   As Saint Paul wrote:   the knowledge of God, of His divinity, is evident in creation (Romans 1:19–20).   Where there is order founded in goodness there is glory.  Where there is beauty there is glory.    It is not the sound of the Bach Mass; it is what you hear beyond the sound of the Bach Mass, what you see beyond the beauty of Raphael and Van Gogh.  It surrounds a bride on her wedding day . It is the solid something that inhabits love.     Glory is the perfection of order.   It is a sign of the presence of the holy.   Glory is the reward of fidelity, “if only we will fix our eyes on what is unseen, not on what we can see.  What we can see lasts for a moment. What is unseen is eternal” (II Corinthians 4:17). 

Glory has an antonym, for which it is difficult to find a single word:  the disordered, ordinary, the ignoble, the flat and undistinguished, the low and debased.   The best New Testament word is translated “corruption” or “decay.”  The promise of God’s will for the salvation of both nature and his elect is the overcoming of decay:  “for creation itself will be set free from the bondage,” the slavery, from the decay to which all things crested are subjected since the rebellion in Eden (Romans 8:21).  Corruption or decay is the inevitable companion of time.  Peter describes it as “the corruption that is in the world because of passion,” by the escaping of which we may share in the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4).   Passion:  the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, pride of life (I John 2:16), which corrupt whatever  they touch.   Of this threat to the soul nature provides the effective analogy.   Now the roof, which was repaired just short years ago must be repaired again.    Now I must do my exercises because my body is decaying before my very eyes.   There is the cosmic reality:  sin leads to decay or corruption which leads to death.  Righteousness, the acceptance of grace,  leads to holiness, to participation in Christ, which leads to glory, with its ordered permanence and beauty.  

It is the anticipation of glory that shines in the life of every saint.   Every life, says Paul, is like a seed falling into the ground, given to God, ready to bear the fruit of glory.   “So it is with the resurrection of the dead.   What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.   It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. . . .  We have borne the image of the man of dust, of Adam, “ we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (I Corinthians 15:42–50). 

Among other realities, this truth, that glory is the reality and the end,  casts into vivid relief the terms and conditions of human existence.   One consequence of sin is the distortion the created order, the existence of ‘natural’ evil—no evil is natural in God’s eternal plan—from tornados to plagues.  Another is the persistence of sin that so easily colonizes the human will so that while sin can be resisted it cannot be overcome, driven out of creation utterly and completely, until Christ returns; indeed it is the revealed pattern that the world untouched by grace grows worse.    This makes the anticipation of glory as it exists in the lives of saints, in order, in beauty, precious and worth defending, indeed celebrating.  This is why the good things of this life, beginning with the care of our own souls,  deserve our loyalty.   This is why civilization, always impermanent, and fragile, never a good in itself, ladened as it is with intimations of the life to come, deserves our loyalty.   But while the damage sin may do to the temporal order is severe, the damage sin inflicts upon the soul by denying it the fruition in glory that is its supernatural end  is far worse.   The end of disorder and decay that belong to this world may end in nothing, in the bleeding away of the very forms of reality, but the destruction of the form of souls destined for the glory and created for eternal life of holiness in God’s presence is an eternal sorrow.  

But here let us be concerned with the thought and possibility that glory is the revealed name for the reality for which Plato was groping, a reality that de-relativizes not just ideas but everything, making everything matter.    Perhaps it is true that when anything is done with the order that belongs to beauty, goodness, and truth, glory is being, often quietly, revealed.  If this is true every action, every artifact, that makes up civilization, by expressing the order of glory, is an anticipation of the glory of the age to come.    If this is evident in great, glorious, music, it is also shown in making the bed and setting the table, and along the way in manners and conversation.  If this is the case it follows that it is a Christian duty, perhaps not the most important but still very real, to support art.   What you hear in Rachmaninoff’s “Pathetique” is an anticipation of the glory of God, no small thing.  This is why liturgy must be beautiful, representing as it does the glory that belongs to God’s order.

This of course raises a question about the art of modernity and post modernity, which is, generally, critical image art, illuminating the good and the beautiful by its absence.  Here the fundamental principle that glory is the just ontological background is intersected by the seemingly inescapable rule that artists tell the story of their time and place.   Perhaps because such images represent ordered beauty, great museums in the United States are busily de-accessioning pre-modern paintings.   Necessarily so, because the civilization that reigns is  characterized at its living margins by public perversity, riot, and political prevarication, by what the Scriptures call decay or corruption.   [And to reiterate, it is neither necessary or right to deny that post-modern art simply corrupt; it is art, it is often full of insight, which raises the question once again, ‘What is art?’.  

The program for opposing the decay and corruption into which sin-infected nature will decline if unopposed must be based on the certainty that there is a transcendent ground, the background, remote or immediate, for every human action that is to be found where Plato’s region in which the ideas live is intersected by God’s reality, the realm of glory.    This why living is an art, which does not meant that the good life is merely aesthetic.  No human act is merely aesthetic.

 

NOTE FROM THE CHAIRMAN

Friends and Patrons of the Lewis Tolkien Society: 

As Dr. Patrick would say, we’re still in the business of saving Western Civilization. In that unflagging, irrepressible spirit, I’m writing to affirm that every program you’ve loved—every program Dr. P cared about, stood for, and set in place, continues.

Specifically that means:

• Text & Talk on Saturdays
• The Lewis Tolkien Society dinner in November
• Rofters (Readers of First Things)
• Annual honorary lectures, such as the Thomas More, Thomas Howard, and John Henry Newman lectures.

Dr. Patrick’s presence is keenly felt in programs featuring a lineup of scholars and speakers who knew and admired him. Join us to meet the people, share the ideas, and continue to nurture and enjoy and grow in all that Dr. Patrick planted. 

Step one is this Saturday at noon, the first in a five-week Text & Talk series at Christ the King Family Center.  Dr. Ron Muller—longtime friend and colleague of Dr. P—will lead. (See announcement below.)

In his long life, just by teaching what’s true, Dr. Patrick drew people who became lifelong friends, influencing one another in the love of learning.

Join us as we continue the common tradition to read, think, discuss, learn, and grow.

 

Jim Roseman

Chairman of the Board of The Lewis Tolkien Society.

 

You’re invited to join the friends, members, and associates of the Lewis Tolkien Society

 

In Remembrance of Dr. James Patrick:

His Insights, Thought, and Teaching

12:00 noon

Beginning Saturday, April 13

Christ the King Catholic Church

8017 Preston Rd, Dallas

 

Please make plans now to attend a new series of Saturday “Text and Talk” sessions to review and remember the vision and legacy of Dr. James Patrick, author, professor, lecturer, and Provost Emeritus of the College of Saint Thomas More.  Join the Society, founded for the renewal of the common tradition of Western civilization to advance learning in the light of Christian revelation and those insights which form a truly human life, as we honor Dr. Patrick’s unceasing dedication, industry, and love for truth.

 

Moderated by Dr. Ron Muller and members of the Lewis Tolkien Board, the Saturday sessions will explore topics and themes taken from Dr. Patrick’s extensive writings, lectures, and memorable teaching. Those attending will be invited to participate through active discussion reflecting on topics such as:

 

“Ideas have Consequences”

“The Legacy of Athens and Jerusalem”

“Great Books and Great Ideas”

“The Christian Worldview”

“Lewis’ Abolition of Man”

 

Join via Zoom if you’re unable to attend in person by finding the link at https://www.lewistolkiensociety.org/lts-calendar.

The battle of the Boyne in July 1690 decided the fate of James III, who fled to France, which assured the Protestant Ascendancy. How land ownership in Ireland moved into the hands of absent English aristocracy is a longer story, but it is the essential element in Irish history. At mid 19th century native Irishmen owned very little of the land that is Ireland. Most of it was in the hands of middlemen who collected the rents from the landlords and may never have visited the plantations.

The famine of 1842-1850 triggered an unprecedented immigration, mostly to the United States, but also to Canada. Thousands took ship from the northwest in vessels frequently unseaworthy. Their destinations were often Boston, where Irish Protestants were tolerated but Catholics were viewed as a threat, their religion being inimical to American freedom.

This was not the first time the Irish had immigrated to the United States. It had begun before the War of the Revolution and increased after the Rebellion of 1795.  Of particular interest is the immigration of Irish protestants during and immediately after the revolution, which established Presbyterianism in the American backcountry of Virginia and North Carolina.

Boston, where Catholic immigration threatened Puritan control of the city government, became a center of the Know-Nothing Party, which took control of the Massachusetts legislature in 1854. In the face of the great immigration between ‘42 and ‘50, the legislature passed laws barring Catholics from being buried in public cemeteries, denying church officials any control over church property, and requiring children to read the bible from the Protestant King James version in public schools. The legislature formed a nunnery committee that raided Catholic schools and convents on trumped-up pretexts. In the long run, several Catholic churches were burned. Interestingly, the intellectual founder of the Know-Nothing movement was Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, eminently respectable, respected American, and rabid anti-Catholic. In a screed entitled “Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States,” Morse accused the Vatican of seeking to subvert the values and ideals of Anglo-Protestant America.

Catholics lived through the Know-Nothing Movement (a total dislike of everyone who wasn’t an Anglo-Protestant). There was the task of providing churches for the unprecedented immigration, as well as schools and colleges. The only crisis in the development of the Catholic Church in America was Testem Benevolentiae Nostre, in which Leo XIII warned against what he considered “Americanism,” the claim that American Catholicism was different and needed room to engage the Protestant culture.  This sometimes included the thought that the more difficult teachings of the Church need not be represented. In his letter, the pope warned against valuing the active apostolate more than the apostolate of prayer, which was pursued in monastic devotion.

It’s possible to see Americanism as defining the fracture that has characterized American Catholicism for the last century. Americanism tended to divide the Church into Accommodationists—people who believe the American republic somehow was unique and deserved a place of special consideration—and the old-line Irish Catholics. Over the next century the Accommodationists were represented by America, the flagship magazine of American progressivism, and Father Hesburgh’s Notre Dame. The old-line Irish were represented by The Wanderer newspaper, and their control of the diocesan hierarchies.

The text of Testem Benevolentiae includes what Americans will always see as freedom of the press: “The confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt on any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now greater need for the Church’s teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful, both of conscience and duty.”

 

Having lived through the Americanist difficulty and the outbreak of modernism in the early 20th century, the Catholic Church enjoyed a century of what appeared to be real and solid progress. All this was disrupted in 1952 by the Second Vatican Council. In the wake of the council the fracture that could be discerned in the Americanist controversy grew wider. With the Accommodationists adopting the Land o’ Lakes Proposal that the only criterion for success in the universities was rejection of the role of theology in favor of a standard of secular success.

What happened to the Irish in all this? There is no scientific answer but anecdotally I would expect to see the Irish who remember grandmother’s religion clustered around EWTN and the National Catholic Register. EWTN is the most successful communications exercise sponsored by the Catholic Church. It is loudly detested by the Roman authorities as a purveyor of what Pope Francis called “backwardism.” Like the National Catholic Register, it promotes traditional Catholicism in the face of the Progressive Ascendency since 1955.

Now after five generations of immigration it is impossible to identify who is Irish and who is not because almost everyone is Irish to some degree. The religion to which the Irish clung for four centuries appears to have crashed, but we don’t know the end of the story. Meanwhile we can keep doing genealogy, some of which will lead back to Ireland.

 

            Many years ago I was a harmless Episcopalian bedeviled by the inconsistencies of the theology of that church. Kings could be divorced or annulled—take your choice—but into the 19^th century an ordinary member of the Church of England needed an act of parliament to secure a divorce.

            And there was the intractable pro-life issue. The sign that says “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” is correct. Add to this the complication of figuring out what Jesus said–if he said anything–and there was always more than one interpretation of what he meant. Buried down inside it all was the clarion call of Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

            It was bound to strike anyone alive in the Pontificate of Pius XII that expectations for Catholics were different from expectations for your run-of-the-mill Episcopalians. And something about that clarion call cast all theological conferences, all of the bright-intelligent books based on continental authors, into the shade because the Lord had said, “Do what you can. Do everything you can, and don’t stop until you’ve done the very most you can do.”

            Guided by this inspiration I left the Episcopal Church with its friendliness and goodwill and made for the further shore of the Tiber.

            Becoming a Catholic was not easy. Once in California I climbed down one mountainside and up another to reach a Catholic seminary where I’d be greeted with advice not to worry because Episcopalians were good people too. That attempt to join the Catholic Church failed; the monsignor suggested I have a cocktail and cool off.

            My next attempt was with a crafty Jesuit at the Catholic church on the hill in Knoxville. He generously received me leaving such questions as confirmation in abeyance.

            During the next year—this would have been 1972—I worked my way into being a decent member of the Catholic faithful, abetted, it would be only fair to say, by the gracious pastor of Holy Ghost Church in Knoxville, Father Hinkle. In truth I was the last thing the Catholic Church wanted: a former Episcopalian there for all the wrong reasons, namely, convinced as I was that the Catholic Church bore the burden of divine revelation.

            Over the years I would find a place in the Roman Catholic Church in service to the flagship Texas academic institution The University of Dallas, where I chaired the theology department and then was the school’s academic head. After that, happily, I spent 30 years with the College of St. Thomas More in Ft. Worth, the love of my life.

            In 2014, the College, having chugged along for 30 years, was destroyed by my own ineptitude in alliance with those who should have been anxious for its preservation. And I now know that with regard to wonderful things like the College of St. Thomas More there are no second chances. But let it be said that I did not pass up the opportunity to join the fight.

            I was reminded just the other day of my maternal great-grandfather, Alan Jasper Harris, and Benjamin Harris, brothers determined not to miss the war.  On November 3, 1864, when the cause was surely lost, they made their way from Copiah County in Southeast Mississippi to the front lines of the Confederacy, which then lay in Middle Tennessee. My grandfather lived to return to south Mississippi. His brother—my great uncle—was shot on Dec. 30 in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, having served as a lieutenant before falling to the onslaught. He died the next day, on Dec. 1, and was buried in McGavock Confederate Cemetery on the Carnton Plantation—later remembered by Alan Tate in his Ode to the Confederate Dead.

            I hope in the autumn of my life that it will not be said that I failed to make it to the front lines. The battle formations are shifting now–ecclesiastical authority aligned delicately but unmistakably with the comfort of the world, but there is always the Lord’s advice to all of us:  “Do what you can. Do everything you can, and don’t stop until you’ve done the very most you can do.”