June 26, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
NEW Essay at The Abbeville Institute – Dabney on Fire – A New Book You Should Have
Friends,
Most times when I pass on to you a published essay in a
major publication—in such journals as The
Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute,
Reckonin.com, Chronicles Magazine, and others—that essay is based on something I’ve
written originally as an installment in the MY CORNER series, and then reworked
or edited a bit.
But occasionally I get a commission to write something
directly for publication by one of those journals.
Today, then, I pass on a review essay I wrote specifically for
the Abbeville Institute at the request of its managing
editor, Dr. Brion McClanahan. It has not
appeared on my Web blog prior to this. It’s a detailed examination of a new
book, a collection of four very significant essays by the great Southern post-War writer and theologian Robert Lewis Dabney. It was edited with
an introduction by Zachary Garris, and is titled, Dabney on
Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education, Feminism, and Government (2019). I recommend it very highly as an excellent
means to become acquainted with the thought and views of one of the South’s—and
America’s—greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century.
I have
written about Dabney previously, on several occasions; but this long review
essay is new, and incorporates specific insights about Dabney’s views on the
family, the education of our children, feminism, and the existence of and obedience
to authority.
In many
ways Dabney, who died in 1898, was a prophet for our time. I hope you’ll read
the review essay, then get this volume. And it is or should be just the
beginning. Dabney has much to say to us and teach us.
ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE
Dabney on Fire: A review
of Dabney on Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education,
Feminism, and Government (2019) by Zachary Garris, ed.
Boyd Cathey June 25, 2019
A review
of Dabney on Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education,
Feminism, and Government (2019) by Zachary Garris, ed.
During his lifetime, Southern
theologian and writer Robert Lewis Dabney was most notably known for his 1866
biography of General “Stonewall” Jackson (The Life and Campaigns of
Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson) and for his post-war apologia for the
Southern cause, A Defense Of Virginia, And Through Her, Of The South,
In Recent And Pending Contests Against The Sectional Party (1867).
But his renown as a theologian and philosopher were also well-established. In
addition to serving as chief of staff for Second Corps under Stonewall Jackson,
and being a Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Seminary in Virginia
(until 1883), he also served as Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the
newly-founded University of Texas until his retirement in 1894. His
volumes Practical Philosophy and Sensualistic Philosophy of the
Nineteenth Century and his membership in the Royal Philosophical
Society of Great Britain attest to his expertise and international fame.
Inspired by Richard Weaver’s
treatment of Dabney’s thinking in the marvelous volume, The Southern
Tradition at Bay (1968), his classic study of great Southern writers
who defended the cause of the Confederacy and post-bellum Southern thought, I
wrote a paper on Dabney while in grad school at the University of Virginia in
1971. Weaver’s intellectual portrait of Dabney as a “cultural” or “political”
philosopher and critic of what historian Paul Gaston has called “the new South
Creed” profoundly influenced me. How was it that such a brilliant and
perceptive writer on what was occurring in the late nineteenth century, such an
acute and intellectually fascinating figure, had been largely forgotten or
ignored, and not only nationally, but in his Southern homeland?
I went back to his writings which
had been collected near the end of Dabney’s life and published in five
volumes, Discussions (1890-1897), and the only biography I
could find of him, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney (1903),
by Thomas Carey Johnson. Long after I had left Virginia, finished a doctorate
in Spain, and returned to North Carolina, Sprinkle Publications republished a
facsimile edition of Dabney’s works (1982-1999). Those hardbound volumes are
still available but hard to get.
Now, thanks to the work and
diligence of Zachary M. Garris, four essential and substantial essays by Dabney
are made readily available in a handsome new paperback edition, Dabney
on Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education, Feminism, and Government (2019).
Garris, in his introduction, rightly emphasizes the fact that Dabney’s
writings, even the most secular—volume four of his Discussions is subtitled
“Secular Discussions”—must be understood in a larger and more fundamentally
religious context. For Dabney was, above all, an Old School Presbyterian
minister and theologian, indeed, a theologian and philosopher of international
repute. His writings, even the most political, reflect his understanding,
shared by nineteenth century thinkers and writers as diverse as Cardinal John
Henry Newman in England or Juan Donoso Cortes in Spain, that all political,
social and cultural issues can be reduced to essentially religious and
theological questions.
Garris’s first included essay is
a recopied and very detailed sermon which Dabney gave to the Synod of Virginia
in October 1879, “Parental Responsibilities” (from volume one of his
Discussions). Theologically, it sets the stage for his further writings and
essays in the volume. For it is incumbent to understand the basic and essential
role of the family within the Christian framework and in society, and, indeed,
of the father as head of the family, before advancing on to discuss the
remaining subjects addressed here in Dabney’s writings: “Secularized
Education,” “Women’s Rights Women,” and “Civic Ethics.”
Understanding this primordial
responsibility—which is necessary prior to any discussion of children’s
education, the position of women in society, or civic responsibilities of
citizens—begins with understanding Biblical teachings, and indeed, from a
larger perspective, Divine Positive Law and natural law. And here, although
Dabney comes from an orthodox Calvinist heritage and views both theology and
history from that perspective, his language and arguments are also within a broader,
orthodox Christian tradition and can be appreciated in that sense.
Dabney’s famous writings on the
nature and responsibility for the education of children are, thus, annealed in
his understanding of the supreme rights of the parents and their duties, both Scripturally and in natural law, for the educating of their offspring. Garris
has included as representative Dabney’s 1879 essay, “Secular Education,” as an
excellent discussion and summary of these arguments.
Dabney first wrote on the topic
in his debate with Virginia’s first Superintendent of Public Instruction
William Ruffner in the mid-1870s. His commentary is undergirded by his profound
understanding that so-called “public” education could not and never would be
“neutral” when it comes to religion. State-run education not only usurped the
God-given rights and solemn responsibility of the parents over the education of
their children, but would, he foresaw, devolve into basically what we see
today: anti-Christian and anti-family indoctrination.
More so, state-run education
sought to impose an unnatural equality on all. “Providence, social laws, and
parental virtues and efforts, do inevitably legislate in favor of some classes
of boys,” he declared. “If the State undertakes to countervail that legislation
of nature by leveling action, the attempt is wicked, mischievous, and futile.”
Indeed, Dabney questioned “whether the use merely of letters is not education,
but only one means of education, and not the only means.” True education
involved more than simply the use of letters. Most citizens had traditionally
found education through their various professions, a training of the “moral
virtues by the fidelity and endurance” with which they earned their livelihood.
The laboring man “ennobles his taste and sentiments by looking up to the
superior who employs him. If to these influences you add the awakening,
elevating, expanding force of Christian principles, you have given the laborer
a true education…a hundred fold more true, more suitable, more useful, than the
communication of certain literary arts, which he will almost necessarily
disuse.”
Almost alone among writers of the
late nineteenth century, Dabney saw the distinct danger of the new public
school system being used by “demagogues, who are in power for a time, in the
interests of their faction.” And his most serious indictment of public
education has become a question that has only become more critical since then:
what happens to religious instruction if the state takes over the teaching of
children? Given the status of post-war relations between church and state and
changing constitutional interpretations, the state could not endorse one
religious belief over another. State-sponsored education would become
secularized. But if education were not Christian, then it would inevitably
become anti-Christian. “He that is not with his God is against Him,” Dabney
repeated. Could education really be education if it educated “the mind without
purifying the heart?” Dabney answered: “There can be no true education without
moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity.”
Dabney resolutely rejected the
idea of egalitarianism, whether between men who found themselves in disparate
social and economic conditions, or between men and women. Again, from a Scriptural perspective while God had created all mankind and given to each person
a right to life and a right to the attainments of his own labor, He had also
created us all in many ways differently and, in most respects, unequally in
intelligence, in talents, in roles and professions, by sex, and by inheritance.
That inequality was not of the prejudicial kind and did not invite prejudice or
disdain for someone who excelled at what society might consider a “lesser”
profession or task. Thus, the tradesman’s superior capability in crafting
superb furniture might not appear to us as prominent or as important as the
actions of a national political leader, but God did not judge us based upon
comparisons with one another, but rather on how well we fulfilled, how well we
measured up, in completing our own unique, innate and God-given abilities and
talents (recall the Parable of the Talents in St. Matthew).
And natural law, in fact,
legislated these differences.
It was the height of folly, wrote
Dabney, to read back into the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution
modern ideas of equality, or to use statements made in a particular historical
context “that all men are created equal” to advance modern movements such as
feminism. As more recent historians such as Mel Bradford (in his Original
Intentions) and Barry Alan Shain (in The Declaration of
Independence in Historical Context) have extensively detailed, Dabney’s
understanding of our nation’s founding documents, as well as the Founders’ and
Framers’ rejection of egalitarianism, was essentially correct.
Such talk of and demand for “rights”
incurred some of Dabney harshest and most withering fire, including his
criticism of the clamor for women’s suffrage.
There is a long passage from
Dabney’s essay on equality and women’s suffrage (included in the volume) which
deserves to be fully quoted:
The very axioms of American politics now are, that ‘all
men are by nature equal,’ that all are inalienably ‘entitled to liberty and the
pursuit of happiness,’ and that ‘the only just foundation of government is in
the consent of the governed.’ There was a sense in which our fathers propounded
these statements; but it is not the one in which they are now held by
Americans. Our recent doctors of political science have retained these
formularies of words as convenient masks under which to circulate a set of
totally different, and indeed antagonistic notions; and they have succeeded
perfectly. The new meanings of which the ‘Whigs’ of 1776 never dreamed are now
the current ones. Those wise statesmen meant to teach that all men are morally
equal in the sense of the Golden Rule: that while individual traits, rights,
and duties vary widely in the different orders of political society, these
different rights all have some moral basis; that the inferior has the same
moral title (that of a common humanity and common relation to a benignant
Heavenly Father) to have his rights—the rights of an inferior—duly respected,
which the superior has to claim that his very different rights shall be
respected.
The modern version is that there are no superiors or
inferiors in society; that there is a mechanical equality; that all have
specifically all the same rights; and that any other constitution is against
natural justice. Next: when our wise fathers said that liberty is an
inalienable, natural right, they meant by each one’s liberty the privilege to
do such things as he, with his particular relations, ought to have a moral
title to do; the particular things having righteous, natural limitations in
every case, and much narrower limits in some cases than in others.
Radical America now means by natural liberty each one’s
privilege to do what he chooses to do. By the consent of the governed our
forefathers meant each Sovereign Commonwealth’s consenting to the constitution
under which it should be governed: they meant that it was unjust for Britain to
govern America without America’s consent. Which part of the human beings living
in a given American State should constitute the State potentially, the populus
whose franchise it was to express the will of the commonwealth for all—that was
in their eyes wholly another question, to be wisely decided in different States
according to the structure which Providence had given them. By ‘the consent of
the governed’ it would appear that Radicalism means it is entirely just for
Yankeedom to govern Virginia against Virginia’s consent, and that it is not
just to govern any individual human being without letting him vote for his
governors. The utter inconsistency of the two parts of this creed, is not ours
to reconcile. It is certain that, both parts (consistent or not) are firmly
held as the American creed….
To these errors the American
people are too deeply committed to evade any of their logical applications.
In addition to a basic
misunderstanding of the American Founding, such modern views on equality
fundamentally violated the teaching of Holy Scripture and the laws of nature
and the roles assigned by it to the different sexes. Thus, it had been the near
unanimous teaching of the Christian tradition since Apostolic days. And more,
although not venturing deeply into the topic, Dabney inferred that both
physiological and genetic conditions militated against sexual equality.
Yet, in his battle with the feminists and egalitarians, Dabney despaired. For other than a few conservative Southern writers and churchmen, what he termed “Northern conservatism”—the “conservative movement” of his time—was weak, vacillating, and compromising. Here he is, again, painting a picture of contemporary conservatism, a picture that has not changed much in over a century:
It may be inferred again that the
present movement for women’s rights, will certainly prevail from the history of
its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves
anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the
progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of
growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted
novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism;
it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which
will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third
revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism
is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards
perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near
its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it
he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless
because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle.
It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea
of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a
protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that
its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners
by enacting its decent rôle of resistance. The only practical purpose which it
now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to
keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having
nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have
become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed,
and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar
weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it
will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution
requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with
great dignity, its final position.
The final essay Garris includes,
“Civic Ethics,” comes from the third volume of Dabney’s Discussions. It addresses not only the moral basis for obedience to
civil authority, but is an excursion into the different theories about the
origin of society and the authority of government. Dabney is harshly critical
of such writers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom
he lumps together as proponents of the “social contract” theory of society:
that we are somehow created as autonomous individuals who then come together
voluntarily to form a society and create a government. Not only in logic, but
in historical fact, this view is erroneous. Man is born within a society and
under some form of government, which, in some way, is ordained by God. As
Dabney points out, given the fallen nature of man and the existence of evil in
the world, the rule of law and the operation of governments and obedience
thereto are absolutely requisite to a well-ordered commonwealth, just as the
family forms the natural and basic unit of the society, and in microcosm forms
a kind of mini-government over its members.
The one slight difference I have
with Dabney comes in this last essay, his critique of what he calls
“Legitimism,” which he identifies with the Divine Right of Kings. Rightly, as he
defines it, he opposes it—and given his Old Republicanism, that is to be
expected. Yet, I would distinguish between most true Legitimist (mostly
royalist) movements in Europe during the nineteenth century, and the theories
of Divine Right. Traditionally in Christendom, kingship was not considered
absolute, as certainly as it evolved during the Enlightenment. Traditional
monarchies generally practiced a form of subsidiarity, even a broad form of
“states’ rights,” in which local and regional bodies, communities, guilds,
regions, and other subdivisions within society exercised a considerable degree
of authority and autonomy, even at times a veto, within a commonwealth, even
when that commonwealth was headed by a king or emperor. The examples from
history are manifold, and I would cite my own experience and studies in Spanish
Traditionalism: those Legitimist defenders of the old Spanish monarchy termed
“Carlists” who fought several civil wars for “God, Country, Our Local and
Regional Rights, and the King,” emphasis emphatically on “our local and
regional rights”: their unbreachable “fueros.”
Robert Lewis Dabney was also a
staunch opponent of crony capitalism and the mass industrialization of the
South. He saw the destruction of our agricultural society and the rapid growth
of industrialization with alarm. In his essay, “The New South,” Dabney drew a
comparison between the United States of 1789 and ninety-three years later, in
the 1882. In the former year no one city, no one or two states, no handful of
corporate giants controlled the nation’s wealth. But in 1882 New York City had
become “the commercial mistress” of the whole nation and a handful of
industrial barons dictated policies to presidents. Asked Dabney: “Can a
sensible man persuade himself that political independence and individual
initiative shall remain in a land where financial despotism has become
established?”
And he continued: “the transfer
of wealth and power into the hands of a few, and the marvelous applications of
science and mechanic art to cheapen transportation and production” were causing
not just the transformation of the South, but a massive change in all of
American society. Centralization and monopolization in industry meant a vast
reorientation in manufacturing, with far-reaching effects socially and
culturally. What happened to independent small businessmen and craftsmen who
were now overwhelmed by monopolies, mergers, and crushing competition? When
capital was controlled by the few, and the powerful barons of industry
commanded the masses at their bidding, individual liberty soon disappeared.
Although not covered in the four
chapters in this book, such prescient commentary on post-War America and what
was happening to his beloved Southland merit perhaps another volume of
selections.
It was Dabney’s role, holding
fast to his firm Presbyterian orthodox theology and his understanding of the
principles of the American Founders, to offer a roadmap for a righteous
citizenry and for the survival of a nation. And he did so as one of the most notable
thinkers that the South—and America—produced in the nineteenth century. Yet, he
exclaimed with melancholy late in his life in 1894, “I am the Cassandra of
Yankeedom, predestined to prophesy truth and never to be believed until too
late.”
Zachary Garris’ new volume of
some of Dabney’s best writing offers an opportunity to re-discover this prophet
and to begin to comprehend his thought, based in the traditions of Christian
theology. Dabney has much to teach us today, and Garris’ Dabney on
Fire is an excellent way to begin that process.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from
the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard
Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of
Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and
philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State
Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has
published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as
classical music and opera. He is the author (November 2018) of the volume, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage
(Scuppernong Press).
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