Lee and Orthodoxy

 The South holds a unique place in modern Western history. While most Western countries in recent centuries were discarding Christianity and other traditional norms, the people of Dixie were doing the opposite: defending an hierarchical view of the cosmos with the Holy Trinity reigning over all; defending Christianity, as well as traditional notions of marriage and family as found in the Holy Scriptures and in ancient Greek and Roman society; looking distrustfully upon rapid mass industrialization; upholding the slower, more humane agrarian economic system in its stead, believing that the creation is suffused with meaning and with the presence of God Himself, that it serves a sacramental function, rather than being simply ‘dead matter’ to be transmuted by factories into consumer goods and monetary profits.

While not identical in content, the South’s defense of traditional living is yet very similar to what was going on in the Orthodox world at the same time – with St. Athanasios Parios and the Kollyvades Fathers of Mount Athos, for example, or with Ivan Kireevsky, Alexei Khomiakov, and the other Slavophiles in Russia.

The closeness of Dixie to Orthodoxy may be seen in other ways as well: in keeping the fasts before Easter and Christmas, even forbidding weddings during those times, celebrating Christmas on its Old Calendar day of 6 January, and honoring St. George at Eastertime. There were also Southern converts to the Orthodox Faith like Philip Ludwell III as well as Orthodox settlements in the Old South, such as the Greek community in New Orleans.

There are plenty of reasons, then, for the Orthodox to be interested in the South, and vice versa.

Throughout her 417-year history, a number of Southerners have exemplified Dixie’s traditional Christian ethos: from William Berkeley, Robert Byrd II, and Robert ‘King’ Carter I, to Flannery O’Connor, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle – but the greatest exemplar of them all remains Robert E. Lee.

Robert Edward Lee was born on January 19th, 1807, into the squirearchy of Virginia, his father the famous Light Horse Harry Lee, a general in the War for Independence from Great Britain, and his mother Ann Hill Carter Lee, of the renowned Carter family. He would marry into another distinguished Virginia family, the Custises, when he was wed to Mary Custis in 1831, the great-granddaughter of George Washington’s wife, Martha; their marriage was a fruitful one, bringing seven children into the world.

Lee was a devoted Christian from his early years, attended the West Point military academy as a young man, and spent much of his adult life in the United States Army, mostly in the Corps of Engineers, but he would experience combat in the Mexican-American War in 1847 as well as at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 to quell the insurrection of John Brown. After Virginia seceded on April 17th, 1861, Gen. Lee resigned his commission with the U. S. Army on 20 April and was made on May 14th a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army, in which he served with gallantry and distinction until the end of the War with the Yankee invaders on April 9th, 1865, the day he surrendered himself and his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses Grant of the Union Army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

After the War, Gen. Lee made it his primary mission to promote reconciliation between the States and to work for the common good and upbuilding of them all. To that end, he accepted the office of President of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia (later to be renamed Washington and Lee University) in October 1865. There he busied himself for five years, forming the minds and characters of the young men who attended the College. On September 28th, 1870, while at a vestry meeting at Grace Episcopal Church in Lexington, he suffered a stroke. He passed from this life to the next shortly thereafter, on 12 October 1870, to the great sadness of his Southern countrymen. His final words were ‘Strike the tent.’

More than 150 years have passed since Robert E. Lee left this world. Life has changed significantly over that time. Can anyone, particularly Orthodox Christians, benefit at all from a closer look into his life?

Another exceptional Southerner, Richard Weaver (reposed on 1 April 1963), whose writings portray especially well the essence of Dixie’s way of life, answers in the affirmative in his essay ‘Lee the Philosopher’. He notes that it is common to exalt Gen. Lee as a great military leader, a model husband and father, and an embodiment of Southern culture. These are not unimportant in the present age of barbarism and promiscuity. But, he says, there are more important things to note about Lee. And in the characteristics that he notes, we will see how they correspond well with truths proclaimed by the Orthodox Church.

Professor Weaver first notes that Gen. Lee understood that mankind has an innate attraction to warfare. He quotes Lee as saying once at Fredericksburg during the War, ‘It is well this is terrible; otherwise we should grow fond of it.’ Since the desire for war is ever with us, Prof. Weaver interprets, we must find some way of turning it to good purposes. If a substitute for physical warfare could be found, it would be profoundly helpful.

Some of our renowned Orthodox Fathers complete this good structure of contemplation begun by Gen. Lee. It is precisely in spiritual warfare that mankind can satisfy his desire to fight, while also improving himself and benefiting his neighbor in doing so, rather than bringing destruction and mayhem into their lives. St. Anthony the Great recognizes that spiritual warfare is with us for all our days: ‘This is the great work of man: always to take the blame for his own sins before God and to expect temptation to his last breath.’

St. Maximos the Confessor reveals some of the benefits of spiritual warfare: ‘There are said to be five reasons why God allows us to be assailed by demons. The first is so that, by attacking and counterattacking, we should learn to discriminate between virtue and vice. The second is so that, having acquired virtue through conflict and toil, we should keep it secure and immutable. The third is so that, when making progress in virtue, we should not become haughty but learn humility. The fourth is so that, having gained some experience of evil, we should “hate it with perfect hatred” (cf. Ps. 139:22). The fifth and most important is so that, having achieved dispassion, we should forget neither our own weakness nor the power of Him who has helped us.’

Per the third reason of St. Maximos, it is evident that Gen. Lee had made progress in virtue, for his humility was a defining characteristic of his life, as Prof. Weaver says: ‘The ideal of duty is related to the quality which above all else gives Lee an antique greatness, his humility.’ He showed both wisdom and humility in recommending ‘patience and silence’ after the War to help with the process of reconciliation, believing that these would help calm the fires of rancor and bitterness that still raged within the breasts of men of both the North and the South.

St. Isaac the Syrian recommends the same: ‘Conquer men by your gentle kindness, and make zealous men wonder at your goodness. Put the lover of justice to shame by your compassion. With the afflicted be afflicted in mind. Love all men, but keep distant from all men.’

Abba Pambo, one of the holy Desert Fathers, expresses the benefits of silence in a remarkable way, one that Gen. Lee would more than likely agree with:

‘When he reached the skete, the Fathers came out to greet him, and each found some word to say to him. Only the holy Pambo stood out of the way, silent. "Are you not going to say anything to the Patriarch for his benefit?" the elders asked. "If he does not benefit from my silence, brothers, neither will he benefit from my words," answered the wise Father.’

Finally, Gen. Lee’s deep trust in God allowed him to experience disappointment without succumbing to despair. Prof. Weaver writes, ‘Despite failure in the great effort of his career, and despite a twilight of five years during which, it seemed to Stephen Vincent Benet, “He must have lived with bitterness itself,” he gave no sign of despondency. His expression, we are told, took on a look of settled sadness, but he never allowed feeling to assume control. Whatever of doctrine Lee knew was derived from Christianity, and there we read that God sometimes appoints to men the task of contending and falling in a righteous cause.’

Lee acknowledged that he had reasons to be tempted to despair, but as Prof. Weaver has said, he did not allow them to overwhelm him. This is Gen. Lee himself speaking, in some of his most poignant and poetic words: ‘ . . . nor, in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors, which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present state of affairs, do I despair of the future. The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient, the work of progress is so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, and that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.’

This conjoining of abiding in sadness and bitter experiences with hope in God leads us quite naturally to those now well-known words spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ to St. Silouan the Athonite, after St. Silouan had passed an excruciating 15 years of ascetical labors to reacquire the Grace he had lost: ‘Keep thy mind in Hell and despair not.’

But love is the highest Christian virtue, and here again Gen. Lee is a good example to us all. In one of his letters to his daughter Annie, he writes, ‘But my limited time does not diminish my affection for you, Annie, nor prevent my thinking of you and wishing for you. I long to see you through the dilatory nights. At dawn when I rise, and all day, my thoughts revert to you in expressions that you cannot hear or I repeat. I hope you will always appear to me as you are now painted on my heart, and that you will endeavour to improve and so conduct yourself as to make you happy and me joyful all our lives.’

Robert E. Lee is not an Orthodox saint. But the world is currently so profoundly lacking in people who have acquired even the most basic virtues that men like Gen. Lee have only grown in importance. Not only does he show us what is possible in terms of simple, ordinary human goodness, but, for the Orthodox, he is also a bridge to those with the greater gifts, to the saints, who have transformed and deified fallen human nature by co-operating with God’s Grace, and have become gods by that same Grace. As one who has often been viewed by the Southern people as something of a reappearance of one of the ancient Greek immortals, perhaps Lee’s role of bridge or waysign to the Orthodox saints is, in the end, not a thing to be wondered at.

Works Cited:

‘The Ancient Fathers of the Desert: Section 7,’ Fr. Chrysostomos, trans., https://www.goarch.org/-/the-ancient-fathers-of-the-desert-section-7.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York, Ny., Oxford UP, 1989.

Bob Hufford, ‘Robert E. Lee,’ https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/615/robert_e-lee.

Captain Robert E. Lee, Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York, Ny., Cosimo Classics, 2008.

St. Anthony the Great,https://orthodoxchurchquotes.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/st-anthony-the-great-expect-temptation-to-his-last-breath/.

St. Issac the Syrian, https://orthodoxchurchquotes.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/st-isaac-the-syrian-conquer-men-by-your-gentle-kindness/.

St. Maximos the Confessor, https://orthodoxchurchquotes.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/st-maximos-the-confessor-five-reasons-why-god-allows-us-to-be-assailed-by-....

Richard Weaver, ‘Lee the Philosopher,’ The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, Curtis and Thompson, edrs., Indianapolis, Ind., LibertyPress, 1987.