Ransomed from H--L:
                                    
                The Literati of the Middle South and the
                                    
                     Cultural Crisis of the Twenties
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                                    
                            Peter J.  Wallace

I.  Introduction
     Neither John Crowe Ransom nor H. L. Mencken commend
themselves to posterity as great theologians.  Both lived and
wrote in literary orbits--the former as a poet and literary
critic, the latter as a journalist and critic of everything that
walked on two feet.  Yet in 1930 both men published books on God,
religion, and theology.  
     The odd parallels between the sage of Baltimore and the poet
of Nashville do not stop there.  Both men believed that the Old
South had produced the finest culture in American history--yet
while Mencken prized its aristocracy, Ransom preferred its
agrarianism.  Both men abhorred liberal Protestantism--yet while
Ransom detested its flimsy God, Mencken berated its flaunted
moralism; not surprisingly, both would use the tools of
Protestant liberalism to undermine liberal religion.  Both men
abandoned organized religion in their youth--yet while Mencken
adopted Nietzsche and scientific naturalism, Ransom pursued
poetry and a quasi-religious aestheticism.  Both men believed
that religion and poetry had a close affinity--yet while that led
Mencken to ridicule religion as denying the most obvious
realities, it drew Ransom to appreciate religion for its
aesthetic quality.  Culturally and temperamentally conservative
themselves, both men deeply respected genuine religious
conservatism, but had lost the ability to believe it, yet neither
could stomach what they saw as the cultural arrogance--and
emptiness--of mainstream Christianity.
     This paper will examine the cultural critique offered by
these two figures through the lens of their religious discourse. 
After examining Mencken's satiric strictures on modern
Protestantism, we will compare the duo's divergent definitions of
the nature of religion, concluding with a detailed exposition of
Ransom's critique of what he considered to be the  new religion
of the modern, scientific world.  Mencken's affinity for the
scientific method, qualified by a Nietzschean mood of irony,
found its antithesis in Ransom's aesthetic sensibility, which led
the agrarian poet to question the entire enterprise of modernity. 
I propose that the juxtaposition of these two thinkers reveals
the tensions of the larger cultural crisis of the twenties in
which the emergent secular world attempted to restructure the
foundations of American society.
     But why did both these men publish their only religious
works in 1930? Throughout the first quarter of the twentieth
century Mencken had frequently commented on the prudery and
"puritanism" of modern Protestantism, but only in his capacity as
columnist, reporter, and reviewer.  Ransom was a poet of
increasing stature, and had been talking to his friends about a
book on aesthetics--not religion.  What prompted these two
outsiders to deviate from their literary careers and tackle the
problem of religion in 1930?
     Perhaps this way of asking the question reveals the distance
between 1996 and 1930.  In a culture which had just been
bombarded by the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy and the
Scopes Trial, religion represented a inescapable part of life
even for those like Ransom and Mencken who darkened church doors
as infrequently as possible.  The 1920s was the first decade of
an ostensibly post-Christian era.  Darwinism had provided a
universe which needed no Creator; and the ascendance of the
humanities and the new social sciences had provided a society
which needed no religion.  For the first time in human history
religion had become ostensibly superfluous for a large number of
people.  While Thomas Huxley and his followers had been battling
for such a world, Mencken and Ransom participated in the first
generation that actually lived in that world, and stood among
those who recognized that no one had bothered to think through
what would replace traditional religion.  The 1920s and 30s,
then, became the pivot of the cultural crisis.  Having roots in
an era when the trappings of religion still hung in the centers
of cultural power, secular critics still felt compelled to engage
in religious questions.  For those who were just emerging from
the shadow of a toppling Protestant cultural hegemony one of the
central questions was, "since Protestantism has failed, what star
shall guide us?" To this question, Ransom and Mencken gave
radically different answers.  Ransom, Tennessee born, Oxford
bred, and scion of Methodist theologians, sought the lofty path
amidst the aesthetic mists of poetry and sensibility.  Mencken,
Baltimore born, with no more than a high school education, yet
heir to a house of agnostic German intellectuals[fn on the PhD
status], pursued the earthbound trail of science, knowledge,
wealth and power.  Much has been made of Mencken's admitted
inability to appreciate poetry.  He himself alleged that poetry
was like medicine--good only for the sick, yet useful in such
times.  Ransom, on the other hand, might have responded that
humanity was perpetually sick--and for such an ailment, poetry
provided the finest aliment.
     Mencken and Ransom's exchange occurred between 1930 and
1931.  Although Ransom had largely finished God Without Thunder
by the fall of 1929, he could not refrain from adding a brief
critique of Mencken's Treatise on the Gods when the latter's work
came out early in 1930.  Mencken returned the favor in 1931 by
reviewing God Without Thunder as well as Ransom's contribution to
I'll Take My Stand, the agrarian manifesto issued almost
simultaneously.  This exchange helped to define the common
critique of liberal Protestantism which they shared, as well as
the distinctive alternatives which Ransom and Mencken offered. 
In an odd way, Mencken and Ransom each chose sides in a secular
fundamentalist/modernist debate.  Mencken reveled in the
destruction of religion, but believed that science had no better
moral standards to offer.  Following a Nietzschean paradigm, he
suggested that at best one could hope merely for a moderate
amount of wealth, power, knowledge, and pleasure.  Ransom, on the
other hand, argued that science had constructed its own religion
(co-opting much of protestantism along the way) which was
actually inferior to traditional religion because it starved the
aesthetic sensibility.  Utilizing an agrarian model, he claimed
that only the recovery of "orthodoxy" could rehabilitate a more
chastened and humane existence--one which would dethrone science
from its rationalistic excesses.

II.  Mencken's Critique of Traditional Religion
     In surveying the religious landscape of the 1920s, Mencken
found essentially two kinds of Protestants: those who were
turning to Rome and those who were turning to the Ku Klux Klan. 
The average Protestant church-goer, Mencken explained, "stands
to-day on a burning deck" as both Modernists and Fundamentalists
abandoned ship.  Affirming that he had more respect for John
Wesley and Francis Asbury than modern Methodists, Mencken chided
liberals for abandoning their beliefs as heartily as he ridiculed
fundamentalists for taking leave of their senses.  Mencken
surveyed the mainline churches of Baltimore and other Eastern
cities and concluded that modern Protestants had replaced the
fear of the devil with a "sense of beauty" and a Romish liturgy,
while their fundamentalist counterparts in the South and rural
Midwest threw "the New Testament overboard, and [went] back to
the Old, and particularly to the bloodiest parts of it." The
ordinary Protestant in the middle, Mencken suggested, must think
that either evolution or the Pope would be better than such
buffoonery.  Neither side, Mencken added elsewhere, is really
honest.  Fundamentalists claim to believe the Bible--yet through
Prohibition clearly rejected I Timothy 5:23 ("Take a little wine
for your stomach").  Modernists claimed that there was no
conflict between science and Scripture--yet had abandoned most of
the latter in their eagerness to claim the former.  Nonetheless,
Mencken whimsically concluded, humans needed illusions to make
life more livable, so both sides were welcome to their idiocies
so long as they did not try to force them upon him.
     In trying to find a good comparison for religion, Mencken
utilized politics which, as he put it, "consists
of...unintelligent crazes...so idiotic that they exist only as
battle cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical
statement at all.  It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is
simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities."
Mencken did not object to religion as poetry, so long as it did
not attempt to invade the sphere of fact.  He even argued that
its poetry made Christianity superior to all other religions--not
only the poetry of the Old Testament, but also of the New, such
as the Virgin Birth.  Such poetry, he claimed, "is worth a
million syllogisms." 
     And as long as it remained in the realm of poetry Mencken
was satisfied.  Belief in traditional religious doctrine, as
dogma, however, was simply preposterous.  "A man full of faith is
simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and
realistic thought.  He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. 
Worse, he is incurable....What he usually says, in substance, is
this:  'Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us in the
past.'" 
     Occasionally, however, Mencken found an intellectual with
clear arguments and sound thinking who still embraced traditional
Christianity.  Mencken always respected such a man--even if such
a man's existence baffled him.  D. G. Hart states correctly: "As
a system of belief, the creed of fundamentalism may have been
littered with imbecilities from Mencken's perspective.  Even so
he found [Billy] Sunday's to be tolerable and [J. Gresham]
Machen's admirable.  But when that creed moved out into society
and conflicted with Mencken's enjoyment of beer, his respect for
science, his literary tastes, or his elitism," Mencken went for
the jugular.  
     In a similar way, Mencken had little tolerance for a whole
region of the country which was dominated by religion.  The
South, in his mind, languished in the doldrums of cultural
lethargy; yet, ironically, no one person had more influence upon
the southern literary renaissance as Mencken.  His provocative
essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart" riled up many southerners, and
ironically led to his becoming one of the chief promoters of many
of the southern literati of the 1920s who found his criticisms of
the South accurate.  Mencken praised few southern writers, but he
made an exception in the case of the first appearance of The
Fugitive, the poetry magazine edited by Ransom, Allen Tate, and
other future Agrarians.  John Stewart even records that Allen
Tate even went about "with Mencken under his arm, and Tate owned
that he had."  Judging by their statements about southern
poetry, the Fugitives appear to have been strongly influenced by
Mencken's critique.  By the late twenties, though, Ransom and
Tate began to distance themselves from "Menckenism"--and Mencken
himself soon found their interest in traditional religion and
culture absolutely incomprehensible.  
     In place of traditional religion Mencken offered very
little.  He admitted that he had no grandiose philosophy which
could give solace and comfort.  What he offered was a sober
realism which refused to give in to delirious visions of the
grandeur of humanity--well, at least as sober as Mencken could
make it: "To sum up: 1) the cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making
10,000 revolutions a minute.  2) Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy
ride on it.  3) Religion is the theory that the wheel was
designed and set spinning to give him the ride." His reading
and translation of Nietzsche influenced his early career, and
remained a significant force throughout his life [do the
Nietzsche thing here].  Blatantly aristocratic in temperament,
his works reflected a passionately anti-democratic sentiment,
along with the tendency to exalt the intellectual elite, who
became Mencken's version of the ubermensch.  Convinced that
America had been colonized not by the cream, but the dregs, of
Europe, Mencken found three strata of society in America: 1) at
the top perched an insipid plutocracy--an utter failure at the
nobler aspects of aristocracy--terminally stupid, resistant to
eccentricity, essentially nothing more than a horde of enriched
peasants; 2) at the bottom existed the "vast mass of
undifferentiated blanks"; and 3) in the middle, "a forlorn
intelligentsia gasping out a precarious life in between." 
     This intelligentsia, in Mencken's mind, was America's last
chance at developing an aristocracy which could provide cultural
stability and solidity.  Mencken, like Ransom, utilized the Old
South as a model, but his interest focused on the hierarchical
structure of southern society which allowed the aristocracy to
pursue their own interests without interference from the rabble. 
Mencken's ideal aristocratic intelligentsia would be interested
solely in pursuing knowledge and science for their own sake. 
Science's "aim is simply to establish the facts.  It has no more
interest in the moral significance of those facts than it has in
the moral significance of streptococcus.  It must be amoral by
its very nature: the minute it begins separating facts into the
two categories of good ones and bad ones it ceases to be science
and becomes a mere nuisance, like theology."
     But while Mencken praised the scientific method as the only
way to attain true knowledge, he had no illusions about some
pretended moral dignity of science.  Rather he claimed that the
genuine scientist was inflamed not by a passion for the
betterment of humanity (which he considered as bad as
Prohibition), but by mere curiosity, even though he knows that
his discoveries will do as much harm as good, and that many more
worthless people than noble will benefit from it.  He is not like
the Good Samaritan, "but the dog sniffing at an infinite series
of rat-holes." 

III.  The Nature of Religion
     One sees Mencken's scientific persuasion most clearly in the
methodology he adopted in his Treatise on the Gods, in which he
attempts to analyze religion in strictly scientific terms.  Much
of his historical treatment, however, assumed that ancient
peoples were just as rationalistic and skeptical as himself--
which means that his volume is more a study of early twentieth
century religion rather than the treatise on the development of
religion which it purports to be.
     For Mencken, the nature of religion is essentially "the
sense of helplessness before the cosmic mysteries" together with
the "pathetic attempt to resolve it by appealing to higher
powers." The single function of religion "is to give man access
to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single
purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him.  That
function and that purpose are common to all religions, ancient or
modern, savage or civilized, and they are the only common
characters that all of them show." While various accretions of
ethics, rituals, doctrines, etc., may affix themselves to
particular manifestations of religion, all religions partake of
this fundamental core.  From this starting point, Mencken assayed
to account for the entirety of human religious history.  It is
not particularly interesting for its account of religious origins
or biblical criticism--which few anthropologists or biblical
scholars today would support, but rather for how it illustrates
Mencken's own scientific and Nietzschean world-view, and the way
in which he viewed modern American religion.  After commenting on
the evolutionary manner in which religion came into being,
Mencken asserted that:
     it was not all easy sailing.  The gift of blarney went
     with the sacerdotal office, in the earliest days as
     now, but there must have been failures occasionally
     which even the richest blarney could not explain
     away....If [the priest] survived to die naturally, as
     natural death was understood in that gory era, it was
     probably only by the aid of casuistry, which is thus as
     old as theology, and remains its chief staff in our own
     enlightened day.  
     
     Further, Mencken claimed that "there must have been plenty of
skeptics in Babylon from the days of the primitive sun-god
onward," blithely assuming that since religion is absurd,
therefore there must always have been some intelligent people
around to doubt it.  This is more a commentary on Mencken's
disgust with twentieth-century Christianity than any "scientific"
study of early religion.
     Mencken suggested that pure religion (i.e., mysticism) was
too rarified for ordinary people, whose simplicity required a
more elaborate development of "liturgy, dogma and priestcraft" in
order to maintain the veil between the people and their God. 
Regardless of religious rhetoric, all religions maintained such
an intermediate authority--whether Catholics at High Mass or
Baptists bowing down before the King James Bible and the
ecclesiastical tyranny of their pastor who would "lay down
regulations governing their private conduct....The majority of
Baptists, like the majority of non-Baptists, have very little
private talent for religion.  They have neither the intrepidity
necessary for gaining access to God and making their wants known
to Him, nor the erudition needed to interpret His dark wishes and
commands.  Thus they are forced to resort to professionals."
Religion then becomes the attempt "first, to attract the notice
of the gods, and, second, to induce them to be amiable."
     Ransom was perfectly willing to grant that much of religion
is like this, but argued that this was not true religion, but
magic.  "The peril to which a religion is constantly exposed is
that of being regarded as a magic--greedily practiced by its own
adherents as a valuable magic" providing them with control over
nature and favor with the gods.  Magic arises, Ransom
suggested, when the believer begins to think of his God "as a
demonstrable or historical being.  He is so stupid that he thinks
all the detail of his myth is a part of the natural order....He
is a pure naturalist, and a particularly gullible one.  So it is
logical that he should try to enter into profitable relations
with a God of whose factuality he has convinced himself." Yet
Ransom argued that the fundamentalists are different.  Certainly
they "regard their God as an actuality, and treat their
supernatural fictions as natural objects," yet they do not
suppose that they can control their God.  Ransom has taken some
heat for suggesting that fundamentalists had simply picked "out
of all the myths a particular one to profess and to keep," but
at least he was able to understand that religion can consist of
more than merely manipulating the Gods.  
     But of what in particular does this "something more"
consist?  Ransom suggested that there is both an aesthetic use of
religion, as well as a practical one.  These uses comprise the
heart and soul of Ransom's call for a return to the thundering
Gods.  The aesthetic use of religion consists of maintaining a
sense of awe and wonder in the face of the bleary grey world of
science and industry.  The practical use consists of the ritual
of worship in which the people sense the fullness of God, and the
command in which God makes clear his will for his people.  The
fundamentalist who has maintained these aesthetic and practical
uses of religion realizes that it is absurd to suppose that the
"majestic and incalculable" God will "bend to his pleasure," yet
he prays in order to reconcile himself to God.  Unfortunately,
most fundamentalists think that God "is a natural cause who can
be touched, and persuaded to govern natural events for them. 
They think that in religion they have a way of access to his
favor."
     It is in this context that Ransom cast a withering glance
toward Mencken's Treatise on the Gods: "Mr. Mencken declines to
be intimidated by the organized Baptists, the organized
Methodists, or the organized Catholics: but I should imagine that
he is deeply intimidated by the organized scientists." After
quoting from Mencken's work, Ransom pointed to the fundamental
distinction between them: whereas Mencken will applaud biblical
poetry even while dismissing it as a viable religion, Ransom
claimed that "the difference between a religious myth and a
poetic myth is not at all in the naturalism or the
supernaturalism of the belief, but rather in the importance and
the persistence of the belief.  The religionist is not committed
to magic any more than the poet." For Ransom, religion ought
not to be held up to the canons of naturalism any more than
literature, since both are attempting to articulate myths rather
than facts.  Following in the footsteps of Friedrich
Schleiermacher in his attempt to defend religion before its
cultured despisers, Ransom's attempt to preserve a place for
religion came to the brink of so radically changing its nature as
to make it unrecognizable for its practitioners.
     Nonetheless, in his better moments, Ransom described
religion as the attempt to "define the intention of the universe,
and man's proper portion within this universe.  It is therefore
his fundamental philosophy, it expresses the conviction he holds
about his essential destiny, and it is bound to be of determining
influence upon his conduct." This central thesis of his book
asserted that all societies have a religion--the question was,
what kind of religion is it?
     It is with this definition in mind that Ransom argued that a
new God had emerged in Western culture, because the older gods
were disappearing.  When man's understanding of the universe
changes as radically as it had since the rise of modern science,
it is inevitable that his religion will also change--whatever
labels it might still retain.  

IV.  Ransom's Critique of the New Religion
     In 1929, Walter Lippman articulated his plea for a new
humanism to emerge in his A Preface to Morals.  While Ransom
never mentioned this book, he certainly dealt with its argument. 
In Lippman's confident assertion that "a new crystallization of
an enduring and popular religion is unlikely in the modern
world," Ransom would have discerned the delusion of the modern
mind that religion was a thing of the past.  Far from agreeing
that "the acids of modernity are so powerful that they do not
tolerate a crystallization of ideas which will serve as a new
orthodoxy," Ransom argued that modernity had created a whole
new religion which was invulnerable to such acids, because those
acids were the very lifeblood of the new religion.
     This religion of scientific naturalism had displaced the old
religion to such an extent that "the service of God has become
merely the service of man, and there are no offerings required of
the believers which are not scrupulously accounted for as
contributions to human welfare." Whereas the older religion of
orthodox Christianity had believed that God was stern and
inscrutable, the modern religion embraced "a God who wouldn't
hurt us; who would let us understand him; who would agree to
scrap all the wicked thunderbolts in his armament....Such a
religion as this is clearly the one which adapts itself to the
requirements of our aggressive modern science."  Liberal
Christianity, Ransom claimed, "could see as well as the
scientists, if they cared to look, that their God had been
supplanted, but they were being invited to participate in the
optical illusion that no change had been made, they were being
persuaded not to make a scene." This new alliance between
scientists and religionists he found profoundly disconcerting--
not because it compromised science, but because religion had
agreed to barter away its God, and had settled for merely being
the guardian of morals.  Yet, Ransom countered, "Religion is not
a secular code of conduct but a form of worship."
     Yet the new religion, he claimed, had also created its own
theology, ethics, and worship.  They acknowledged a God who is 
     a scientist; the universe is his workshop; but among
     his productions he has produced man, and all the other
     productions are for man's benefit....God is the great
     scientist, but man is himself a little scientist.  For
     he can understand God's scientific technique, and he
     can actually in considerable degree apply it in the
     human sphere, anticipating God, and hastening the
     course of his good works. 
     
     God, in this view, became the servant of humanity, whose worship
consisted of humanity serving itself "as hard as possible." In
short, this religion believed that God has "had the goodness to
invite men to profiteer upon the universe." As such the
religion of science was blended with technology and industry in
one massive attempt to overthrow the old mythologies and
establish a religion which would cater to every whim of humanity.
     Ransom offered a fascinating lineage for the development of
the new religion.  Following Milton's heterodox portrayal of
Satan and Christ as competing demigods, Ransom suggested that the
promotion of Christ to the place of the supreme God was the
turning point in the history of science.  In all previous
religions man had no direct access to the divine, but in Christ,
now a man was fully divine, which meant that God and nature were
no longer mysterious and ineffable, but were fully
comprehensible.  Hence where Christ was originally subordinate to
the one true God, now the man-God Christ had become the only God. 
As the Logos, the Reason of God, Christ was originally
subordinate to the Father.  Jesus came not to make people worship
himself, but to point them to the one true God.  It was only
later that Christians claimed that Christ was identical to God. 
He himself claimed only to be a demigod.  Yet as such he provided
a certain level of limited knowledge about God, which offered man
limited access to the mysteries of the universe.  Since Christ
was the Logos (i.e., Reason), "His technique [is] scientific--and
also negotiable, or capable of being borrowed by the
beneficiaries and employed for the sake of supplementing and
hastening the God's good works." In this way science was
intended to be limited by the Logos; it was not ultimate because
he was not ultimate; it was subordinate because he was
subordinate.  Yet Christianity insisted upon making the Logos
equal to God, thereby giving humanity a place in the godhead.  In
this scheme, the root of modernism occurred at the Council of
Nicea, where Christ was proclaimed to be of the same substance of
the Father.  The Eastern Church maintained an element of
subordinationism in its theology--preventing the rise of modern
science (since it did not place the Logos at the center of the
Godhead); but the Western Church asserted the filioque clause,
which claimed that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father
and the Son, making Christ fully equal with the Father.  The
development of Western Christology, Ransom argued, reveals the
increasing position and authority of Christ within the Godhead,
until liberalism started claiming that the religion of Jesus
overturned the religion of the Old Testament completely.  In
modern Protestantism, especially, "Christ is the spirit of the
scientific and ethical secularism of the West." As evidence,
Ransom pointed to a recent liturgy offered by a Unitarian church
for use in liberal communion services: "the God is compounded of
any and all Gods that ever were thought of, and no offense is
done to any....The faith is disintegrating from within."
Looking at the Christocentrism of modern liberalism, Ransom saw
the eclipse of God the Father as the triumph of the scientific
world-view: "Industrialism is the effect of a Christianity that
has elevated the Man-God to the throne of Jehovah, and made of
Christ the temporal Messiah that he intended not to be."
     Not surprisingly, in view of their more subordinationist
Christology, Ransom suggested that Eastern Orthodoxy was the most
authentic form of Christianity.  As pointed out above, Mencken
had commented on the drift of modern Protestants toward Rome;
curiously, several of Ransom's fellow Agrarians--including his
closest friend, Allen Tate--wound up converting to Rome.  For
himself, while envying "their spiritual advantages," Ransom
believed that individual conversions denied the history and
rootedness of their communities, and so concluded that such
conversions were "too simple."  "I still seek the religion that
will be the expression of the social solidarity of my own
community."
     Such an individualistic model of religion missed the
interconnectedness of life that Ransom struggled to articulate. 
For better or for worse, our religion must always parallel the
rest of our society.  For example, Ransom suggested that a strong
connection existed between modern industrialism and modern
religion.  "It is not a mere coincidence that our age is distinct
from others in two things at the same time: first, in that it has
applied its sciences to an extent never before attempted; second,
in that its religion is the worship of the Man-God Christ, the
closest approach to pure secularism that a religion has ever
made." Why was this not a coincidence? Because "a religion has to
justify itself as an economy that makes for human happiness," and
the prosperity and progress of American industrialism was the
justification for the religion of modern science. 
Industrialism, Ransom observed, consisted of "the practical life
which men lead in obedience to their religion....[It] is
something practiced and defended by the adherents of a faith:
they consider it not only expedient but right." As such, Ransom
argued, industrialism is simply the "cult whose name is Science"-
-the external rites of the "Spirit of Science.  For if the Spirit
of Science is holy then the works of the Spirit are holy too."
     But why complain? After all, statistics demonstrated that
America was the most wealthy nation in the history of humanity
and technology had given us the ability to do everything faster,
better, and more efficiently than before.  Yet, Ransom cautioned,
as "the figures of prosperity become more and more colossal...the
fact of prosperity becomes more and more dubious." We have
increased the number of gadgets and gizmos exponentially, but how
many of them do we really need? "The machines, and the mechanical
amusements, which are nothing but so many pursuits and drives
after play-objectives, have the purpose of making us indifferent
to the sensible infinity which constitutes the landscape of our
world....They have as their function to minister to our pride of
power and our scorn of nature, and they are all but features of
the ritual of the Logos." Science merely tried to stimulate new
desires rather than allow "a feeling of communion or rapport with
environment which is fundamental in our human requirements--but
which is sternly discouraged in the mind that has the scientific
habit."  At least at this point, Mencken had some sympathies
with Ransom; he bewailed the intrusion of the telephone on a
peaceful life, and proudly claimed to be the first to have
abandoned the abominable automobile.  Yet while Mencken could
flippantly bemoan the intrusion of technology into every corner
of life, the ensuing diminution of the aesthetic sense was
Ransom's deepest concern, because "Man not only lives his animal
life but enjoys it."  Science, he claimed, is an excellent
ability--but it is wholly incapable of providing delight and
enjoyment in life.  It may enable him to get more of what he
wants, but it cannot help him enjoy what he has.  "In order to be
human, we have to have something which will stop action, and this
something cannot possibly be reason in its narrow sense.  I would
call it sensibility."
     Further, Ransom argued, while science claimed to be able to
provide all that we need, it only had limited success in its
primary sphere--the physical sciences--and had proven to be
almost completely incompetent in the biological and psychological
sciences.  Ransom's chief concern was that the wild stimulation
of modern prosperity was turning America into a work-crazed land
with little time for the contemplation of the inner life.  With
all the new modern amusements there was no longer any need for
the cultivation of virtue and aesthetic taste; and modern
scientific education could dictate what was necessary for people
to know in order to fit into the gigantic machine of industrial
society.  Yet science could not live up to its claims.  Even in
the height of its glory, Ransom saw the futility of trying to run
a society scientifically.  Science, along with its optimistic new
religion, simply could not deal adequately with the problem of
evil.  "We have abandoned the religion that would have prepared
us to receive the lesson of tragedy and failure."
     So whereas Mencken had little to offer by way of a program,
Ransom at least wanted to suggest some positive directions.  The
first step, he suggested, would dethrone the modern God of
science and industrialism.  Industrialism, Ransom observed,
"seems a miserable fate for any people to suffer; but it is one
which we have invited upon ourselves with our worship of the God
of Science; and one which we will hardly get rid of till we shift
our whole view of the universe and once more reduce the Demigod
to his place of subordination within the Godhead." This
subordination, Ransom argued, must take place in the context of
the rediscovery of the aesthetic sense.  Science was a useful
servant, but it had usurped the throne; its pretensions needed to
be eliminated before human life could be restored to its proper
balance.
     As an example, Ransom took such a simple illustration as
labor.  Science claimed that increased efficiency would lead to a
greater enjoyment of life since people would not need to work as
much.  But Ransom was unconvinced that labor was such a terrible
thing.  Certainly "the hungry belly must be filled.  But that is
easily done; especially is it easily done with the aid of a
little scientific equipment.  It is so easily done that it might
as well be done with enjoyment." There is nothing wrong with
using science as a means of increasing human enjoyment.  The
problem is that modern industrial society had an entirely
different end in view:
     The applied sciences aim at a maximum efficiency and a
     minimum duration of labor, and therefore they have a
     purpose which is destructive of enjoyment....They
     divest labor of its dignity and make it servile.  So
     they have set up the modern industrial system: a system
     which may be defined outwardly as producing goods as
     fast as possible, and inwardly as deliberately
     sacrificing the enjoyment of labor.
     
     Industrialism thought that it could build a new culture upon the
rubbish heap of the old one.  Ransom disagreed: "Culture...is not
a material commodity to be bought and consumed, but the byproduct
of a humane kind of life.....[It] will never come unless the
right sort of living invites it." The right sort of living,
Ransom suggested, could be found in older cultures which
maintained aesthetic and religious values as well as scientific
ones.
     This balance of scientific and aesthetic was rooted in
Ransom's understanding of what he called "the third moment."
First, there is the direct experience of an object.  Second,
there is reflection upon that object in a rational, scientific
abstraction.  Yet in this second moment something is lost.  The
original experience has become rationalized and analyzed, yet
there is much that was contained in the original experience which
cannot be quantified.  So, third, there is the recognition that
analysis is incomplete.  Rather than attempt a Hegelian
synthesis, Ransom suggested that the third moment is that of
imagination which is a blending our images of the experience with
the concepts of the second stage.  This is the sphere of art,
religion, and poetry.  Science is useful and necessary in
analyzing objects of experience, but it is incapable of
satisfying the imagination or aesthetic sense.  "Devoted
scientists, those who in private life do not relax from their
professional obligations, are deficient examplars of humanity,"
because by focusing almost exclusively on general principles and
laws, they "suppress a substantial group of experiences." 
Without an aesthetic appreciation for the individual, the unique,
and the sentimental, science becomes cold, harsh, and inhuman.
     Ransom viewed religion as a type of poetry or art.  Insofar
as religion creates a system of symbols or images, "the doctrines
of religion are poetry..., and certainly religion cannot outlast
poetry; the religion that surrenders its images to the scientific
censors is about to go out of business as religion and become
Social Service, or Rotarianism, or Humanism."  Ransom believed
that religion and poetry consisted of the heart and soul of human
experience, because it was here that the matters of central human
experience found expression.  He had no more belief in the
historicity of the bible than Mencken; but as he saw the demise
of the world to which the biblical story had been central, Ransom
became convinced that modern society was losing more than it
could handle.
     Others in the twenties had similar concerns.  While Ransom
made no mention of Joseph Wood Krutch's The Modern Temper, his
book read like a response to the mood of despair found in the
sundered self of Krutch's divided world of intellectual
fascination with science, yet emotional barrenness of spirit. 
The modern world made brilliant scientific discoveries, but
starved the poetic and imaginative spirit.  Krutch argued that
the generation of T. H. Huxley had "fought with such zeal against
frightened conservatives that it never took time to do more than
assert with some vehemence that all would be well, and the
generation that followed either danced amid the ruins or sought
by various compromises to save the remains of a few tottering
structures." Krutch claimed that it was possible that humanism
was antithetical to nature and ultimately incompatible with human
existence--but if so, he concluded, "then we may at least permit
ourselves a certain defiant satisfaction when we realize that we
have made our choice and that we are resolved to abide by the
consequences," and at least die out with pride at being human. 
The terrible irony of science is that it has shown us that the
universe is irrational and we have no place within it.
     Ransom found this sort of cant ridiculous.  If we have made
a wrong turn in our history, we should not be smugly self-
satisfied with going down with the ship; we should admit our
error, correct our course, turn around and attempt to steer our
society in a path which can make science our servant rather than
our master, and rejuvenate the poetic spirit.  Reason and science
have failed to create a culture which is humane; let us then
recapture those elements of an older world which were conducive
to such a culture.  It was this--rather than any wistful fancy
for the Old South--which produced his agrarianism; and it was
this which led him to abandon agrarianism when it became apparent
that society would not follow.  The angst of the 1920s and '30s
faded; the war demonstrated a healthy and vigorous America; and
society showed no signs of collapsing any time soon.  Agrarianism
was Ransom's means of asserting his convictions about the need
for myth and structure, as well as the futility of science to
provide a full-orbed explanation for the universe and humanity's
place within it.  Once the crisis had passed, it lost much of its
original purpose and passion.
     Thus it was in his aesthetic crisis that Ransom's interest
in the old religion intersected with his interest in the Old
South.  Mencken had admired the Old South for its aristocratic
tradition, and believed that the best blood in America still came
out of the South, naturally moving North to more hospitable
waters.  Ransom admired the Old South for a more subtle reason. 
He had no romantic notions about the Confederacy, no dreams about
the lost cause; he saw the Old South as the last agrarian economy
in America, and so used it as a vision of a slower-paced world
with older values and a richer aesthetic sense.  The older
religion and the older economic system were bound up together. 
To provide a more human life, with greater emphasis upon people
rather than machines, industrialism must first be subdued, and
the more leisurely pace of pre-industrial society should be
adopted--at least as far as possible.
     Part of that subjection of science and industry, Ransom
argued, needed to happen in the sphere of religion.  Yet just as
he had no radical agrarian program to offer, so also he had no
radical religious program.  Society could not be reformed through
drastic measures; rather 
          With whatever religious institution a modern man
     may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards
     orthodoxy.  
          Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and
     accept no Principle as a substitute.
          Let him restore to God the thunder.
          Let him resist the usurpation of the Godhead by
     the soft modern version of the Christ, and try to keep
     the Christ for what he professed to be: the Demigod who
     came to do honor to the God.
     
     Ironically, whereas Mencken detested Fundamentalist
appropriations of the "bloodiest parts" of the Old Testament,
Ransom encouraged it as a healthy understanding of the
incomprehensibility of God and nature.  

V.  Conclusion
     When Mencken sat down to review God Without Thunder he found
its main thesis to be "perfectly sound....[T]he current effort to
reconcile science and religion...can only result in reducing
religion to the shabby level of Rotarianism.  Either Christianity
is true or it is not true." And if Christianity is true, then
certainly the thundering God of the Old Testament is far superior
to the "pallid made-in-Greece Gods that infest the New Testament
or any of the feeble abstractions invented by scientists eager to
retain their respectability without actually getting on their
knees." This missed Ransom's central point that even the
secular scientific community has joined in the established
religion of scientific naturalism.  Mencken failed to see that
Ransom was claiming that all human societies have established
"myths" to account for the hows and whys of reality--myths that
explain the universe and humanity's place within it.  
     But while Mencken's scientific rationalism blinded him to
his own reliance upon such myths, it also enabled him to see the
flaw in Ransom's argument.  In trying to save religion from the
ravages of science, Ransom had turned it into myth totally
divorced from fact.  Mencken pointed out that "literature, when
it is imaginative, does not pretend to record a series of
objective facts, but revealed religion always does." Ransom's
religion ends up as a conscious creation of the human mind--and
what devout believer would be willing to worship a figment of his
own imagination?
     In a similar way, Mencken missed the point of Ransom's
agrarian sympathies.  Mencken himself agreed that industrialism
needed to be carefully restrained, and allowed that the pre-
industrial South had produced a much richer culture than the New
South, but argued that agrarianism was merely a pipe-dream; what
is needed is to grapple with present realities.  Ransom,
however, argued that the only way to recover a richer, more
humane culture is to recover the essential character of that
older culture, and transplant it into the soil of the modern
world--uprooting the scientific-industrial monstrosity and moving
it to a side plot where it belonged.
     The literary productions of H. L. Mencken and John Crowe
Ransom in 1930 reflected the intensity of the cultural crisis of
the 1920s and 30s.  In the void created by the increasing
disintegration of Protestantism as the American civil religion,
these two literary figures attempted to sketch the contours of
religion's place in society.  In an odd way they embodied a
secular fundamentalist/modernist debate.  While neither man had
any place for traditional religion, Ransom at least defended the
fundamentalist creed that God's ways are higher than man's ways--
while Mencken utilized the weapons of anthropology and biblical
criticism to undermine the place of religion altogether.  Ransom
insisted upon the centrality of myths in shaping the way in which
we view our world--and claimed that not even science was exempt
from myth-making.  Not that Ransom cared especially for religion;
rather he cared passionately for the aesthetic life, and found
that the scientific cult of industrialism stifled the inner life
and dehumanized much of human existence.  Unlike Mencken, Ransom
was willing to consider going back to an older world in order to
recapture the aesthetic quality of a more humane life.  
     Yet the crisis of the 1920s passed--not because any issues
had been resolved, but because by the end of World War II the
scientific-industrial world had convinced most people that it
actually was capable of standing alone, and any thought of
subordinating science to religion or poetry were distant dreams
of the past.  Virtually all forms of traditional religion (both
modernist and fundamentalist) had adapted themselves to the
syncretistic religion of technology and consumerism.  After all,
if religion is what Ransom suggested--namely, the way in which we
conceive of the world and our place in it--then virtually all
Americans could be called devotees of an industrial religion
which views science and technology as the primary sources of
blessing and happiness.  

Copyright   1997, All rights reserved.