The nature and proper end of man are central to any discussion not only of whether a certain culture is weakening, but also of whether such a culture is worth preserving

Richard Weaver, the Gospel, 

and the Restoration of Culture

by Bradley G. Green

Somewhere along the way, many twentieth-century pilgrims have found inspiration and insight from the pen of Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963).[1] More than one friend cites Weaver’sIdeas Have Consequences when they recount their own intellectual journey, and when they describe when and how they began really to “think.” Best known as the author of Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), Weaver was a southerner who has had a significant impact on political thought in the United States in the twentieth-century. Born and raised in North Carolina, Weaver did his undergraduate work at the University of Kentucky. A leftist-liberal during his undergraduate days in the 1920s, after a year of graduate work at Kentucky, he moved on to Vanderbilt for graduate study (early 1930s). During his time at Vanderbilt, Weaver was greatly influenced by the Nashville Agrarians (often called the Southern Agrarians, or the Vanderbilt Agrarians), which included such persons as Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and his thesis advisor, John Crowe Ransom. Weaver would eventually do doctorate work at Louisiana State University (1940-1943), where he would write his dissertation on southern culture (eventually published posthumously as The Southern Tradition at Bay). By the time he began doctoral work, Weaver had become disillusioned with the Left, and had become a southern partisan. A conservative, agrarian, southern framework would be the general framework in which he would work during the remainder of his life. Weaver would go on to a teaching career in English at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1944 until his death in 1963.

Christian theological themes are found implicitly and explicitly in the work of Richard M. Weaver. Weaver would eventually see his work as a “restoration of culture,” or of civilization, and he relies extensively on Christian themes as he writes about the restoration of culture. In this essay I seek to explore how the following Christian theological themes appear consistently in Weaver’s work, and how these themes serve as the necessary substructure or precondition of this intellectual program. The key themes I explore are: creation, the Logos, faith seeking understanding, and eschatology and the importance of history. I argue that Weaver’s use of such Christian themes are both too extensive and intensive to be simply peripheral to his thought. However, I ultimately argue that there is something key missing in Weaver’s use of such themes—the Christian gospel—and I try to elucidate the ways in which this lacuna may weaken an otherwise very penetrating criticism of modernity, and may hamper an otherwise brilliant attempt at the restoration of a meaningful culture.

Christian Themes in the Thought of Richard Weaver >>>>

• Faith Seeking Understanding ...
• Past and Future: History and Eschatology ...
• Why the Past Matters: The Importance of History ...
• Where Are We Headed? The Importance of Eschatology ...
• Richard Weaver and The Gospel ...
• Creation ...
• Logos ...
• ...

Weaver was spot on to recognize—even if he never quite said it this way—that the verities of the Christian tradition were the necessary “first things” in his own hopes of restoring culture. Weaver appears to have maybe stumbled over the rock of offense, for indeed the gospel is at its heart offensive, and strikes at our pride. Perhaps it was simply too difficult to think that a fleshly, first-century Jew from the backwater town of Nazareth—a particular man, of a particularrace, in a particular time—was, and is, the key to the restoration of culture. Weaver’s own southern tradition—at its best—has admirably paid attention to particulars, and appropriately so. In his attempt to outline the possibility of a restoration of culture, I suspect Weaver ignored the central particularity which is the key to the whole affair—a particular first century Jew. Ideas indeed do have consequences, but sometimes the key is found by giving attention to the particulars, and it is by giving attention to a particular first century carpenter’s son that we find the true key to the restorations of persons—and of culture.
Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org