[Tate grounds] his quite various speculations on art, letters, society, manners, morals, and human behavior … on a total view of man; that is to say, on religion, and specifically the view of man given in the classical-Christian tradition. Thus, Tate can set forth an ethics, an aesthetics, a concept of proper social order, and an idea of history that are thoroughly consonant with one another. Tate's writings do not, to be sure, give off the reek of the conscious system builder. But from any thoughtful reading of his works in verse and prose, of his fiction and his nonfiction, there arises the sense of a remarkable coherence. (pp. 686-87)

[Tate] located and articulated his essential ideas while he was still a very young man. Think of that remarkable essay "Religion and the Old South." The ideas contained in this seminal essay state, in what anthropologists and other scholars...