Russell Kirk and the Moral Imagination

The first time I heard Russell Kirk speak, I was surprised. Having read some of his hard-hitting essays on the modern age's malaise, I was prepared to hear an impassioned orator. On the contrary he presented a benign appearance, and he spoke quietly, making his points in the manner of a man sitting down with a few friends to share some insights that he found helpful and that he believed might be of some assistance to them. Not that what he had to say, without fanfare, was any less pithy and to the point. Although he was friendly and approachable, his manner was perfectly characterized by William F. Buckley when he referred to Kirk's "warm aloofness which is his trademark." Russell Kirk was a gentle man.

Reading Kirk's books and essays will richly reward anyone trying to make sense of the last half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, whether the reader finds himself sympathetic to or at odds with Kirk. Both the title and subtitle of his autobiography, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (2002), are apt. Our era sees the sword as primarily symbolic although at one time it was the basic weapon of individual warriors in mortal combat. What more powerful weapon could be wielded in the clash of ideas than the "sword of imagination"? The chapter titles and subtitles testify to the author's penetrating insights and mordant sense of humor: "The Dead Alone Give Us Energy," "When Public Schools Taught Discipline," "A Penurious Scholar at the Cow College," "In the Educational Waste Land," "Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus on the Sand Dunes," "The Conservative Mind Breaches the Walls," "War with Behemoth University," "Among Illiberal Men of Letters," "Flannery O'Connor: Notes by Humpty-Dumpty," "Right Reason Does Not Pay," and "From the Night Club of the Holy Ghost to the Shroud of Turin," to name a few. Those who perhaps have pegged Kirk as a conservative in order to dismiss him may well be surprised at his disdain for ideology as such and his glowing admiration for such figures as Norman Thomas, Dick Gregory, and Eugene McCarthy.

Russell Kirk was a happy warrior who enjoyed taking on adversaries whom he characterized as "the intellectual goons of the latter half of the twentieth century." He was proud of his roots. Not only is history important, Kirk insists, but one's individual history and sense of place are critical to understanding who one is and what life is about. In looking back over his life it was "in the heat of combat," Kirk writes, paraphrasing Edmund Burke, that he "learned how to love what ought to be loved and how to hate what ought to be hated." Two of his favorite phrases were "the permanent things" and "the moral imagination." Those two phrases were Kirk's way of settling one of the oldest philosophical conundrums dating back to Plato and Aristotle—that of the One and the Many. For Kirk the moral imagination was the One which gave meaning and coherence to the permanent things, the Many. These phrases give us a clue to what was most important to him and join all that he said or wrote during a long and productive life. Perhaps that is why it is a mistake to label him a conservative—or even why, finally, no label will suffice for this brilliant multifaceted man. Many have tried. In a genuine effort to understand him, one writer has said that Kirk was a "Cavalier and Covenanter" and a "Tory and Puritan" in his temperament.

A prosaic summary of Kirk's origins would include that he was born of working-class parents in the small town of Plymouth, Michigan, less than a month before Armistice Day. From his mother he learned as a child to appreciate Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper. By the time he was seven he intuitively felt that the answer to the question "Who am I?" was more than just the reflection he saw in a mirror; he...