Religion and [i]The Conservative Mind[/i]

To know The Conservative Mind is to know the mind of its
remarkable author, Russell Kirk. He was an old-fashioned
man—courtly, retiring, serene, formal in dress and manner—
whose view of the world, proclaimed by every photograph, was
traditional, anti-modern, even obscure. Captured in his study, his
library, his home, surrounded by pens, books, family, and friends,
he looks every bit the paternalist man of letters, a figure unmistakably
of the past. To critics, he was a sort of mid-western Evelyn
Waugh, tweedy, fustian, fond of a dram, a contramundum crank.
To friends, he was a man who knew the good life and lived it to the
full, preaching domestic joys and practicing them with panache.
To the unpersuaded, Kirk’s social poise was social pose. By dress
and manner, by truculent toryism, he mocked a world he did not
understand. To the persuaded, he understood the world too well
and wanted nothing to do with it. Certainly his conservatism
seemed at times compounded of complaint and cussedness. Mass
production and mass consumption, history forgotten, the old
ways of faith at a loss: if this was modernity it was not for him. His
home at Piety Hill, with its simpler commerce of family life,
seasonal change, sacramental connection to the land, was more to
his taste. In one sense, critics who dismiss him as a right-wing
type, a persona, get the point yet miss it entirely. He played a role
he wrote himself, actor and lines in perfect harmony. As for the
part, he was proud to call himself Catholic, gentleman, husband,
father, a man of letters, friend. These were badges of honor, not
(as the psychologizers would have it) social masks concealing
some more authentic self. “Manners maketh man”” said William of
Wykeham in the fourteenth century. The style is the thing itself.
Kirk embodied the dictum. Of all men, he was mannerly, courteous,
self-consciously gallant. At the heart of that manner, at the
core of his private being, was religion. When the pen was laid down
and the last letter written, he remained a man of God.

Such was the author. What of the book? Here the story is
different. If Kirk the Man and Kirk the Manner were one and the
same, The Conservative Mind is a volume where appearances
deceive. Things are never quite as they seem. It is shot through
with irony and surprise, with odd juxtaposition and unexpected
insight. In the first place, it is paradoxical: here is a book so oldfashioned
as to be positively original. The Conservative Mind
(perhaps the conservative movement as a whole) is the philosophical
equivalent of one of those grandfather shirts that have
come into fashion once again: it is so uncool that it is suddenly all
the rage. In 1953, even more so today, the book’s anti-modernity
was sufficiently complete as almost to be itself modern. It mocks
conventions, derides received opinion, strikes dissenting attitudes.
Its rejection of the current is itself au courant. The book
was also novel in the confidence of its conservatism. In 1953, after
a Hitler, an Auschwitz, a war to end war, it required more than
usual self-assurance to bring together Edmund Burke and John
Adams, Walter Scott and John Calhoun, Cardinal Newman and
William Lecky, and to propose that such superannuated worthies
had anything to say to a world whose enormities they could never
have imagined. The reaction, he surely knew, would be laughter
among the chattering classes. (Another irony, by the way: As they
talked and talked, those self-same chatterers undermined their
own claim that the point of the death camps was that all chatter
must cease. The old moral categories no longer hold, they said.
God is dead. The Word made Flesh has been incinerated. Speech
falls silent, unable to utter the unutterable, name the unnamable.
Never has the inadequacy of language been more articulately
urged.) How could Kirk’s miscellaneous assembly make sense of
Dachau, explain Hiroshima? Yet he persevered with them, offering
a new generation old truths. That took elan, a dash of
intellectual bella figura. And notice a final paradox. The very
dustiness of Kirk’s style marked him as an original. Simply as
literature, as mid-twentieth century prose, The Conservative
Mind has an oddly Victorian feel: it breathes the language of
waistcoat and fob in an age of T-shirt and exposed navel. The
authorial voice—gnomic, orotund, erudite, vaguely dyspeptic
and world-weary—could pass for Froude or Macaulay, Gladstone
or Disraeli. Here was not the received pronunciation of Michigan
State University, the way a professor is supposed to talk in a staterun
college of agriculture.¹ In an age of dry academic prose Kirk
had panache; in an era of specialization, his learning was broad
and deep. The Conservative Mind was thus more innovative than
critics allowed. It was also funnier, livelier, better informed. No
wonder he found the modern university, and the modern literary
world, unwelcoming. He was too big, they too small; he too
protean, they too neat. For all his erudition, Kirk did not fit the
standard liberal arts college, a place full of conformist nonconformists,
every opinion as standard as a shop-bought loaf of
bread. Kirk was genuinely nonconformist, a scholarly one-off.
Most selection committees would have thrown up their hands and
raced for the door.

What, then, to make of this singular man and book? What
were his fixed principles, the ideas that make sense of the rest?
This symposium examines some of them but let me suggest that,
of them all, religion was most important. Faith, specifically the
Christian faith, under-girded his conservatism, providing the
foundation for other notions—property, order, respect for the
law, family life—that filled out the rest of his philosophy. But
there was nothing simple or straightforward about it. Religion
operates variously throughout the book, sometimes providing a
ground for moral confidence, sometimes for doubt, sometimes
revealing man’s moral mastery, sometimes his depravity, sometimes
opening to us the knowability of the world, sometimes
locking us more deeply in its mystery. It was Kirk’s perfect
metaphor, the idea that contained the totality of his mind. Yet this
versatility could also be weakness. Sometimes he seems to ask too
much of it. Subtle distinctions begin to seem more like discrepancies
as Kirk struggled to contain the complexity of his own
intellectual impulses. A man of faith, he was not simple-minded.
This was as it should be. The perplexities in his piety, finally
resolved, make it more persuasive as a philosophical and practical
commitment.

The complexity has biographical roots. Religion played an
unusual role in Kirk’s thought, also in his life. Unbaptized as a
child, his growing up was far from churchy. His parents held to a
vague, undogmatic spiritualism, the kind of empty numinosity
that nowadays finds echo in new age movements but then lay
halfway between deism and watered down biblicism. They might
have approved of Clement Attlee’s clipped response to Christianity:
“”like the social teaching: no time for the mumbo-jumbo.”” (At
the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, precisely the opposite might
be said of Kirk. If by “”social teaching”” is meant sentimental
humanitarianism—doles justified in the name of the via dolorosa,
the Nicene Creed reduced to a commitment to niceness—he
wanted nothing to do with it.) There were plenty of ghost stories
when he was young, but not much Holy Ghost. Auto-didacticism
saved him. Gradually, then more urgently, he discovered deeper
truths in Christianity through extensive reading, especially the
early fathers of the church. Finally, he embraced Catholicism,
being received into the Church, after desultory and pro forma
instruction, in 1964. As with T.S. Eliot, so with Kirk: “”he became
a Christian on discovering he already was one—a very common
type of conversion.””² The Catholic Church remained home for
the rest of his life, not without alarms but never with any anxiety
that his decision had been wrong. Kirk gave some account of his
journey in The Sword of Imagination, a quirky memoir of a “”half
century of literary conflict”” in which revelation and reserve are
dispensed in roughly equal measure. Writing in the third person—
a device designed to keep unnecessary revelation at a distance yet
all the more revealing for that—he described a bookish conversion,
a scholar’s realization that Catholicism was, simply, true.
Like Hilaire Belloc, his faith owed nothing to enthusiasm or
evangelical fervor, to sudden epiphanies, to flashing moments of
truth:

Therefore it was on no road to Damascus that Russell Kirk…came
to believe in the Apostle’s Creed. His was an intellectual
conversion, if conversion it may be called. After Kirk had read for
years about ultimate questions, and reflected upon them, late in
1953 he obtained formal instruction in Catholic doctrine
from…Father Hugh O’Neill. The learned priest was somewhat
surprised to learn that Kirk’s reason for seeking him out was
merely the yearning of intellectual curiosity: Kirk desired to have
the principle dogmata explained to him, that he might truly
understand…It was the intellectual love of God that worked
upon Russell Kirk; he never became an enthusiast, but the
doctors of the church persuaded him…Reading the [early]
fathers, Augustine and Gregory and Ambrose especially, [he]
gave up his previous spiritual individualism… “”The calm judgment
of the world is that those men cannot be good who, in any
part of the world, cut themselves off from the rest of the world.””
Therefore the Church had been raised up.³

This debt to patristics is suggestive, recalling the experience of
converts such as Newman and Christopher Dawson whose discovery
of the church was also, at root, historical. “”The Fathers
made me Catholic,”” Newman once wrote to John Pusey; and, on
another occasion, “”To be deep in history is to cease to be
Protestant.””⁴ Kirk could have written the same thing. Likewise, he
shared Dawson’s sense that, a commitment to Christianity once
made, it was either Rome or nothing. Dawson’s description of
Newman applies neatly to Kirk:

There were but two paths—the way of faith and the way of
unbelief, and as the latter led through the halfway house of
Liberalism to Atheism, the former led through the half way house
of Anglicanism to Catholicism.⁵

The logic of conversion was the logic of the church.
Yet why did the fathers lead Kirk to Catholicism? At one level,
it was because of the persuasiveness of their case. Religion was a
fact, a reality, a truth not to be wished away. The Catholic form
of it, he came to believe, was vindicated again and again by the
calm judgment of the world. Religion formed societies and held
them together, it gave shape to man’s deepest desires, it remained
the one reality through time and space that seemed to express and
explain the infinite variety of things. That was a powerful evidence
of the truth of something. With Newman and Dawson, Kirk was
led to Catholicism by the notion that all history, properly understood,
points in the direction of the Church. Yet Kirk’s acceptance
of the argument was rooted in something more than its intrinsic
merit. At the risk of pyschologizing a philosophical commitment,
his embrace of the Church had to do with its authoritativeness, its
confidence, its splendid finality. When Rome spoke, the matter
was over. There was a touch of Bossuet in his enthusiasm for a
church that spoke language of unbendable conviction. In a
disordered world, it represented order; in an age of chaos—in the
chaos of every age—it remained serene. Catholicism for Kirk was
not the question, it was the answer. “”Jesus Christ will teach you,
in His own words and in those of His apostles, all the things that
make a state happy,”” Bossuet proposed in Politics Drawn from the
Very Words of Holy Scripture. “”His gospel makes men all the
more fit to be good citizens on this earth in that it teaches them
to make themselves thereby worthy to become citizens of Heaven.””⁶
Kirk admired and envied such certainties. The Rock of Ages was
the rock of Peter.

#page#

The search for certitude is a reasonable impulse. “”You mount
to heaven in one flight,”” says Pierre to ecstatic Violaine in
Claudel’s L’Annonce Faite a Marie. “”But I need, just in order to
mount a bit, the work of a cathedral and its deep foundation.””⁷
Most of us are with Pierre: we cannot do it alone. Weak and
uncertain, we crave the assurance of doctrine, authority, community,
tradition. Kirk certainly did. His admiration for John Henry
Newman, for example, owed much to their shared hostility
towards private judgment in religion and politics—that is to say,
towards liberal individualism.⁸ Yet the assurances of certainty
come at a price. With Kirk, it sometimes seems, the need for fixed
principle introduces a degree of conditionality into his Catholicism,
as if certainty itself was the object of his devotion, the
church only its secondary instrument. Notice how he tended to
admire Rome when it acted as a bulwark against modernism but
reproached it when it took the modernist side. Such selectivity is
called Protestantism. There was still a bit of the kirk in Kirk.
Consider, for example, his defense of papal infallibility. He
approached the teaching in an unfussy, practical, non-theological,
down-to-earth way. “”This doctrine, so much assailed by
modernists,”” he wrote, “”was a necessary fiction, like the English
legal doctrine that the king can do no wrong, or [the notion that
Supreme Court] decisions are final…An ultimate power of decision
on questions of faith and morals must repose somewhere;
church councils cannot be meeting perpetually; so it is simply in
the nature of things that papal infallibility must be sustained by
the church.””⁹ “”Necessary fiction”” sounds more like Tory pragmatism
than Petrine ecclesiology. The irony is obvious: here was a
reformation defense of a counter-reformation doctrine. And the
conditionality continues. Kirk had no patience for Catholics who
claimed religious sanction for political revolution, finding the
sight of Marxisant clerics in battle fatigues especially gruesome.
Nor had he any time for liberalism within the Church either as
principle or policy. He thought Pope John XXIII foolish when he
entertained “”hopes of gaining concessions from the masters of
Kremlin”” and was unsurprised when it resulted in a million votes
for the Italian Communists in 1963. By contrast, he admired Paul
VI as “”by nature and instinct a man of order,”” a pope to steady the
listing barque of Peter.¹⁰ As it turned out, the ship was already
holed below the waterline, not even Paul able to bale it out. Kirk
thought the Second Vatican Council a disaster that left the
Church broken, demoralized, and abandoned. “”When a Catholic
falls away,”” he quoted Samuel Johnson as saying, “”he falls into
nothing,”” the line reworking Chesterton’s remark that a man who
ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing but in
everything. That was the fate of American Catholicism by the end
of Kirk’s life.¹¹ The note of lamentation for a lost faith, and
contempt for a modern stripping of the altars, is plain:

The typical Catholic layman resented prolonged tampering with
the traditional liturgy; he was alarmed by the intrusion of radical
doctrines into Catholic homilies; he disliked the awkward
English of the new “”priest’s Bible,”” so inferior to translations
previously employed. A few more years of “”renewal,”” it seemed
to the Kirks early in the Seventies, would leave American
Catholicism shattered to its foundations.¹²

The insight was prophetic. Mercifully he did not live to see more
recent calamities.

It would be easy to make a case, then, that, with Kirk,
conservatism came first, Catholicism second. The value of faith—
any faith—seems instrumental, a way of promoting harmony and
discouraging dissent. He seems more interested in the contentments
of religion than its contents, as if any transcendent tradition
is to be preferred over atheism, agnosticism, or enlightenment
rationalism. Perhaps so: but this represents a surprisingly
frail and provisional allegiance for one convinced that the Church
speaks with absolute authority in matters of divine truth. It
prompts ancillary questions. What exactly is being conserved in
his conservative Catholicism? What is so powerful about tradition
that it requires such vigorous defense? Part of the answer lies
in historical imagination. Kirk saw value in tradition precisely
because it was traditional. Faith was handed down; it was made
precious by the passage of time; it derived wisdom from the
murmured prayers of the unforgotten dead. Somehow its very
survival sanctified it. This is not a poor argument—quite the
opposite—but it needs to be handled with care. A sense of the
presence of the past, the dead not departed but at our side, is one
of the most important truths of Christianity. Yet is also capable
of misleading the unwary. It can bleed into a kind of cultural
homesickness, into a too easy requiem for some vanished historical
Eden. The Conservative Mind is shot through with this kind
of regret. Kirk mourned the loss of “”everything venerable in
England, from open fires to church bells,””¹³ almost as if offering
not only religion as cultural nostalgia but cultural nostalgia as
religion, the past itself fetishized and made an object of worship.
To be sure, there were good Christian and Tory grounds for this.
Kirk thought one component of conservatism was veneration
itself—a spirit of humility, simplicity, trust, modesty, self-restraint;
all the things, in fact, missing in modernity. But sometimes
the spirit of veneration can become detached from the object of
veneration so that religion turns into religiosity, into vague,
undogmatic spiritualism—all numinosity and no luminosity. This
may serve a number of purposes but it is theologically unpersuasive.
It seems to return Kirk to his childhood years, the son of wellmeaning
social ethicists. Like Claudel’s Pierre, we still need the
deeper foundations of that cathedral to help us mount to heaven.
The spirit of veneration is important but it needs to be materialized.
Otherwise it will keep us all in moral nonage.

This difficulty needs to be faced. The charge of religious
conditionality is surprisingly hard to shake. Strongly anti-utilitarian,
Kirk seems to share the utilitarianism he reprobates in others,
reducing religion to sacred glue holding together the secular
order. The Conservative Mind, critical of the Benthamite view of
man as embodied appetite, often presents religion as itself one of
those appetites, a hunger whose satisfaction brings important
benefits to the individual and the world. Again and again the
language is of utility, of social value, of good consequences. One
is reminded of those surveys that appear from time to time
claiming that people of faith live longer, lead happier lives, fulfill
the American dream—as if, somehow, the surest way of postponing
the afterlife is to hope for it. Kirk had little time for that kind
of blather. Sometimes, though, his praise of religion came uncomfortably
close to it. Notice the description he offers of Alexis de
Tocqueville in The Conservative Mind. Here was a man, he tells
us, who “”knew that a democratic people with religious faith will
respect private rights and the portion of posterity far more
reverently than a democratic people who have material success as
their goal.””¹⁴ Or consider his Tory view of natural law: “”the laws
of nature, ordained by Divine wisdom, make no provision for
sharing goods without regard for individual energies or merits…the
true natural rights of men…are equal justice, security of labor and
property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits
of orderly society.””¹⁵ Or think of his belief that only “”reverence
toward God and toward the prescriptive ways of men”” will save us
from anarchy.¹⁶ Condemning radicals who treated society “”as a
simple contraption to be managed on mathematical lines,”” he,
too, tended to see religion as, in part, a form of social management.
When the “”spirit of veneration”” is lost, “”so much sinks with
it.””¹⁷ “”In the church I see not the mystery of the incarnation,””
Napoleon once said, “”but the mystery of the social order.”” Kirk
sometimes came uncomfortably close to the same idea.

This complacent theodicy is nowhere more evident than in
The Conservative Mind’s treatment of Edmund Burke. Burke was
Kirk’s chief inspiration—the book is an extended anthem to him,
even when he is not directly under consideration—and the
influence was subtle and profound. For all the subtlety, however,
Burke’s “”great melody”” was occasionally flattened into something
too smug and well-fed, the head-patting paternalism of the Tory
squire:

Poverty, brutality, and misfortune are indeed portions of the
eternal order of things; sin is a terribly real and demonstrable
fact, the consequence of our depravity, not of erring institutions;
religion is the consolation for these ills, which can never be
removed by legislation or revolution. Religious faith makes
existence tolerable; ambition without pious restraint must end in
failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which
solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.¹⁸

Of all thinkers, and with obvious irony, this sounds closest to
Marx, whose disparagement of religion as the opium of the masses
was merely a variation on an earlier Benthamite or Burkean
theme. True, there were important differences. Marx deployed a
false anthropology (man as a mere materialist, no more than a
getter and spender) to sustain a false teleology (history as a class
struggle and an eventual proletarian triumph). He also relied on
shaky methodology. Arguing that ideas derive intelligibility from
the conditions they purport to explain, he fell into a circularity:
religion is reducible to economic necessity—he seems to claim—
because religion is reducible economic necessity. (Not only
circular, the argument was also self-refuting. If systems of thought
reflect contingencies of time and chance, ideas commanding no
respect as things in themselves, why should Marxism be exempt
from its own limitation?) Dismissing religion as the sacralizing of
mundane necessities, Marx misunderstood those necessities—
family, warmth, food, shared life—as constitutive of their own
simple holiness. To begin by excluding the sacred was to end by
discovering its absence. Kirk knew better. Insisting on religion’s
integrity, its reality as a thing-in-itself, he saw its deeper truths
revealed in the prosaic exigencies of ordinary life. His vision was
more authentically human and more historically plausible.

Still, puzzles demand solution and Kirk’s religion, in The
Conservative Mind and elsewhere, remains a riddle. Is it possible
to rescue him from a kind of spiritual Benthamism, an unduly
instrumental account of faith? To do so requires the construction
of a conservatism that upholds utility but not utilitarianism, one
that sees usefulness not as a social engineer’s calculation but as
part of a divinely ordered scheme. That in turn requires some
account of Kirk’s core religious principles and the way in which
they shaped his political thought. What were those principles?
And how did he make the transition, philosophically, from soulcraft
to statecraft? The Conservative Mind offers some clues. Unfortunately,
he was not a systematic thinker: quite the opposite. His
project was to unsettle systems, to destroy ideology, to show the
dangers of theory removed from reality. The Conservative Mind
conveys that distrust of system in form as well as content, the book
being haphazard, quirky, and idiosyncratic: a series of selfcontained
essays more than a monograph. That said, there is a
spine holding the thing together. To be more precise, two central
ideas form the backbone and it is to these we should now turn.

II.

The first of these ideas is the doctrine of original sin. The second
is Kirk’s understanding of history. Let us examine each. Human
depravity bulks large in The Conservative Mind. The book exhibits
a very Tory insistence on the reality of evil, the folly of schemes
of social and personal perfectibility, the inevitability of disappointment
in a world of corruption. Pessimism is never far from
the surface, as it was never far from the surface in his own life.
(Kirk thought of himself primarily as a Christian stoic. His best
writing reflects a conviction that the most perduring of the
permanent things is sorrow. We would not be human, he thought,
without “”the inescapable emotion of grief.””)¹⁹ Yet this apprehension
of man as an exile of Eden was not as gloomy as it sounds.
Indeed Kirk used it to justify a politics not of despair but of hope.
After all, to recognize the fall from grace was to recognize grace
itself as salvifically necessary. Awareness of human weakness was
the beginning of wisdom. No man-made city will last without the
foundation of faith. The point was well expressed by G.K.
Chesterton, a writer who appears only once in The Conservative
Mind (even then as a thinker “”outside the true line of descent in
conservative ideas””) but was nonetheless a writer Kirk much
admired.²⁰ In his book Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton examined
two seemingly similar dispositions: Greek nature-worship
and delight in the ordered cosmos, and Saint Francis’s enchantment
with the beauty and bounty of God’s world. Between them
lay a distinction. The first was, at root, a celebration of the self.
To assert the intelligibility of the cosmos was to assert the
intelligence of the perceiving participant in it. It was to applaud
the human capacity to decode, unaided, the deeper mystery and
meaning of order and chaos. The second was a hymn of praise to
creation itself and to the generosity of the Creator whose gift,
unbidden and undeserved, it is. Chesterton noticed a paradox.
The glorification of reason, which is ultimately a form of narcissism,
always ends in unreason. It leads ineluctably to reigns of
terror, to five year plans, to smashing of statues. Thus Chesterton:

The Greeks…started out with the idea of something splendidly
obvious and direct: the idea that if a man walked straight ahead
on the head road of reason and nature, he could come to no harm;
especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened
and intelligent. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone
enough to illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends
upon this fallacy… The wisest men in the world set out to be
natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world [the worship
of the sun] is the very first thing they did…The truth is that
people who worship health cannot remain healthy. When Man
goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he
manages somehow to put his nose out of joint; and that in
accordance with something much deeper in human nature than
nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery
of that deeper thing…that constituted the conversion to Christianity.
There is a bias in man like the bias in a bowl; and
Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and
therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the
saying, but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news
brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.²¹

For Kirk, too, to understand the fall was to see it, and not in any
antinomian way, as a kind of liberation from self. “”Original sin and
aspiration toward the good are part of God’s design,”” he wrote,
one bound up with the other.²² Alone of doctrines, it made sense
of the rest, replacing rationalist optimism, naive and fatuous, with
Christian hope, humbly confident that the old Adam, sin, would
be crushed by the new Adam, Christ. This was not to disparage
rationality. Unlike Luther, Kirk did not think reason “”the devil’s
whore,”” a seductive mistress. Reason-worship was the problem,
not reason. Kirk resembled Michael Oakeshott (to give one
example of many thinkers in the conservative anti-idealist tradition)
in his hostility to rationalism untempered by empiricism.
Liberal experimentalism unrestrained by history and tradition
was doomed to fail. Forgetting flawed human nature, the reasonworshipper
becomes a sort of fundamentalist of the mind, convinced
that intellect alone holds the key to wisdom. Eager for
certitude, for system, for procrustean neatness, he forecloses on
the mysterious, the unknowable, the things on heaven and earth
undreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy. The soul gets a dusty answer
when hot for certainty—even religious certainty. To understand
man’s first disobedience was to understand the boundaries, not
the boundlessness, of the human capacity to know.

#page#

This paradox—epistemological limitation as liberation—holds
the first clue to the importance of religion for Kirk. The second
is his understanding of history itself as the stage on which the story
of sin and redemption is played out. History has meaning,
intelligibility, but—precisely because we are limited in vision and
wisdom—its truths do not yield themselves to easy apprehension.
This, of course, is the central problem of faith. We look for the
finger of God in history, Newman wrote, and we look in vain. How
can we be sure to read the signs aright? How can we be sure they
are signs? Why presume that history has lessons to teach of any
kind, let alone Godly ones? These are troublesome questions and
Kirk honestly admitted to difficulty in answering them. To read
The Conservative Mind is to encounter an author in two minds
about the prescriptive significance of the past. Indeed his attitude
to history reveals a deeper dualism running through his thought,
an uneasy balancing of the empirical and the idealist, the physical
and the metaphysical. On the one hand, he was committed to
history as descriptive of the distinctiveness and multifariousness
of human experience. It chronicled the particular, the private, the
unique, the unrepeatable, the contingent—in other words, precisely
those realities that reveal man’s moral agency, his freedom
to make and mold his own world. That gave it especial claim to
respect, almost veneration. But to recognize uniqueness and
unrepeatabilty is to make a dangerous bargain with history. It
estops the very possibility of prescriptive and predictive lessons
at the very moment when the past seems ready to teach them. If,
as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “”the past is a foreign country—
they do things differently there,”” then history’s very historicity, its
completed action, is the point. Its lesson is that there is no lesson.
Kirk resisted such a notion but his belief in historical contingency
pointed him, willy-nilly, in that direction. As with original sin, he
intuited, history forces us to be humble, to abandon narcissistic
presentism, to leave behind the search for novelty, to realize there
is nothing new under the sun. A line of W.B. Yeats comes to mind.
He, too, saw history as terrain radically different from our own,
a closed, scarcely knowable world that demanded almost mystical—
certainly non-rational—engagement. Once, looking over
the landscape of Ireland, he thought of its peasantry as “”a people,
a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by
stories and poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a
past of great passion which can still awaken the heart to imaginative
action.”” Here was the world of mystery, local truth, private
memory: the past made present but also closed off to outsiders.
Kirk, too, understood history as the language of particular
experience. To speak that past-centered language is to resist grand
design, easy abstraction, overblown metaphysics. It is to prefer
the customary, the conventional, the idiosyncratic—experience
itself—as source of wisdom and mode of understanding. Claes
Ryn has written recently that “”ideological universalism that
scorns historically formed societies is a potential source of
unending war and great [disaster].””²³ That is as good a summary
as any of Kirk’s position. Humility is the key, hubris the danger.
To know history is to know the limitation of knowledge itself.

Yet this poses a problem. To prefer experience over theory,
the real over the ideal, is all very well, but that preference must
itself be cloaked in theory to become intelligible or persuasive.
Even empiricists must make sense of sense; even they cannot
presume it will make sense on its own. To deny abstraction is itself
an abstraction; to reject historical laws amounts to historical law.
Kirk saw the contradiction. Distrusting a priorism was for him an
a priori position. To disparage ideology was his ideology. This
seems to injure his enterprise from the beginning—his own form
of original sin, as it were—rendering it incoherent and absurd. He
seems to look in two directions, insisting on the pastness of the
past—””they do things differently there””—yet also on the permanence
of its truths. To propose the latter is to deny that history,
precisely as history, has any lessons at all. The past simply
becomes an earlier version of a truth already known, an illustration
of some insight achieved by philosophy or theology, history
as a catalogue of examples, not itself the source of wisdom.

Kirk’s answer was to resort to a notion of unchanging human
nature, of eternal verities providentially enfolded in the endless
particularities of time. For all its suspicion of metaphysics, The
Conservative Mind is a paean to providence, a song of praise to
grand design. The thinkers Kirk admired reasoned their way to
reason’s limits and sensed that sense alone made little sense. It is
not an easy epistemology to carry off. Certainly the language of
the book is loftily theodician. “”History is the gradual revelation of
a supreme design, often shadowy to our unblinking eyes, but
subtle, resistless and beneficent…God makes history through the
agency of man;””²⁴ the “”conservation of society [is] based upon the
grand design of piety;””²⁵ the “”foundation of human welfare is
Divine providence;””²⁶ society “”cures its own maladies, or effects
its own adjustments, by a process at once natural and Providential;””
²⁷ a “”divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging
an eternal chain of duty of right and wrong which links great and
obscure, living and dead…Political problems at bottom, are
religious and moral problems.””²⁸ “”Providence is the proper instrument
for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance
of the real tendency of providential social forces;””²⁹ it “”acts
through the instincts and intuitions of our feeble flesh, [demonstrating]
that religion and politics are inseparable, that the decay
of one must produce the decay of the other.””³⁰ Examples need not
be multiplied. We are not mere individuals, each assertion seems
to claim, but exist, rather, as participants in a set of divinely
ordained associations—the family, the community, the nation,
the state, the communion of saints itself—that remove us from
our baser selves and make us more authentically human. The
clamor of history, impossible to hear unless the soul be properly
attuned to it, is not a cacophony but harmony, a soul-sweet sound.
The Conservative Mind takes its stand with both the mess and the
music of history.

How does Kirk come to this balance? Recall his mid-western
youth and the sources he used to read himself towards conversion.
The springs of his faith were the early fathers, Augustine
especially. Later he came to Newman. From both, and from
others, he derived an understanding of history as theodrama, as
a God-play in which the news of original sin was trumped by the
greater news of the incarnation of Christ and the redemption of
man by His death and resurrection. Augustine was the key. From
him, Kirk saw the meaning of history, its central intelligibility, as
the relationship between the sacred and profane entangled in
human time. Two great cities—the City of God, the City of Man—
are perpetually at war and it is this conflict that gives History its
foundation and fulfillment. The earthly city “”ruled by love of self
and contempt of God”” cannot live at peace with the heavenly city
ruled “”by love of God, even to the contempt of self.”” The world
knows these cities not separately but radically entwined. Augustine
was no Manichean, of course. His entire project was antimanichean.
He saw history as a fusing of the sacred and profane,
the pagan and the godly. Salvation history does not exist separately
from secular history but is intimately bound up with it. This
has important eschatological implications. Since the two cities
“”have been running their course mingling one with the other
through all the changes of times from the beginning of the human
race, and shall so move on together until the end of the world,
when they are destined to be separated at the last judgment.””³¹

It is hard to overstate the importance of this vision in Kirk’s
thinking. Later Augustinian writers—think of Luther in the
sixteenth century or Bossuet in the seventeenth—saw the souldrama
in Augustine’s notion of history but missed his subtle
account of human, that is to say, historical, agency. Luther fell
into the manichean trap Augustine avoided. His dualism is too
dark, too dismissive of reason, too rooted in the Fall, too doubtful
of the human capacity to build an earthly Jersualem. Bossuet went
in the opposite direction: too confident in his own power to
interpret the divine will, too certain that the heavenly city could
be identified with precise historical epochs, too indifferent to
human agency and historical contingency, too cheerful, too naive,
too panglossian. Kirk avoided these dangers by reaching back to
the source—Augustine’s denial that the heavenly city is linked
with any particular era and his corollary assertion that every era,
every historical moment, is shot through with divine as well as
human significance. God’s encounter with Man exists in time and
through time and defines time itself. In that sense, the point of the
past is that it is not past. History is not completed action but living
reality. “”There are no dead,”” Kirk liked to say: there are the merely
departed.³² We are all full of ghosts, he quoted Lafcadio Hearn
with approval in The Sword of Imagination: “”all our emotions and
thoughts and wishes, however changing and growing through the
various seasons of life, are only compositions and recompositions
of the sensations and desires of other folk, most of them dead
people.””³³ It was an admirably Augustinian insight. From Augustine,
he derived the two pillars of his historical and moral
imagination. The first was insistence on cosmic harmony, the key
notion in Greek thought in the centuries before Christ, that was
later appropriated and baptized by the Early Fathers in the
centuries after. When Christopher Dawson described “”Augustine’s
profound sense of the aethetic beauty of order and [his] doctrine
that even the evil and suffering of the world find their aesthetic
justification in the universal harmony of creation”” he could have
been describing Russell Kirk. The second debt was to Augustine’s
transformation of that ancient necessitarianism into a radically
new commitment to human agency, to historical processes, to the
possibility of human freedom within a theodician schema. It is
precisely the latter that makes history possible: eternity enters
time not to destroy but to transform it, to give it intelligibility, to
make it mean something. To see the immutable in the mutable, the
permanent in the impermanent: this is not to deny but to affirm
the very solidity, the here-and-nowness, of history. The novelist
Andrew Klavan makes the point well: “”to be in this very moment
as if it were forever is not to stop the work of life but to begin it
afresh in celebration.””³⁴ That gracious intrusion of eternity into
time is precisely what time means.

We begin to see, then, the sources and significance of Kirk’s
vision of the past. He was Burkean but, before Burke, Augustinian.
History is more than a passing show, a meaningless succession
of empires and kings. It is revelation itself—the unceasing
reality of God’s life made visible in the lives of His people and in
His created order on earth. Hidden in the chaos, visible only when
passing clouds no longer obscure the sun, are harmony, stability,
and peace; the signs of God’s providential presence, the marks of
true religion and its greatest gifts. Order was thus not social
narcosis, a tyrant’s dream of popular sedation. Much more
profoundly, it was physical and metaphysical, earthly and heavenly,
a meeting of the present and the past, a communion of the
living and the dead. Burke understood this. So did Kirk. Interpreting
him in The Conservative Mind, he painted a beguiling vision
of true order:

Society is immeasurably more than a political device. Knowing
this, Burke endeavoured to convince his generation of the
immense complexity of existence, the “”mysterious incorporation
of the human race.”” If society is treated as a simple contraption
to be managed on mathematical lines—the Jacobins and the
Benthamites and most other radicals so regarded it—then man
will be degraded into something much less than a partner in the
immortal contract which unites the dead, the living, and those yet
unborn, the bond between God and man. Order in this world
is contingent upon order above.³⁵

This was not the Napoleonic or Marxist notion of religion as
nonsense for the natives. Kirk drew from Burke truths that Burke
left unsaid, truths, perhaps, he did not recognize himself. Notice
how he teases out incarnational implications from this “”immortal
contract.”” Kirk recognized the patrisitic and medieval sources of
Burke’s intuition that the very particularity of custom and tradition
contain glimpses of the divine, that the historical, the local,
and the contingent, without losing their uniqueness are part of
design, that the natural law is a participation in divine life.
Augustine and Aquinas were the true progenitors of Burke’s
wisdom. Synthesizing Aristotle and Augustine, St. Thomas offered
a theodicy that respected human freedom and creativity
while accommodating them within a scheme that acknowledged
structure, design and purpose. The natural and the supernatural
are inseparable as experienced truths. In the order of the universe,
he wrote in Summa Contra Gentiles, natural things tend to
participate in divine goodness as their ultimate end according to
their proper nature. To discover the proper place which man
occupies in the order of nature, to reflect this order in the human
soul, to find God’s intention in creating the world for man: that is
the task of the philosopher, theologian, historian, of every man.³⁶
“”This, then, is the ultimate perfection to which, according to
philosophers, a human soul can arrive,”” he repeated in De
Veritate, “”namely, that in it the whole order of the universe can be
described with all its causes. In this also all men find their ultimate
end, which will be realized in the vision of God.””³⁷ Kirk took this
as a motto. The scholastic schema of human freedom within
divine order was foundational to his philosophy of history, his
Christian Toryism, his understanding of society as communion of
the living, the dead, the still to be born. He admired Burke but only
because he was a Thomist.

This has a crucial consequence. The permanent things of
which Kirk so often spoke—order, harmony, even, for that
matter, sorrow and grief—are, first and foremost, things. The
gifts of the Creator—those “”bond[s] between God and Man”” he
calls them—come to us as lived, experienced, sacramental realities.
They are incarnated in persons, cultures, traditions, ways of
life. God participates in our life, and we in the mysterious life of
God, in the ordinary and extraordinary dailyness of living. Eternity
is not simply more time: it is all time. The alpha and omega,
the beginning and end, are made visible in history and through
history in Christ and in His mystical body which is the Church.
Here, to give the point practical expression, is Kirk’s description
of Burke’s notion of rights:

Burke’s natural right is the Ciceronian jus naturale, reinforced by
Christian dogma and English common law…[For him], natural
right is human custom conforming to Divine intent. He dislikes
having to define it closely; natural right is an Idea comprehended
only by the Divine intellect; precisely where it commences and
terminates, we are no fit judges. To think that divine law could
not operate without the sanction of our human legislation would
be presumptuous. But so far as we can delineate the features of
natural justice, it is the experience of mankind which supplies
our knowledge of the Divine; and the experience of the species
is taught to us not only through history, but through myth and
fable, custom and prejudice… Natural law can enter our
cognition only so far as it is embodied in social prescription or
charter. The rest remains a sealed book to us.³⁸

The source is Augustine through Aquinas. Eternity enters time
and transforms it. God is manifest in the material, the sacramental,
the down-to-earth. He is not outside history, directing its ends
as an omnicompetent conductor. He is inside history as its very
action and source.

This is a key turn in the argument. As we have seen, the
strongest objection to Kirk is that his veneration of the past, his
respect for the prescriptive claims of tradition, is a kind of moral
and cultural particularism, an elegant situation ethics that somehow
tips the balance in favor of gentlemanly behavior. “”What may
be right on one occasion and for one man may be unjust folly for
another man at a different time,”” he has Burke claim, evidently
approving the idea. On the face of it, this seems an alarming return
to that self-limiting historicism that understands behavior solely
by reference to time and place and thus explaining good and evil
also explains it away. It seems to empty history of moral moment
precisely by emphasizing the moment, not the morality. In fact,
the argument does no such thing. To propose that “”natural rights
do not exist independent of circumstances”” is not to provide
sanctuary for the relativist: quite the contrary. To urge prudence
in moral judgment is not to assert the plasticity of moral standards
themselves. (Indeed it is to claim that prudence itself is one of
those moral standards.) But Kirk’s point is not so much about
natural rights as about the way we grasp them circumstantially.
Circumstance is the tangible way we grasp intangible truth. We
know goodness by doing good; we know joy by being joyful. The
metaphysical, in other words, is not anti-physical, a denial of hereand-
nowness. It is what the physical means. To understand
incarnation is to understand that history, experience, and culture
derive worth not because Christ empties them but because,
emptying himself, he embraces them, revealing their true meaning
by revealing himself through them and with them and in them.
The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. He is amongst
us still. History is not over. It has hardly begun.

Seen in this way, Kirk’s Toryism is radically deeper than a
desire to hold on to the best of the past, some kind of nostalgia for
a world rapidly passing from sight. Rather, its attachment to
things—solid, tangible, sensible realities—is a commitment to
other-worldly truths made present in the world as we know and
grasp it today. Incarnation was at the heart of it. The conservative
mind resisted system but it held fast to certain principles—the
notion of divine providence, the importance of tradition and
order, distrust of “”sophisters and calculators,”” the inseparability
of property and freedom, hostility to rapid change, the belief that
political problems were at bottom religious and moral problems—
and these, for all their seeming grandeur, could only be
grasped in modest, prosaic, quotidian ways.³⁹ Material things
matter. They matter because they speak spiritual truth. Tangible
goods enshrine the intangible Good: property honestly earned
and happily handed down; family life nurtured in shared sorrows
and joys; trust bestowed in the shaking of hands; people hardy and
independent while honorably reliant on others—parents, children,
friends; local communities solving local problems, with the
state not as a first but a last resort; history cherished in landscapes,
churches, objects of beauty. All of society, all the doings
of man, have sacramental significance. Kirk’s project was to bring
that significance to bear on a generation who had either forgotten
or never known it.

#page#

Sacramentality—spiritual truth made known in material things,
material things newly understood as spiritually significant—
demands a radical re-ordering of mental categories. If Kirk’s first
debt was to Augustine, his second to Aquinas, his third to Burke,
his last was to Newman. Throughout The Conservative Mind, as
we have seen, an epistemology is a work, a way of knowing, a
crafting of experience into intelligibility, a shaping of multifariousness
into unity. Much of that epistemology derives from what
Newman called the “”Illative Sense.”” We have begun to realize, I
hope, that Kirk’s skepticism about rationalism was not irrational.
His prejudice in favor of prejudice was not prejudicial. His
defense of dogma was a form of humility, recognition of the
limitation of pure reason in the face of the deepest longings of
man. Some words from Newman, and Kirk’s understanding of
them, constitute the epistemological center of the book. They
provide a bridge between the various oppositions that define his
project—between the physical and metaphysical, the particular
and universal, the mutable and immutable. They repay quotation:

If, then, we do not form our lives, or even our sciences, upon a
logic of words or a museum of specimens, what exactly is the
source of our first principles, of our governing motives? “”It is the
mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings [Newman
writes in The Grammar of Assent], not any technical apparatus of
words and propositions. This power of judging and concluding,
when in its perfection, I call the Illative Sense.”” It is [Kirk
exegesizes] the combined product of intuition, instinct, imagination,
and long and intricate experience. Yet [it] is not infallible
in any man…We must correct our own particular Illative Sense
by reference to Authority; for Authority, which is a sort of filtered
collective Illative Sense, provides the purgation of individual
error. As Newman wrote in his essay on John Keble (1846),
“”Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the
Church; such is Antiquity; such are the words of the wise, such
are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical
memories, such are legal saws and state maxims; such are
proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.””⁴⁰

Thus through a hundred winding ways, we emerge from shadows
and types to reality. Long experience, intricate reasoning, even a
false start or two, will build us our cathedral. A man who is wise
will use it to mount to heaven.

The debt to Newman transforms the book. No longer simply
an expositor of patristic or scholastic thought, Kirk is now
involved in an encounter with ideas that have shaped modernity—
even post-modernity—in the last century or so. Consider the
context. Newman wrote as nineteenth century science began to
claim for itself an epistemological high-ground that excluded, as
a matter of course, the subjectivity of the perceiver in favor of the
objectivity of the world. Radically empirical, committed to verifiability,
convinced that absolute reality may be made known to
those who seek it, the scientist sought the extinction of the subject
and, as one recent theologian has well described it, “”the emergence
of the objective world in its full splendor.””⁴¹ That agenda—
more philosophical than scientific—was given heft in the early
twentieth century by the likes of Carnap, Russell, Ayer and
Wittgenstein, zealous positivists all. For the early Wittgenstein, a
recent biographer has written, “”as the self withdraws, the world in
itself emerges. When subjectivity…vanishes into absolute privacy,
reality remains in splendid objectivity.””⁴² But this quest for
splendid objectivity did not last long. Logical positivism held only
brief sway, soon to be challenged by thinkers such as Martin
Heidegger who proposed that the subject remained a legitimate
locus of philosophical inquiry. By mid-century, Heideggerian
phenomenology offered a very different account of knowing, the
perceiver now restored to something like centrality, perception
itself understood as freighted with cultural, historical, personal
significance. Objectivity, newly problematic, began to seem unattainable,
even undesirable. To be sure, the epistemological naivete
of scientism—hard fact as alone worthy of consideration—
was sometimes replaced by historicism equally naïve, with writers
such as Thomas Kuhn (for example) discovering, but then overemphasizing,
non-scientific elements in scientific change. Still,
Kuhn was typical of many in drawing attention to the multiple
social and personal commitments embedded in scientific (and all
other) accounts of the world. Of course, this was not without
hazard. This legitimate and necessary return to subjectivity ran
the danger of anti-rationalism—the possibility of any objective
truth dismissed—and of solipsism—the perceiving self incapable
of perceiving anything other than self-created worlds. That was a
risk most mid-twentieth century phenomenologists were prepared
to embrace.

Perhaps this is too bald a summary of nineteenth and
twentieth century philosophy. Still, it surely has a place in Kirk’s
story. Newman was a strikingly modern thinker and, understanding
him, Kirk was able to offer a newly persuasive account
of history that appealed beyond the usual denominational or
philosophical categories. History’s emphasis on the local, the
finite, the culturally unique could now be seen as part of this new
phenomenology of man. All our ways of knowing, caught up as
they are in the complexity of the personal and the particular, the
inescapable here-and-nowness of our lives, are not to be seen as
forms of limitation but as radical apprehension of the variety,
indeed of the infinitude, of things. It was a creative response to
created order; a new way of perceiving the intelligibility of the
world.

III.

Thus we approach the heart of the matter. William F. Buckley, Jr.
has observed that Kirk disliked the term “”conservative,”” preferring
to describe himself a “”realist.”” It was a good instinct, one that
other conservatives should take to heart. But, realist or conservative,
he was also curiously modern—modern enough to speak a
language of signs and symbols, of culture and cult, of intuition and
imagination, of reason’s power and reason’s limits. With him, an
intellectual man of parts, Edmund Burke seems not so very far
from Edmund Husserl, Froude closer than might be thought to
Freud. Such versatility should silence his critics for a time. All the
same, the modernism should not obliterate a deeper realism. He
was a realist, yes, but what was the reality he claimed to know? It
was partly—only partly—a Johnsonian insistence on the solidity
of things. Realism has its small satisfactions—refuting Berkeley
by stubbing at a stone, kicking at Kantians by refusing to penetrate
their impenetrabilities. We should not willingly give up these
pleasures. Nor, however, should we become addicted to them.
Honest empiricism may keep our feet on the ground but without
idealism, without some metaphysical principle, we would deny
ourselves the sky above and the sun beyond. If Kirk held to solid
things, he also held, more firmly, to the solidity of their meaning.
Their deeper intelligibility had to do with order and freedom,
without which conservative schemes—any human scheme, for
that matter—may not survive. “”Order, in society, is the harmonious
arrangement of classes and functions which guards justice
and obtains willing consent to law and ensures that we all shall be
safe together,”” he wrote in Redeeming the Time. Likewise, to
assert “”freedom as an absolute, somehow divorced from order, [is
to] repudiate our heritage of practical liberty and expose ourselves
to the peril of absolutism.”” This was well said but it was not,
for all that, very different from Bentham or Mill. The difference
came from the source. Order was a thing altogether more compelling
than harmonious social arrangements. “”In the moral realm,””
he wrote, “”it is the realizing of a body of transcendent norms—
indeed a hierarchy of norms and standards—which give purpose
to existence and motive to conduct.””⁴³ This existential purpose, to
summon Aquinas once again, is to discern the place man occupies
in the order of nature, to reflect this reality in the human soul, to
find God’s intention in creating the world for man, and to live in
accord with the divine will. Order and freedom were nothing less
than manifestations of the life of God in the earthly life of man.

This does not make God a Tory any more than it made non-
Tories ungodly. Crude schemas of that sort are more Bossuet
than Kirk. It is, however, to place his stout, sensible, empirical,
system-resisting conservatism into a metaphysical mold without
which it might have collapsed into cultural nostalgia or social
snobbery. In manner and appearance Kirk was patrician but his
head and heart were humble. So, too, The Conservative Mind.
The book’s confident erudition is at the service of a more modest
piety. Kirk’s theme is what happens when men try to do what they
cannot do—what happens to them and their world when they
come to believe themselves masters of a destiny they cannot
control. That said, his own project could not have been more
ambitious. Not a moral philosopher, still less a theologian, he
attempted nevertheless a kind of theology of history in which he
sought to explore, in time and through time, the meaning of time
itself. That meaning—call it the purpose or the end of time—will
become clear only at the end of time. In the meantime, we may
discern, in ways obscure but not wholly invisible, the hidden hand
of God.

History, in this sense, does not have utility. We do not learn
from it, the better (as Santayana has it) to avoid its mistakes. That
is to forget another truth—the reality of original sin. Yet the past
is a place of discovery precisely because it represents not finished
or completed action but action awaiting completion, human
striving groaning for its last perfection at the end of time. History
is the memory of the continuing presence of permanent things in
a world fallen but redeemed. To forget it is to forget ourselves. To
abandon memory is to abandon spiritual truths made manifest in
material things. Words of the poet Wendell Berry come to mind.
Describing a country funeral where the old gather one more time
to say farewell to one of their own, then return, diminished, to
fields themselves soon to pass from view, he ponders the meaning
of “”memories doomed to die.””⁴⁴ What does keeping faith mean?
Where should our loyalty lie—with an unrecoverable past or a
world still to come? The two, he realized, were not separable, one
somehow existing at the expense of the other. What we owe the
future, he says

is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed
of our life in this place. There is not only
no better possibility, there is
no other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible
new start. And so as the old die and the young
depart, where shall a man go who keeps
the memories of the dead, except home
again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, lest the dead die
a second and more final death.

#page#

Kirk, too, feared that second and more final death. He presumed,
however, to offer an answer to it. The answer to death, of course,
is life: life here, life now, life in the world to come; the life of the
mind, the life of the heart, the life of the spirit; the corporate life
of the living, the dead, the yet-to-be-born. For Kirk himself, it was
a life richly lived—in Piety Hill, among books and family and the
laughter of friends, fields and hills leading the eye to horizons
beyond and histories behind. It was the life, in other words, of a
man of faith and a man of God. For those who never knew him but
who wish to have some share in it, and for those who seek
participation in that greater life of which any man’s life is only a
portion, The Conservative Mind is a good place to start.

Dermot Quinn
Seton Hall University

NOTES

1. Delightfully, Kirk called his first university president a
   “”chickenologist.””
2. Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half
   century of Literary Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995)
   233.
3. Ibid., 230–231.
4. Quoted in Chris
   
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