Keeping The faith

National Review, Jan 29, 2007 by James E. Person, Jr.

The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, edited by George A. Panichas (ISI, 525 pp., $30)

LOOMING over the fireplace in the late Russell Kirk's library in Mecosta, Mich., are three small stone images, statues given to Kirk by the renowned Scots sculptor Hew Lorimer during the 1950s. Lorimer's images represent history, law, and theology--and they now appropriately adorn the cover of this fat book. History, law, and theology are roughly analogous to the central concerns of Kirk's thought: order, justice, and freedom. Through the study of history we learn the primacy of order. Through law, we maintain justice. And through theology--through faith in God--we find freedom that transcends circumstance.

George Panichas, longtime editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, undertook a daunting task in compiling the present volume. How does one set about delving into Kirk's many hundreds of published works of a half-century, to select those passages that are essential? Kirk was not just an essayist but a novelist, reviewer, historian, biographer (his Eliot and His Age is underappreciated), and teller of ghostly tales. He contributed a regular column to NATIONAL REVIEW for half his career, during the magazine's rough-and-tumble early years. He is best known for the 1953 book The Conservative Mind, a landmark history of ideas tracing the lineage of Anglo-American conservatism from the time of Burke.

Kirk's works in every genre have some highly memorable recurring themes: the permanent things, the moral imagination, the timeless moment, the little platoons, the contract of eternal society. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote that the conservative "is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character--with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded."

Kirk considered himself a traditionalist conservative--not a movement conservative, a neoconservative, a libertarian, or a fusionist. He was an advocate of small-town and agrarian culture, rather than urban culture. A world traveler, he was never happier than when at home in Mecosta, one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it villages that dot the farm country of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, well north of Detroit. He was a conservationist who loved green spaces and planted trees throughout Mecosta County all his life.

In international matters, Kirk clung to the old vision of America as a national republic, not a wide-ranging presence for Making Things Right all over the world. (He once declared that "a soundly conservative foreign policy, in the age which is dawning, should be neither 'interventionist' nor 'isolationist': It should be prudent. Its object should not be to secure the triumph everywhere of America's name and manners, under the slogan of 'democratic capitalism,' but instead the preservation of the true national interest, and acceptance of the diversity of economic and political institutions.") With regard to American influence abroad, Kirk had little faith in the success of culture "poured in from the top," in John Crowe Ransom's memorable phrase.

As a scholar, Kirk was an exhaustively well-read source of wisdom on America's traditional ideals (lengthy excerpts from his lively 1974 history The Roots of American Order are included in this collection, notably a chapter highlighting the signal contribution of the ancient Hebrews toward elevating our understanding of God and His ways)--yet he enjoyed nothing better than sitting down with friends, and especially young people, and telling ghost stories. In a world of buckram masks and literary phantasms, here was a man--to use Kirk's own assessment of Wyndham Lewis, included in this volume.

Kirk's key concepts of order, justice, and freedom permeate the book. In the introduction to his Portable Conservative Reader (1982), Kirk articulates the fact that conservatism is not an ideology, designed to change human nature for the better as we march toward a glowing new tomorrow, but rather a way of looking at life. Or, as Panichas summarizes it, "It is a way 'of looking at the civic social order,' and centers around basic beliefs in a transcendent order, in social continuity, in 'things established by immemorial usage,' in the virtue of prudence, in human variety, and in human imperfectability." In counterpoint to Kirk's ruminations on conservative thought, the editor has included two scathing essays on what Kirk called "Demon Ideology."

Panichas has also selected essays by Kirk on his literary and scholarly heroes, notably Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, the economist Wilhelm Roepke, and a good man largely forgotten today: Max Picard, author of The Flight from God (1934), a work that argued that in fleeing from faith in God toward secularization, modern man has placed himself in a precarious state here below, leaving himself naked before his enemies--who work relentlessly to undermine the edifice of civilization through appeals to men's passions.