The Sword of Imagination: Memories of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 25, 1995 by Forrest McDonald

His religious awakening was slow to come; it began in 1943, when his mother died. At the hour of her death, Kirk writes, he 'knew next to nothing about religion.' He found some consolation in Marcus Aurelius, but then, in a powerful description of his evolving thought processes, he tells us that he 'commenced to move, very languidly, beyond Stoicism to something more.' He began to 'inquire within himself by what authority he presumed to doubt.' Upon authority, he continues, 'all revealed religion rests, and the authority that lies behind Christian doctrine is massive. By what alternative authority did Kirk question it?' Chiefly the likes of H. G. Wells and Leonard Woolf, whose other opinions he totally rejected. And if men like Johnson and Burke 'gave credence to revealed religion, must not Kirk, in mere toleration, open his mind to the possibility of religion's truth?' And so, 'by slow degrees,' Kirk 'began to perceive that pure reason had its frontiers and that to deny the existence of realms beyond those borders -- why, that's puerility.'

But 'it was on no road to Damascus that Russell Kirk, in erring reason's spite, came to believe in the Apostles' Creed.' In 1943 he went no further, but during the next decade his voracious reading included the theological works of Richard Hooker, Thomas Browne, and John Henry Newman, and in due course he read the Church Fathers, Augustine and Gregory and Ambrose. In 1953 he obtained instruction in Catholic doctrine from a Jesuit professor of classics, who was 'surprised to learn that Kirk's reason for seeking him out was merely the yearning of intellectual curiosity.' In time, his earlier Stoicism 'was not effaced, but it was transmuted very gradually. Stoic insights had blended with Christian revelation in the early years of the Church, in the West especially; so it came to pass in Kirk's meditations also.' In 1964 he was given formal instruction and was baptized.

Toward the end of this remarkable book about this remarkable man, Kirk tells us that he had sought three things in his lifetime. The second and third were 'to lead a life of decent independence' and 'to marry for love and to rear children who would come to know that the service of God is perfect freedom.' In regard to these goals, he knew he had been blessed with success. As for the first, he was not as sure: it was 'to defend the Permanent Things . . . to conserve a patrimony of order, justice, and freedom; a tolerable moral order; and an inheritance of culture.' If the outlook for this end remains bleak, it is not nearly so bleak as it would have been without Russell Kirk's heroic efforts.