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Oh, He’s Just a Biographer

May 3, 2013 By 3 Comments
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Bradley J. Birzer

by Bradley J. Birzer

“In every age, society has been relieved only by the endeavors of a few people moved by the grace of God.”–Russell Kirk, Roots Of American Order (1974)

As I approach my fifteenth year teaching history at Hillsdale, and my seventeenth (or so) year of teaching at the college level over all, I find myself more and more taken with biography and the idea of personality as the fundamental and driving “forces” behind history.

“Oh, he’s just a biographer”

As a graduate student, I found–much to my surprise–that few professional historians viewed biography as anything other than a way of selling out to popular desires and public appetites.   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bradley J. Birzer, History Tagged With: May 3, 2013

For Saxons, Think Americans and Wonder

April 24, 2013 By 1 Comment

by Stephen Masty

saxons americans wonderThe thousandth anniversary of the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066 AD, is still a few decades away and most people know the related story of food and the cultural differences. Our modern English words for domestic animals tend to be the names used by the lowly Saxon farmer-folk who raised them, while once the beasts are slaughtered and cooked we assume the lexicon of the Norman nobleman’s table (pig versus pork/porc, cow versus beef/boeuf, etcetera).

Were Americans once the new Saxons and are they still? One does not mean only to contrast the American elites, with their fancy pasta dishes and complex coffee-drinks that would confound a medieval alchemist, versus the simpler fare of the poorer and the old-fangled. I mean something much more. [Read more...]

Filed Under: G.K. Chesterton, History, Poetry, Stephen Masty Tagged With: , April 24, 2013

“Unfit for the Age”: Charles Gayarré, the Conservative as Satirist

March 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment
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Charles Gayarre

by Stephen M. Klugewicz

If Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré (1805-1895) is remembered at all today, it is for his monumental, three-volume History of Louisiana, which was held in high esteem in its day by the eminent historian George Bancroft and which is still valued today as much for its literary quality as its historical content. Gayarré  eschewed dry history, believing it the historian’s prerogative to inject imagination into his writings. “History is marble,” Gayarré wrote, “and remains forever cold, even under the most artistic hand, unless life is breathed into it by the imagination….Then the marble becomes flesh and blood—then it feels, it thinks, it moves, and is immortal.” In his revealingly titled Romance of the History of Louisiana, the forerunner of his later History, Gayarré declared his intention “to relate events, and…to point out the hidden sources of romance which spring from them—to show what materials they contain for the dramatist, the novelist, the poet, the painter.” A Creole patrician, Gayarré was not only a historian but a politician, novelist, and satirist whose career and writings reflect his disdain for democratic politics and the emerging egalitarian society of nineteenth-century America.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Conservatism, History, Literature, Stephen M. Klugewicz March 12, 2013

The Restoration of Tradition

March 1, 2013 By 3 Comments
Tradition

Eric Voegelin

by Stanley Parry

A guide to the paths that remain open when “tradition falls out of existence.” 

The position this paper will attempt to illustrate, if not demonstrate, is that once lost or weakened the tradition of a society can be restored only by a creative and even radical reconstruction of the tradition itself. The problem to which we address ourselves is as complex as it is profound. And clear thought about it is inhibited by the corroded vocabulary and the stylized modes of conception that distort the very formulation of the problem. In a society where the substance of tradition is already thin and unpersuasive, the term tradition is taken to indicate habitual modes of behavior normally concerned with the periphery of life, reaching at most the dignity of a campus “tradition” when they rise above the level of etiquette. More obfuscating still is the conception of tradition as the element of sameness within a world of change, so that the changing and the traditional are viewed as antithetic. To be “progressive” is to be anti-traditional. The truth is that tradition itself changes in the sense of unfolds; it undergoes permutations. So that the disruption of tradition is encompassed not simply by change but by certain kinds of change. Once “bad” change eviscerates tradition, it can be brought back to life only by vigorous and even radical “good” change. To make this point we must first refurbish the idea of tradition. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Eric Voegelin, History, Modern Age, Stanley Parry, Tradition March 1, 2013

Christopher Dawson and the History We Are Not Told

February 16, 2013 By 1 Comment
christopher dawson

Christopher Dawson

by Jeffrey Hart

A people that no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The temples of the gods are the most enduring works of man. -Christopher Dawson

The first impression one has upon opening a book by Christopher Dawson is of what can be called the romance of learning, a romance experienced as an independent aesthetic category apart from the substance of that learning. We experience here the aesthetic appeal of sheer erudition, the sort of excitement that pervades Montaigne’s Essays, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Browne’s Religio Medici, and many passages in Paradise Lost. It is the special aesthetic appeal of Old Books, an appeal that Walter Pater and T. S. Eliot knew well how to exploit. 

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Catholicism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, History, Jeffrey Hart, Modern Age February 16, 2013

How Dead is Edmund Burke?

February 4, 2013 By 1 Comment

by Russell Kirk

BurkeWalk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a trifle west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to Number 12, Arran Quay. This is a brick building of three stories, which began as a gentleman’s residence, some time since became a shop, and now is a governmental office of the meaner sort—symbolic of changes on a mightier scale during the generations since 1729. For here in that year Edmund Burke was born. Across the river you see what once was the town house of the Earls of Moira and is now the office of a society for suppressing mendicity; and beyond that, the great Guinness brewery. Back of Burke’s house, toward the old church of St. Michan in which, they say, he was baptised, stretch tottering brick slums where barefoot children scramble over broken walls. If you turn toward O’Connell Street, an easy stroll takes you to the noble façade of Trinity College and the statues of Burke and Goldsmith; to the north, near Parnell Square, you may hear living Irish orators proclaiming through amplifiers that they have succeeded in increasing sevenfold the pensions of widows, a mere earnest of their intent. And you may reflect, with Burke, “What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, History, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk February 4, 2013

Russell Kirk among the Historians: Myth and Meaning in the Writing of American History

February 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

by Mark G. Malvasi

Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk

America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World. If there is anything in this view…then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the non-existence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.”[1] In 1953, two years before the appearance of The Liberal Tradition in America, Russell Kirk, then an unknown professor at Michigan State College (later University), had published The Conservative Mind. Kirk not only announced the existence of a vibrant Anglo-American conservative tradition, but, as his publisher Henry Regnery declared, he gave “coherence and integrity” to the postwar conservative movement in the United States.[2] [Read more...]

Filed Under: History, Mark Malvasi, Political Science Reviewer, Russell Kirk February 3, 2013

Christopher Dawson: The Twofold Nature of Christian History

January 29, 2013 By 1 Comment

by Gerald J. Russello

Christian

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson wrote with two different audiences in mind. He sought both to displace the bankrupt Victorian and Edwardian liberalism of his own day and to shake the complacency of his coreligionists who preferred to bask in the quickly fading light of false medievalism. His carefully crafted prose revealed a nuanced and original understanding of Western history.

To combat “scientific” theories of progress, Dawson argued that every civilization relies on those who most fully represent its ideals and shape the culture through their actions. Dawson maintained that “history is at once aristocratic and revolutionary. It allows the whole world situation to be suddenly transformed by the action of a single individual.” It is this dynamic historical process that is fatal to a secular understanding of religious approaches to history. In the words of Edmund Burke that Dawson quoted with approval, at times a “common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn have changed the face of the future and almost of Nature.” To the Christian, this understanding of historical development permits interpretation of past events in the light of divine will and spiritual forces that may be unknown even to the actors themselves. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Crisis Magazine, Culture, Gerald Russello, History January 29, 2013

A Patron Saint for the Idiot Box?

January 7, 2013 By 4 Comments

by Stephen Masty

Saint

Fulton Sheen

One may have had low expectations when his television show began in 1951, to put it mildly.

The former radio broadcaster worked without a teleprompter or cue cards or referring to written notes, with only a blackboard for a prop, alone without guests or so much as a chair, delivering an almost full thirty-minute unscripted monologue at the camera and a studio-audience invisible offstage. Moreover, he was a Roman Catholic priest dressed flamboyantly from black cassock to flowing scarlet cape (only missing were the mitre and crosier). And he talked about God, rather a lot in fact. Other unfashionable topics included philosopher Henri Bergson’s lectures in 1920s Paris, he analysed inductive logic, critiqued polling theory, discussed advances in modern science from biology to psychiatry, went deep into the brainier kind of unpopular literature and much besides. Meanwhile, screened at 8 pm on Tuesdays, he was up against hit programming featuring Frank Sinatra and America’s best-loved television comedian. Must-see entertainment? A good shot at the Nielsen ratings? It would fill the air-time, at least until someone could think up a new game-show. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Catholicism, History, Stephen Masty January 7, 2013

Barbarism and History

December 27, 2012 By 14 Comments
mark malvasi

Mark Malvasi

by Mark Malvasi

Did we think we would get away with it?

In the coming days and weeks we will hear much discussion about how video games, television shows, and the movies have contributed to the rising tide of violence that seems to be engulfing American society. Such talk has already begun. I have no wish to challenge or dismiss a substantial and painstaking body of research that explores the influence of a violent popular culture on impressionable, and perhaps unhealthy, young minds.  But it is not, to invoke a fashionable cliché, the “culture of violence” that threatens us.  It is, rather, the breakdown of civilization and the growing prevalence of barbarism, the causes of which lie in the past. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture, History, Mark Malvasi December 27, 2012

Men Have Forgotten God: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

December 1, 2012 By 2 Comments
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Culture, History, John Barnes, Orthodoxy, Religion, Russia December 1, 2012

The Moral Imagination

November 30, 2012 By 4 Comments
imagination

Russell Kirk

by Russell Kirk

What is this “moral imagination”? The phrase is Edmund Burke’s, and it occurs in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke describes the destruction of civilizing manners by the revolutionaries: In the franchise bookshops the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. Yet no civilization rests forever content with literary boredom and literary violence. Once again, a conscience may speak to a conscience in the pages of books, and the parched rising generation may grope their way toward the springs of moral imagination. The first annual lecture at this new Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature is an endeavor to describe that high power of perception and description which has been called “the moral imagination,” and to relate that imagination to what Chateaubriand called “the genius of Christianity.” What once has been, may be again. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Conservatism, Great Books, History, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Literature, Moral Imagination, Philosophy, Russell Kirk November 30, 2012
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