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Russell Kirk: An Integrated Man

May 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk

by Ian Boyd, C.S.B.

The most obvious and important thing that must be said about Russell Kirk concerns the harmony that existed between his public and his private life. He was an integrated man who lived what he wrote. There were no disappointing disjunctions between the private and the public self. On the contrary, the happy domestic life at Piety Hill was a sort of extension of his written work, a lived parable which illuminated everything he wrote about the primacy of private life over public life, about the family as the essential human community, and about the basic loyalties to the villages, neighborhoods, and regions in which human beings were most likely to find fulfillment and a measure of happiness. The philosophy that he outlined in his many books and essays was embodied in his everyday life, and his everyday life provided a running commentary on the deeper meaning of that philosophy. Those who were privileged to be his friends were people whose understanding of his thought was only deepened by their knowledge of a life which made that thought even more real for them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community, Conservatism, Culture, G.K. Chesterton, Ian Boyd, Intercollegiate Review, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk May 14, 2013

Awakening the Moral Imagination

May 7, 2013 By 1 Comment
moral imagination

Vigen Guroian

by Vigen Guroian

The notion that fairy tales and fantasy stories stimulate and instruct the moral imagination of the young is, of course, not new. The Victorians certainly held to that notion when they brought the fairy tale into the nursery. In our day, we have seen a resurgence of interest in the fairy tale. The renowned psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim gave this an important impetus twenty years ago with his publication of The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1975). “It hardly requires emphasis at this moment in our history” Bettelheim wrote, that children need “a moral education… [that teaches] not through abstract ethical concepts but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful…. The child finds this kind of meaning through fairy tales.”[1] [Read more...]

Filed Under: Intercollegiate Review, Literature, Moral Imagination, Vigen Guroian May 7, 2013

Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy and the Drama of Mankind

April 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Voegelin

Eric Voegelin

by Gerhart Niemeyer

Nearly two decades ago there appeared the first three volumes of Eric Voegelin’s exemplary quest for a theoretically intelligible order of history (Vol. I, Israel and Revelation; Vol. 11, The World of the Polis; Vol. 111, Plato and Aristotle). The plan projected three more volumes: Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries, and The Crisis of Western Civilization. When the fourth volume was actually published in 1974, its title, The Ecumenic Age, indicated that the author’s ideas had undergone a considerable change during the intervening years. In the Introduction Voegelin announces not only “a break with the program” of Order and History, but also the partial abandonment of his former views on the course of history, although the revised concept still issues from the rigorous application of the original principle guiding the entire work: “The order of history is the history of order.’’ That work seems to have attained its climax in The Ecumenic Age, since volume V, under the title In Search of Order, will conclude the project with a presentation of studies of contemporary problems that led to the whole undertaking. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, Intercollegiate Review, Philosophy April 16, 2013

G. K. Chesterton: Rallying the Really Human Things

April 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment
G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton

by Vigen Guroian

“We need a rally of the really human things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.”[1]

That was the judgment of G. K. Chesterton some seventy years ago in an essay entitled “Is Humanism a Religion?” In order to rally the really human things, Chesterton proposed a new Christian humanism, while he simultaneously warned of the dangers and deceptions of a popular secular humanism that is behaving as if it were a religion.

Chesterton distinguishes this modern secularist humanism from a much older tradition of Christian humanism with which he strongly identifies. The headwaters of this Christian humanism are the writings of such ancient church fathers as Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom, Saint Augustine and Gregory the Great. The stream is replenished by such late medieval and early Renaissance figures as Dante, Erasmus, and Thomas More. Chesterton extols the efforts of these humanists. “I doubt,” he writes, “if any thinking person, of any belief or unbelief, does not wish in his heart that the end of mediaevalism had meant the triumph of the Humanists like Erasmus and More.”[2] [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christian Humanism, G.K. Chesterton, Intercollegiate Review, Orthodoxy, Vigen Guroian April 12, 2013

Flannery O’Connor: Mystery & Metaphor

March 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor

by Gregory Wolfe

Flannery O’Connor and the Language of Apocalypse, by Edward Kessler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, edited by C. Ralph Stephens. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

A recent review in the New York Times employed the phrase, the Flannery O’Connor industry,” in reference to the growing number of scholarly studies, letter collections, and biographical works about O’Connor and her fictional world. Up to now, the notion that art “industry” could be developing around O’Connor’s work would have seemed an unlikely phenomenon. The victim of disseminated lupus at a relatively early age, Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) left behind a small body of work—two novels and two dozen stories—that has been considered eccentric and emphatically minor, though occasionally intriguing. Her “grotesque” characters and settings and her strong identification as a Southerner and Roman Catholic have often elicited dismissive or merely bewildered comments from the critics. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Flannery O'Connor, Gregory Wolfe, Intercollegiate Review, Literature Tagged With: , March 25, 2013

The Demise of Congressional Deliberation: Willmoore Kendall

March 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment
by John Alvis

congressional deliberation

John Alvis

The one teaching of Willmoore Kendall’s toward which all his early thought tended and from which radiated all his later thought was this: America’s vindication of the capacity of men for self-government rests upon its devotion to the idea of a virtuous people, under God, determining national policy by the deliberations of a supreme legislature composed of representatives who should reflect the moral beliefs of the people and should deliberate under conditions free, open, rational, and accountable. How does that teaching fare today, and how might it serve to guide us in our present predicament? The time is seasonable for a reassessment of the grounds of our trust in representative democracy for we have cause to feel concern that recent alterations in the way Congress conducts its business have corrupted its ability to deliberate and threaten to erode the very foundations of rule of law. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Congress, Federalist Papers, Intercollegiate Review, John Alvis, Politics, Presidency, Willmoore Kendall March 22, 2013

Pessimism Is Hope

February 14, 2013 By 2 Comments

by Molly Brigid Flynn

Hope

Roger Scruton

The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton.

In the excitement (and disappointment) of the politics of hope and change, surely a conservative’s responsibility must be to remind us that change is not the substance of things hoped for, and that reasonable hopes for those concrete goods really within human grasp are best fulfilled by preservation or repair—and by the small-scale, face-to-face work of everyday life. In other words, the role of conservatives is to be the wet-blanket. To those whom Roger Scruton calls “unscrupulous optimists,” this attitude appears unhappy. It is with some surprise, then, that we find a certain cheerfulness throughout Scruton’s newest book, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope. The book is about knowing ourselves as other than what we might want to be, coming to terms with the human condition, and living within our limits with equanimity. There is a truism that a pessimist sees the glass half empty when the optimist sees it half full. The only problem here is that this truism isn’t true. Knowing that an empty glass is possible, and inevitable if we drink without refilling our reserves, the pessimist can be grateful for whatever the glass does hold. Having a memory that appreciates the past and not just an imagination that dreams up a future, he can also point the way back to the cow.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Community, Conservatism, Intercollegiate Review, Molly Brigid Flynn, Roger Scruton February 14, 2013

Conservatism as the Highest Form of Modernism

February 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

by Dr. Robert P. Kraynak

ConservatismArguments for Conservatism: A Political Philosophy by Roger Scruton.

Conservatives always need to be on the look-out for new arguments to defend their positions, despite their conviction that there is “nothing new under the sun.” They may wish to live unreflectively by following the customs of their ancestors, but circumstances require that they also be vigilant culture warriors and defiantly critical intellectuals simply to preserve what is best in the past. That is because conservatism arises in response to modernity—as a defense of tradition against the modern spirit of revolution and its insatiable desire to remake society according to utopian ideologies and even to transform human nature through social engineering. A conservative thinker is driven by a kind of reluctant necessity to oppose these trends and often feels like a lonely knight from an ancient chivalric order battling against overwhelming historical forces. Yet, strangely, this means that a conservative thinker is more a modernist than a naive traditionalist, and it may even imply that conservatism is the highest form of modernism in the sense of being the most thoughtful and self-conscious way of living in the modern world. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Conservatism, Intercollegiate Review, Robert Kraynak, Roger Scruton February 6, 2013

A Proper Core Curriculum is Political & Ought Not Be “Politicized”

February 2, 2013 By 1 Comment

by John Alvis

Core Curriculum

John Alvis

The idea for this essay came from a question posed during a meeting of the National Association of Scholars, where several of the presentations had decried recent academic movements of the sort led by Marxists, feminists, homosexualists, or Black separatists, and complained of these groups having politicized higher education. Subsequently, a panel discussing the idea of a core curriculum featured a defense of Thomas Jefferson’s model for a system based in classical republicanism and another paper arguing for a reinstatement of the traditional center of education in the ideal of developing the good citizen. Sensing an anomaly, a Princeton graduate student asked what was the difference between conceiving of the purpose of liberal education as political and abusing advanced education by politicizing it? I suggest the question deserves careful consideration, and I offer here a distinction that may guide us in thinking through the current debate on the Western canon and its place at the center of a general curriculum. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Classical Learning, Education, Intercollegiate Review, John Alvis, Liberal Learning February 2, 2013

Ordered Liberty under God

January 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment
by Douglas C. Minson

To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent…. Those who consider that a discussion of the nature of a Christian society should conclude by supporting a particular form of political organization, should ask themselves if they really believe our form of government to be more important than our Christianity. -T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society 

The end of the Cold War has brought in its wake an unrestrained enthusiasm for liberal democracy, even among Christians who had previously maintained an agnostic stance toward any particular political system. Seemingly forgotten are the voices of those tutored under the dehumanizing lash of communism, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, even as they embraced the West, expressed significant concerns about modern democratic liberalism. Perhaps the only consistent opposition to global liberalism remaining may be that of the Islamic states, whose reservations are understandably receiving little sympathy these days.


If Robert P. Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy did nothing more than exhume and reiterate the critique of liberalism by such thinkers as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Solzhenitsyn himself, it would be well worth reading. And this much the book certainly does. Kraynak skillfully dismantles the illusory neutrality of liberalism, which in reality “promotes its vision of the Good Life with all the weapons of cultural hegemony and state power.” The book serves as a welcome reminder that a robust social pluralism is incompatible with the totalizing and homogenizing force of the modern welfare state. But Kraynak’s project is significantly more ambitious.

The stated purpose of Christian Faith and Modern Democracy is twofold. Kraynak argues that liberalism requires Christianity to provide a sufficient foundation for human dignity—an account it is unable to generate on its own and upon which modern democracy depends. Having made his case for liberalism’s theoretical dependence on Christianity, Kraynak then devotes the bulk of his book to developing an argument that Christianity in no way necessitates modern liberal democracy. In fact, he proposes that liberal democracy and Christianity are profoundly irreconcilable.

* * *

Kraynak’s thesis is nothing if not bold. For most American Christians, who can perceive no tension between their religious and political devotion, it would appear that Kraynak’s intellectual project is both perverse and impossible. Remarkably, however, one leaves the book impressed that Kraynak is equal to his task.

Much as Richard John Neuhaus has observed that modern atheism is a “Christian” atheism— in the sense that the only God it bothers to deny is the monotheistic, eternal, and personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition—Kraynak contends that modern democratic liberalism is the only form of democracy that is a candidate for serious consideration. Modern democracy, unlike ancient Greek democracy, for example, is democracy as an end unto itself, a political expression of the rights that accompany a particular conception of human nature and human dignity. This particular notion of dignity is equated with “autonomy and mastery of one’s fate.” As such, liberal democracy is more than merely a system of social and political order: “it is a philosophy of freedom.”

Christianity’s account of human dignity, by contrast, is essentially hierarchical and unsuited to the purposes of modern democracy. Kraynak’s treatment of the politics of human dignity is particularly insightful, both for its lucidity and its ecumenical scope. Kraynak examines the way that the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin all reflect a hierarchy of being in their understanding of the imago dei, human reason, and human responsibility. His examination of Christianity’s understanding of man as conceived within and measured by a cosmological order has important implications for law and justice and provides a stark contrast to the liberal democratic view of human dignity as absolute and undifferentiated. For Kraynak, the Christian understanding of human nature finds its political expression in Augustine’s doctrine of Two Cities— a doctrine that both accommodates a range of political systems and finds every particular regime (including our own) ultimately inadequate.

Over and against the prevailing conception of democracy, which only thinly disguises its claim to being the best regime, Kraynak offers a theory of Christian constitutionalism. Such constitutionalism is “more open to the diversity of political regimes than liberalism” and is less ambitious than its secular counterparts. Rooted in a substantial view of higher goods and higher spheres that cannot be absorbed by the state, the temporal ends of the state are more narrowly conceived than is the case with modern liberalism.

In effect, Christian constitutionalism in no way aspires to resolve or overcome what Peter Augustine Lawler has suggested is humanity’s essentially “alien” nature. The citizens of the City of Man are ever and necessarily strangers in a strange land, pilgrims on a journey, temporal beings longing for eternity and transcendence. Thus is the City of Man “desacralized.” Nonetheless, because it is divinely ordained, it can never be purely secularized. It is limited to temporal ends, but with an eye to eternal concerns.

Christian constitutionalism provides an alternative framework for limited government on a distinctly “illiberal” foundation. Indeed, Kraynak draws upon Reformed notions of “sphere sovereignty,” Roman Catholic conceptions of subsidiarity, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism to provide a metaphysical foundation for a pluralistic social order. But offering an alternative to the prevailing democratic orthodoxy is not Kraynak’s primary concern— it is only an element of his contention that liberal democracy cannot be harmonized with the Christian faith.

Kraynak examines several theoretical and historical movements that are commonly identified as ushering in the nighuniversal embrace of democracy and human rights as central to Christian political thought. These usual suspects include Scholastic constitutionalism, neo-Scholastic popular sovereignty, the Protestant Reformation, religious rationalism, and Christian responses to slavery, industrialism, and the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. Of particular interest in this examination is Kraynak’s discussion of modern democracy’s conspicuous rejection of essential political teachings of the Protestant Reformers. Kraynak’s forceful insistence that the Protestant Reformation is insufficient to account for the emergence of liberal democracy starkly distinguishes him from those on both sides of the Christian confessional divide who commonly attribute the inspiration for democratic liberalism to the Reformation and identify this effect, alternately, as a vindication or an indictment of the sundering of Christendom.

* * *

Ultimately, Kraynak attributes the emergence of liberal democracy to the thought of Immanuel Kant. The pains taken to distinguish Kant’s political ideas from those of the Enlightenment as a whole may seem unnecessary, but his specific concern is the doctrine of rights that emerges from the Kantian conception of the autonomous person. This feature of modern democracy more than any other renders it incompatible with Augustine’s Two Cities framework.

Kraynak argues that while Kant makes human dignity the central theme of liberalism, he (like other Enlightenment theorists) is unable to provide a satisfactory conceptual foundation for human dignity apart from Christianity. But while the Kantian philosophy of freedom requires a Christian foundation for its notion of human dignity, the Christian understanding of human dignity is inherently at odds with the Kantian philosophy of freedom. Man conceived within a hierarchy of being as a “measured measure” cannot be reconciled with the indeterminacy of human ends that is the cornerstone of Kantian freedom, the animating force that inspires the modern democratic state.

Christian Faith and Modern Democracy is a valuable consideration of Augustine’s doctrine of Two Cities as it bears upon modern political theory. In the light of this work it is clear that any easy identification of Christian political theory with modern liberal democracy must be reexamined carefully.

What is less clear is the extent to which Kraynak’s thesis and critique may be applied to the American polity, at least as it was originally conceived. The possibility that the American founding bears a marked resemblance to the constitutional and limited republic that Kraynak champions in contrast to contemporary forms of liberal democracy warrants greater consideration than it receives.

In deference to the rhetorical flourishes of the Declaration of Independence, Kraynak appears willing to concede to Thomas Jefferson an intellectual dominance over the American founders—but such dominance is far from self-evident. Jefferson’s articulation of universal and inalienable rights may comport with the central principles of modern democracy, but they alone were clearly insufficient justification for revolution: the Declaration also details various abrogations of magisterial responsibility that would have resonated in the breasts of the Calvinists of the Continental Congress. Though Kraynak proposes that Protestant impulses are insufficient to account for the emergence of liberal democracy, there can be no doubt that they played a role in inspiring the American Experiment. Christian ideals, though surely not the sole—and perhaps not the primary—animating spirit, were certainly vital to the enterprise.

It is also unclear that the U.S. Constitution reflects the sentiments of Jefferson’s rights language. Such a notion is belied by the heated debate over the adoption of the Bill of Rights—amendments which may themselves be read as a re-articulation of the limits placed upon a federal government of strictly enumerated powers rather than an expression of essential human liberty.

To be sure, some explanation must be given for the marked difference in the American republic as originally conceived and as it is now understood. But might it not be contended that the “diluted and rationalized version of Christianity” that underlies modern democratic liberalism is better attributed not to America’s founding, but to her refounding? Perhaps the foundations of modern liberal America lie not so much in a declaration signed in Philadelphia as in an address delivered at Gettysburg.

Douglas C. Minson is Vice President, Academic Affairs and Programs, at The John Jay Institute. Reprinted with the gracious permission of The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 2002). 

Filed Under: Christianity, Douglas C. Minson, Intercollegiate Review, Ordered Liberty, Robert Kraynak January 21, 2013

Worth the Wait: Edmund Burke

January 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment
by Jeffrey O. Nelson

Edmund Burke

by F. P. Lock, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
 
Thomas Copeland, the editor of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke and a central figure in Burke’s twentieth-century revival, once observed that of all the books written about Burke the most important was the work never written: his “official biography.” Unfortunately for posterity, Burke’s literary executors, having completed a sixteen-volume edition of his Works, died before completing a planned biography. Copeland’s view is surely correct that this was a “decisive failure,” for as Sir James Mackintosh observed of Burke at the dawn of the nineteenth century, “perhaps a fit biographer is more important to his just fame than ever such a person was before to a great man.” Burke’s reputation was also affected by another misfortune. Lost to historians were the papers and letters compiled by Burke’s executors. This lacuna had obvious consequences on Burke scholarship, from the death of the last of his two executors in the 1820s until the papers were re-discovered and made available again in the 1930s. So an accident of history and the inability of the first chroniclers to complete their intended studies have made the pursuit of a definitive biography elusive. [Read more...]
Filed Under: Books, Edmund Burke, Intercollegiate Review, Jeffrey O. Nelson January 12, 2013

Rhetoric and Ranting: Inspired by Richard Weaver

January 8, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan

by Michael Jordan

In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams tells us that he was born into one world in the nineteenth century and lived on into another. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1838, he lived to see the emergent twentieth century—a world in which a secular Dynamo replaced Venus and the Virgin, two manifestations of the transcendent that once animated Western culture (Venus a cultural force in the pagan world; the Virgin in Christendom). Adams saw unity, harmony, and beauty in the older world, but multiplicity, fragmentation, chaos, skepticism, and confusion in the new. The old world was an orderly and beautiful creation, for both the poet and the scientist; the new world was merely matter in motion, “colliding atoms,” “a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces.”[1] [Read more...]

Filed Under: Conservatism, Intercollegiate Review, Michael Jordan, Poetry, Rhetoric, Richard Weaver January 8, 2013
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