Russell Kirk’s Catholic Mind
At last, in 1845, John Henry Newman swam the Tiber. It was one of those conversions that, until it happens, seemed inevitable to everyone—except the convert. Newman, who was canonized by Pope Francis in 2019, seemed to set off a chain reaction. In the following century, there was a breathtaking influx of authors, artists, and intellectuals into the Catholic Church throughout the Anglosphere.
Most of these converts were “conservative.” Like Newman, they recognized that Christendom was under siege, both from without and from within. The older Protestant sects, like the Church of England, had no interest in trying to save Western civilization. In fact, many were calling for its death. Ultimately, they were bound to agree with St. John Henry Newman: “There are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism.”
Russell Amos Kirk (1918–1994) was probably the last of these great literary converts, though by no means the least.
Kirk rose to prominence in 1953 with the publication of his magnum opus The Conservative Mind. Almost overnight, Kirk became the godfather of the English-speaking Right. It’s a position he retained for the rest of his life. To this day, The Conservative Mind is recognized as the most important text in Anglo-American conservatism, except perhaps for Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
One of Kirk’s first disciples was a young man named William F. Buckley, Jr. Shortly after The Conservative Mind appeared, Buckley had the idea to found a magazine—one that might serve as a flagship for the nascent conservative movement. Such an enterprise could not be undertaken without Kirk’s support, however. So, the urbane young journalist flew to central Michigan for the blessing of the “Sage of Mecosta.”
Yet, surprisingly, Kirk wouldn’t become a Catholic until 1963, when he was forty-five. Granted, once he’d “poped,” there was no going back. He was a founding board member of Una Voce America, a leading voice of traditionalist Catholicism in the post-conciliar era. After he edited and published his Portable Conservative Reader in 1982, he wrote to Buckley saying he was sorry for not including his (Buckley’s) 1967 column “The End of the Latin Mass.” In it, Buckley gives his very candid opinion of the liturgical “reforms” that flourished after Vatican II: “One’s heart is filled with such passions of resentment and odium as only Hilaire Belloc could adequately have voiced. O God O God O God, why hast thou forsaken us?” Those who witnessed these “reforms” will know this wasn’t being flippant.
Yet Kirk was received into the Church a year after the Council was convened. What could have led a man of Kirk’s caliber to resist the call of Rome until this not-so-opportune moment? The answer may lie in Kirk’s strange, fascinating childhood.
If you go back far enough, the Kirk family is of solid, Yankee Puritan stock. His more immediate ancestors were carried away by the various esoterisms that flourished in the 1800s. Most were Spiritualists and Swedenborgians. Kirk himself grew up superstitious, but not religious. As a young man, he adopted Stoicism as his “religion.” He served in the Army during World War II; the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were his constant companion.
As he matured, he became increasingly attracted to the Christian faith. What’s more, Kirk—unlike most academics today—never bought into the lie that our Founding Fathers were militant secularists, or that they opposed “organized religion.” Perhaps his most important thesis is that the Founding Fathers were not influenced by Enlightenment radicalism, but by the Greco-Roman republicanism. They were renaissance men, not philosophes. Yet he also believed that the influence of the Middle Ages on the Founding was even smaller. In his 1991 study The Roots of the American Order, Kirk admits:
The majestic Schoolmen of the Continent—Albertus Magnus, Abelard, Hugh of St. Victor, even Aquinas—were little better than names even to the learned in eighteenth-century America. Only when Roman Catholic colleges and universities began to be founded in the United States, chiefly in the late nineteenth century, would the old Schoolmen’s intellectual power be recognized in this country. Anglican and Presbyterian and Puritan divines, rather than medieval philosophers, nurtured American faith and reason.
No doubt the absence of a strong Catholic tradition in America made it difficult for Kirk to consider conversion, steeped as he was in the writings of men like Edmund Burke and John Adams.
All the same, several great “Romanists” appear in The Conservative Mind. The first is Orestes Brownson (1803–1876). Brownson was a leading member of the Transcendentalist movement and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s. In other words, he was a quintessential early-American radical. Then he “poped,” too.
In his long career as a public intellectual, Brownson slowly grew to feel that America was being driven mad by too much freedom—or, rather, freedom of the wrong sort. His radical friends exalted in the almighty Individual. All influence, be it forceful (like government) or voluntary (like tradition) was to be rejected. In fact, Emerson resigned his ministry because he found the Unitarian Church too reactionary!
The Transcendentalists’ hypocrisy was exposed Brownson’s “path of self-discovery” led to the Church of Rome. Emerson and his followers rejected Brownson, and he rejected them. He realized that, for the Transcendentalists, man was not “free” to seek a teacher, an authority, a community. He wasn’t “free” to find safe harbor—only to drift on the high seas, lost and lonely forever.
Yet, for Brownson, Transcendentalism was only the logical conclusion of the Renaissance. . . and the Reformation. . . and the Enlightenment. It was the latest phase in an ongoing trend: a breaking-up, a coming-undone. He lived to see the rise of Karl Marx; in fact, the first writer to rebut the Communist Manifesto. And, to Brownson, there was no cure for this growing illness except the Church. “We have heard enough of liberty and the rights of man,” Brownson thundered. “It is high time to hear something of the duties of men and the rights of authority.”
Brownson appears in The Conservative Mind as a relatively minor figure, but his influence on Kirk grew as the years went on. He especially grew to appreciate Brownson’s idea that our country needs a “divinely-ordained mission.” America needed to be free to do something besides pleasuring itself. As Kirk wrote in a 1991 essay,
Such is the character of true social justice, Brownson tells us: a liberation of every person, under God, to do the best that is in him. Poverty is no evil, in itself; obscurity is no evil; labor is no evil; even physical pain may be no evil, as it was none to the martyrs. This world is a place of trial and struggle, so that we may find our higher nature in our response to challenges.
It is America’s mission, Brownson told his age, to offer the world an example of such a state and such a society, at once orderly and free.
The other great Catholic to appear in The Conservative Mind is, of course, Cardinal Newman. For Kirk, Newman’s key contribution to the conservative tradition is his idea of the Illative Sense. According to Newman, the Illative Sense is “the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings.” It is a “power of judging and concluding.” Or, in Kirk’s words, “the Illative Sense is constituted by our impressions that are borne in upon us, from a source deeper than our own conscious and formal reason.”
That seems rather complicated, but they’re talking about an experience we’ve all had: often, we do our best thinking when we’re not actually “thinking.” Over the course of our day—and our lives—we absorb information, sensations, and experiences. Sometimes we wrestle with them; sometimes we talk them over; sometimes we let them ferment in the back of our minds. But there’s this “sense” at work all the time, synthesizing all this data and making sense of it, usually with very little input from our conscious minds.
This was important to Newman (and Kirk) because it smashed the Enlightenment idol of human reason. It shows that there are faculties that men need as much as—perhaps even more than—a sharp mind. Clever arguments aren’t enough. According to Newman, one needs a philosophical habit, one that gives the Illative Sense time and space to do its work. This habit, he says, is one of “freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.”
In a way, Our Lady is the model of the Illative Sense, the philosophical habit. What did she do after speaking with the Angel Gabriel? Well, she didn’t rush out and tell the Bethlehem Times-Courier. Every woman in Israel dreamed of bearing the Messiah. That privilege was given to Mary—and yet she didn’t say a word, not until her Son began His public ministry. Nor did she leave St. Joseph, knowing she was fated to be something a more than a carpenter’s wife. No: according to St. Luke, “Mary kept all of these things, and pondered them in her heart.” That’s humility. That’s wisdom.
This is also why men need authority. Authority is like the Illative Sense of the whole race, by which we calibrate our own minds. It’s the clocktower by which we set all of our watches. And, as Newman pointed out, it manifests itself in many different forms:
Conscience is an authority; the Bible us 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 maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.
For Kirk, it was really Newman who discredited the Enlightenment and made the world safe for religion once more. For most of his life, he’d admired traditional Christianity—its philosophers and statesmen, its poetry and music and architecture, etc. Thanks to Newman, it was not only admirable but plausible.
As Kirk’s own Illative Sense worked over the next decade, he was drawn more and more to the Catholic Church. As he explained in a letter to William F. Buckley, “I was not ‘converted’ to the Church, but made my way into it through what Newman calls illation—fragments of truth collecting in my mind through personal experience, conversations, knowledge of exemplars, and much reading and meditating.”
But perhaps what made Kirk’s conversion to Catholicism, besides falling in love with a beautiful young lady of French extraction, was his “supernaturalism.” As we said, Kirk grew up with no real religion. Yet the existence of a realm beyond the material was a given. It wasn’t a matter of faith; it was an obvious fact. There where ghosts in his childhood home, just as sure as there were tables and chairs.
This supernaturalism was so fundamental to his worldview that it actually got him “unstuck” from his grounding in Burke and Adams. He was instinctively drawn to the Medieval and, so, to Catholicism. As he wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory,
Mine was not an Enlightened mind. . . it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, the venerable, the awful. . . I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.
It seems only natural that Kirk would try his hand at writing ghost stories, which are widely considered to be the most “conservative” genre of literature. And not only did he try: in his own lifetime, Kirk’s best gothic novel, Old House of Fear, outsold all his nonfiction books put together. This, if anything, seems to have drawn Kirk to the Catholic way of seeing things. In the introduction to a collection of his stories called Watchers at the Straight Gate (1984) Kirk said,
The tales in this volume have retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficent phantoms, conjuring witches, demonic possession, creatures of the twilight, divided selves. I present them to you unabashed. They may impart some arcane truths about good and evil: as Chesterton put it, all life is an allegory, and we can understand it only in parable.
In this sense, ghost stories are also an “authority.” They impress upon our minds the idea of an order to the universe—one entirely beyond our powers of comprehension. Kirk knew that this order has a name: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, through whom all things were made.
That’s why—despite being a bestselling novelist, newspaper columnist, and political philosopher—he did his best to imitate the “hidden life” of St. Joseph. From the time of his graduation from St. Andrews in 1953 to his death in 1994 he lived in his ancestral home, Piety Hill. This magnificent home stands right in the middle of Mecosta, a town of about 400 people in central Michigan founded by Kirk’s great grandfather. Kirk turned down countless appointments in academia and government so he could live in his own little Bethlehem.
Kirk died in 1994 and was buried in the cemetery of St. Michael’s parish in Mecosta. Next to his grave is a headstone that reads, “Clinton Wallace, Knight of the Road.” Wallace was a tramp who befriended Russell and his wife Annette. Whenever he blew into town, he’d stay at Piety Hill, earning his keep by doing odd jobs. One night, Russell found Wallace dead in the snow. They buried him next to Annette’s brother in the family plot.
Russell Kirk knew what “love thy neighbor” meant. He knew it better than many men who spent their whole lives going to Mass and reading the Bible. In that sense—as in so many others—Kirk’s really was a Catholic mind.
The Permanent Things
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal
Based at Russell Kirk’s ancestral home of Mecosta, Michigan, the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal aims to recover, conserve, and enliven those enduring norms and principles that Russell Kirk called the Permanent Things. As Kirk put it:
There are certain permanent things in society: the health of the family, inherited political institutions that insure a measure of order and justice and freedom, a life of diversity and independence, a life marked by widespread possession of private property. These permanent things guarantee against arbitrary interference by the state. These are all aspects of conservative thought, which have developed gradually as the debate since the French Revolution has gone on.
It is the work of the Kirk Center to strengthen the Permanent Things, especially as they relate to America’s tradition of order, justice, and freedom.
It hosts seminars, research, and fellowship opportunities in what is now a unique residential library and conference center. These activities, rooted in one of American conservatism’s historic places, constitute a lively educational community at the core of the Center’s mission. From here, its Kirk on Campus initiative supports programs that bring Kirk’s ideas and the tradition he represents to the rising generation at our colleges and universities. Through The University Bookman and other resources online, it engages a wide variety of people in its mission of renewing the culture.
Civilization can only thrive, Edmund Burke once wrote, as a partnership of “those living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.” The Kirk Center brings this truth to life. Since its founding in 1995, the Kirk Center has enjoyed a national and international reputation for linking together generations past and present in an educational journey to discover and nourish the roots of America’s political, economic, and religious order.
Through both its residential and on-campus programs the Kirk Center explores the means by which the patrimony of culture may be preserved and renewed. Civilizational memory and community together can foster the kind of continuity in beliefs, practices, and institutions necessary if a culture is to foster authentic human flourishing.
In these ways the Center continues Russell Kirk’s own efforts to enrich our understanding of the Permanent Things that maintain and nurture America’s civil social order.
For more info, visit the kirkcenter.org.