Russel Kirk's "ghostly tales"

Russell Kirk is best known as America's foremost conservative thinker. Historian, essayist, biographer, his The Conservative Mind (1953) put conservatism on the map as an intellectual force in America, capable of resisting the onslaughts of welfare statism, ideological egalitarianism, bureaucratism -- the most recent plagues of our increasingly cumbersome democracy. His most recent work is a biography of Edmund Burke, England's leading conservative thinker of the 18th century. (Students of Rudolf Steiner's ethics in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity should know that the phrase 'moral imagination' originated not with Steiner, but with Burke.)

The old, honorable conservatism which Kirk represents rests upon the conviction that human life is based upon a moral order as much, if not more than, a natural order. This moral order, by definition, presupposes the existence of a supernatural or transcendent dimension. The "mystical" or "ghostly tale," by pointing to this supernatural dimension, can thus "be an instrument for the recovery of moral order." For the Beings who inhabit that realm -- and these pages -- "retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficient phantoms..." etc. are real -- as real as decisions of good or evil, as real as salvation or damnation.

In one of my favorite stories -- "The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion" -- an "unworthy servant of the light" meets "a worthy servant of the darkness," and the drama is continued in the astral world. The malign magician, "Archvicar Gerontion," says to his counterpart and antagonist, Manfred Arcane: "I shall take your body!" A hideous parody of Christ's words at the Last Supper! And only through Christ is resolution achieved in this powerful tale of a dark magician's desire to appropriate the life of another and so avert his own death.

Or take "Uncle Isaiah." How to describe the supernatural presence of this character, who defeats one Bruno Costa, a North End (Boston) racketeer and extortionist who has been hounding his nephew? Best do it in the author's own words, encapsulating style and humor:

" 'Yeah?' Costa hesitated, and knew that the old man perceived his incertitude; so he strode defiantly to the middle of the room, where he stared across the table at the old man. Costa kept his hand in his pocket. 'Yeah? No, we ain't met, but I heard about you, you crazy old bstard. What's up?'

" 'I look upon you, sir,' said Isaiah Kinnaird, 'as an interesting phenomenon of social disintegration, a representative specimen of these depraved days. Your reference to my origin is inaccurate; for only one instance of illegitimacy has been recorded among the Kinnairds in more than a century; while you, Mr. Costa - if you will forgive my saying so -- manifestly are the end-product of many generations of unbridled lubricity.' "

The supernatural thriller or ghostly tale has its drama in the ongoing conflicts of matter and spirit: but its physical body, so to speak, touches down with the noblest literature -- words, the love of language for its own sake, the embellishments of style. The genre flourished prior to the First World War and immediately afterwards. The names Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare first come to mind. Then there was the master, Charles Williams -- friend of Owen Barfield, C.S. lewis, and J.R.R. tolkien. Dr. Kirk is a worthy heir to these British masters -- no small accomplishment, especially today, when a fashionable anti-transcendental cynicism now rules the literary mobs. And, speaking of Barfield, Dr. Kirk writes elsewhere that "he and I have never met, though we have tried to."

For indeed Dr. Kirk is but a hair's breath away from Anthroposophy himself: True, that span is of some significance; for, as he writes in his foreword to these tales, "No one ever has satisfactorialy supported by evidence a general theory accounting for ghostly apparitions and similar phenomena." Anthroposophy could offer to Dr. Kirk such a "general theory" -- and more. Such true and wise intuitions as fill these pages could be transformed into cognitions. Through the anthroposophical path, the transcendent dimension can be recovered for mankind not through the 'facts of knowledge," but through the act of knowing: knowledge itself, like the events recounted in these stories, becomes experience, initiation.

And what, may we also ask, could conservatism offer to Anthroposophy? Its respect for laws, traditions, constitutions, written and unwritten codes which are the heritage of our political freedom and the best safeguards for it, could offer a healthy corrective to the utopianism which sometimes infects anthroposophical thinking. For these political freedoms, with their restraints, limits, and formalities, make a space for that inner freedom rightly valued by Anthroposophy.

So much for the marriage of Anthroposophy and conservatism: which, given the respective natures of each, is in itself a rather utopian notion. Nevertheless, students of Anthroposophy should know about Russell Kirk, and these wonderful tales are a great way to strike up an introduction. They are memorable to read, and the language in which they are framed is a pleasure to taste. Would that those of us who claim to have found the new path of knowledge could speak with so sure a voice, so fine a tongue.

LORD OF THE HOLLOW DARK by Russell Kirk. Christendom Press, Front Royal, VA 22630, 1993. 384pp, paperback, $13.95. Reviewed by Caryl Johnston in The St. Croix Review, v.XXVI, No. 6, December, 1993.

Russell Kirk is best known as the Founding Father of conservatism in twentieth-century America. He is the author of The Conservative Mind, The Roots of the American Order, studies of Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot, and numerous other works. He is less well known as a writer of ghostly tales and mystical romances, a creative writer on a par with that unearthly Englishman, Charles Williams.

Yet it is in the legacy of imagination that the real growing point of a living conservatism may lie. This is the true conservatism -- of the Soul. This conservatism of this soul is nourished by two convictions: first, that the spiritual world is real, and second, that human destiny cannot be understood as only a "this-world" affair. These two convictions likewise feed the source of morality -- the idea of self-restraint and of wise limits. Where this morality is true, the idea is not self-restraint and limit merely to refrain from doing evil -- though that, certainly -- but more to the point, to prevent the Soul from wasting its resources in profligate and premature action. A Soul so wasted has hardly the spiritual resources to think clearly, much less perceive into the spiritual.

To perceive the spiritual: this is one way of viewing liberation. It is not the prayer, Libera me, Domine, which is to be despised; but it is important who speaks it, and to what purpose. In Russell Kirk's mystical cosmos, liberation can be achieved within limits, natural and supernatural. It is not to be found in the disregard or annihilation of those limits.

There are those who would say otherwise. Lord of the Hollow Dark deals with the conflict of opposing ideas of liberation. Set in a Gothic castle in Scotland, Balgrummo Lodge, a gathering of the disciples of an occult master takes place. All of the participants have taken names from T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland; their chief goes by the name of Apollinax.

Apollinax's lordly purpose is nothing less than the annihilation of that chief limit upon all human endeavor -- time itself. He plans the consummation of this purpose in a nefarious ritual of evil and bloodshed, by which prelude he intends to project his followers into the Timeless Moment. That Moment represents the collapse, for all, of Forever into Now: they will never escape, never die, never live, never transform. Apollinax speaks:

"... think how intense will be the perpetual endurance of some overwhelmingly strong action and emotion! There, not in some fancied 'other world,' is to be found our immortality. Here and now, you and I can be in eternity. What we hear now, see now, feel now, do now, can be our seeing, hearing, feeling, acting when the dream-realm of material things has passed away altogether. Our passionate pleasures need know no termination: they may outlast the great globe itself. You and I may dwell unchanged... quite freed from past and future, quite unalterable. You and I may be as gods."

It is not for nothing that Dr. Kirk remarked of his book -- that it "penetrates into the ... mystery of what we call the Soul." The real danger of the Soul comes not from the materialists, but from those who, like Apollinax, are too spiritual. The Soul, mediating link between our bodies and the spiritual, lives, breathes, and transforms itself through time. The record of its passage through time we call history; the testimony of meaning in history we call religion. It is Kirk's great insight that the breaking-free of this Soul from history and religion leads, not only to degradation and deeper, but to complete stasis.

But there is a great mystery, too, concerning time and the soul. The Lord of the hollow Dark, Apollinax (or the Evil Being whom he represents) knows of this mystery, though he would pervert it. He has all of his acolytes and participants take on the archetypal names from Eliot's poem. And in point of fact, time is meaningful to the extent that we are all, to some extent, not just persons -- but also 'personages.' In modern life we have cast aside the old archetypes, the participated meanings and 'ancient unities' by which, in former days, human beings knew themselves. We are free largely and precisely because we are 'personal' -- self-enclosed, apart from the universe. And yet, and yet ... the qualitative sense for days, months, years, the passing of one age into another, the 'revelatory' messages from time itself -- this sense is not altogether dead within us. The Soul feels the difference between youth and age, dawn and dusk, even if our minds are often forgetful of it. But this qualitative feeling is the essence of the soul's most intimate life: indeed, it is that life.

But it is just here that we confront a very great problem. It is one that shows signs of becoming one of the great spiritual problems of our age. And it is this: the meaningfulness of time, presupposing a realm of the transpersonal which is common to all, is not easily reconciled with the personal. An excessive preoccupation with the meaningfulness of time can lead to an obliteration of the personal. But the excessively and exclusively personal can lead to the sense of time as mere passage, meaningless duration, mere conjunction of moments. The evil genius of Apollinax has figured out a way to combine these two dangers: the law of archetypes drives out the personal. But the personal, denied access to its proper realm of time and incarnation, becomes all-consuming and eventually collapses into a senseless and alienated prolongation.

Time as an enemy of spirit -- time as the wise limit of incarnated life: these two conflicting views fight it out in the bowels of Balgrummo Lodge. In this novel Russell Kirk the fabulist joins forces with Russell Kirk the thinker. The union of Imagination and Reason in conservatism's finest thinker suggests the path to be followed by a conservatism of the future. It is not enough just now to seek for the "first things," or even the "permanent things," however enlightening these coherent bodies of thought may be. Of what use are coherent bodies of thought to a populace whose leaders seem to be incapable of even rudimentary exercises in clear thinking? Conservatives must have the courage to go down into the darkness and wrestle, if need be, with the Lord of Darkness himself -- bearing witness to the impermanent and the perishable, which is the law of all created things, the law of all that we love. The battle is joined -- for time and the soul.