Kirk may be one of the, if not the, most important American thinkers of the twentieth century. He was a historian, a literary biographer, a political biographer, a best-selling novelist, a social critic and essayist, a defender of academic freedom, an economist, an advisor to presidents and presidential candidates, a Roman Catholic, a Stoic, a Christian Humanist, a convinced believer in ghosts, a nationally-known debater and lecturer, a traditionalist, an environmental conservationist, a Justice of the Peace, the founder of the post-World War II conservative movement, and, perhaps above all, a truly charitable soul. In short, he was a “man of letters” and a natural aristocrat, each a position nearly extinct in the twentieth-century.

“The American Cicero: Russell Kirk”
By Bradley J. Birzer

This present life here below, Kirk had perceived often in his mind’s eye, is an ephemeral existence, precarious, as in an arena rather than upon a stage: some men are meant to be gladiators or knights-errant, not mere strolling players. Swords drawn, they stand on a darkling plain against all comers and all odds; how well they bear themselves in the mortal struggle will determine in what condition they shall put on incorruption. His sins of omission and commission notwithstanding, Kirk had blown his horn and drawn his sword of imagination, in the arena of the blighted twentieth century, that he might assail the follies of the time.

Kirk may be one of the, if not the, most important American thinkers of the twentieth century. He was a historian, a literary biographer, a political biographer, a best-selling novelist, a social critic and essayist, a defender of academic freedom, an economist, an advisor to presidents and presidential candidates, a Roman Catholic, a Stoic, a Christian Humanist, a convinced believer in ghosts, a nationally-known debater and lecturer, a traditionalist, an environmental conservationist, a Justice of the Peace, the founder of the post-World War II conservative movement, and, perhaps above all, a truly charitable soul. In short, he was a “man of letters” and a natural aristocrat, each a position nearly extinct in the twentieth-century.

During his forty-three year writing career, he touched on numerous topics, and he received accolades and friendship from many famous persons: including Flannery O’Conner, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Reagan, and Ray Bradbury. He was labeled, among other things, “the American Cicero,” the “Sage of Mecosta,” (Mecosta is Kirk’s ancestral town in central Michigan) and the “Wizard of Mecosta.” As Kirk said of himself, he drew his sword, and he lived what he preached.

Though a natural aristocrat, Kirk did not enter the world, however, with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. Instead, he was born in 1918 on “the wrong side of the tracks” in Plymouth, Michigan; Kirk’s father was a railroad engineer. Most of his mother’s family were intellectuals and spiritualists, and Kirk grew up learning the importance of education as well as witnessing and participating in some rather bizarre paranormal activities, the essence of which Kirk would later reject theologically, but he never stopped to believe in the reality of the unreal.

Kirk earned his B.A. at Michigan State University and his M.A. in history from Duke University. The University of Chicago published his M.A. thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the greatest of the first generation of American congressmen and Senators, as a book in 1951. Having one’s M.A. thesis published as a significant academic book was as rare then as it is now. During the second world war, Kirk did his duty in the salt flats of Utah as a clerk at an army base which specialized in experimental weapons. As his wife, Annette, has said, “Russell spent his time in the desert.” At the end of the war, Kirk took a position at Michigan State as a professor of western civilization and began further graduate studies at St. Andrews in Scotland. Rather than earn a Ph.D., Kirk attained an even higher degree, the D.Litt, essentially a double Ph.D. (one had to prove expertise in at least two unrelated subjects and write a thesis obviously worthy of publication). Kirk remains the only American to have received the highly distinguished degree.

His thesis, The Conservative Mind, was published to astounding acclaim—even being a part of the cover story of Time’s 1953 Fourth of July issue. His “fat book,” as he often called it, became the basis of the post-war conservative movement, though Kirk was quick to point out that his definition of conservatism was not strictly political. Instead, it meant preserving (conserving) the best of our traditions. Tracing the Anglo-American inheritance of Edmund Burke’s thought, Kirk admitted that his book was an extended essay considering the definition of “conservatism.” His book changed forever the discourse regarding America and its supposed “liberal” origins. No longer could any scholar with integrity label America as simply a brave new liberal world, molded within a purely Lockean framework, with homo economicus emerging from an amorphous state of nature. Instead, as Kirk noted, strains of traditionalist and Burkean thought continue through this present day in the Anglo and American mind. America, far from being new, emerged from the long western tradition, inheriting the best of the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Christians (Catholic and Protestant), and medieval English. Six tenets, he noted, formed the conservative mind:

1. "Belief in the transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.”
2. “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.”
3. “Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a ‘classless society.’”
4. “Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.”
5. “Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.”
6. “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”

In short, the conservative, or man or woman of tradition, understands that a world greater than this time and place and these senses exists. “Those men and women who fail to perceive timeless moments are prisoners of time and circumstance,” Kirk wrote toward the end of his life. “Only by transcending the ravenous ego, and sharing their joy with others, do mortals come to know their true enduring selves, and to put on immortality.” Hell, after all, is “imprisonment with the ego, in the winter of discontent.”

With the phenomenal success of The Conservative Mind, Kirk became a full-time writer and free-lance lecturer. From 1953 to his death in 1994, Kirk lectured and debated throughout the country. And, thousands of students visited his home in sparsely populated central Michigan. A naturalist and conservationist, Kirk planted over 1,000 trees and would often tutor his pupils while gardening. Kirk was well-rounded and eclectic, if not healthily eccentric. He served as a speech writer and advisor to politicians, refused to be ideological in his views, and even wrote best-selling horror and fantasy horror fiction, in the vein of his good friend, Ray Bradbury.

The productivity and life changes Kirk experienced between 1953 and 1975 are nothing short of astounding, as Kirk led one of the most blessed of lives. 1964 served as the banner year for Kirk. Though his candidate lost the presidential election, his life changed dramatically. Kirk, formerly a pagan stoic—highly taken with and comforted by the writings of Marcus Aurelius—married the beautiful and highly intelligent Annette Courtemanche, and he joined the Roman Catholic church, taking the name Russell Amos Augustine Kirk. Together, Russell and Annette had four daughters, the last being born in 1975. During these years, Kirk published an impressive number of books, covering an array of topics, including: The Conservative Mind; St. Andrews; Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition; Program for Conservatives; The American Cause; Beyond the Dreams of Avarice; Confessions of a Bohemian Tory; The Political Principles of Robert Taft; Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered; Enemies of the Permanent Things; T.S. Eliot and His Age; and The Roots of American Order.

Between 1976 and 1994, Kirk continued to lecture and publish. He published a comprehensive text on economics, Work and Prosperity; several more works of fiction; four collections of essays: Reclaiming a Patrimony; Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky; The Politics of Prudence; and Redeeming the Time (published posthumously); an extended historical essay on the cultural affinities of Britain and America, America’s British Culture; and his own memoirs, The Sword of Imagination. He also edited thirty-one books. In 1989, President Reagan awarded Kirk the Presidential Citizen’s Medal for Distinguished Service. In 1993, Hillsdale College named an academic chair in his honor, and he began the process of editing the complete works of Christopher Dawson.

In his 1989 Prospects for Conservatives, perhaps his most polemical and, simultaneously, his most brilliant work, Kirk argued that one separated the economic from the legal from the political from the cultural only with forced artificiality. The “economic problem blends into the political problem, and the political problem into the ethical problem, and the ethical problem into the religious problem.” Coming from one Creator, all of creation is of a unified whole. The solution to everything, Kirk rightly noted, was a true understanding of the virtues, as developed and handed down through the western tradition: prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and charity. Only a cultivation and habituation of these, through the acceptance of grace, will order the soul and the commonwealth. If these are lost, if grace is rejected, the soul and the commonwealth are also lost.

While all of the virtues work together, it is love, the greatest of the virtues, that unifies the rest. In one of the most beautiful paragraphs composed in the entirety of the twentieth century, a century saturated with blood, ideologies, and technology, Kirk wrote:

At the back of every discussion of the good society lies this question, What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death.

Man was not made to follow the arbitrary reason of tyrants or captains of industry. Men are put in a certain time and a certain place, armed with unique gifts, by their Creator “to live like men, and to die like men.” They are to fight the good fight on the “darkling plain,” knowing that the battle is their’s, but the war is not.

In the last weeks of Kirk’s life in the spring of 1994, bedridden, he talked much with his four daughters, his wife, and some of his closest friends. Kirk’s last real advice to his daughters was to “read and reread four specific writings informed by the moral imagination: The Little Fir Tree, by Hans Christian Anderson; The Pilgrim’s Regress, by C.S. Lewis; “The Golden Key,” by George MacDonald; and Tree and Leaf, by J.R.R. Tolkien.” On April 23, Kirk learned of the death of his close friend Richard Nixon, with whom much of his earlier career had been connected, though he felt great disappointment with Nixon over Watergate. Five days later, still bedridden, Kirk read Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well. He also re-read Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse,” finding and sharing with his family the new insights in the rousing poem. The following morning, April 29, 1994, Kirk and his wife, Annette, talked of many things, but at around 10AM, Kirk became unresponsive. Annette and two of his daughters sang to him, and Dr. Kirk passed away, a gentle smile upon his face.

Kirk lived like a man, according to his own strictures. In addition to writing twenty-nine books and numerous articles attacking the follies of our day, he and his wife Annette raised a family of four daughters. Together, they took care of their parents and extended family. To a fault, as Kirk admitted in his short stories and in his autobiography, he and Annette helped anyone in need, sometimes putting their own lives in mortal danger. They took in hobos and refugees, many of them living with the Kirks for years. No one could rightly accuse them of having lived in an unloving manner.

Today, the knight-errant against the ideologues rests in the cemetery of St. Michael’s Parish in Mecosta, Michigan. One cannot imagine a more fitting protector than St. Michael, the Knight-Errant of the Heavenly Host, to stand watch over the “American Cicero” who believed in love above all things.

Interested in Dr. Kirk’s thought and life? Think about an American Studies major. For more information, contact Dr. Dan Sundahl via email or phone (x2443).