The last year has brought us a number of books that ought to serve as town criers to the West. While we have had a veritable tradition of such warnings throughout the modernist era—Chesterton, Benda, Ortega, Eliot, Tate, Voegelin, Burnham, et al. I don’t believe that there has been a time since the Thirties in which alarums have been sounded more insistently or in such happy profusion. The recent crop, taken together, is reminiscent of the coalition that formed the American Review (1933–37); it includes the subject of this review, John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture; Jacques Ellul, Betrayal of the West (Seabury, 1978); Arianna Stassinopoulos, After Reason (Stein & Day, 1978); Joan Colebrook, Innocents of the West: Travels Through the Sixties (Basic Books, Inc., 1979); and Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (Gateway, 1979). The points of view differ greatly. Senior is a Catholic with medieval foundations, Ellul a French Calvinist, and so forth, but each has glimpsed the future that is already here, and seen its desolation of spirit, and each calls for a return to the values of the West.

Ordinarily, such a statement might seem jejeune, to be marked by the teacher as “generalization! which West?” But the point is that in these extraordinary times, when the threat is to the very existence of the West, with all its inner contradictions, the crisis must be stated in Tolkien’s terms: the Men of the West v. Eastern Mordor. Though he disagrees with them radically, Senior can find Hume and Voltaire closer to his basic assumptions than Kung or Russell. The question is, can the West survive? Have we gone so far that we cannot return? In To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow wondered whether we do not all “go about lightly chloroformed,” while a “dark power” enslaves our thinking. This loss of perception of what we are now in relation to what we have been exercises the wits of each of the authors, and summons apocalyptic moods and rhetoric. Belloc had laid it down that “Europe is the Faith, the Faith is Europe.” The New Humanists were willing to reform the proposition to “the West is a set of moral standards and limitations,” though they were mightily excoriated by the late Allen Tate for this reduction. But even this rarefied formula has become increasingly repugnant or incomprehensible before the triumph of a nightmarish modernism which seems, as both Senior and Ellul observe, to have seized the minds of even the best thinkers with a perversity that looks upon everything Western as outmoded and discredited. Colebrook and Stassinopoulos join Senior and Ellul in wondering at what James Burnham called “the suicide of the West,” while Kirk drolly reviews the self-destruction of the intellect in a disintegrating culture.

It is against this background that Senior writes, his academic concerns at one with his life as a teacher. Since the book first appeared last January, it has been taken to task by several reviewers, as well as some readers, for what is perceived as a difficult, annoying, even perverse style. I confess that I have not had this problem in reading him, perhaps because I can identify so readily with the spirit of anger and exasperation which informs his lively prose: Daily in my teaching I encounter the same problem which exercises both his and Ellul’s wrath—a matter-of­-fact assumption that “all that” has been left behind us in the kitchen­ midden of the West, that now we are embarked on a new journey in spaceship earth or in a new lifestyle in the global village commune, where all the moral, religious, and epistemological assumptions of the past are obsolete or quaint. Perhaps some of my readers can identify with the urge to clenched fists and battle cries in the spirit of Roland.

In The Way Down and Out, a much earlier book by Senior, he wrote “perhaps in the end we shall be reduced to a set of clenched teeth.” While he has by no means been so reduced, he has (like Ellul) been angered, and his prose has an urgency about it born of trying to contend with epidemic error and general fog. When one is encircled by Dark Riders, it is no time for the polite nothings of the university presses.

Nevertheless, Senior’s book is not hysterical; quite the contrary, its arguments are cogent and sound—it is what he has the audacity to say that is unpalatable to reviewers. He commonly returns us to first principles in the spirit of his mentors, Belloc, Cardinal Newman, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Plato. In relation to the seriously confused ecumenical movement, he offers Aristotle’s Principle of Contradiction; to those hankering after Eastern mysticism, a clear discussion of the metaphysical opposition of East and West; to those confused about Church and State in education, a refreshing discussion of the difference between true and false liberalism. Beginning with a question, “What is Christian Culture?,” Senior examines the idiocies of the current scene for topsy-turvy revaluations of all values and a perverted sense of compassion, and begins a contrast which he uses effectively throughout the book, between the jaded decadence of fashionable thinking and the basic premises of Christian Western man, grounded in love, work, family, realist metaphysics, prayer, and God.

Perhaps the best and most needed section of the argument is the pursuit of the “modern” at its roots. For Senior, the Modernist movement in literature and culture begins precisely where it ends—Rimbaud and Baudelaire do not differ essentially from Ginsberg and Co.—for they commence by rejecting and hating the West and, with inexorable predictability, proceed to a love of the East which, as Senior analyzes with skill, is nothing but a love of the nothingness that is not there. Historically, we may observe the accuracy of Senior’s thesis, from Plato’s struggle with the sophists to Paul’s with the Corinthians to the romantic’s pursuit of the lotus to the streetcorner gurus and befuddled theologians of the 1970s. What is characteristic of the East is gnosticism, and disbelief in the concrete individual thing or person, and when the West falters in its first principles, it opens itself to that invasion of that spirit in every dimension of its existence—religion, family, art, education, work, language—which men like Augustine and Voegelin have fought so well. Senior challenges the comfortable orthodoxies of the “modern tradition,” and the scriptures (Joyce, Proust, Lawrence, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, etc.) on which it founds its anti-church. We have not seen such literary irreverence since Chesterton: it is delightful to have it from a professor of classics who knows the modern world very well indeed.

Senior’s attack on the popular assumptions of the time proceeds through many topics, but his progress is also a regress—to the first principles of philosophy and the Christian Catholic Faith, and its greatest exemplification in the medieval period, which he opposes to the current corruption in the Church as in the “philosophical imbecility of Hans Kung.” The cure for this latter-day nonsense Senior sees as no different, for church or society, from what it has always been when the Dark Ages threaten—monastic centers of contemplation and education. Drawing on the basic principles of monastic education, he makes an eloquent plea that centers based on these principles be at least permitted existence in the modern university, a gentlemanly allusion to his own embattled Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas (see Russell Kirk’s report in Decadence and Renewal, pp. 325–328). As for the church, it too must return to its monastic center. In “Dark Night of the Church,” he remarks that there is little hope at present for the Visible Church these days, that we have no reason now to be Christians except the right ones, the true ground of hope.

While I agree generally with the conclusions as with the mood of the argument, I wonder if the bulk of the book was not written before the accession of John Paul II. As I write, the Pope is in Poland, that beautiful country that has survived Munich, Yalta, Potsdam. Addressing his fellow countrymen, John Paul argued that Poland is of the West because it is Christian, and he called for a reuniting of the Christian West. Turning from the TV, I found this passage in GK’s Weekly, No. 2, March 28, 1925:

Certainly that nation has proved itself perpetual under conditions when it was thought that anything would have perished. And if indeed we come to a chaos in which it seems that everything has perished, if this Semitic sophistry does link up the Teutons with the Slavonic hordes, if there returns that welter of barbarism which Europe has often seen, many who do not now understand may find themselves saying, if only under their breath, “there is always Poland.”

Thus Chesterton. We may observe that, as far as Poland was concerned, the Germans and Russians did unite to crush it, and crush it again. To Senior’s witty chapter, “Black is Beautiful,” in which black becomes symbolic of the real thing, we may add the hope of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. Malachi Martin has written that the future of the church is in the East, not in the West, where Christianity has been trivialized or diluted, to which Senior would, I believe, reply, “of course, where the West is clearly understood to be on the front lines, and knows its enemy.”  

Dr. R. Kenton Craven was at the time of writing administrative director of the Human Life Center, St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

The most revealing fact in James Bryce’s study of the impediments to good citizenship in a democracy, which Howard G. Schneiderman notes in his Introduction, is that Bryce never describes or defines citizenship, good or otherwise. The precise nature of good citizenship is left vague, perhaps because Bryce expected his audience to know the definition of a citizen and what constituted the duties of good citizenship. The contents of this book were originally presented as a series of lectures given by Bryce at Yale University in 1909, and Bryce makes many wise observations about the dangers modern democracy poses to good citizenship. However, this book can also be read as evidence of how far the civil discourse of our nation has deteriorated, even to the point of not understanding the assumptions necessary to any discussion of citizenship.

The annals of Greece and Rome provide us no end of sources for models of good citizens. The Greeks gave us Socrates, who refused to leave Athens in violation of its laws even if the laws judged him to be executed; he had enjoyed the freedom of an Athenian citizen, and so he would also accept the responsibilities. The Romans offer Cincinnatus,the noble-born farmer who takes up the mantle of dictator in order to save his people, and then relinquishes it when the threat is over and returns to his fields.

The classics, as well as Christian and modern concepts of citizenship, are implicit in The Hindrances to Good Citizenship; Bryce expects his audience to know the examples given above among others, and so does not spend time discussing them but proceeds directly to his argument.

That argument is still relatively simple, even after all these years. Individualism, the driving force of democracy and the arbiter of its values, can itself be destructive to democratic society. The needs of the individual must at times be subordinated to the greater needs of the majority; indeed, this is required for a democracy to operate at all. Bryce respected the power and energy of individualism, but he feared that in the glorification of the self the delicate balance needed in a democracy would founder. The theory of democracy assumes a much higher level of civic virtue than can reasonably be expected; as Bryce states,

“the citizens have failed to respond to the demand for active virtue and intelligent public spirit which free government makes and must make. Everywhere there is that same contrast between that which the theory of democracy requires and that which the practice ofdemocracy reveals … Thus the deficiencies which free governments show reduce themselves to the failure of the citizens to reach the needed standard of civic excellence.”

Self-government requires sacrifice and the assumption of responsibilities such as voting and running for office; democracy suffers if in place of sacrifice and responsibility citizens demand more rights and increasing amounts of government largesse; the result of such demands is not a government of free citizens but a nation of dependents.

The irony of a government founded on the powers of the individual but ending as a centrally run mass-state is not lost on Bryce. He discusses it in a lecture entitled “Indolence,” which is the most widespread of the three hindrances to good citizenship; the other two being “Private Self-Interest” and “Party Spirit,” to each of which Bryce devotes a lecture.

Indolence, while always present in human society, has tended to be more evident with the rise of democracy; this is in part a function of the growth of government, a growth just beginning to accelerate in Bryce’s time. The size of the modern state causes the individual citizen to feel that his own contribution is not valued or needed. The ancient Greek city-states had voting populations barely in the thousands; when citizens number in the millions, whence comes the impetus to participate? In large democracies, the sense of public responsibility is weakened:

“A duty shared with many others seems less a personal duty. If a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand other citizens are as much bound to speak, vote, or act as each one of us is, the sense of obligation becomes to each of us weak. Still weaker does it become when one perceives the neglect of others to do their duty.… The Average Man judges himself by the average standard and does not see why he should take more trouble than his neighbors. Thus we arrive at a result summed up in the terrible dictum, which reveals the basic fault of democracy, ‘What is Everybody’s business is Nobody’s business.’”

As Bryce notes, this state of affairs should cause the exceptional citizen to work all the harder; but in a democracy the exceptional are drowned in a sea of mediocrity and can accomplish little. This opens the way for citizens of lesser intelligence and virtue to assume political office, and a depressing cycle ensues: the more good citizens refuse to do anything, the more politics is overrun with corruption, which in turn discourages citizens from attempting to change affairs for the better. This is especially true in our day, when a political class has entrenched itself so thoroughly behind innumerable statues and among countless agencies as to be virtually unmovable. Bryce also notes that in our modern world citizens are too distracted by amusements and newly appearing luxuries to take much interest in reforming politics; this observation has become only more appropriate to an America addicted to the television.

Bryce names three qualities which are needed if good citizenship is to be cultivated at all in a free society: Intelligence, Self-Control, and Conscience. Of the three, the last is the hardest to produce in a democracy, for conscience is at root about duty, and it is conscience that causes a citizen to “feel his responsibility to the community and be prepared to serve it by voting, working, or (if need be) fighting.” A democracy, however, prefers to accentuate not duties but rights. Dating from the Glorious Revolution, Bryce says, the connection of rights to duties has been obscured. “Duty is the correlative of Right. Nevertheless, [this] relation is the one which always tends to be forgotten and to drop into the background, so much more do men enjoy being honoured by the ascription of Rights than they do being reminded of Duties. It is more blessed to give than to receive. But to the average man it is less agreeable.”

In his last lecture, entitled, “How to Overcome the Obstacles to Good Citizenship,” Bryce provides several remedies to help advance the cause of good citizenship. These remedies he divides into the mechanical, those affecting political procedures; and the ethical, those which attempt to alter behavior. Some of the mechanical remedies, such as the Initiative and the Referendum, are rather familiar; others, such as obligatory voting, are less so.

It is with the ethical remedies, however, that we see how far we have come since Bryce’s rather hopeful age. He speaks of reaching the will of the citizen through his soul, and of “moral education combined with and made the foundation for instruction in civic duty” that will combine our disparate immigrant groups into one people, and cause their self-interest to lose its selfish quality. These are noble sentiments, and did in fact work for a time in this country, yet today we need further remedies. We live in a nation where moral education is banned by law from the public school, and where various groups flaunt their differences without at the same time seeking a common good, indeed where many have denied there is a common good and use governmental power for this scheme or that. Bryce spoke in a time when an appeal to the will through the soul might have a wide effect upon public opinion; in his own day, the Yale lectures were considered front-page news. While Bryce’s message is still of value for those who understand the role of the citizen in a free society, Bryce is of supplemental value only for the greater task of national regeneration, that of learning definitions and first principles. 

“A study of the various forms government has taken cannot but raise the question what ground there is for the assumption that democracy is in its final form-an unwarranted assumption, for whatever else history teaches, it gives no ground for expecting finality in any human institution. All material things are in a perpetual flux.… Within the century and a half of its existence in the modern world free government has passed through many phases, and seems now to stand like the traveller who on the verge of a great forest sees many paths diverging into its recesses and knows not whither one or other will lead him.”

—James Bryce, “The Future of Democracy”
in Modern Democracies, Volume II (1921)

Gerald Russello holds a degree in Classics from Georgetown University and was at the time ofwriting studying Law at New York University.

A good friend of mine, scion of an old Virginia family, when deep into his cups, regales me with stories of John Randolph of Roanoke. Late into the night, when we have both imbibed heavily of Tennessee’s finest sour mash, my friend invariably offers to share with me a closely guarded secret. Lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, he tells me that old “Mad Jack” Randolph lies buried in a vaulted cavern far beneath the cold waters of the James River. When peril threatens Randolph’s people, he will arise from the gloomy depths, and once again the lacerating sting of his anathemas shall be felt in the land. I smile, wish it were true, and forbear reminding my friend that in today’s Virginia, few people have even heard of John Randolph of Roanoke, much less look to him to save the Commonwealth.

Historians, of course, know of John Randolph, but most of them call him up simply to scorn him, for Randolph had the temerity to vilify a hero of most American historians, Thomas Jefferson, to whom Randolph—in a fair sample of his slashing sarcasm—referred as “St. Thomas of Cantingbury.” Besides, Randolph castigated the very things most celebrated by liberal historians: democracy, equality, and social reform. Randolph planted himself squarely athwart the path of the engine named “Progress,” and it rolled over him as it careened into the future. Only Russell Kirk, in a study first published in 1951 and now in its third edition, has given the self-proclaimed “poor, half-crazy, moonstruck Southsider” his due.

If John Randolph has not won the affection of American historians, he has certainly commanded their attention, for the gaunt, glowering champion of the old verities has compelled them to recite his foibles and damn him for his erring ways. With weary resignation I opened the latest scholarly book on Randolph, Robert Dawidoff’s The Education of John Randolph. First with relief and then with mounting joy, I discovered that Professor Dawidoff never bought that neatly wrapped little box of received historical orthodoxy labeled “John Randolph of Roanoke.” Dawidoff decided to think for himself. And think he has, for he has pursued the fiery Virginian for over two decades. His perseverance has paid off, for Dawidoff has written a book filled with flashing insight and thorough understanding. Throughout the book there presides a spirit of deep appreciation—even admiration—of the life and thought of John Randolph. Read alongside Russell Kirk’s book, Dawidoff’s study enables one to grasp the full significance of Randolph’s stubborn refusal to dance the merry jig of the exuberant and expansive American democracy.

Focusing on Randolph’s political theory and practice, Russell Kirk thereby uncovered the close connection between Randolph’s ideas and Edmund Burke’s. In designating Randolph the “American Burke,” Kirk pried Randolph out of the narrow confines of American politics and placed him in a broader transatlantic context. Dawidoff, by contrast, excels in his analysis of two other facets of Randolph’s make-up: his immersion in poetry and fiction and the childhood roots of his conservatism.

From Swift to Byron, Randolph read voraciously in theliterature of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. “Randolph was always utterly serious about literature; his view of its importance went far beyond the limited utilitarian notions of his class.” Randolph identified with the books he read, and took upon himself the roles suggested by his favorite authors. In shaping the image of self he showed his contemporaries, Randolph forged his disparate readings into weapons used in two ways: to combat the decline from the high ideals of the American Revolution and to protect himself from the retaliatory blows of a hostile society. The venomous satire of Swift joined the melancholy egotism of Byron, allowing Randolph to slash effectively at his foes and then retreat into the lonely citadel of the persecuted Romantic hero. In the oftentimes labyrinthine working out of this strategy, Randolph bedazzled and befuddled friend and foe alike.

In probing the sources of Randolph’s conservatism, Dawidoff carefully avoids a psychological reductionism that would dismiss the principled stand of the adult as simply the product of psychic wounds suffered in childhood. Randolph’s detractors have often seized upon such reductionism to avoid coming to grips with Randolph’s critique of his age. What better way to discredit conservatism than to attribute it to psychological maladjustment? Dawidoff will have none of this cheap psychologizing. He eschews the trendy trappings of psycho-history, for he clearly perceives the pitfalls and alluring simplicities awaiting the historian who blithely imposes the categories of psychoanalysis upon the past. Still, the complexities of Randolph’s personality urge one beyond a consideration of his readings in Burke, Swift, and Byron. Something deeper goaded Randolph into his fits of rage against the iniquities of the Republic.

As a boy Randolph imbibed a stern and rigorous code that took root deep in his psyche; his upbringing planted in his mind a literalism ill-befitting him to deal flexibly with the shifting tides and political exigencies of a young and rapidly changing nation. His father, who died when young John was only two years old, became, through Randolph’s imagination and the promptings of his widowed mother, the model of the Anglo-Virginian gentleman, a figure of probity, honor, and duty whom young John strove to emulate. Randolph’s mother, like his father a descendant of the great Virginia families, drove home to her son the need to venerate and cherish land, family, and religion. “Keep the land and it will keep you,” she told him. For an impressionable lad with a fertile imagination, the combination of devotion to the dead father’s ideals and adherence to the mother’s stern adjurations determined the boy’s—and ultimately the man’s—psychological make-up. “Randolph persisted stubbornly in the practice of what he had been taught at the cost of his conventional success and hopes and expectations.” He kept the faith of the fathers as few sons have ever done.

John Randolph undertook a task that America always needs but seldom honors. He assailed the surging hosts of progress, democracy, and egalitarianism, making them pay dearly for their victories. In America’s headlong rush into the future, the John Randolphs have always lost, but in the magnificence of their resistance and the nobility of their defeat, they have taught us the true meaning of devotion to a lost cause. Robert Dawidoff recognizes the worth of Randolph’s embattled stance, for he singles out as Randolph’s legacy his “trenchant and eloquent perception of what in America’s heritage was sacrificed to the demands of democracy and nationhood.”

One hundred years after Randolph’s death in 1833, another bold warrior, Donald Davidson, the old Nashville Agrarian, faced defeat at the hands of the innovators; but like his predecessor, he taught us how to die, sword in hand: “Plan your harrying / If you would gnaw his ravaging flank, or smite / Him in his glut among the smouldering ricks.” From John Randolph to Donald Davidson, the South has produced a steady succession of men willing to bear the opprobrium of their contemporaries in order to defend the old ways. Despite the words of my friend, John Randolph will not arise; but there will always be men of courage and honor to take up his mantle. As America plunges further and further into the future of which Randolph warned, those inspired by “Mad Jack’s” example will remind us of the price we pay for abandoning the faith of our fathers. John Randolph lies in his grave, but John Randolph lives. 

James J. Thompson Jr. edited The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver among other publications.

In the six decades since he began attending meetings of the Fugitive group as a seventeen-year-old Vanderbilt sophomore, Robert Penn Warren has become one of America’s most versatile and prolific writers. He has published thirteen volumes of poetry, ten novels, a number of short stories, two studies of Southern race relations, a volume of selected essays, a play, and book-length treatments of various literary and historical topics. In addition, he and Cleanth Brooks founded the Southern Review and have collaborated on a number of textbooks, including the vastly influential Understanding Poetry.

As one might expect, there has been a tremendous amount of critical work done on Warren’s writing (an annotated primary and secondary Warren bibliography published by G. K. Hall in 1977 ran to 396 pages). Surprisingly, however, little of what has been written by or about Warren deals with his life. While many lesser artists have engaged in constant self-promotion, Warren’s natural modesty has kept him from writing memoirs and from cooperating with would-be biographers. As a result, his works are far better known than is the creative personality behind them.

In an attempt to make that personality more accessible to the reading public, Professor Floyd C. Watkins and John T. Hiers have published a series of conversations with Warren in a single volume called Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews 1950–1978. The scholarly value of such a book should not be underestimated. While literary historians of the past would study a writer’s letters and journals, the impact of modern technology has caused letters and journals to be replaced by more ephemeral modes of communication. As T. Harry Williams points out in his biography of Huey Long, those interested in preserving the history of the recent past must rely increasingly on “the tape-recorded interview with persons still living.”

On several occasions during these interviews their subject was asked to account for the abundance of first-rate Southern literature in the period between the two World Wars. Like his old friend Allen Tate, Warren arguesthat when an insular and traditional subculture begins to be assimilated into the outside world, a sudden flowering of literary creativity often occurs. Not only was this true of the South during the Twenties and Thirties, but also of the Jewish and black populations after World War II.

One of the most important by-products of the so-called Southern Renaissance was a new approach to literary criticism. Through their textbooks and various critical writings, Warren and Cleanth Brooks have, with some modifications, applied and propagated the theories of their old teacher John Crowe Ransom. Sometimes called ontological or formalist criticism, but most frequently known as the “new criticism,” this approach replaces the emphasis of older scholars on historical and biographical research with close textual reading and a more purely aesthetic analysis of literature.

Speaking of the opposition elicited by his critical methods, Warren maintains that the new criticism “is a term that belongs to the conspiracy theory of literary history.”

A lot of people—chiefly aging, conservative professors scared of losing prestige or young instructors afraid of not getting promoted—middle-brow magazineeditors—and the flotsam and jetsam of semi-Marxist social significance criticism left stranded by history—they all have a communal nightmare called the New Criticism to explain their vague discomfort.

Warren displays his own critical acuity in various comments he makes about literature, whether he is discussing Melville’s poetry, Dreiser’s novels, or the contrasting concepts of time in the works of Faulkner and Hemingway. Among other things, Warren finds that his favorite American writers share his own critical affection for this country. To illustrate his point he tells of an Italian soldier who defected from Mussolini during the Second World War. According to this man, the fascist government made a serious blunder in translating novels critical of the United States (“The Faulkners and God knows who”) for their presumed propaganda value. Reading these books convinced him not of the decadence of American life but of the strength of American freedom.

Some of Warren’s most perceptive observations concern the creative process itself. Like Yeats, he sees literature as belonging to the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” “Whoever wants to tell a story of a sainted grandmother,” he says, “unless you can find some old love letters, and get a new grandfather? In heaven there’s no marriage and giving in marriage, and there’s no literature.” For Warren it is the function of literature to call us back to the things of this world.

An implicit sacramental unity underlies Warren’s view of life and of art. He sees concept and image not as antagonistic modes of perception, but as complementary aspects of a single reality. As a case in point, he cites Kekule’s attempt to find a formula for the benzine ring. One night while trying to solve this problem intellectually, the chemist fell asleep and had a nightmare about snakes biting each other. He woke up with this image in his mind and spent the rest of the night working out the formula suggested by it. The writing of poetry involves a similar dialectic: “The dream work is done on the material that is already available in the man. There can be no revelation to a man to whom the revelation would not be a summing up of his own experience.”

In addition to being a major critic and writer, Warren is also one of the finest teachers of our time; and as such, he has some provocative insights about higher education. He speaks, for example. of the value of small schools and of the direct contact which they afford between teacher and student. The opportunity which a large university provides for students to encounter a large number of first-rate thinkers can sometimes be self-defeating, because “the students didn’t learnhow to think …, they didn’t follow one man closely enough to see how his mind worked, for better or for worse, on a problem.”

Although he is not a professional historian, much of Warren’s creative and critical writing has been concerned with history. He shares the conservative’s fundamental distrust of abstraction and reductionist theory. At age thirteen, he read Buckle’s works on geographic determinism and thought that he had an adequate explanation of human behavior. Warren’s subsequent disillusionment with Buckle bred a skepticism about monistic historiography. He was thus inoculated against the Marxism which many of his contemporaries embraced during the Great Depression.

The one abstraction which does seem to fascinate Warren is that in which the American nation itself is grounded. Alone among nations America was forced to define itself overnight, a task accomplished by “one man in an upstairs room, Thomas Jefferson.” Paraphrasing the Polish historian Adam Gurowski, Warren notes that America is unique in being based not on accidents of geography or race, but on an idea. “Behind the comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July platforms,” he observes, “there is the solemn notion Believe and ye shall besaved. That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a part of the American experience.”

Time and again in these interviews Warren comments on the acceleration of change in recent history. He cites Whitehead’s observation that prior to the industrial revolution the world experienced disasters but no fundamental change. Since about 1800, however, we have acquired what amounts to a new sense of time. Warren’s father was twenty-one when the Battle of Wounded Knee was fought, and his grandfather was in the Civil War. In a sense, the author feels closer to the world in which these two men lived than to the one which his son inhabits.

One of the defining characteristics of our age is the sort of intellectual fragmentation which C. P. Snow discusses in The Two Cultures. A byproduct of this fragmentation is the increasingly peripheral role assumed by poetry. Warren notes with amazement that Tennyson was able to get married and set up housekeeping on the money he made from “Maud.” With the exception of Rod McKuen, however, no contemporary poet would dream of similar financial success.

Warren contends that in an era of specialization poetry is no longer called upon to serve the same function as in previous times (“if you talk about science in the modern world, you don’t write a poem like In Memoriam”). The persons who interpret our present culture to us are not poets, but journalists, polemicists, and pop sociologists—all of whom write in prose. The social-consciousness poetry of the Thirties and Sixties, Warren argues, was merely the exception which proves the rule.

One of the other casualties of our current mania for specialization, according to Warren, is the loss of a sense of the past. Ignorant of history, modern man is limited not by space but by time. (This condition Allen Tate has called “the new provincialism.”) The historian as humanist has been replaced by the social scientist as technician. Whether it be cause or result of this process, a corollary development is man’s decreasing sense of human community and his increasing reliance on mechanism and technology.

Although not as specific as Virginia Woolf—who said, “on or about December, 1910, human nature changed”—Warren seems convinced that we live in a time of more than ordinary transition. “My guess is that nothing has happened like this since the rise of Christianity,” he says, “—a fundamental change. Human sensibility, human instinct for value, is changing. Now to what, nobody knows yet.” He suspects, however, that this change may be the apogee of a cumulative process rather than the result of some apocalyptic event. If the end is near, it is likely to come not with a bang but a whimper.

One could continue cataloguing Warren’s views on various issues and still not convey the flavor of this book. Like other great literary conversationalists (Samuel Johnson and Samuel Coleridge immediately come to mind ), Warren impresses us with the eclectic nature of his intelligence and with his passionate commitment to ideas. The play of mind with concept and the emergence of new insights are frequently more apparent in the flow of an interview than in the more formal cadences of a finished essay. It is perhaps a commentary on our times that for Warren the tape recorder should serve as his Boswell.  

Mark Royden Winchell (1948–2008) was a biographer, essayist, historian and literary critic. At the time of his death he was Professor of Literature and European Civilization at Clemson University in South Carolina, where he had taught since 1985.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has something important to say to mankind—this is generally conceded, even though there is little agreement on what he has to say, or on the validity of his thought. It is disturbing, therefore, to ascertain just how few people have read Solzhenitsyn carefully and widely over the body of his work. Fashionable talk about the great Russian is much more common than knowledge of him.

Professor Ericson has contributed greatly to a solutionof this problem. He has written a definitive guide to Solzhenitsyn, of real value to specialist and layman alike. An introductory section is followed by chapters analyzing each of Solzhenitsyn’s works which are available in English translation. The general arrangement is chronological in terms of date of composition, though Solzhenitsyn usually has several works in progress at once, often picking up and working on one project on many occasions over a period of years.

Each work is placed in relation to the others, and analyzed in terms of the main purposes behind it. Characters and plot in fiction, and philosophical themes in non-fiction are sketched broadly. Chapter by chapter, an horizon-wide picture of Solzhenitsyn against the backdrop of our times gradually takes shape. By the end of the book, this shape in the sky, Ericson’s Solzhenitsyn, takes on a reality of its own, rivaling the Russian himself while not contradicting him, much as Boswell’s Johnson merged with the real Johnson and brought him to the margin of comprehension for his contemporaries.

The book is equally valuable for the cognoscente searching for a fresh approach, for the layman who has never read Solzhenitsyn (whether or not he goes on to read the major works), for someone currently reading one of those works, and for someone who has finished one of them and would like to think it over and collect his impressions. Ericson has made Solzhenitsyn much more accessible to the average reader; if this guide is widely distributed and widely known in churches and libraries and schools and homes, it should triple or quadruple the number of souls who will be touched directly by one who may be the greatest literary artist, historical analyst, and spiritual guide of this age.

The literary artistry of the great exile, and the filtering effect of that artistry on his political and religious thought, is exemplified in the “polyphonic” technique of projection through a multitude of characters (foreshadowed by Tolstoy’s War and Peace), and through the presentation of characters and events in a constantly shifting mutual play of coefficients.

Ericson defends Solzhenitsyn the political commentator and analyst against the accusation from the liberal elite of the West that he is antidemocratic. The charges are shallow and glib, automatic libels against that which is too deep for the New Class of the West to comprehend. But all Ericson can bring up in defense is to note that Solzhenitsyn is not actually opposed to the technique of nose-counting and majority rule when it is used to appoint and confirm rulers, and that he may even approve of free elections for this limited purpose, when and where the people have had some “practice.”

A wise reader, willing to swallow hard at first in order to avoid indigestion later on, would be better advised to accept Solzhenitsyn’s indifference, if not hostility, to democracy, and his affinity with Continental conservative thought, the stream of Bonald and De Maistre. But he speaks from outside that mainstream; he speaks as a Russian—not as a Russian nationalist, but like Dostoevsky, as a voice of the great Russian Culture, a culture and a way of looking at the world which may always be somewhat opaque to men of the West. One of Spengler’s great insights was that the Russian Culture and civilization was born several hundred years after the birth of the West, and that it is today only in its early summer, while the last leaves are coming down in the West’s November. Like the Syriac civilization which Spengler saw as warped and distorted by the overwhelming material and organizational forms of the mature classical world, this flat-plains-oriented Russia has been twisted and starved by the immense shadow of the mature West with which it has had to live so closely. Solzhenitsyn could well echo Spengler’s description of “the alien executioners of the Russian spirit, from Peter the Great to Lenin.”

Another service that Ericson provides isto indicate the predominant position which August, 1914 and its two unpublished sequels occupy in the final summing up of Solzhenitsyn’s insight. The spotlight Ericson points at Samsonov is invaluable for understanding the “Russianness” of the author’s perspective—a perspective that suddenly reduces Vorotyntsev, the typical Western hero, to no more than the co-star of the novel. The publication of April, 1916 and October, 1917 will be pivotal dates in the West’s and Russia’s understanding of themselves and each other, and perhaps in man’s comprehension of man.

And here lies Ericson’s greatest achievement: he perceives and convinces us that Solzhenitsyn is at bottom a great Christian of the dimensions of Pascal, Luther, and Augustine. Solzhenitsyn as writer and as lover of God is in itself a testimony to the truth and the concomitant undying validity of Christianity. It may be that Ericson does not sufficiently distinguish the writer’s neglect of God’s grace, and his almost Pelagian trust in man’s capacity to change himself out of his own resources. But what difference the degree to which Solzhenitsyn leans between Faith and Works, against the Johannine Light which shines through his sentences! It is remarkable that Solzhenitsyn’s works are not piled on the main tables of religious book outlets in the United States. Perhaps his acceptance by ordinary American Christians will be a measure of the survivability of contemporary American religion.

It is easy to look at Solzhenitsyn’s sad eyes and long beard and to listen to his denunciation of our own society’s shortcomings as well as the viciousness of Communism, and to call him, in faint or blatant mockery, “a prophet.” But that word should bring us up short. Is it not at least possible that God might still show such mercy and compassion on his creatures as to use one of us, weak and errant though he may be, as a Messenger? Who can read the little prayer which Ericson brings to centrality without hearing, at the faint edge of the world, the rustle of Wings?

And now with measuring cup returned to me,
Scooping up the living water,
God of the Universe! I believe again!
Though I renounced You, You were with me!

(The Gulag Archipelago, vol. II, pp. 614–615)

John W. Bowling was a retired army officer who taught at Troy State University in Alabama.

It was difficult to believe, until this book arrived at my desk, that in this fin de siècle of computers, word processors, videos, and other robots, poems still are written, are accepted for publication, and are beautifully published. All this in ninety-four pages, not the hundreds of pages in which pedantic professors express their world-saving panaceas!

What first strikes the reader is the poet’s daring to use words well beyond the mechanized citizen’s poor little vocabulary or the student’s two-hundred-word vocabulary for term papers and doctoral dissertations. Moser challenges a whole civilization when he employs the full resources of the English language—plus Latin, French, German, and Greek—dusts off old words and makes them work for the expression of the noble passion, the distilled sensation, the hard-to-articulate sentiment. The universe, taken apart by experts into insignificant bits, suddenly acquires meaning. The unusual image, ignored in urban lifestyle, springs before us, shaking up our routine-bound eyes and ears with color, sound, and savor, as if the cosmos had regained the significances and symbols which used to proliferate but are now caged. Master of words, Johann Moser discovers their magic intent, the times when the uttered formula had powers of incantation, changing reality or at least recombining its elements.

Words evoke worlds. But enough of incoherent enthusiasm. My favorite among these remarkable poems is “Bordeaux, 408 A.D.” Stupendous four pages! The last Roman armies are leaving territory once occupied, civilized, latinized. Ships in the harbor, legions abandon old fortifications. The barbaroi already have been sighted while Roman gentlemen converse in half-sentences. Like childhood, decadence speaks in brief phrases, for it has seen all; swiftly it captures thoughts, impressions, memories. The new people too “shall aptly raise basilicas of thought into the heavens.” “Until then?” “Until then the wine, my friend, a final cup; the night is growing heavy … among the sepulchers of our fathers in their sleep.”

In his own self-assured way, this poet gives life to ancient splendors. There are Grecian urns aplenty in poetic literature. What Moser does is to animate museum pieces, making them parts of a sensual vision. Moser seems to let loose all the instincts and passions; yet he controls them with form learned in the school of the Middle Ages.

This book rehabilitates language—and with it, objective reality. Paul Claudel would applaud. Let us not now lament the “cultural” horrors of our time-the wooden language, the shrinking vocabulary, the impoverished concepts. I vainly tell students that the outside world is infinitely rich, beyond their hedonistic dreams; that it is prosaic and poetic; and that words generously serve as transliterators of all you ever would wish to say. Students do not believe me; or rather, they don’t care: How can they, when announcers and headlines bark nouns, ignore verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; ungrammatizing the once-meaningful sentence?

Moser ignores this red-light district of cheapened meanings. Mention of the poems’ titles restores one’s imagination: a lament for Gilgamesh of Uruk; Henry the Fowler; Aeneas Sylvius Poccolomini; Galileo; etc. Many verses and stanzas ought to be quoted, and greeted joyfully for resurrecting reality; celebrating reality’s wedding with the Word. Speaking in tongues, the poet recovers the rights of language, which had been thrown into the junkyard by demagogues.  

“The universality of the sacred and its unbroken presence in some cultural contexts explain why those inside its world do not actually apprehend its presence, just as they hardly notice ordinary habitual occurrences. For the same reason, members of a desacralized civilization—our civilization—are not aware that practically all reference to the sacred has been erased from our daily existence.”

—Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Eerdmans, 1988)

Thomas Molnar is the author of a great many serious books, among the better-known of which are The Decline of the Intellectual, The Counter ­Revolution, Politics and the State, Utopia, the Perennial Heresy, and The Two Faces of American Foreign Policy.

Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was that rare man of letters who was also a man of the world. If Churchill was the statesman who earned laurels as an historian, Berlin was the intellectual who served with distinction in the trenches of diplomacy and politics and, not surprisingly, the careers of the two men are intertwined. True to its title, this biography, with which Berlin cooperated but over which he exercised no editorial control, is accordingly as much about Berlin’s life as his thought.

Berlin brought a sense of realism to philosophy, which had become preoccupied with abstractions, of which the most dangerous, Marxism, was also the most popular. Berlin was incapable of enthusiasm for these intellectual fashions for reasons that were rooted in his childhood in Russia, that influenced his early career as an Oxford philosopher, and that set the stage for his intellectual achievement.

Indeed, the value of this biography is that it shows how Berlin’s life may have influenced his thought. From childhood, Berlin was engaged with the world and its dangers. Born in 1909 in Riga, then a polyglot Tsarist Russian provincial capital—where Russian was the language of government, German the language of culture and commerce, and Yiddish and Latvian the languages of the street—Berlin was the pampered only child of a Jewish timber merchant and his wife. A threatened German invasion during World War I prompted the family to move to St. Petersburg, only to face the Russian Revolution. In 1920, they fled Bolshevik thuggery, first to Riga, then to England, where all three would live out their lives peacefully. Many of the relatives they left behind would later die in the Holocaust.

These encounters with history, Berlin later confirmed, made it impossible for him to embrace socialism, which set him apart from most of his peers. As Ignatieff puts it, “his own two years in Lenin’s Russia, waiting for the Cheka to knock, had inoculated him against Marxism for ever.” His personal experiences might also have accounted for Berlin’s decision as a young scholar at Oxford to put aside pure philosophy in favor of intellectual history—a discipline which Ignatieff says barely existed at Oxford at the time—opting to study actual events and real people rather than the abstractions and doctrines favored by his colleagues. That Berlin would become firmly grounded in history may, in turn, have had something to do with the half-dozen small roles he later played in the making of history.

Unlike many if not most intellectuals, Berlin constantly sought out the company of other people, including politicians and other men of action. At one time or another, he was personally acquainted with Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Guy Burgess (innocently), John Maynard Keynes (not so innocently), T. S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak, Greta Garbo (who told him, “You have beautiful eyes”), C. S. Lewis, Felix Frankfurter, Virginia Woolfe, and a young Rhodes Scholar from Germany, Adam von Trott, who would a decade later be arrested and executed for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. Berlin assisted Churchill with his memoirs, received from Pasternak an early draft of Doctor Zhivago and helped publish it in England, and huddled with President Kennedy on the first night of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Berlin’s first meeting with Churchill—or non-meeting, as it turned out—became the kind of story Berlin would live off for many years. Working for the British Embassy in Washington during the Second World War, Berlin’s dispatches on American politics and opinion made an impression on Churchill, but the Prime Minister knew their author only as “Mr. Berlin.” When Clementine Churchill informed her husband that Irving Berlin was in London in 1944, the Prime Minister naturally insisted on having him for lunch. Peppered by Churchill with questions about Roosevelt’s Washington, the guest replied with “only vague and noncommittal replies,” reports Ignatieff. As Churchill’s probing elicited further shrugs, he became confused, then irritated. Finally, Churchill asked his guest what was the most important thing he had written. “White Christmas,” came the reply.

Less famous, but far more important to Berlin, was his meeting with the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. Dispatched to the British Embassy in Moscow in 1945, while London’s relations with Moscow were still aglow from the allied victory, Berlin found Akhmatova in her cramped, spare Leningrad apartment. They talked until sunrise the next day. A subsequent crackdown by the KGB on Akhmatova and other intellectuals led the poet to believe firmly that her meeting with Berlin had actually launched the Cold War. For Berlin’s part, “He never doubted that his visit to Akhmatova was the most important event in his life. He came away from Russia with a loathing for Soviet tyranny, which was to inform nearly everything he wrote in defense of Western liberalism and political liberty thereafter.”

His essays, especially “Two Concepts of Liberty” and “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” are seminal works of twentieth-century thought. His “Winston Churchill in 1940,” in which he described his subject as “the largest human being of our time,” helped to create Churchill’s modern reputation, enabling his admirers to forget that Churchill had for much of his career been a hated, defeated, and ridiculed figure.

In a promotional interview, Ignatieff called Berlin “the greatest liberal philosopher since John Stuart Mill.” If true, this speaks more to the materialist and secularist shortcomings of liberalism than it does to the achievements of philosophy. For like Mill, Berlin had strong libertarian convictions, but a somewhat leftist political profile and little in the way of religious faith of a traditional kind. In the vernacular of the era, he was a liberal anti-Communist or Cold War intellectual. Ignatieff describes Berlin as a big-government liberal, who thought government power was needed to create the essential conditions for freedom but who also believed that government power had to be limited so as to defend freedom.

Yet it was to Berlin’s credit that he acknowledged and, perhaps most importantly, articulated, the conflicts that tear at the heart of modern liberalism, despite the best efforts of liberal politicians to deny them. Berlin, Ignatieff says, “challenged the whole post-war social democratic tradition by pointing out that the values at the heart of it—equality, liberty, and justice—contradicted each other. For example, it might be necessary to increase taxation on the incomes of the few in order to bring greater justice to the many, but it was a perversion of language to pretend that no one’s liberty would suffer as a result.” Ignatieff then quotes Berlin:

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’ individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom—social or economic—is increased.

In making the case for liberty, Berlin reminded us of both the necessity of choice and the inevitability of loss. He reintroduced a tragic vision to politics, saying:

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social.

Berlin was persuasive in his arguments that freedom was an objective good, yet the critic might ask, good for what? A dazzling lecturer and prolific essayist, Berlin was criticized for never producing a major opus. Limiting himself to lectures and essays may be seen as enabling Berlin to avoid grappling with the weightier issues that a larger work might have required. Yet beyond defending political liberty in the here-and-now, Berlin had no agenda. “Berlin’s central objective,” Ignatieff writes, “was to separate a defense of liberty from any claim that it had an emancipating or improving effect on human nature. Indeed, the only defense he offered of liberty’s priority in politics was in terms of pluralism. If values were in conflict, then liberty’s priority was procedural…. He never professed to be bothered by his own failure to ground the defense of liberty on ultimate principles.” Making apparent the connections between Berlin’s life and thought, Ignatieff’s life of an intellectual who was at once Russian, German, Jewish—and English to the core—illuminates what perhaps were the sources of Berlin’s enthusiasm for unfettered pluralism.

Berlin’s value derives from his arguments against utopian ideas during a life that coincided with—and was touched by—utopian horrors. He reminded us what the Greeks already knew, that utopia was another name for “no place.” He resurrected Kant’s warning for the ages that, “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” In reminding us of the flaws in liberalism and socialism, he shared with us the hard truths that scholarship—and life—had taught him.  

A former journalist and congressional aide, Kevin J. McNamara is an assistant vice president at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and an adjunct scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia.

H. L. Mencken once said that the college professor, “menaced by the timid dogmatism of the plutocracy above him and the incurable suspiciousness of the mob, beneath him, is almost invariably inclined to seek his own security in a mellifluous inanity.” This is fine rhetoric, but it lacks the weight and validity of the good inside job, a task that Russell Kirk, who has taught at a number of colleges and universities (Michigan State, for one, from 1946 to 1953), performs exceptionally well. His criticism of professors in the present book is splenetic and biting, all right, but not more so than that expressed by some American teachers of the past—Henry Adams, say, or Irving Babbitt, and George Santayana, and V. L. Parrington. “He padded his bibliography,” Parrington wrote, “like a college professor seeking promotion.”

This book is a revised edition of the volume originally published in 1965 by Louisiana State University Press. It comprises a baker’s dozen of essays, arranged under four main rubrics—“Colleges and Culture,” “Religion, Morals, and Culture,” “Beauty, Community, and Culture,” and “Wealth and Culture,” under which you will find the author’s memorable essay, “The Inhumane Business Man.” There are discussions of science, religion, beauty, economics, manners, architecture, and other topics. Kirk ranges far and wide, but he never strays for long from his persistent concern with the problems of education. A long while ago he wrote “that in education we often find it prudent to row toward our destination with muffled oars.” In this book his oars are not muffled. The essays are sane and wise, and, for the most part, cheerful. “Splenetic criticism is cross, crusty, and testy,” Kirk observes, “but also the adjective signifies remedies for an inflammation of the spleen.”

Dr. Kirk does not condemn all professors, by any means. Among them he has found “a good many scholars of liberal minds and loyal hearts.” But he has scathing words for those “who feel they have been invested with the prophetic afflatus; and, having discarded theology and morals as so much antiquated rubbish, they are thrown back upon the dreary resources of twentieth-century nihilism.” He dedicates the new edition to the memory of Warren Fleischauer, who was his friend, a frequent reviewer for this quarterly, and a notable scholar and teacher. Kirk dedicated a fine study of Edmund Burke (1967) to John Abbot Clark (1903–1965) who taught English for many years at Michigan State University, and probably introduced Kirk, as he did this reviewer, to the writings of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. A shy, modest, learned man, Professor Clark never mistook in Stephen Leacock’s words, “the shadow for the substance or the casket for the gem.” In other books, Russell Kirk has praised such outstanding teachers as Richard Weaver, Gordon Keith Chalmers, Donald Davidson, and Frederick Wilhelmsen.

In the essay “An Outsider Looks at the Catholic College,” Kirk subjects that institution to a stringent examination and finds it deficient in a number of important respects. Because he sees the Catholic college as the last possible place where ethical and humanistic values are likely to prevail, he treats seriously the deficiencies he finds. He strongly endorses Irving Babbitt’s contention that “under certain conditions that are already in sight the Catholic Church may be the only institution left in the Occident that can be counted on to uphold civilized standards.”

For many years the author has been a resourceful champion of humanistic education. “Limitless enthusiasm has been generated for putting a man on the moon,” he writes, “but only obdurate gadflies still ask, ‘To what end?’” Kirk is indeed an obdurate gadfly. Clinton Rossiter was right in declaring, “It is the heirs of John Dewey, not those of Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Kirk reserves his most eloquent strictures.”

There is an especially provocative essay, “May Professors Profess Principles?” It deals with the case of Professor Jerome Ellison, an accomplished professional journalist turned teacher, who was dismissed from the faculty of Indiana University not long after being promoted to an associate professorship. The university administrators took great pains to point out that he was not dismissed because he wrote two articles for the Saturday Evening Post in which he described a considerable part of current college life at Indiana University and elsewhere as “an odd mixture of status hunger, voodoo, tradition, lust, stereotyped dissipation, love, solid achievement, and plain good fun. It drives a high proportion of our students through college chronically short of sleep, behind in their work, and uncertain of the exact score in any department of life.”

So here Russell Kirk scrutinizes some of the most important problems of our civilization, “the failure of our great wealth to produce greatness of mind and art, … the decay of religious sentiments into mere sociability, and the conversion of our universities into amusement parks.”

In a somber but hopeful conclusion, he prays that among us “there are men and women enough who know what makes life worth living, enough of them to keep out the modern barbarian, if they are resolute. If they are enfeebled, and if they cannot make common cause, the garment of our civilization will slide to the rag bin, and the cultural debris of the twentieth century will drift down the rubbish heaps of the future. Not many years of indulgence, I fancy, remain to us. But—as Henry Adams was fond of saying—the fun is in the process.”  

“Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of ‘insecurity’ and ‘anxiety’ and ‘constitutional inferiority,’ will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the causes of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch or the tranquilizing drug.”

—Russell Kirk, “The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man,” in The Intemperate Professor and Other Cultural Splenetics

Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War, edited by William McCann, recently reappeared under the imprint of Gateway Editions (Regnery Gateway, Inc.).

The dominant pathological feature of our times often seems an adulation of growth. That bigger is better and that the self is to be fulfilled are characteristic deductions from absurd premises, when they are not absurd premises themselves. They are absurd because pathological, and pathological because cancerous.

In the late Sixties, when everyone was “turning on,” a microbiologist friend suggested that that phrase was a good definition of cancer. A cancerous cell was a “turned on” cell, a cell whose hierarchy and sequence of functions had broken down and whose repertoire of activities was, consequently, being activated chaotically. Likewise our world, our society, ourselves. We have been sold, and willingly bought, a bill of goods, in which quality and hierarchy are banished and quantity reigns. Bigger is better. Be yourself. Turn on.

Although he never uses the word, Father Jaki is directly concerned with this cancer in his powerful work. Few collections of essays deserve to be called powerful. The genre is structurally alien to concerted effect. This is an exception. Its themes are limited, and intricately interwoven: the defense of objective reality against scientistic solipsism and pragmatism; the rejection of the separation of science and humanities into separate cultures and the insistence on their mutual relevance; the importance of theology to science (most centrally, the connection between the Christian doctrine of creation and the rise of modern science as a self-sustaining project); and the qualitative validation of the quantitative. The argument of the volume is clear and cogent. Its scholarship bridges the gap between the supposed “two cultures” and is truly admirable. And the industry and assiduousness to which the footnotes give evidence are amazing. Much of the first two essays is concerned with the defense of objective reality, of ontology, against the drastic interpretation which the Copenhagen school put upon Heisenberg’s indeterminacy or uncertainty principle. Despite argumentation to the contrary by men of such stature as Max Planck and Albert Einstein, that school made the all too facile leap from the principle’s statement about the limit to precision of measurement to an assertion about the supposedly consequent absence of causality (a leap which Jaki has elsewhere called a rape of pure and simple logic). Consequent upon the Copenhagen caper came the rejection of causality as a way of thinking, the ruin (in thought) of strict interaction at the fundamental level of nature, and “the dismissal of objective reality itself.” Thus, “from mere probability with respect to being it was only a short step to despair about the rationality of existence.”

Enter “chance,” the darling of derelicts and desperadoes in thereal world, and the apparent imperial mistress (cf. the “O! Fortuna …” of medieval despair) of most mathematics and theoretical physics today. But what is chance? Jaki asks whether it is something real,something ontological, or “merely a mathematical device.” Can there be, for instance, in connection with the last alternative, a mathematical theory of randomness without “at least one subtly concealed non-random parameter in the ensemble”? Whichever alternative is chosen, there appear consequences which are not to the liking of the subjectivist or solipsist.

And solipsism seems to be the natural conclusion of much contemporary thought, even in science. Various multi-world theories have been proposed (“there are as many worlds as there are observers”), Jaki points out. One is reminded of a brief bit of high doggerel (Housman comes to mind as the author, but my memory is vague here):

Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.
I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth’s foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.

But perhaps beyond the absurdity of solipsism lies the further absurdity of autophagic (self-consuming) statements (e.g., classically, “I met a man from Crete who said to me, ‘All Cretans are liars’ …”). A particular twist seems to be given to autophagism by those scientists who use the success of quantum mechanics in measuring and predicting action and reaction in the objective world as a proof of the theory’s (drastic) contention that there is no objective reality.

The fine conclusion to the second essay (“From Subjective Scientists to Objective Science”) recalls important contentions made throughout the first two essays, such as that “the very assertion of causality and reality imply a kind of reasoning or rather mental judgment [“logic” as one form of reasoning is subsequently detailed] which is very different from statements of mathematical physics.” The extensive argument there reminds one of Kafka’s somewhat cryptic but slowly revelatory comment (I paraphrase): truth is indivisible, therefore cannot know itself; he who seeks for truth must be false. Perhaps, like the argument about virtue in the “Meno,” and unlike various forms of pantheist reductionism, the adage points us in the right direction.

The third, fourth, and fifth essays are concerned with Jacques Maritain and G. K. Chesterton as sane thinkers reflecting about science and scientism, and Goethe as a rather insane one. For instance, Maritain described science in his very first published article (La science moderne et la raison, 1910) as a diminished knowledge, accurate to the extent that its object is restricted. He also spoke pointedly of intellectual fashions and of “associative [as opposed to rational] influence or sub-intellectual induction” in science, features of the scientific project which give rise to mindsets and worldviews, which in turn deliver one illusion after another in the name of science.

The next two chapters examine the history and structure of the “two cultures” debate over the last century or so. C. P. Snow’s covert Marxism and scientism are noted alongside Leavis’s overt intemperate literateness. Jaki’s startling familiarity with a wide array of sources is happily illustrated here by a delightfully amusing citation from the poetry of e. e. cummings (used to make a point about common sense, human sensitivity, and reality, e.g., that “consciousness is not the subject matter of physics”):

While you and i have lips and voice which
are for kissing and to sing with

who cares if some one eyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure spring with?

As the argument progresses in the second of this pair of essays we move with the behavioralists beyond freedom and dignity to mechanics and chemistry, to an epiphenomenal view of the nature of knowledge, to libertinism and to control for control’s sake. We are reminded that, on the basis of quantitative considerations alone, we cannot have meaning, purpose, values or immortality, and that “the central issue in our culture is the question of knowledge in an age of science,” for we cannot escape the fact the “the scientific strategy, however limited in its scope, is a most integral part of our humanity.” That question is a philosophic question, a question of limits. Jaki suggests that James Clerk Maxwell’s relevant adage should be carved into every desk in every laboratory and science classroom: “One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods.” Man is man by virtue of the use of both science and letters.

Chapter 8, “The Role of Faith in Physics,” returns us to an earlier consideration in the volume, classically put in the words of Einstein that “belief in an external world, independent of the perceiving subject, is the basis of all natural science.” But, true to his truly rational position and our common tradition of faith as a rationale obsequium, Jaki allows that we may legitimately go along with Huxley’s statement that blind faith is the one unpardonable sin. (Jaki has characterized Einstein’s naive but well-intentioned and basically perceptive forays into philosophy as inarticulate, and his position as fideistic.)

The next chapter, “Theological Aspects of Creative Science,” highlights a central theme of much of Jaki’s work, including that of the following two chapters, “The University and the Universe” and “The Greeks of Old and the Novelty of Science.” That theme is the centrality of the Christian doctrine of creation to the development of science as a self-sustaining activity in Western culture. Put simply, this argument suggests that, while the rest of the world seems to have been overly empirical (and thus developed only technologies), the dominant Greek thinkers were too rational, deducing the nature of things a priori from the supposed eternity and rationality of the universe (things done “for the best,” as with “Mind” in the “Phaedo”). In more recent times the two extremes have met in a strange intellectual bedfellowship. J. S. Mill, for instance, attacked the licitness of the concept of the universe (as did Kant from another direction). He attempted in his System of Logic, which suggested that the world might consist of rational and irrational parts, to destroy metaphysics, which springs from “the notion of a fully rational universe,” by rooting it out of its stronghold in mathematics and physical science.

For science to come to birth, this argument continues, Christianity’s insistence on the creation of the universe is necessary. Christianity gave to the universe both a necessary and a contingent character so that, antecedently assured of its rationality and of the ability of the human mind to approach a knowledge of it, yet aware of the universe’s dependence on a choice external to it, we must check and revise our deductions from a priori propositions against empirical observation and induction.

There are several delightful turns of phrase in the volume and some fine humor, as well as a few grammatical muddles and inappropriate uses of words. More editorial attention would have served the author well. But none of this need be dwelt on here, for it is a minor matter. It is quite important that the volume be read and understood by as many people as possible. In a world gone cancerously mad, Jaki prescribes restraint and sanity.  

Dr. John Lyon was at the time of writing dean of humanities at Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, an innovative honors school associated with Ball State University.

Michael G. Hall’s biography of Increase Mather goes far toward rehabilitating the Mather family of colonial Massachusetts. The Mathers have been more frequently condemned by historians than praised in their roles as the voices of orthodoxy for a century in New England. Hall’s narrative and analysis submerge judgment and focus instead on the richness and diversity apparent in that orthodoxy.

The biography begins in 1639 with the birth of Increase Mather and ends with his death in 1723. It is, therefore, a marvelous primer of Massachusetts spiritual and temporal history. Hall classifies the various stages of Mather’s life—his periods of spiritual development, spiritual leadership, scientific curiosity, and political leadership—and he comments on each.

Early in the book Hall discusses RichardMather, Increase’s father, a dissenting minister from the western midlands of England. He and his wife, Katherine, moved to Massachusetts in 1635 as part of the Puritan migration. The Mathers settled in Dorchester, where Richard became pastor of the local congregation. Hall perhaps exaggerates when he places Mather at the pinnacle of religious influence in the early colony. Richard Mather was less rich, less famous, and less well-educated upon his arrival in Massachusetts than other clergymen.

Studying Increase Mather, we see the life of a man of singular influence. Increase was educated at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1661 he returned to Massachusetts and became the assistant pastor of the North Church. Within a year, at the age of twenty-three, Mather was publicly embroiled in the half-way convenant controversy which divided so many churches in Massachusetts during and after 1662. Mather served as a guiding light in local synods and became the most published American of his generation. He also exerted great influence over Harvard College. In 1683 he developed an interest in science and helped organize a philosophical society in Boston. Most important, he helped restructure government in the colonies as a Massachusetts agent in London from 1688–1691, when he played a major role in negotiating the form of Massachusetts’ new charter. Hall notes the epic significance of the negotiations when he remarks that, as a result of decisions reached then, “The Puritan commonwealth dreamed of and put in place by John Winthrop was no more; the constitutional framework for the pluralistic, secular society that would be inherited by John Adams was now in place.”

Increase Mather was orthodox. He stood to the right of his father during the half-way covenant dispute when he supported tradition and objected to the baptism of the children of parents who had themselves been baptized but had never become church members. During the 1670s, Mather was a master of the jeremiad, a sermon type which blamed woes on local sinfulness and called for repentance as a solution. In 1676, during King Philip’s War, Mather ran afoul of popular opinion when he blamed the crisis on Puritan laxity rather thanIndian savagery. God was punishing New England through the Indians for its sins, he said. By the end of the decade, according to Hall, “Mather had established himself as the conservative champion of the New England church as it had been put in place by his father’s generation.”

During the 1680s Increase Mather became, according to Hall, a moderate. In the controversy over royal government and the creation of the Dominion of New England, Mather saw the danger inherent in the intransigence of stalwarts. He recognized the necessity of making accommodations with royal authority. Mather remained a moderate when he secretly left for England as an agent of the old order. Mather tried but failed to resurrect Massachusetts’ ancient charter rights, swept away by royal government. He stopped writing in Puritan plain style and began writing like a Whig lawyer. He joined Quakers and Catholics in their support of the King’s Declaration of Liberty of Conscience. He accepted major concessions demanded by the king’s councilors and still praised the new charter as New England’s Magna Charta. When he returned to Massachusetts and discovered the colony possessed by witchcraft hysteria, he spoke out vigorously against the trials.

According to Hall, certain moderating influences came to bear on Mather. Throughout the early 1680s Mather became increasingly interested in English writers, especially scientists. He wrote and published several works on astronomy and comets. At the same time there was a spirit of optimism in the colony due to increasing prosperity. The most important moderating cause, however, was the fall of charter government. Under the old charter, residents of Massachusetts had convinced themselves that theirs was an errand in the wilderness, that God had claimed New England as His own to be governed by His laws in preparation for the spiritual regeneration of the world. Such regio-centric faith was no longer possible. New England no longer seemed to play a key role in world events. Acceptance of this, according to Hall, transformed the vision of even the Puritan clergy “from a providential world view to a modern, secular outlook.”

Hall is clearly more enamored of the moderate than the conservative Mather. Mather comes alive when he is converted to moderation during his forties. He becomes a man of charm and grace rather than a pedantic prophet in the Massachusetts wilderness. Mather is seduced by London. There he finds intellectual fellowship and regeneration, increasingly identifying England as home. He yearns during the last decade of his life to return and spend his final years there.

In his analysis Hall turns puritanologist Perry Miller on his head. Miller created the paradigm of Puritan declension in New England, tracking a long-term falling away from the high standards of the Puritan fathers and mothers, a loss of vigor and faith that was fundamental by the end of the seventeenth century. Hall, on the other hand, views the movement toward a pluralistic, secular society as favorable, as regeneration rather than degeneration.

The title of the study is misleading. Increase Mather is not the last Puritan. If anything, the last Puritans were reactionaries such as William Stoughton and Elisha Cooke, who continued to champion the old order in the face of so much change. Mather was an agent of that change, albeit at times an unwitting one.

Still, it is refreshing to see the reputation of one of America’s early premier families resurrected. Even the peripatetic Cotton, Increase Mather’s son, receives sympathetic treatment. Cotton differs with his father as easily as Increase did with Richard, suggesting, quite appropriately, that opinion among the orthodox was itself often diverse. It also was enriched by an awe of science and reason. Orthodox opinion may not have been nearly as diverse as the pluralism which would follow, but it was not nearly so narrow, limited, or restrictive as a previous generation of American scholars supposed.  

Dan Campbell was at the time of writing visiting assistant professor of history at Grand Valley State University.