Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Kirk Resigns from Michigan State, Fall 1953

One would have hoped for a dignified and gracious statement from Michigan State College spokesman on the occasion of Russell Kirk’s resignation. His tragic and irreparable loss has cost the faculty a figure of international distinction, one of the brilliant prose writers of our day, gifted as an intellectual historian, and essayist, and a composer of short fiction.  Russell Kirk is a modest and humble young man, a graduate of Michigan State College, a native of Michigan, who is brought the college an unprecedented amount the most favorable publicity.  The college is bestowed no recognition upon him; he held the rank of assistant professor, teaching freshmen and sophomores, while other faculty members who have never published a line in their lives teach graduate research courses and seminars.  Mr. Kirk resigned on a matter of principle, not for the purpose of securing another position; few members of the faculty can fail to respect this principle, and the administrator who now charges him with ‘irresponsible defamation’ personally praised him for his stand at the time of his resignation. The spectacle of these college spokesman running to cover to ‘defend’ themselves against these ‘charges,’which are no more than a simple statement Mr. Kirk made as to why he resigned, embarrasses and humiliates the academic community. No university will ever lose its career administrators and its tenured mediocrities; let it mourn deeply, and acknowledge in a manly way, the loss of genius.

--Lansing State Journal, October 1953.
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Holiness in Pfeifer, Kansas

The Christian Humanist

To defend the West, we must follow six tenets:
  • First, that the preservation of the virtues of the West, best understood through the stories of the exemplars of these virtues, is a sacred duty.
  • Second, that one must understand history in metahistorical, theological, and poetic terms as did Virgil and St. Augustine.
  • Third, one must embrace a proper anthropology, defining man by both his inherited sin and his received grace. The person, at root, is a being endowed with rationality, reason, and passion. He is higher than the animals, but lower than the angels. He must, to be fully human, balance each of these tensions.
  • Fourth, Christians (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant)—in alliance with believing Jews and even virtuous pagans—must sanctify the world through the Grace of God. For men of good will to fight amongst themselves squanders precious time and resources, and it leaves the field to the Enemy.
  • Fifth, the real struggle in the world is not between left and right, but between Christ and anti-Christ, between that which is humane and that which is anti-humane.
  • Finally, true remembrance, preservation, and advocacy of all that is Good, True, and Beautiful, comes from a recognition that our highest form of understanding is derived from the reflection of the light of the Logos (Gospel of St. John 1:9) in our souls through the faculty of imagination. In this point, one must follow not just St. John, but the Blessed Virgin Mary: “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Or, as St. Augustine put in it in his sermon on Psalm 58: “Of itself it hath no light, nor of itself powers; but all that is fair in a soul is virtue and wisdom; but it neither is wise for itself, nor strong for itself, nor is itself light to itself, nor is itself virtue to itself. There is a certain fountain and origin of virtue, there is a certain root of wisdom, there is a certain, so to speak, if this also is to be said, region of immutable truth; from which if the soul withdraws it is made dark and if it draws near it is made light.”