Welcome back to the seventh week of the Albertus Institute's blog course on Russell Kirk and Catholic social teaching. The previous posts can be followed from the Russell Kirk page .
This week we turn to the sixth of Kirk's principles, that of imperfectability:
Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. [The full ten principles can be found here.]
Reading:
Russell Kirk [synopsis of his book, The Roots of American Order] here
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Augustine: political and social philosophy' here
Critical discussion:
Kirk's vision of human imperfectability reminds me strongly of the Augustinian vision of the tension between the City of God and the Earthly City:
while Augustine doubtless holds that it is better for Rome to be Christian than not, he clearly recognizes that officially embracing Christianity does not automatically transform an earthly state into the City of God. Indeed, he regards Rome as “a kind of second Babylon.” Even if the Roman Emperor and the Roman Pontiff were one and the same—even if the structures of state and church merged so as to become institutionally the same—they would not thereby become the City of God, because citizenship in the City of God is determined at the individual and not the institutional level.
Augustine does not wish ill for Rome. Quite the contrary, he supplicates God for Rome’s welfare, since he belongs to it, in temporal terms at least. He sees Rome as the last bastion against the advances of the pagan barbarians, who surely must not be allowed to overrun the mortal embodiment of Christendom that Rome represents. Nevertheless, Augustine cannot be overly optimistic about the future of the Roman state as such—not because it is Rome, but because it is a state; for any society of men other than the City of God is part and parcel of the earthly city, which is doomed to inevitable demise. Even so, states like Rome can perform the useful purpose of championing the cause of the Church, protecting it from assault and compelling those who have fallen away from fellowship with it to return to the fold. [From Encyclopedia article linked above.]
There is certainly room for the aim of improving human societies, but our final home is only with God, and any earthly city and politics will fall short of that.
One of the interesting things about Kirk's analysis above is the favourable attention given to Calvin. To quote from the above synopsis:
in Kirk’s phrase, there was still “a reserve of genius in Christianity,” something that ensured its self-preservation by making it a counterpart to temporal society. This aptitude came to the fore in the person of John Calvin, a Swiss lawyer and theologian. Kirk contends that Calvin—probably more than any other person during the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the founding of America —created a climate where church and state could complement rather than compete with one another. His intellectual feat was the joining of religious obligation of fealty to church and clergy and Scripture with equally valuable social and civic obligations—pay your taxes, obey the civil rulers, adhere to legal precepts, etc.—and he thereby helped make a functioning society possible.
The application of the idea of responsibility to civic duty, which grew out of religious obligations, caused people to understand how order was to be achieved in both secular and religious affairs. Calvin’s influence was so fundamental and practical that he can be credited with having helped to make order pre-eminent in the theory and the practice of Western civic construction. His reality was the antithesis of the religious corruption of the Middle Ages when dispensations for any sin could be purchased from the clergy. The incongruous and sinister religion that Christianity had become was intolerable to those who witnessed the disjunction between the words in the Bible and the conduct of priests in the public square. Once religious corruption was made a public issue during the Protestant Reformation and the clergy were “forced” to resume pious ways, freedom of thought (that is, the clergy and the church were no longer controlling minds through religious terrorism) allowed the flowering of the Renaissance. The Reformation’s intellectual revolt against thieving religious administrators (in both their temporal and spiritual aspects) became open conflict between the reformers and the clerisy. As Kirk explains the history of this era he observes that people no longer cowed by religious bullying could perceive a profound insight:
Truth was knowable; order was real. Truth was obscured by man’s follies and passions, and order was broken by man’s appetites and desire for power. Yet right reason might disclose truth to men’s eyes again, and order might be regained by courageous acts of will.
Kirk certainly described himself regularly as an Augustinian (Birzer, 2015, p.501 n.38). Moreover, he emphasises the way that Calvinism was the source of an emphasis in American culture on the Old Testament.
'Because freedom from slavery and oppression were dominant themes in the Old Testament,' Neal Riemer writes, the legacy of Israel and Judah nourished American liberty. 'It warned -as in the story of the Tower of Babel- against Man's attempt to be God. It forced Man- as in the story of Adam and Eve- to recognize his mortality and fallibility and to appreciate that there can be no Utopia on earth. Again and again, it inveighed against the belief that Utopia can be captured and made concrete in idolatry. On the other hand, however, it left ample room for effort to make life better. This is the central meaning, as I read it, of God's covenant with Noah and its reaffirmation with Abraham, with Moses, and with the later prophets.'
[From 'The law and the prophets' in The Essential Russell Kirk, p.78]
However, that historical truth did not prevent Kirk from having, in general, a highly critical view of the reformation and its effects:
Certainly, Kirk held no affinity for the Reformers, and he feared their 'moblike' actions in the sixteenth century nearly destroyed the town [of St Andrews]. 'When Knox and the Reformers dinged down the cathedral and the archbishopric of St Andrews, the soul would have gone out of this remote place had not the little University remained to shelter [the community].'
What is one to make of all this? It should certainly be kept in mind that Kirk is not a systematic thinker and that his writing career lasted half a century and straddled shifts from Stoicism to Christianity to Catholicism. (Although the above dismissals of the Reformation precede his conversion and the praise of Calvinism postdates it.) The main thoughts, however, are the imperfectability of politics and the Burkean importance of tradition. Neither medieval Catholicism nor Calvinism produce the perfect society because, in his Augustinianism, Kirk sees that nothing can do this. In Europe, the Reformation destroyed tradition, not completely, but to a great extent. Kirk, as a conservative, is therefore critical of it. In America, on the other hand, it was part of the founding DNA. Whatever, problems that may have led to, it was not a wholly bad inheritance, and any correction of those problems has to respect that organic inheritance and work with it rather than wholly dismissing it.
[Next post: 19 September]
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