The Holy Fool as Bohemian Tory

The Wise Faith of Russell Kirk

by James E. Person, Jr.

“I have enjoyed from my earliest years the advantage of being a Fool,” wrote Russell Kirk, that most unfoolish of men, in 1987. In explanation of this odd remark, he cited his antithesis: the Wise Man—the ungrounded intellectual—in Yeats’s play The Hour-Glass, who is saved from spiritual destruction in the last moment of his life when he discovers one person who still believes in God and in the soul, Teigue the Fool.

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James E. Person, Jr. is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (Madison Books), as well as Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow (Cumberland House Publishing), and is a longtime book reviewer. He has written on Kirk and on Evelyn Waugh for Touchstone.

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