Ghostly Light
on Russell Kirk’s “Ex Tenebris” & the Moral Imagination
Once upon a time, nothing engaged a Christmas audience quite like a ghost story. In Washington Irving’s “The Christmas Dinner,” it is the parson who tells some of the best uncanny stories during the winter season. Russell Kirk, fond of this tradition though it had gone out of fashion in the twentieth century, wrote a defense of the practice. It is not mere didacticism nor an unhealthy obsession with the grotesque that makes the uncanny appropriate at Yuletide gatherings, he averred; ghost stories “can be an instrument for the recovery of the moral order” (Essential Russell Kirk, 182). The practice might actually be more valuable at Christmas than during the closing week of October, when the typical neighborhood is festooned with ghouls and goblins.
Kirk understood this so well that he expended quite a bit of energy writing such stories. He makes his interest in the genre plain in his book, Enemies of the Permanent Things, where he writes, “Imagination, given time, does rule the world” (132). This may surprise those who more readily associate Kirk’s name with National Review or the books he published about America and conservatism. Yet he does not say that public policy, political influence, or social causes rule the world, but that imagination does. Even so, what does that have to do with ghost stories?
Three Manifestations
Kirk thought the imagination manifested itself in three ways: through the idyllic, the diabolic, and the moral. The distinctions between them are significant. The idyllic imagination, often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “rejects old dogmas and old manners and rejoices in the notion of emancipation from duty and convention [which] ordinarily terminates in disillusion and boredom” (Essential Russell Kirk, 161). This kind of imagination often signals a cycle of cultural decadence. The diabolic imagination often follows on the heels of idyllic boredom. It is an imagination that “delights in the perverse and subhuman.” It is easy to find such patterns of imagination at work in a study of ancient Greece or Rome, for instance.
These two categories can be found in every culture throughout history, often working in tandem: first one, then the other, then back again. Their historical connections remind Kirk’s readers that he was not speaking in the abstract or seeking to produce a new sophistry when he lauded the imagination. He was describing observable patterns.
The third category, the moral imagination, also finds expression throughout history, but it is set apart from the idyllic and diabolic. It is the counter-imagination. The term comes from Edmund Burke, but it was Kirk who defined it in clear terms. In Enemies of the Permanent Things, he explains thatthe moral imagination is
the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. . . . It is the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest. (138)
It is the moral imagination that enables individuals to do better than indulge their basest appetites; it is part of the imago Dei in humanity. It does not distract us but focuses us. Nor does it lead us to boredom or destruction; rather, it ushers us into activity, into life. It is the difference between becoming healthy only by running on a treadmill and staying fit by tending a garden. The moral imagination helps us do battle against the temptations of the flesh and the impulse to sin. “For the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Hence, Christians must look deeper into the mysteries of life, particularly those immersed in artistic and creative endeavors.
From whence does the moral imagination come? According to Kirk, the source is what he calls the Great Tradition, particularly the Great Tradition in literature, for “literature is meant to rouse and fortify the living, to renew the contract of eternal society” (Enemies of the Permanent Things, 76-77). Note Kirk’s phrasing: not “ought,” not “should,” but “is meant.” Literature has meaning as a human enterprise. It possesses a purpose even outside an author’s specific aim, shocking as this notion might be to our hypermodern ears. For the Word has been since the beginning, even before man (Gen. 1:1-4; John 1:1-5).
This means that you will not be likely to find communion with the eternal society in your dogeared copy of Twilight or even Harry Potter, despite their authors’ attempts to explore the sort of numinous experience that Kirk creates in his ghost stories. No, it is not as simple as picking up any book. Kirk highlights this by explaining that “books often reflect the spirit of the age; but also books can conjure up the spirit of the age” (Enemies of the Permanent Things, 64). Readers beware, because it is easy to be swept away in the current of ideological fashion thanks to pretty prose. Anytime we encounter a story, we must look for the things that provoke our moral imagination, rather than those which encourage the idyllic or diabolic. The latter will reflect our age, but the former will conjure up the wisdom of the past.
Sean C. Hadley teaches humane letters at Trinitas Christian School and the Baptist College of Florida. He has published works in FORMA Journal, The Imaginative Conservative, and The Hemingway Review. He and his wife have four children and attend Providence Church (CREC).
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