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.
One of Kirk’s best stories is “Ex Tenebris” (available on the Russell Kirk Center website: https://kirkcenter.org/fiction/ex-tenebris). It stands out as an example of how a story can help recover the moral order, for it is exactly the kind of story that provokes the moral imagination.
A Spiritual Sickness Exposed
“Ex Tenebris” is the story of an elderly woman, Mrs. Oliver, who has retired to her native village in rural England to live out her twilight years in quiet. Her home is small and old, much like herself, but it is hers and is near the neighborhood church. But Mr. S. G. W. Barner, a city planner, wants to relocate Mrs. Oliver to a local government-built housing unit—for her own good, of course. The story takes a turn when a mysterious Reverend Hargreaves, in seeking to help Mrs. Oliver, offers Mr. Barner a chance to repent of his hard-hearted scheme, but Barner refuses.
Several aspects of this story stoke the moral imagination. First, Kirk’s antagonists generally embody a spiritual sickness that the reader is meant to discover. In this story, Barner suffers from an attachment to ideology and abstraction. He is committed to the idea that true order comes from a systematically planned society. One is reminded of Lewis’s “scientific planners” in The Abolition of Man: “Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men” (73).
Barner reveals his obsession while thinking of all that he could accomplish for “society” if only old Mrs. Oliver could be removed from his path. “Ruins are reminiscent of the past; and the Past is a dead hand impeding progressive planning,” he tells himself. If the moral imagination draws upon the wisdom of the past, Barner must be lacking in it, for he has no such well from which to draw. He stands opposed to the permanent things in the world, which have more in common with the spiritual than with the material. Those who suffer from ideological ills reject or twist the past to make room for the newest program.
The names and physical descriptions in “Ex Tenebris” also ought to get a reader’s mind moving in the right direction. It is no coincidence that Mrs. Oliver’s church is named All Saints, signifying the communion of which the old woman is a part. Barner may insist that he is the only person around who understands “the wants of common human beings,” but Kirk makes a point of describing him as resembling an ape. So while Mrs. Oliver is seen to be part of a long history of man, involving all of God’s people throughout the ages, Mr. Barner seems more closely linked to Darwin’s unthinking ancestry, motivated by little more than genetic prodding.
Kirk highlights this divide with the most haunting line in the story, designed to show the depths of Barner’s depraved soul as well as his commitment to an ideological cause. When he goes late at night to the churchyard to meet Hargreaves, the latter asks him, “For the sake of a void upon a map, man, would you cast away your hope of salvation?” In reply, Barner just shrugs.
This scene contains a dialectic element, with the back-and-forth of questions and answers revealing a deeper truth, although Barner remains indignant at the thought that he might be nearing an undesirable eternal destination. Yet he ought to be concerned with his final destiny, and readers must wrestle with the same questions. Russell Kirk was a master of bringing the supernatural into a natural setting, and of thereby reminding his readers, through his characters, that something exists outside of them.
From Thinking to Doing
These elements suggest ways in which the moral imagination is urged on to something else. But to what? Was Kirk’s primary interest in entertainment that it prompted good thoughts? For him, the intellectual and the moral work together, and this working together begins in the home, in domestic pursuits such as sitting around a warm fire or at a family dinner (Essential Russell Kirk, 276). We see this in “Ex Tenebris,” as the widowed Mrs. Oliver serves tea, first to the spectral Hargreaves and later to another ghostly character, the lost Mr. Reddy, when they come to visit her.
The two men, who were the cause of each other’s end in life, possessed intellectual virtues, but their actions led them into eternal torment. Mrs. Oliver may not be the most erudite of characters, but she is good, tending her modest home and sweeping the tombstones in the neighboring graveyard even though she hardly recognizes the names of its occupants anymore. We see the contrast between her and the two ghostly men: the humble find peace, while the proud find strife.
Even Kirk’s choice of a little, unheard-of village as the setting for this story is part of the point, for it avoids the pitfalls of conjuring up the current age. In “Ex Tenebris,” he adheres to his own guidelines for the writer of fiction: “Whatever the immediate political opinions of the guardian of the Word, his first duty is to be a conservative in the larger sense of that adjective; his work, his end, is to shelter and promulgate an inherited body of learning and myth” (Enemies of the Permanent Things, 71). One does not have to look too hard into Kirk’s tales of the uncannyto find further examples of conservation, the handing down from one generation to another the great illuminative truths that help us move beyond right thinking into right doing. That is the end goal of the moral imagination.
“Ex Tenebris” is the kind of story that stokes the imagination in the reader, pulling him away from the idyllic or diabolic and moving him closer to the moral. Since the moral imagination is not a source of anxiety and distraction but a faculty of the human soul, this story pushes the reader to focus on the good, the beautiful, and the true. The combination of positive and negative examples, in the portrayal of wicked men and a humble woman, prods the reader to think about his or her own actions, for everyone should desire to avoid not only Barner’s fate but also his outlook.
While this is good for any reader of Kirk’s story, it is of particular value for Christians, who ought to see the elements in a story that prompt the moral imagination. If we have such principles in place, every good book becomes a potential refiner of our souls. In the end, it is the imagination that will rule the hearts and minds of men all through the ages.
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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