Obedience to What is Noble

For, when everything is said, there could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts, beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the clear call from above.––Paul Elmer More, Aristocracy and Justice

Teenage Russell Kirk's First Academic Article

by Bradley J. Birzer

Below, I have dictated quotes from Russell Kirk’s first published academic article, “Tragedy and the Moderns.” The article appeared in January 1940, when Kirk was just beginning his second semester of his senior year in college. He wrote it, however, during either his freshman or sophomore year at Michigan State, under and with the encouragement of his favorite professor, John Abbott Clark.

It should be remembered, then, that Kirk wrote this paper when he was either 18 or 19. Somewhat shockingly, Kirk’s first article carries with it a depth both in thought and writing style--as well as an originality--that is sorrowfully absent in most academic writings today. And, yet, the young man who wrote it was still a teenager.

Kirk’s professor, Clark, published little, but he was, Kirk thought, the greatest of the undergraduate professors at Michigan State. And, yet, the administration in East Lansing treated Clark with nothing but contempt. I’ve yet to find out if Clark studied directly with Irving Babbitt, but he very much considered himself a disciple of Babbitt and Paul Elmer More.

Paul Elmer More on Woodrow Wilson

“I have disliked various politicians, Roosevelt for instance; but I have never felt towards any other man, not even Bryan, as I do towards Wilson. He has certain qualities which appeal to the intelligence of men otherwise clear-sighted and straightforward, and as a consequence he seems to have corrupted the nation at the top, and lowered our whole mental and moral tone.”--P.E. More, 1915

“The imagination is excited by the devilishness of the new machinery of death, by the power of the long-range guns, the insidious terror of craft that smite inhumanly under the cover of water, and drop destruction from the clouds,” More wrote in 1915. “We have never known these things before, and it is almost as if we were in the position of a too cunning Frankenstein, shuddering at the demon he had created for his own ruin.”

Quote of the Day: Paul Elmer More

What saved me from moral and emotional paralysis in this pseudo-philosophy was, I think, a deep-seated interest in humanity. I could not reason myself into believing that men are only machines; I could not smother in logic the sense of mystery that broods upon the world, not find any place in the network of blind chance and fate for the human will. What is the nature of this thing we call life, this irrational power which by its own initiative expands into endless activities, and finally creates for itself a conscious soul of suffering and joy?

-- Paul Elmer More (Pages from an Oxford Diary)

Quote of the Day: Paul Elmer More

In brief the need is to restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely aesthetic function, but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history and of distinguishing what is essential therein from what is ephemeral. The enormous preponderance of studies that deal with the immediate questions of economics and government inevitably results in isolating the student from the great inheritance of the past; the frequent habit of dragging him through the slums of sociology, instead of making him at home in the society of the noble dead, debauches his mind with a flabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism. He comes out of college, if he has learnt anything, a nouveau intellectual, bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as the nouveau riche to the man of inherited manners; he is narrow and unbalanced, a prey to the prevailing passion of the hour, with no feeling for the majestic claims of that within us which is unchanged from the beginning. In place of this excessive contemporaneity we shall give a larger share of time and honor to the hoarded lessons of antiquity. There is truth in the Hobbian maxim that “imagination and memory are but one thing”; by their union in education alone shall a man acquire the uninvidious equivalent in character of those broadening influences which came to the oligarch through prescription - he is moulded indeed into the true aristocrat. And with the assertion of what may be called a spiritual prescription he will find among those over whom he is set as leader and guide a measure of respect which springs from something in the human breast more stable and honorable and more conformable to reason than the mere stolidity of unreflecting prejudice.--Paul Elmer More (Aristocracy and Justice)

The Christian Humanism of Paul Elmer More: From Plato to Chalcedon

By Bradley J. Birzer

[Since the brief piece I posted on Friday regarding Paul Elmer More’s take on Woodrow Wilson, a number of friends have written indicating a desire to know a bit more about PEM.  I’m no expert, but I will add some of what I can, especially regarding PEM and his final statement—a religious one—as offered in his book, Pages from an Oxford Diary, one of the great short works of the last century.  If offers a profound statement of faith from a man who spent most of his life being skeptical regarding Christianity.  Though he consented to Christian truth later in his life, it remains unknown whether or not he ever received communion, even on his death bed.  Below is part of a speech I delivered at the Climacus Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, February, 2011]

Though few remember Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) now, he once stood with his closest friend, Irving Babbitt, as the leader of the so-called “New Humanist” movement.  An editor of The Nation and a classicist at Princeton University, More influenced many of the greats of the 20^th century—especially through his friendships. 

Punishment of the Gods: P.E. More vs. Woodrow Wilson

by Bradley J. Birzer

As the great Princeton classicist and Nation editor Paul Elmer More viewed it, the Great War (1914-1918) had descended upon the world as a punishment by the gods.

Nineteenth-century liberal man had forgotten how utterly flawed the human soul could be, and he had attempted to hide or destroy the temples and the so-called “superstition.”   

“Now it used to be the belief of an ancient people, superstitious you may call them, yet one of the great promoters of civilization, that the invisible powers behind the things we see were wont to observe the thoughts and actions of mankind with watchful jealousy, and were particularly quick to avenge those who, from arrogance or folly, forgot, as the saying was, to ‘think as mortals,’” More wrote in early 1915.  “Upon the minds of such men they sent a nemesis, in the form of madness and dazed bewilderment.  Atê it was named.  And to one listening today to the language of the press and the street it might almost seem as if the avenging gods were not dead.”  Disaster has been brought upon the world, not by the sober minority of learned and civilized western men, More argued, but by “the ideologues who have had the ear of the multitude.”[1]