Russell Kirk and the Moral Imagination

Russell Kirk on the moral imagination :

The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth. This moral imagination was the gift and the obsession of Plato and Vergil and Dante. Drawn from centuries of human consciousness, these concepts of the moral imagination—so powerfully if briefly put by Burke—are expressed afresh from age to age. So it is that the men of humane letters in our century whose work seems most likely to endure have not been neoterists, but rather bearers of an old standard, tossed by our modern winds of doctrine: the names of Eliot, Frost, Faulkner, Waugh, and Yeats may suffice to suggest the variety of this moral imagination in the twentieth century.

It is the moral imagination which informs us concerning the dignity of human nature, which instructs us that we are more than naked apes. As Burke suggested in 1790, letters and learning are hollow if deprived of the moral imagination. And, as Burke suggested, the spirit of religion long sustained this moral imagination, along with a whole system of manners. Such imagination lacking, to quote another passage from Burke, we are cast forth “from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.”

Burke implies that there exist other forms of imagination than the moral imagination. He was well aware of the power of imagination of Jean Jacques Rousseau, “the insane Socrates of the National Assembly.” With Irving Babbitt, we may call the mode of imagination represented by Rousseau “the idyllic imagination”—that is, the imagination which rejects old dogmas and old manners and rejoices in the notion of emancipation from duty and convention. We saw this “idyllic imagination” infatuate a great many young people in America during the sixties and seventies—even though most of those devotees never read Rousseau. The idyllic imagination ordinarily terminates in disillusion and boredom.