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From the President

Dear Reader,

Ah! Weather! For 30 years, I raised my family in Southern California. People would say to me in envious admiration, “What beautiful weather you have!” “Actually,” I would reply, “we have no weather, and I think I miss it.” 

I've got it now. Living in northwest Iowa on the border of Minnesota, we've had quite the ride this year. A gorgeous surprise spring in February was followed by a return to winter, then 10 inches of rain leading to record flooding, which all dried up during the long drought of summer. An unseasonably warm October clothed the bean fields with flaming yellow, often surrounding hollows still colored inky green with late planting, while the reaping machines turned the dry cornfields from ochre to harvest gold. October ended with a Halloween snowfall, which I enjoyed watching through our warm bedrooms bay windows - beautiful white flakes blustered about by a fitful wind against a mixed background of still green and bright yellow and bare naked trees, the last reaching their fine bronchial branches up to the luminous gray-white clouds. What will November bring? One thing I know - no matter how harsh the winter, spring will come again. 
 

October 28th witnessed the passing of Eva Brown, for over 60 years a Tutor, and inspiration, and leader of St John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. I only met her once, at a Circe Institute gala honoring her with The Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, but I owe her a great personal debt. Her institution inspired the founding of Thomas Aquinas College, the dear mother that inflamed and informed my love of learning, and kept me in weatherless SoCal for so long. More personally, she had a profound impact on my mentor, colleague, and friend, Richard Ferrier, in whose spirit of infectious wonder, joy in life, and passionate love of learning I was blessed to bask for countless hours. Whatever I have done in the service of the classical liberal arts renewal we are enjoying has been the fruit of Eva and Richard and the many other exemplary teachers I have had, who labored to keep the flame of learning alive as it fell into winter elsewhere.

We are now into the third or fourth generation of this recovery, and it is beautiful to see many new shoots arising in the United States and around the world. This issue of the Bulletin features more fruit from the Eva tree. David Arias, a student of mine some years ago, is now leading the unique efforts of the Albertus Magnus Institute, while Jean Carlos Guerreiro, another Thomas Aquinas College graduate, has returned to his native country of Brazil to contribute to the recent upsurge of parents and educators planting new classical liberal arts schools there. I look forward to meeting many of those involved in Brazil in May, when I will speak at a conference organized by the Instituto Newman de Educaçao Classica. 
 

Speaking of Brazil, I am excited to announce that Lucas Fonseca Dos Santos, one of our Boethius Fellows and a master of classical languages, is translating many of our Arts of Liberty materials into Portuguese. We are blessed to be able to offer the abundance of these resources to a population eager to receive them. We have already seen the number of website visitors from Brazil jump from dozens to hundreds!
 

I also had the joy of visiting two schools that have been at the classical renewal long enough to count as established. Immaculata Classical Academy in Louisville and Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Rapids impressed me with the unity of their faculty and their desire for excellence. I was inspired to write a blog account of my visit to the former and to share the fruits of discussing leading Discussion Classes at the latter. I hope that you are blessed to be associated with schools like these, as parents, teachers, alumni, or supporters, and pray that beautiful educating communities like these will continue to spread throughout the world.

The Albertus Magnus Institute

by Dr. David Arias
 

From the time of its inception in 2020, the Albertus Magnus Institute has blessed many who are hungry for a liberal arts education. Setting out to make a liberal arts education accessible to all, we offer Great Books courses to adults from various walks of life and various educational backgrounds. These courses are live, online, and taught by some of the greatest minds in higher education– Drs. Anthony Esolen, Joseph Pearce, and Pavlos Papadopoulos, among them. Since 2020, we have offered 41 live courses that span from novels to Aristotle, logic to Euclid, from Shakespeare to Homer. 
 

As a board member, Senior Fellow, and instructor for AMI since the first round of courses four years ago,  I have seen personally the profound effects these courses have had on the Magnus Fellows, most of whom have never received a liberal arts education, and all of whom have joined us with a love of learning. 

When the 2023 Academic year began in August, the Magnus Fellowship had 904 of these hungry fellows. 
 

We offered ten courses this past academic year. Last fall we offered our first Latin course, Introduction to Ecclesial Latin with Father Peter Hannah; the third installment of Friendship and Freedom in the Lord of the Rings with Dr. Helen Freeh; Rousseau and the Moral and Diabolical Imaginations with Dr. Emily Finley, and my fifth philosophy course, Philosophy of Man. 

Early 2024 we offered four new courses: Professor Cortright taught our first course on Ancient Greek; and Dr. Hattrup of Thomas Aquinas College taught his first course with us (but not a new topic for him!) on Aristotle’s Categories. We welcomed Drs. Amy and William Fahey from Thomas More College to our fellowship and they offered courses on War and the Great Books and Northern Literature, respectively. 
 

Magnus Fellows were able to take part in these liberating courses at no charge to them. Stephen, who received a liberal arts education from Thomas More College said of the courses, “It has been far too long since I have been able to study, converse, and think deeply with a group on a single topic for an extended time. It was terrific fun and sorely missed. I'm glad that I get to do this without having to worry about school payments or stressful circumstances.”  A large number of our fellows are like Stephen,— students who received a liberal arts education from a great books school and want to continue that education. 
 

Though many of our fellows did receive a liberal arts education, an even greater number of them have come to us because, until now, they have missed out on the beauty of a freeing education. Raymond, who participated from the Philippines said, “It's amazing how these AMI courses provide me the university education I wish I had, and I'm sure many of us feel the same!” And Claudia, who has taken six classes with us, does indeed feel the same: “Having received a public school education in a third-world country, learning all these things has enriched my life tremendously and filled in many educational gaps." 
 

But from the beginning, the goal has been to offer these courses in a coherent and complete curriculum as well as "stand alone" courses. Earlier this year another fellow, Joe, said, “When there are enough courses to run the curriculum in sequence, in record -- or even, if we dream, to run it live in sequence or even in cohorts -- what a powerful influence on culture and faith this can be.”  
 

Our greatest success of the academic year was realizing this dream— a program that does just that— run the courses both in live sequence and in Cohorts. We launched this program earlier this fall and filled it with 26 registered fellows. For three years, students will meet once a week for eight weeks for four terms each year. In the spirit of 2 John, as friends who have become cooperators in a work of truth, fellows will complete a coherent liberal arts curriculum that will guide them toward becoming liberal artists.

Beginning this past September our first Cohort embarked on this three-year journey through the Trivium, Quadrivium, and Philosophical sciences utilizing the Great works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, St. Thomas Aquinas, and more. Through these texts these Cohort members will learn to contemplate the true, good, and beautiful in hopes that by the end of the three years they will be even closer to understanding the eternal Logos Himself. Dr. Hattrup and I are leading the Cohort during the first year, and we are presently closing our eighth week, having completed Homer’s Iliad, and just about to complete Homer’s Odyssey.
 

Our now 1,060 Magnus Fellows (Joe, Claudia, Raymond, and Stephen among them) have received different educations, have come from various parts of the world, and have joined the Fellowship for different reasons, but together they all believe in the value of a liberal arts education, and have come to the Albertus Magnus Institute to come one step closer to the truth that that sets us free. With God’s grace, we hope the coming year will continue to bless our fellows, new and old.

The Liberal Arts Renewal in Brazil

by Jean Guerreiro, Fellow
 

After High School in 2017, I received an invitation to apply to a six month program in Porto Alegre, Brazil, called ‘Intensive Program of Liberal Arts’ through my literature teacher in the local public school that I attended. I had never heard of liberal arts, but I saw that the Institute had multiple online courses on the Liberal Arts, and thousands of students around the nation. These students were all enrolled there not for professional training, resume building, or even for a diploma to get a job. They were studying Latin, Greek, literature, logic, among other subjects. I was surprised to realize that Instituto Hugo de São Vitor was not the only institution working towards the promotion of an educational renewal, a coming back to the classics, in Brazil. They were a part of a greater movement for the restoration of the pursuit of truth. 

As I was born in a small town in Brazil and went to a public school all my life, classical education was not in the radar for me or my family. Reading wasn’t a habit of mine, nor did I see why it would be. Little did I know that I would fall in love with classical education so deeply, that helping to restore education here has been in the forefront of my mind ever since.

I did go to Porto Alegre and lived there for six months, studying Latin, Greek, logic, and literature. It was like a rebirth to me. I didn’t have an appreciation for the higher things of culture such as music, literature, and art, and also was in complete oblivion of the fact that learning could be for its own sake. I loved it thoroughly and there was no coming back after such an experience. In 2018, I went to Thomas Aquinas College in its California campus, and was a member of the first graduating class of the New England campus, which opened its doors in 2019. 

My experience at Thomas Aquinas College was so rich that I could not help but try to share that with my fellow countrymen. During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I tried to recruit students from Brazil to come to TAC, as I saw that this experience was very far from anything that anyone could achieve in Brazil. Thanks be to God, there were five students who got accepted to the College and were set to come that fall. An idea, then, came to my mind and I started co-teaching and co-organizing a program with another Brazilian student from the California campus to help these students, and others, to prepare for Thomas Aquinas College. That is when I started teaching online courses on the Great Books using the Socratic method. 
 

After my graduation in 2022, more and more students were seeking to pursue independent studies reading the Great Books with me. What was even more surprising: the students who started coming were not only the ones who were preparing to come to TAC, they were engineers, college professors, teachers, lawyers, among others. I have been teaching online and in person programs on the great books, attempting to give a taste of what I received at TAC with Aristotelian logic, Euclid, literature, natural science, amongst other programs. The students are grateful and only want to get more and more, and that is rewarding. 

But, teaching was not my primary occupation after graduation. I began working for the office of admissions on the New England campus of TAC, and was able to travel through many different states visiting many great Catholic schools, such as the Lyceum, Immaculata Classical Academy, Chesterton Academies, Gregory the Great Academy, amongst many others. These schools would allow me to speak to all of their students about liberal education, and why it was a natural follow up to the classical education they were receiving. Besides these trips, I got to know and speak to many fellow Brazilians who wanted to take their educations to the next level and make the jump to attempt to come to the U.S. and attend TAC. The experience of working in admissions only increased my love of Thomas Aquinas College, and its view of Catholic Liberal Education. 

Since then I have come back to Brazil and been more immersed in the classical renewal. I have been impressed by the amount of people who have been searching for such an endeavor. As a matter of fact, there are nine Brazilians currently attending Thomas Aquinas College, along with six alumni and over a dozen of applicants. This might be seen as a small number compared to the vast population of over 212 million people that Brazil boasts. But, going to TAC is the culmination of something much greater that has been happening in the past decade in the country. It is worth noting that the Brazilians who have gone to TAC have undergone multiple sacrifices in order to make it work - all to receive a true education.

How it all began, and who are the most important figures in this educational renewal, I cannot claim to know fully. But, certainly there were important teachers who influenced beyond the classroom. Some who deserve mentioning are Olavo de Carvalho, Padre Paulo Ricardo and José Munir Nasser. Olavo was a conservative teacher and writer. He founded a program called ‘COF’, which stands for Online Philosophy Course in Portuguese. The course boasts of 585 recorded classes on the various subjects of philosophy, without any particular school of thought being followed. The focus was on forming conservative thinkers. The course has taught more than 80,000 students. Many others deserve mentioning here, such as a priest called Padre Paulo Ricardo - a priest who is similar in many ways to Venerable Fulton Sheen in his work and popularity-  who has been responsible for an incredible number of conversions to the true faith in the country. José Munir Nasser also had a tremendous impact. He taught a five year humanities program very similar to John Senior’s, amongst many other great figures who contributed to this renewal. 

Nowadays, there are three different fronts that the classical renewal has taken: families starting Catholic schools, homeschooling, and independent learning and study of liberal arts and philosophy, mostly online.  Over a hundred Catholic schools have been starting in the previous five years in Brazil. While it is difficult to provide a true education without the previous formation of teachers and principals, the movement has been focusing on trying to do their best to educate their children in the light of the faith. This movement is very hungry for true formation, and is docile to learning from others. Homeschooling is becoming more and more of an option for families with a desire to remove their children from the woke ideologies presented in the schools. This is worth noting, because despite homeschooling being illegal in Brazil, parents are truly sacrificing their freedom to try to educate their children in the light of the classical curriculum. On the side of adults, there are thousands of students pursuing the truth. The truth that they felt was denied them while they were at school. There are many teachers around the country who are extremely influential, with thousands of students themselves. What do they teach? The classical liberal arts and philosophy. 

Beyond that, we have many people making remarkable progress in spending time for a solid formation. A couple of friends deserve mentioning. There is Rodrigo Ribeiro, who is now a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College and has a strong aspiration to help in the educational renewal in Brazil, but only after receiving many years of experience at the College. Marcus Porto went to Vivarium Novum in Italy, learned Latin fluently, attended TAC and was a distinguished student, and then went on to a masters in classics in Greek and Latin at Kentucky University. Lucas Fonseca - another fellow in the Boethius Fellowship - after studying law decided to take on philosophy as his passion, learned Latin fluently at Vivarium and now teaches the liberal arts in Latin and tutors teachers around the country, as well as getting his masters online at University of Dallas. Many others around the country are united in seeking the best education they can, in order to provide for the true education of others. 

From the numbers of converts to a more serious approach to the faith and to learning arising in every little town and state in the country, one can see easily that Brazil is going through a classical renewal in its education. Is it in the mainstream? Not at all. Not yet. From what I can tell, though, - and I am no prophet - there is hope for the future here. I don’t know if the movement will be able to be strong enough to overcome the strength of the other side, but we know we are on the winning side in the end, and so we keep fighting the good fight, hoping for the crown of victory at the end. 

Reflections on Imaginative Conservatism

by Eva Brann

Reprinted with permission from The Imaginative Conservative. See the full essay here.

Author’s Note: I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once utterly at home in America and quite without spatio-temporal boundaries, Marilynne Robinson, who produces in reality the images I only analyze, and thereby not only saves but augments the tradition I love—the aboriginal imaginative conservative, one who celebrates the glory of the commonplace.

 

When Winston Elliott invited me to become a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative I had misgivings. “Is this an honor honestly come by?” I asked myself. Am I a conservative, true blue and staunch? A conservative at all? Would a political conservative have twice voted for our current president, and for my reasons? Because he could speak both in the faith-borne periods of a black preacher and the consideringly correct paragraphs of a Harvard professor. Because he was physically graceful and young. (My disapproving conservative friends claim I fell in love with his ears—and I had no deniability.) Because he was half-black (a way of putting it that suppresses, absurdly, that he is half-white) and I felt this to be great cause for national pride. But, then again, that I thought he was a pragmatic crypto-conservative (in which I turned out to be half-wrong, though all too right if you ask his Left). And because nothing has more eroded my political conservatism than the mulish obstructionism he’s met with in the Far Right, that miserable simulacrum of conservatism.[1]

Yet, “imaginative conservative” does just about describe me. Let me put “political” conservatism aside for a–long–moment. Later I’ll want to show why an “imaginative” conservative might be all over the political map, as occasion arises: right, center, left–reactionary (disgustedly oppositional), moderate (prudently dithering), and radical (exuberantly reformist).

So, as always in life, having found the phrase that wins my adherence, it’s time to figure out what it means. What’s “imaginative?” What’s “conservative?” And how does the adjective modify the noun and the noun support its adjective? For my basic assumption is that—let other persuasions appeal to bleeding hearts, Christian conscience, or political realism—a conservative should have, first of all, recourse to self-awareness, mindfulness, reflection. One last confession before I get to it: none of the subjoined lucubrations are anything but second editions, so to speak, recollections and rephrasings of thoughts thought and re-thought over the decades. But perhaps that is in itself a sort of conservatism—to allow one’s convictions to modify and self-reform, but not to be given to swoops and loops and U-turns.

...

Eleventh: Imagination

In my penultimate consideration, I come to the term closest to my heart—imaginative, for me the dominant term in this phrase “imaginative conservative;” I’m a conservative primarily because this adjective, I’ll claim, correctly modifies its noun, though the converse also has its force: imaginativeness tends towards conservatism. For example, imagination gives political ideas their concreteness and forestalls, to some degree, unintended consequences. You have a cure-all program: tell me in concretely imagined detail how it will work out in real life, and also where you may get exactly what you don’t want. That takes imagination of the literal sort I’m about to lay out. I was talking to a sympathetic friend about this essay, and by way of keeping me from one-sidedness, he said: “But the others [liberals, he meant] also have imagination.” “For instance?” I said. “Well, they envision a better world, a world free of… [a litany of ills].” We both began to laugh, because neither of us could see a thing—neither anyone’s real land (there being some three-hundred plus countries, as I recall), nor any specific desire (there being an infinity of those), nor any concrete plan (with escape routes). These goodhearted wishings were not imaginations but ideations, resulting in “ideas,” bright ones. Once, long ago, “idea” did indeed connote ultimate repleteness; now it mostly means mental fixation on a gift-wrapped thought-package.

At this near-last moment, I ought to define the conservatism whose imaginativeness I have wanted to analyze. Definition is dictionary business, and I often have recourse to Partridge’s Origins (an etymological dictionary), in part because he’s not overscrupulous about morphological fact, but very attached to what words mean or meant to their speakers. So: con– is an intensifier to servare, Latin for “to keep safe.” Conservatives, then, are people deeply concerned with preserving, with keeping things safe. I go on from there: because they know things worthy of safekeeping; the implication here is that there might be a kind of conservatism attached to unworthy preservation, or to holding on for the sake of holding on. To some degree, hold-outs are, as I’ve said, to be respected, first, because it is the way of the world that what goes round comes round and what seems retrograde this day may be progressive another day. But more importantly, these folks try to protect stability, and without stability the soul goes blindly shallow with anxious hustle, and the imagination fails in the face of a life oscillating between fast-forward and rewind. That is not to deny that being dug in can also be grave-like and suffer its own obliviousness. Some kinds of conservatives can only chant destructive slogans; the living sense is gone; reactionary movements are the clattering dance of the dead.

The bridge, a long one, between past and present is memory—the memory bridge is a figure for my more literal claim above, that memory is all the past there is. Along this long bridge, some of the past worth saving may, by a misapplication of the memory-mode called memorizing, be turned into sallow ghosts, thence into petrified effigies; the latter particularly in our public or external memory. Similarly, moving thoughts can become rigid abstractions (as in philosophy textbooks that trade in “isms,” idealism, realism, rationalism, empiricism, etc., etc.). Poignant visions can become inert abridgments (as in those infamous Study Notes students don’t admit to using.)[6] This whole educational cemetery is laid out, I think, according to misguided notions concerning the afterlife of human works, the most acute case of wrongheadedness being that so-called delivery systems are separable from their content, that the concrete specificity of the original texts (in which I include responsible translations) is not inextricably involved in what is said, and that our students’ fictional or philosophical imagination can be aroused by informational abstractions. Derivates are not only failure-prone in finance.

Now to that imagination itself. It is a power and has products. Our souls imagine and bring about works, works of two sorts, mental imagery and external images. Most external images, verbal, visual, even auditory are—the ins and outs of this would be worthy of a big book—imitations of interior imagery, although some external images have no internal originals. (Example: conceptual art; some artists [egged on by their estheticians] claim to visualize only as they are drawing, that is, ex post facto; so they are not imitating psychic pictures but originating manual gestures. Some people say they relish such productions.)

There is behind this account of the imagination a deeper view of the soul, called “epistemological,” that is, “giving an account of knowledge.” In this account, which has ancient and modern versions, imagination has a Hermes-like function. (Hermes, recall, is the conductor-god who transfers souls from earth to the underworld.) Thus the imagination takes delivery from the senses, which give us the world in its solidity and gravity, and rarifies their content into transparent weightless images (sometimes taking these even further down to the mere schemata, the idea-diagrams just mentioned) until they are fit to be presented to the intellect—de-materialized, quasi-spatial presences, on which the mind can think, or, in neuro-peak, which the brain can further process.[7]

Images themselves have a wonderful ontology, mentioned above and implied in my description of image-formation. They are and are not what they represent. Pull a picture from your wallet and say, “That’s my grandson.” If I responded, “No, it isn’t,” I’d be infuriating, but I wouldn’t be wrong. For an analysis of image-nature yields that very melding of Being and Non-being which so attracts and astounds the intellect attempting to think comprehensively: An image is a present absence—or an absent presence. It is a mystery of disincarnation, of which the willing mind, cunningly compromising its logical requirements, just manages to take hold.[8] (Cognitive science and neuroscience provide explanations of mental imagery that are more sharp-edged but less illuminating in my context.)

Memory, the imaginative conservative’s special domain (since, as I claimed above, it makes the past have being and the present vitality), is the imagination’s supply house and workspace, for imaginative material is, I would say, basically memorial; who can imagine anything, even a futuristic prospect, that is not a modification of the past?

The imagination, then, is the worker within this memorial store; it transmutes, transfigures, and transforms memories. Sometimes it falsifies, but I think that in its invention it is less liar than interpreter. I’ll put it this way: the well-conditioned imagination is a myth-recalling and myth-making imagination. It puts a background of meaning to present experience. Human meaningfulness almost always has, I think, a sense of depth to it, which in memorial space acquires the feel of “out of the past.”

So it’s time to meditate on the sources of memory. There are basic external origins, of course, sensory experiences and their evaluations—reality-derived memories. Among these are external images, crafted by painters and other visual artists or developed by cameras and other recording devices, snapshot-style or posed, unretouched or doctored, intended as honest testimony or passed out with a deceitful agenda—true or lying imitations.

And then there are internal images, imaginative images, effects of the productive imagination working on its psychic material. And these images of the soul raise the most acutely wonderful of all questions concerning the imagination: What are the originals of imaginative images? Whence comes the material that the working imagination contributes on its own, drawing on presences not found in experiential, this-worldly memory? Most quasi-sensory elements of inner images must, for such as we are, indeed be world-derived. But there are beings, events, atmospheres that have never yet eventuated in this world, or at least were never within our sensory reach. When poets and novelists make them external for us (and we in turn internalize them) we call them fictions, but falsely, because we may find them more actual than merely real facts.

The question concerning the originals of imaginative images is, I think, ultimately theological. Explanations in terms of the sub- or unconscious are subterfuges—no one can actually locate these limbos; explaining away is not explaining. When I say “theological,” I have in mind the Muses who live on Olympus and are invoked by poets from Homer to Milton, who both had access to the realm of divinity, where the Muses are quartered. So also great novelists express, more prosaically, some sense of being visited from Beyond. And it is no accident that the greatest phenomenologist (that is, an account-giver of inner appearances, in this case of memory and imagination, in his Confessions) was also among the greatest theologians, namely Augustine of Hippo (354-430). In sum, the originals of memories are mostly external and come to us largely through the frontal doors of perception, but the originals of the imagination on its own are imparted—who knows whence?—to some hinterland of the soul—which, once again, it’s no use to call the unconscious, for if it’s just neural, how does it issue as “conscious,” and if it’s conscious, how is it “un?”

So much for the ontology, activity, sources, and originals of the imagination; as I said, a culpably condensed treatment worth a big book.[9] And now, one last time: Why is the imagination a specifically conservative concern so that it is rightly attached adjectivally to the noun “conservative?”

The imagination should be anybody’s interest, a common interest, for just as articulateness damps rage, so imaginativeness relieves alienation. Thus, as the preservation of expressive (non-twittering) language should be a social concern, the saving of the imagination should be everyone’s care. I will argue below for the implication that nothing matters more to our psychological security than the protection of children from degraded speech and vulgarized images.

What are the dangers? First, the outsourcing of the imagination, the riffing, as it were, of the in-house working imagination, to be replaced by the inundating hyper-productivity of an industrial image-source. Next, the loss of worldly originals, particularly the paving over of nature, the systematic replacement of what is given to us, is of slow growth, is deep and mysterious, by what is made by us, is quickly produced, and is complex and so completely analyzable—without being at all understood. The practical business of resisting the transmogrification of first into second nature belongs to those uncomfortable kin of conservatives, the conservationists; they are lately learning not to ride rough-shod over people’s livelihoods in their enthusiasm and to find mutually satisfactory accommodations, so that conservation can become a win-win game—in the conservative mode, one might say, chuckling.

A final slew of dangers I can think of is the concentration of physical vision into the field of a miniscule window, where occurs “texting” with its digital modes: literal fingering, calculational figuring, verbal frittering. Concurrently, imaginative visioning is overwhelmed by image-inundation, and keen intellectual appetite is spoiled by a surfeit of information.[10]

But then, what’s all this to the imaginative conservative in particular? Well, we ought to be glad and close observers of all givenness, green nature above all, great sniffers-out of the corrosive vapors issuing from the excessive ingestion of the original world, the world that is, for faith, God’s creation, or for philosophy, Being’s appearance. Another way to put it: Imaginative conservatism means, to me at least, a grounded flexibility functioning between ideal and real, the imaginative space in which concrete specificity and universal essentiality meet—the twice-lived world, once in experienced fact and again in imaginative reflection.

Twelfth: Eccentric Centrality

Finally, an imaginative conservative will have, against all odds, an abiding faith in eccentric centrality. A nun I used to know once explained to me that the energy which moves the world has its center in out-of-the-way places, remote from the mere epicenters of secular power. I agree. The spirit lives in the sticks, in backwaters, small towns, in self-sufficiently recalcitrant, contentedly unregarded places, in local orchestras, neighborhood groceries, in libraries that still have books on shelves—not multiple copies of best-sellers but accumulated collections of middlingly good novels—and, above all, in face-to-face schools that transmit the tradition, its treasures of beauty and of reflection. Of course, they all must scramble, accommodate themselves to “current conditions”—a potently polymorphous notion, the correct discerning of which takes more practical wisdom than most of us possess. Thus the imaginative conservative’s practical project is survival without loss of soul.

So that’s the imaginative conservative I’m willing to own up to being—call it “modified Burkean,” if it’s better off with a label.[11] Do I then have “the Conservative Mind?” I hope not. A mind-set is a major liability for a person wanting to be thoughtful—and a premature fixative of imaginative reflection to boot.

In fact, it is legitimate history to claim that an imaginative—let it be said, a Burkean—conservative will be politically a classical Liberal in the nineteenth-century English sense: of Lockean ancestry, believing in the ultimacy of individuals over groups; ready to trust elected representatives with projects for political reform but resistant to administrative compulsions of social justice; attached to private associations as loci of excellence; and, above all, cherishing liberty over the forcible equality of ideological egalitarianism—as opposed to the equality grounded in our common nature or creation. This is the merest sketch of a politics that seems to me compatible with imaginative conservatism.

My first and last care, however, is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. (I can’t think the desperately “innovative” gimmickry which diverts attention from contents to delivery systems is able to reconstitute failing communities of learning.)

But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily of learning to read books (in whatever format), books of words, symbols, diagrams, musical notes. For entry into all of these, but perhaps books of words above all, imagination is indispensable. Great poetry requires visualization to be interpretable; the word has to become a vision to be realized. (Specific example, perhaps the greatest moment of any: at the climax of the Iliad, Achilles is searching for the vulnerable spot in Hector’s armor-encased body. The armor Hector is wearing is the suit he has stripped from the body of Patroclus, the friend of Achilles’ heart, whom Achilles has sent heedlessly into battle to fight in his stead, clothed in his own armor. Now he drives his spear into Hector’s gullet. Whom is he killing? Homer is silent. See it and shudder.)

Similarly, works of reflection require a kind of reverse imagination, since practically all speech about non-physical being is by bodily metaphor: The transfiguration, the transcending, of such philosophical figures is practically the same as thinking reflectively. (A not so very specific an example, but perhaps among the grandest: Hegel tells of the Spirit coming into time, of God entering the world, through a “gallery of figures,” human incarnations, even identifiable as historical individuals. But, he says, that’s not how we are to understand his Phenomenology of Spirit, meaning his account of the phenomena by which divinity becomes manifest in the world; he is not presenting imagined figures but incarnate truths. It is the most hellishly difficult but most rewarding of image-interpretations known to me; it requires ascending from visualizable images to purely thinkable originals.)

That’s imaginative conservatism for a college and its students, my particular venue and charge. But what matters most is, as I must repeat, the education of children. Looking at them from the vantage point of their future teacher, I would wish this for us: that their memories be stocked with the finest products of the tradition and their minds be—gently—turned toward the outside in close looking and articulate verbalizing and toward the inside in absorbed reading and ready visualizing. Just forget for a while about “preparing them for tomorrow” and “for being productive members of today’s society”—all that routine drivel deserves scare quotes since it’s meant to turn us into sacrificial victims on the altar of utility. It doesn’t work anyhow, since tomorrow is anybody’s guess and actual producing may be by then passé. And while I’m at it: Teach children mathematics for what it is, not dreary, opaquely operational formulas, but the most immediately intelligible language in which Nature speaks to us—and the spare armature of our vision-invested imagination.

All of this can happen if schools for all ages stay resolutely local in place and go expansively cosmopolitan in time. I mean that they should preserve themselves as face-to-face communities in particular places, but dedicate themselves to absorbing living heritage from any time. For the present is too thin to live on, and the future too inexistent.

1 “Simulacrum” because “conservative” practically means “moderate”—or should. I’m speaking here of an obtusely aggressive public persona, not of the understandably aggrieved human souls who have donned it; in some respects I sympathize with them.

6. Though they too have a place—as indexes to very long novels.

7. Such as logic and mathematical diagrams which appear, it seems, in a blank internal imaginative field in which reason—how is a mystery—can inscribe its structures. There are, of course, also external images produced by nature, such as reflections.

8. I want to distinguish sharply the Non-being constitutionally inherent in images from virtuality, which is a discretionary mode of reception, hence, as I said, a danger. More accurately, virtuality is an environment, “the virtual world.” When the promise of this virtual world to come is fulfilled, it will divorce its—presumably still voluntary—participants pretty finally (if only in stretches) from the physical world; they will be cocooned in a world-simulacrum that is absolutely immediate, without intervening organs of sensation or physical distances—achieved by direct electronic stimulation of the brain that subserves our perceptions. It will be a complete environment, a replacement world, without reality-resistance and therefore completely manipulable—by the individual for his own pleasure or by the technological provider with alien motives: inactuality as world-principle—otherwise put, an image-world humanly contrived without originals. Here the wondrous element of Non-being is turned against the very images it sustained as images, caused to be images; in the virtual world, not only have mental images cast loose from originals, but instead of being within us, we are within them, as in a super-mind.
As Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Hell, I would think. In sum, virtuality is a term from the devil’s dictionary, a good word, “virtue,” gone ambiguous as in “virtual reality,” potently unreal reality. Conservationists of the imagination should think twice. This term has suction power.

9. See E. Brann, The World of the Imagination (1991).

10. Here is an omen: The number of visitors to our national parks is on a downward trend; the reason given is in a headline: “Why go outside when you have an iPhone?” (Economist August 17, 2013).

11. Here’s what’s “Burkean.” Edmund Burke (1729-97) is for reform that is not ideologically driven; he is radical when reason-sustained popular opinion requires it (Burke was a supporter of our Revolution); he’s for minimum moralism and conciliatory politics out of respect for tradition  and care for stability; he pays deference both to Nature and historical conditions; he supports incremental change and the narrowest tailoring of planned interventions. He’s not for philosophy, mistaking it, I think, for rationalism (or maybe just being an Englishman of a traditional cast of mind)—that’s where my revisionism comes in: I’m for Burke plus philosophy. And certainly, if conservatives may, on occasion, be divided into Burkeans and bullies, I’ll declare for the former.