Edmund Burke and the Natural Law.

BURKE VINDICATED: Though within historical time there never was a golden age and people have always been sinners, the Western--and thus the worldwide--time of troubles commenced in earnest, in politicized form, in 1789, and then moved into high gear 125 years later, in 1914. In a postscript twenty years ago to the Russian-language edition, published abroad, of August 1914, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: "This book cannot be published now in our motherland except in 'samizdat' [underground, clandestine form] because of censorship for reasons which are inconcevable to the normal human mind, and were it for no other reason, because it would be necessary to write the word God in lower case." As David Walsh has recently pointed out in After Ideology, Solzhenitsyn's piety, courage, and politics are very Burkean.

The atheistic Jacobin-Marxist tradition is now in ruins, but it nearly expunged sanity and deceny-"the normal human mind"--in all those countries over which it held sway in the tweentieth century. That the so-called "Enlightenment" would lead to waves and varieties of revolution and war was foreseen by Burke in 1790. He was pessimitic about the future, maintaining the Christian virtue of hope but not the ersatz, secular brand of optimism. "If a new order is coming on," Burke wrote in 1791, as more and more people were intoxicated by the progressive alcohol of French utopian revolutionism, "and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors would have worshipped as revelations, I say for [myself], that [I] would rather be the last of that race of men, than the first and greatest" of the figures of the new order.

Burke has always had distinguished admirers and commentators, including in our century Winston Churchill, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Russell Kirk: sages and friends of God and man. But no one has more carefully and judiciously discussed the varied aspects of Burke's profound social and moral imagination than Peter J. Stanlis. His Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, originally published in 1958 and recently reissued in a new edition by Huntington House, conclusively demonstrated Burke's fidelity to the orthodox, theistic Natural Law tradition, which Burke's great friend Samuel Johnson succinctly identified as the belief that "he that thinks reasonably must think morally." In fact, Russell Kirk has argued that "from Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson more can be learned than from any other writers of the modern era." This is a shockingly unfashionable claim, but I think a true one. As Stanlis shows, the "Enlightenment" is the fountainhead of the heresies, fanaticisms, and fads that have plagued the intervening two centuries and laid waste to so many of the labors of ages of civilized behavior and imaginative genius. Johnson and Burke saw at the time that the French Enlightenment's secular faith in an inevitable collective progress was a lethal delusion.

The "Enlightenment" led to revolution, again and again. Its rootless and mocking, or ideological and fanatical, rationalisms corrode the foundations of the moral Natural Law which from Antigone and the Old Testament onward have provided the ballast and momentum of Western Civilization. In Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution (Transaction, 259 pp., $34.95) Peter STanlis discusses, patiently and in precise scholarly detail, "Burke and the Moral Natural Law," "Burke and the Rationalism of the Enlightenment," and "Burke and the Sensibility of Rousseau," and for these essays alone his book deserves the closest reading. By contrast, our tenured, home-grown radicals have been sophisticated by those "masters of suspicion," Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, and propagate hybrid varieties of their heresies with all the fervor of moral inversion. They must keep talking and scribbling by reference to these lurid "Enlighteners" in order to keept students and readers from ralizing the massive fact that in the historical liberation of 1989-1991 Edmund Burke has been vindicated, in John Morley's words, as "the greatest master of civil wisdom in our language."

Defending his long campaign against the British colonial depredations of Warren Hastings in India--the activity of which he was proudest, although it was in the short term unsuccessful--Burke wrote hauntingly against ethnocentrism, relativism, and racism, and in favor of the orthodox Natural Law belief that every human person is res sacra homo because made in the image of God: "I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you and I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not" (Letter of January 19, 1786).

This sane and saintly voice has done more for human civilization than all the over-educated Darwinians, Marxists, Freudians, and deconstructionist epigones of Nietzsche who ever lived, or ever will. Burke's writings will last as long as Western Civilization itself, of which they are among the firmest supports and finest flowers. "Magna est veritas, et praevalet."

Mr. Aeschliman is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Virginia.