Milione – Tribute to Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Victor Milione

Tribute to Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Philadelphia Society Regional Meeting

Wilmington, Delaware, October 9-10, 1998

In an early essay for Modern Age Dr. Leddihn wrote that: "…if Judas had been
admitted to be the equal of St. John, Christianity would have had to close shop.
There is no equality in Heave, nor for that matter in purgatory, but there may
very well be equality in Hell, where it belongs."

In Leftism Revisited he wrote: "In the United States illiterates are now admitted
to the polls. Sometime in the coming century, people will rack their brains
pondering how nations with tremendous scientific and intellectual achievements
could have given uninstructed and untrained men and women the right to vote
equally uninstructed and untrained people into responsible positions."

There you have two of Dr. Leddihn’s bete noires, equality and democracy. I
must say that he makes cogent and persuasive arguments against both in his
works. However, the most compelling and corroborative indictment of
democracy is the current occupant of The White House and the publics’
continuing favorable impression of his presidency.

I met Erik over forty years ago through the good graces of Dick Ware, Program
Office of the Relm Foundation and Steve DeBrul, a GM executive, who was a
member of Relm’s Board. Dr. Leddihn had received grants from Relm and
Earhart for a book and some lectures. Needless to say, we met a brilliant
scholar and a great teacher who liked to travel and lecture. I made a new friend
and Relm gave ISI a grant to support Dr. Leddihn on a speaking tour to ISI
members. That would be a good deal at any time, but during ISI’s infancy, the
lean mean years, it was a great one. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

You cannot read Dr. Leddihn’s books The Menace of the Herd, Liberty or
Equality, Leftism Revisited, and his many essays or listen to him lecture without
being awed by the scope and depth of his knowledge. It is encyclopedic,
encompassing a knowledge of religious, philosophic, political, economic
thought and social history. One senses his concern for the totality of life and
with thought in these disciplines as to whether it enhances or hinders freedom or
impedes man’s necessary completion as a God created being. This aspect of his
thought is immediately evident to those students he lectures.

Also evident is the fact that he is a spiritual man, a Catholic. He believes in God,
order in the Universe, and man’s ability to attain truth. This attribute is ridiculed
at many colleges and universities, mired in a wasteland of relativism and
nihilism.

As a classical liberal in the European tradition of that term, he has a passion for
liberty and economic freedom. This is in marked contrast to the liberal
economic nostrums prevalent on campus. I have heard ISI members leaving a
lecture by Dr. Leddihn exclaim, "What a tonic!"

The unity and wholeness of truth has been mutilated in the academy. A former
orderly synthesis of knowledge and truth, an inspiring core, has been
fragmented at best or thoroughly replaced by intellectual chaos. Lem Boulware,
a deceased ISI Trustee, called this the rescrambling of ignorance.

John Milton likened truth to the good Osiris, whose Body, hewn into a thousand
pieces was scattered to the four winds. "From that time every since," wrote
Milton "the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful
search that Isis made for the mangled boy of Osiris, went up and down
gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them."

Dr. Leddihn is one such friend of truth, sifting through the wreckage of Western
Civilization in the wake of the Enlightenment, "gathering limb by limb."

It was fortuitous we came upon him in ISI’s infancy because he was precisely
the sort of scholar we wanted ISI members to meet. And, many of them did
over the past four decades. They and we were blessed by his friendship and
wisdom. Thank you Erik, and God bless!