The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton 9781474251327, 9781474251341, 9781474251310

Citation preview

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Also available from Bloomsbury Moral Matters, Mark Dooley The Roger Scruton Reader, Mark Dooley Conversations with Roger Scruton, Mark Dooley and Roger Scruton The Disappeared, Roger Scruton The Face of God, Roger Scruton

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton James Bryson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © James Bryson and contributors, 2016 James Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-474-25132-7 PB: 978-1-350-04157-8 ePDF: 978-1-474-25131-0 ePub: 978-1-474-25133-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For my Family

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Abbreviations of Scruton’s works Editor’s Preface

xi xiii xix xxi



Introduction: Saving the Sacred

1

1

Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion Mark Dooley

3

2

A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental Roger Scruton

17

Part 1 What Is the Sacred? Some Philosophical and Theological Responses 33 3

What Is the Sacred? John Cottingham

35

4

The Great Absence Anthony O’Hear

47

5

Locating the Sacred Robert Grant

57

6

Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications Brian Hebblethwaite

67

7

That Obscure Object of Desire Fiona Ellis

77

8

A Glance at the Face of God Michael Pakaluk

89

Part 2 Recalling the Sacred: Philosophical and Theological Sources

97

9

99

On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard Christopher S. Morrissey

viii Contents

10 The Problem with Plato James Bryson

111

11 Hierophany or Theophany? Douglas Hedley

121

12 Beyond Dover Beach Alexandra Slaby

133

Part 3 Sensing the Sacred: Aesthetics, Art and Religion

145

13 Religious Thought and the Sensory World Mark Wynn

147

14 The Aesthetic Education of Mankind Thomas Curran

155

15 Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God Férdia J. Stone-Davis

165

16 Art as Religion? Vanessa Rogers

179

Part 4 Conserving the Sacred: Common Law, Conservatism and Conservation

189

17 Law, Liberty and Polity Peter Bryson

191

18 The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism Daniel Cullen

203

19 Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture Charles Taliaferro

217

20 Thinking Is Something Daunting Chantal Delsol

229

Contents

ix

Part 5 The Sacred and the Secular: Charles Taylor and Roger Scruton in Conversation

237



Roger Scruton & Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

239



Epilogue: No Through Road Roger Scruton

253

Index

267

Acknowledgements This collection of essays grew out of the encouragement a teacher offered his student. I am deeply grateful to Douglas Hedley, who encouraged my interest in Roger Scruton’s writings and assured me the present volume and the conference that inspired it were worthwhile projects that could indeed be realized. In a similar vein, I thank all of the contributors, both for their fine essays and for their unflagging enthusiasm and patience, during the challenging work of winning the funds to hold the conference. Special thanks are owed to Mark Dooley for the valuable counsel he offered during the editorial process. When I set about drumming up support for a conference dedicated to Scruton’s work, I was overwhelmed by the kindness of my colleagues at McGill. For their warm encouragement and advice, I would like to thank Torrance Kirby, Garth Green, Ellen Aitken, Douglas Farrow, who acted as moderator for Scruton’s conversation with Charles Taylor, David Davies, Christoph Neidhöfer, Daniel Cere, Charles Taylor and Gaëlle Fiasse. I would also like to thank the following McGill students and support staff for their assistance hosting the conference: Richard Greydanus, Stephanie Butera, Matthew Nini, Hadi Fakhoury, Francesca Maniaci, Alex Sokolov and Debbie McSorley. My interest in Scrutopia began at home. Scruton defends all aspects of the European cultural inheritance I came to love there first: great literature, music, painting and architecture, history, philosophy, theology, the Christian religion and indeed the institution of the family itself. I am profoundly grateful that my parents were able to attend the conference in Montreal, an event I hope they see as a small tribute to the irreplaceable cultural gifts they so diligently passed along to their children. I thank my father for offering a paper, and I am grateful to Fr. Robert Dodaro and my mother Patricia for encouraging him to do so. My sister Barbara travelled from London to attend the conference, providing much welcome moral support, for which I am most thankful. My wife Kristi, only a few months removed from giving birth to our first child Matthew Benjamin, agreed to perform a scene from Scruton’s opera The Minister at the conference, a difficult piece of music, as well as Scruton’s equally challenging Lorca Songs, a performance of which offered invaluable insight into Scruton’s dynamic approach to sacred things. In the build-up to the conference,

xii Acknowledgements

she answered my stress with loving patience, and her exquisite performance of Scruton’s music reminded me how fortunate Matthew and I are to have such a talented, sensitive and loving person as a mother and wife. Of course, the sine qua non of this book is Roger Scruton himself. As the reader will discover, each contributor has benefited from his or her engagement with Scruton’s prodigious philosophical and creative output. Even where there is disagreement, there is profound respect for the philosopher’s intellectual range and insight. His contributions to this collection reflect the patience with which he responded to every paper at the conference in Montreal. I am personally grateful for his gentle encouragement of my own interest in his work. I know all of the scholars who have contributed to his collection have been impressed by the humility with which Roger has accepted such a rigorous examination of his thought. On behalf of everyone who helped to bring this collection to fruition, I extend my most sincere gratitude to Roger Scruton for giving us the opportunity to think about sacred things together.

Notes on Contributors James Bryson, editor of this volume, is a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University. He completed a doctorate in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, where he wrote a dissertation on the Renaissance Platonist Thomas Jackson, an expanded version of which will be published as a monograph by Peeters. Bryson is also working on a translation of and commentary on the ‘erotic works’ of the Romantic philosopher and theologian, Franz von Baader. He has published a number of articles and reviews on late antique, medieval and Renaissance philosophical theology, including two essays that will appear in Brill’s Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Platonism. Peter Bryson is a Justice of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal in Canada. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2000 and to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia in 2009 before his elevation to the Court of Appeal in 2010. Justice Bryson lectured in Equity and Trusts at Dalhousie Law School from 1983 to 1993. He has authored various articles, the most recent of which was (with James MacDuff) Wrongful Conduct and Constructive Trusts: Annual Review of Civil Litigation (Toronto: Thomson & Carswell, 2007). He is an honorary associate fellow at the University of King’s College, where he occasionally lectures on art history. John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of St  John’s College, Oxford. He is a wellknown authority on the philosophy of Descartes and seventeenth-century rationalism, and has written numerous books and articles on the history of philosophy, with special reference to the early modern period. He has also published extensively in the field of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. His recent publications include On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Cartesian Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Why Believe? (London: Continuum, 2009), and Philosophy of Religion: Towards

xiv

Notes on Contributors

a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The Moral Life, a collection of essays honouring his work on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion, appeared in 2008 (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Daniel Cullen teaches political philosophy and the humanities  at Rhodes College, where he also directs the Project for the Study of Liberal Democracy. In addition to various  essays on modern political thought, he  is the author of Freedom in Rousseau’s Political Philosophy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993) and editor and co-author of Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy (forthcoming, Lexington). Thomas Curran is the Associate Director of the Foundation Year Programme (an interdisciplinary, first-year humanities programme)  at the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. His chief publications have been devoted to Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion at the University of Berlin; however,  Munich’s Iudicium Verlag will be the publisher (in 2016) for his current project: to collect and expand his commentaries on specific Cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Chantal Delsol is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Paris-Est and a Member of the Institut Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. She is the author of several books that have been translated into a variety of languages, including Arabic, Czech, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, German, Italian and English. Her recent publications include Qu’est-ce que l’homme? Cours familier d’anthropologie (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2007), and La nature du populisme, ou les figures de l’idiot (Paris: Editions Ovadia, 2008). Mark Dooley has been a Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has published two books on Roger Scruton with Continuum (now Bloomsbury), and works on Derrida with Liam Kavanagh (The Philosophy of Derrida), Kierkegaard (The Politics of Exodus) and the Catholic Church (Why be a Catholic?), among many others. His most recent book is entitled Moral Matters to be published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Fiona Ellis is a Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. Her research interests include the philosophy and theology of love and desire, naturalism and idealism. Her recent publications include God,



Notes on Contributors

xv

Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); ‘Two Erotic Ideals’, Religious Studies, 2014; ‘Schopenhauer on Love’, Oxford Handbook of Love, 2016. Robert Grant retired in 2010. In 2006 he was British Council Distinguished Guest Professor at the Political Studies Institute, Lisbon, and in 1999 Resident Scholar Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Previously a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, then Lecturer at Sussex University, he joined the Department of English Literature at Glasgow University in 1974, was made Reader in 1995, and Professor of the History of Ideas in 2004. He has published three books: Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990); The Politics of Sex and Other Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); and Imagining the Real: Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Prof. Grant has contributed both short and chapter-length articles to (among others) Routledge’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, and to Blackwell’s Companion to Aesthetics and Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. In literature his specialist areas are Shakespeare, the Victorian period, and the Modern era. He is currently writing Oakeshott’s official biography and assembling his own third and fourth collections of essays. The Revd Dr Brian Hebblethwaite is a Life Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, was Fellow and Dean of Chapel there from 1969–94, and Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the Cambridge Divinity Faculty from 1973–2000. He also served as Canon Theologian of Leicester Cathedral and as Editor for Ethics for the Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin). He now lives in retirement near Ely. His books include Evil, Suffering and Religion (2000), The Problems of Theology (1980), The Ocean of Truth (1988), Philosophical Theology and Christian Doctrine (2004), In Defence of Christianity (2005), and The Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer (2007). Douglas Hedley is a Reader in Hermeneutics and Metaphysics in the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of Clare College. His research interests include contemporary philosophy of religion, the history of Platonism and Neoplatonism, early modern philosophy, Romanticism and Idealism. He has published a book on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and has edited volumes on Austin Farrer, Radical Orthodoxy and early modern Platonism. He has recently completed the final volume of a trilogy on the imagination, entitled The Iconic Imagination, which will appear with Bloomsbury in 2016.

xvi

Notes on Contributors

Christopher S. Morrissey is a Fellow of the Adler-Aquinas Institute and he lectures in logic and philosophy at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. His fields of research are philosophical theology, traditional metaphysics, perennial philosophy and ancient cosmology. He is the author of Hesiod: Theogony / Works and Days (2012), and the managing editor of The American Journal of Semiotics. Anthony O’Hear is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham; Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and editor of its journal, Philosophy. His recent work has focused on the philosophy of religion, aesthetics and political philosophy. He has published several books, including Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Philosophy in the New Century (London: Continuum, 2001); The Great Books: From Homer’s Iliad to Goethe’s Faust: A Journey Through 2500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature (London: Icon Books, 2007; Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009); The Landscape of Humanity: Art, Culture and Society (Upton Pyne: Imprint Academic, 2008), and (with Natasha O’Hear) Picturing the Apocalypse: the Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia, Oxford University Press, 2015. Michael Pakaluk is Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University. His areas of research include Aristotle’s psychology and ethics, medieval philosophical theology, and the thought of Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II. Most recently, he has edited a book with Giles Pearson, entitled Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and authored a book, entitled Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: an introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Vanessa L. Rogers is Associate Professor of Musicology at Rhodes College and a Research Associate at the University of Oxford, where she helps to edit the international London Stage 1800–1900 database and works as the Principal Researcher for Ballad Operas Online: An Electronic Catalogue. Her primary area of research is eighteenth-century English opera and aesthetics; current projects include a book on eighteenth-century comic opera and a forthcoming article on Roger Scruton’s opera Violet. She has contributed articles to The Oxford Handbook to the Georgian Theatre, Celebrity: The Idiom of the Modern Era, The Stage’s Glory: John Rich (1692–1761), Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, and Wiley–Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of British Literature. Rogers is currently



Notes on Contributors

xvii

working on co-editing Isaac Bickerstaff ’s 1762 opera Love in a Village for Bärenreiter and is writing a book on comic opera. Alexandra Slaby is a Lecturer at the University of Caen Lower Normandy, France. Her research interests include the history of cultural ideas, history of cultural policy, and Irish history. Recent publications include Histoire de l’Irlande contemporaine, Paris: Tallandier (February 2016); (co-ed., with Kieran Bonner), Culture and Out-of-Placeness in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 37, N° 1–2, 2013; Like a Language We Could All Understand.  Music and the Irish Imagination (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2013); L’Etat et la culture en Irlande (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2010); (ed.),  L’État et la culture dans le monde anglophone, LISA E-Journal, Vol. 7, N° 1 (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2007). Férdia J. Stone-Davis is based at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She is an interdisciplinary academic working at the intersection of music, philosophy and theology. She is author of Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), co-editor of The Soundtrack of Conflict: The Role of Music in Radio Broadcasting in Wartime and in Conflict Situations (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013), and editor of Music and Transcendence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). Charles Taliaferro is a Professor of philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at St. Olaf College, MN. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including The Image in Mind co-authored with Jil Evans (London: Continuum, 2010) and The Golden Cord (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2012). He works in philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind and value theory. Mark Wynn is Professor of Philosophy and Religion in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). He is interested in philosophical as well as theological perspectives on the nature of the spiritual life.

Abbreviations of Scruton’s works AA

The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979)

AI

Art and Imagination (1974 and 1998)

AM

The Aesthetics of Music (1997)

APP

A Political Philosophy (2006)

AR

Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996 and 2000)

AU

The Aesthetic Understanding (1983 and 1998)

CC

Culture Counts (2007)

CV

The Classical Vernacular (1994)

DD

A Dove Descending and Other Stories (1991)

DDH

Death-Devoted Heart (2004)

EE

England: An Elegy (2000 & 2006)

FA

Fortnight’s Anger (1981)

FG

The Face of God (2012)

FN

Francesca: A Novel (1991)

GP

Green Philosophy (2012)

GR

Gentle Regrets (2005)

HMP

A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981 and 2006)

ID

I Drink Therefore I Am (2009)

KI

Kant: A Very Short Introduction (1982 and 2001)

LHH

A Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West (1987)

MC

Modern Culture (2005) (first published as An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, 1998)

xx

Abbreviations of Scruton’s works

MC

The Meaning of Conservatism (1980 and 2002)

MP

Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1994 and 2004)

NG

Notes from Underground (2014)

NN

The Need for Nations (2004)

NS

News from Somewhere (2004)

OC

Our Church (2012)

OH

On Hunting (1998)

PC

Perictione in Colophon (2000)

PC

The Politics of Culture (1981)

PDB

The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990 and 1997)

PMD

The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought (2007)

PP

Philosophy: Principles and Problems 2005 (first published as An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, 1996)

SD

Sexual Desire (1986 and 2006)

SI

Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (1986 and 2002)

SW

The Soul of the World (2014)

TNL

Thinkers of the New Left (1985)

UM

Understanding Music (2009)

UP

The Uses of Pessimism (2009)

UT

Untimely Tracts (1987)

WR

The West and the Rest (2002 and 2003)

XD

Xanthippic Dialogues (1993)

Editor’s Preface It is from religious ideas that the human world, and the subject who inhabits it, were made. Roger Scruton, Philosophy: Principles and Problems

This book derives from a conference dedicated to the work of Roger Scruton, hosted by the McGill Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR) and Faculty of Religious Studies in April 2014. The focus of the conference was Scruton’s recent writings on religion, most notably his Gifford Lectures and his Stanton Lectures published as The Face of God and The Soul of the World respectively. However, as the Introduction by Mark Dooley makes clear, a religious sensibility underlies the entire spectrum of Scruton’s writings. For Scruton, religion is the way people best come to understand themselves and the world around them as the lived experience of the sacred or Lebenswelt. But Scruton does not reduce religion to something that is merely of interest from an anthropological point of view: he also attempts to persuade us that the religious believer has a unique perspective on the world that allows him to stand outside of ordinary experience and catch a glimpse of a transcendental world beyond the here and now. Scruton approaches religion or ‘the experience of the sacred’, not only as a philosopher of aesthetics and conservatism, but also as a literary and poetic author, a composer and musicologist, a cultural critic and a member of the Church of England. Given the variety of scholarly, literary and artistic media by which Scruton develops and conveys what can be plausibly called his ‘philosophy of religion’, the present volume includes essays from an international body of scholars who specialize in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, the history of thought and culture, politics, aesthetics, musicology, ethics and Church history. In order to give some structure to Scruton’s dynamic defence of religion, the essays have been organized into four principal categories, united under the theme and concept of ‘the sacred’. In Part 1 entitled ‘What Is the Sacred’, the contributors respond to and analyse Scruton’s recent work on religion and consider its philosophical, theological and even doctrinal implications. In the second part, ‘Recalling the Sacred’, the contributors trace some of Scruton’s most

xxii

Editor’s Preface

important intellectual influences and show how he rejects or incorporates them into his own views on religion and the sacred. Authors discussed in relation to Scruton include René Girard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Plato, Emile Durkheim and Matthew Arnold. The third section, entitled ‘Sensing the Sacred’, shows how Scruton defends art and beauty as sacred things that are made and revealed in the sensory world, a world that gives people a window through which to view the transcendental. As the contributors to this section show, Scruton makes this argument in different ways in a range of books devoted to architecture, music, beauty, and also in his opera Violet. The fourth part, ‘Conserving the Sacred’, elaborates on Scruton’s commitment to conservative institutions, thinkers and causes, including the English Common Law, Edmund Burke and the environment. This section concludes with a tribute to Scruton by the great French conservative philosopher, Chantal Delsol. This volume includes a version of Scruton’s lecture presented at the conference in Montreal, ‘A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental’. It is paired with Dooley’s piece ‘Roger Scruton: A Philosopher for Religion’, originally delivered as the conference keynote lecture. Taken together these pieces serve as an introduction to the essays that follow and, by extension, to Scruton’s work as a whole – work which combines a commitment to rigorous philosophical argument and the piety of a philosophical way of life. The fifth and final section of this volume, ‘The Sacred and the Secular’, takes the form of a public dialogue that took place between Scruton and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, during which they discussed the place and role of religion in the modern world. The volume concludes with a response from Scruton to a number of the individual essays and to the prevailing challenge issued by each of the contributors to make explicit his beliefs ‘about the world, about human destiny, and about the role of art, morality and religion in giving sense to our lives’. I would like to thank the following institutions, organizations and individuals without whom neither the present volume, nor the conference on which it is based, would have been possible. For their generous financial support, I thank the following sponsors at McGill University: The Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR), the Faculty of Religious Studies, the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee, the Schulich School of Music, the Department of Philosophy, the Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies and the Post-Graduate Student Society (PGSS). Beyond McGill, I gratefully acknowledge the support of John Young, George Cooper, Kathleen McDougall, the Prayer Book Society of Canada, the



Editor’s Preface

xxiii

Canadian Society of Christian Philosophers, and the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University. I would also like to thank Producer Greg Kelly of the CBC Radio One Program, Ideas with Paul Kennedy, for arranging the recording and broadcast of portions of the McGill conference. Finally, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for awarding a Connection Grant to support the travel and accommodation of conference participants and the publication of the proceedings.

Introduction: Saving the Sacred

1

Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion Mark Dooley

What does it mean to think with Roger Scruton? If this is a question I have often posed down the years, it is because he is that most uncharacteristic of contemporary intellectuals: a philosopher of deep learning who has spent much of his long career at war with the academy; a prolific author who eschewed the city for life on a farm, who hunts to hounds and writes movingly on wine as that which comes to us wrapped in a ‘halo of significance’; a conservative who rejects liberal internationalism, but whose outlook is genuinely cosmopolitan; a courageous activist expelled from Communist Czechoslovakia for daring to speak of hope at a time when none existed; a thinker schooled in the Anglophone tradition of philosophy, yet one who is quintessentially European; someone that ‘served a full apprenticeship in atheism’, but who, having pondered his loss of faith against the backdrop of advancing secularism, has ‘steadily regained it, though in a form that stands at a distance from the old religion’.1 Scruton is a man who not only thinks, but gives substance to this thinking. A public intellectual who has taken risks for freedom and who has never sought popularity when truth was at stake. To think with Roger Scruton is, thus, to think with someone who has spent a lifetime seeking ‘comfort in uncomfortable truths’.2 Those truths are enunciated and defended in a corpus comprising fifty books (including four novels and a book of poetry), hundreds of scholarly articles and scores of newspaper columns, on topics as diverse as beauty, architecture, music, sex, politics, animal rights, wine, hunting, farming, the environment and, of course, God.3 Unifying all these works is, however, one underlying conviction, which is that we all long for the consolation of home or of membership.4 We all desire to surmount ‘natural alienation’, to belong ‘somewhere’ that we recognize as ours. In a world where nihilism and estrangement are the norm, Scruton, as I wrote in The Roger Scruton Reader, ‘shines a light on our failures, not in order to

4

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

condemn them, but in order to lead us from despair, loneliness and desecration back home to beauty and its sacred source’.5 That is why I consider him something of a latter-day Hegel, someone who incorporates the full range of human experience into his thinking, and for whom art, religion and philosophy serve as ‘a living endorsement of the human community’.6 I said above that while Scruton was schooled in, and deeply admires the Anglophone tradition of philosophy, he is quintessentially European in his thinking. By ‘European’ I do not mean that Scruton can be read alongside those like Derrida and Foucault, people he routinely condemns as high priests of the ‘culture of repudiation’.7 What I mean to say is that while owing much to his Analytic background, he owes as much to certain figures in the mainstream European tradition of philosophy, such as Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to consider the particular definition and function that Scruton assigns to philosophy. For Scruton, philosophy ought to be what it was for those philosophers writing in the seventeenth century. Despite their ‘scientific leanings’, as he puts it, people like Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza were fully integrated in the surrounding literary culture. Rarely did they confine themselves to philosophy, but composed poetry, essays and wrote in such a way that each word was ‘used with a full sense of its value, not only as a vehicle for abstract reasoning, but as a purveyor of images’.8 What is more, they were all believers, ‘for whom the meaning of the world is neither created by philosophy nor dependent on philosophy for its construction’.9 To put it simply, those philosophers wrote at a time when philosophy was informed and nourished by the prevailing literary and religious currents. The problem with much contemporary philosophy, according to Scruton, is that it has become disconnected from both literary culture and the religious understanding of reality. Those who follow Hegel, Schiller, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in considering aesthetics and religion as central to the study of philosophy, are largely dismissed as something other than philosophers by those in the Analytic tradition. For Scruton, however, you cannot divorce philosophy from the literary culture, or indeed from religion, without losing sight of its true value and vocation. As he writes in The Philosopher on Dover Beach, ‘Philosophy severed from literary criticism is as monstrous a thing as literary criticism severed from philosophy. In each case the result is a kind of intellectual masquerade, a phantom world of discourse, whose principal subject matter is itself.’10 Elsewhere he states that the ‘concepts of the holy and the



Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion

5

sacred are, or ought to be, of considerable interest to the philosopher. For they show how great the disparity can be, between the concepts through which we perceive the world, and those which we use to explain it.’11 That is why he looks not only to those like Kant and Hegel, but also to quintessentially English figures like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and F. R. Leavis, people for whom the acquisition of culture was, in some way, nothing less than ‘redemptive’. It is why he believes, following Leavis, that the task of culture is a ‘sacred task’. As defined by Scruton, culture is not a source of academic knowledge, but that through which we participate in life. By engaging with what Arnold described as the ‘best which has been thought and said’, our perceptions and emotions are transformed, alienation gives way to identity and our lives are redeemed from loneliness. In restoring life to its true meaning, culture enables us to see each other and the world, not as the scientist understands them, but as they are for Hegel: subjects with whom we can feel at home. Viewing culture in this way is to consider the aesthetic, not as a peripheral subject, but as pivotal to the philosophical endeavour. It is to afford it the status it had before philosophy broke free of its literary moorings and became the ‘handmaiden of the sciences’. As I view him, Roger Scruton is heir to those, like Leavis, who believed the task of culture is a sacred task. However, given that he believes philosophy ‘must return aesthetics to the place that Kant and Hegel made for it: a place at the centre of the subject, the paradigm of philosophy, and the true test of all it claims’,12 we can conclude that, for him, the task of philosophy is no less a sacred undertaking. This is not to say that you will find in Scruton a philosophy of religion as conventionally conceived. Trawling through his vast corpus, you will not discover anything like a systematic theology or traditional proofs for the existence of God. What you will discover, however, are ‘intimations of the transcendental’: intimations of the timeless in the midst of time. This explains why philosophy cannot be described as a handmaiden of science, but as the ‘seamstress of the Lebenswelt’ – what he defines as ‘the world in its innocence, the world in spite of science’. Its true task is to ‘repair the rents made by science in the veil of Maya, through which the wind of nihilism now blows coldly over us. And, even with the needle and thread of conceptual analysis, this labour of piety can begin.’13 Its true task is to re-enchant the ordinary human world. The reason philosophy ought not to emulate science is because, as a ‘paradigm of objective knowledge’, science expunges the human subject from its description of the world. In contrast, there is another mode of understanding which does not seek to explain the world as it really is, but which ‘aims to

6

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

describe, criticize and justify the world as it appears’. With Husserl, Scruton calls this ‘intentional understanding’.14 Unlike science, which endeavours to explain the world, intentional understanding fills it with ‘meanings implicit in our aims and emotions’. Those meanings enable us to feel at home in the world, to recognize ‘the occasions of action, the objects of sympathy, and the places of rest’. To describe the world in this way is to describe the Lebenswelt,15 the ‘surface of the world’ where we, as persons, live, dwell and have our being. As he put it in The Aesthetics of Architecture, it is to see the world as something that ‘responds to my activity’ by reflecting back to me ‘an image of my true fulfilment’.16 As the seamstress of the Lebenswelt, philosophy must endeavour to restore the human subject to the starting point of inquiry. This is not to suggest that the scientific description of the world is misguided or mistaken, but simply that it makes no room for freedom, personality or subjectivity – all those features of the human condition that provide the focus for intentional understanding. By labouring to penetrate beneath the surface, by attempting to clear away ‘the thin topsoil of human discourse’,17 science peels away the personality of the world. In so doing, it threatens, as Scruton puts it, ‘to destroy our response to the surface’. That is why philosophy must respond by seeking to ‘save the appearances’. It must respond by showing that the meaning of the world ‘is enshrined in conceptions which, while indispensable to the “Why?” of freedom, find no place in the language of science: conceptions like beauty, goodness and spirit’.18 Saving the appearances is, however, also a matter of saving the sacred, which is why the sacred has been a recurrent theme in Scruton’s writings since the publication of Sexual Desire.19 In the title essay to The Philosopher on Dover Beach, first published in 1986, he writes: The naturalistic explanations [of Nietzsche and Marx] which threaten our sense of the sacred, threaten also the impulse of piety upon which community and morality are founded. This is what Matthew Arnold foresaw on the ‘darkling plain’: the loss of piety, the loss of respect for what is holy and untouchable, and in place of them a presumptuous ignorance, fortified by science. We should ask ourselves, therefore, whether we really are constrained, by our scientific realism, to dismiss the sacred from our view of things. Perhaps we might yet be able to find in our lives some intimation of a transcendence that we can neither explain nor describe, but to which we must address ourselves through symbols.20

The first and most powerful intimation of transcendence is to be discovered in the human subject itself. If naturalistic explanations sever human life



Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion

7

from its value, it is because they dismiss human freedom as nothing ‘but an appearance on the face of nature; beneath it rides the same implacable causality, the same sovereign indifference, which prepares death equally and unconcernedly for all of us, and which tells us that beyond death there is nothing’.21 For Scruton, however, the ‘person who is acquainted with the self, who refers to himself as “I”, is inescapably trapped into freedom’.22 Relying on Kant’s vision of the human predicament, he argues that ‘while there is no place for the free being in the world described by science, our own self-awareness, without which no description of the world makes sense to us, forces upon us the idea that we are free’.23 Freedom, he tells us, ‘is the mysterious lining of the human organism, the subjective reality which gives sense and meaning to our lives’. Hence, to see a face where the scientist sees only flesh, muscle and bone is ‘to recognise that this, at least is sacred, that this small piece of earthly matter is not to be treated as a means to our purposes, but as an end in itself ’. It is, in sum, Kant’s theory of freedom, his ideas of the transcendental subject and aesthetic judgement, which suggest ‘how we might understand the sacred and the miraculous’.24 As Scruton wrote in his timeless book on Kant in 1982: ‘Thus it is that aesthetic judgement directs us towards the apprehension of a transcendent world, while practical reason gives content to that apprehension, and affirms that this intimation of a perspectiveless vision of things is indeed an intimation of God.’25 In saving the sacred, Roger Scruton seeks to show that while much about us can be explained in scientific or evolutionary terms, that explanation is ‘only one half of the picture’. Science describes the human object, but remains silent on the human subject. As he explains in various contexts, this is somewhat like describing the pigments in a painting without making any reference to the ‘painted saint’. When, however, we look at each other and the world from ‘I’ to ‘I’, we can perceive ‘the human soul, its freedom, translucency and moral presence’ despite their absence from the ‘book of evolution’. Philosophy’s sacred task is to counter those who would argue that ‘God is now redundant’, by demonstrating that the only thing science can ‘show us is the how of God’s creation’. What it cannot do is ‘disprove the fact of it, still less cast light on the why’. For the answer to the ‘why’ lies ‘here and now, in you and me – in the free and reflective being …’ That is why, in looking on people as objects, ‘you see that Darwin was right. When you look on them as subjects, you see that the most important thing about them has no place in Darwin’s theory.’ That thing is nothing less than our capacity ‘to see into the subjectivity of one another, and into the subjectivity of the world – which is God himself ’.26

8

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

To perceive the world in sacral terms is to see it under the aspect of freedom and subjectivity. As he writes in Sexual Desire, the ‘sacred is “the subjectivity of objects” – the presentation, in the contours of the day-to-day things, of a meaning that sees “from I to I”. Out of the mute objectivity of the surrounding world, a voice suddenly calls to me, with a clear and intelligible command. It tells me who I am, and enjoins me to enter the place that has been kept for me.’27 Elsewhere, Scruton writes that a sacred place is one in which ‘personality shines from mere objects: from a piece of stone, a tree, or a patch of water. Such things have no subjectivity of their own: which is why they convey the sense of God’s presence. The experience of the sacred is therefore a revelation, a direct encounter with the divine, which eludes all explanation in natural terms, and stands isolated and apart.’28 If the experience of the sacred eludes all explanation in natural terms, it is because in probing beneath the surface, you will not discover an empirical entity that can be identified as the subject, self, consciousness or soul. Just as the painted face is nothing over and above the materials that comprise the portrait, so also subjectivity cannot be explained as something over and above the materials of which the human being is composed. We are not two things, but one ‘which can be seen [or described] in two ways’. As Scruton explains in a wonderful essay entitled ‘The Unobservable Mind’,29 which forms the basis of his discussion of consciousness in I Drink Therefore I Am: ‘We can observe brain processes, neurones, ganglions, synapses and all other intricate matter of the brain, but we cannot observe consciousness, even though observation is itself a form of it.’30 So where, if not in the empirical world, is this mysterious subjectivity? It hovers, says Scruton, ‘on the edge of things, like a horizon, and could never be grasped “from the other side”, the side of subjectivity itself ’. Following Thomas Nagel, he tells us it is ‘not a thing but a perspective’, a point of view on the perimeter of the world ‘which has no identity in the world of objects’.31 Non-rational animals do not possess that perspective. While they are conscious and desiring creatures, they are incapable of resisting impulse in the name of higher ideals. Neither can they love, laugh, lament, blush, smile, judge, nor intentionally offer up their lives in the manner of a martyr. They are, in other words, blind to subjectivity both in themselves and in others. Hence an animal cannot be described as ‘a centre of selfhood and freedom’, for it is neither ‘a source of shame or judgement, but a normal part of the empirical world, sharing some of our feelings with us, but never aspiring to the noble, the true or the good’.32 We might say that while animals belong to the sphere of appetite, they do not belong to that of intrinsic values. They look directly at objects, but



Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion

9

never into them as would a contemplative. They are conscious, but not selfconscious. They have, as it were, no aesthetic sense, no capacity for savouring an object’s beauty or sacredness. If there seems to be a direct relationship between beauty and the sacred in Scruton’s writings, it is because, for him, only selfconscious subjects are capable of ordering their world in response to both. Only we humans can treat certain objects as we ought to treat other subjects: as ends, and never as means. When Scruton remarks, for example, that it is ‘not too fanciful to suggest that the beautiful and the sacred are connected in our emotions, and that both have their origin in the experience of embodiment’,33 it is because they direct our attention and emotion towards the subject which is not separate from the object, but somehow mingled with it. They direct our gaze from the materials to the painted saint, from the physiology of the face to the smiling subject that illumines it from behind, from the composition of the stone to the divine presence contained within. In the absence of beauty and the sacred, we would be tempted to perceive all those things as mere objects. With obscenity, for example, the embodied person (which, for Scruton, is the true object of sexual desire) is ‘eclipsed’ by his flesh. As he explains, the ‘obscene gesture is one that puts the body on display as pure body, so destroying the experience of embodiment’.34 Similarly, when beauty is separated from the sacred, it is harder for us to believe that the divine is a ‘real presence’ in sacred artefacts. As I stressed in Why Be a Catholic?,35 this is why both Scruton and Benedict XVI consider beauty essential to sacred worship. The ceremony, as Scruton writes, ‘embodies a meaning, which is inextricable from its beauty’.36 Strip away beauty, dumb-down the liturgy, substitute folk music for polyphony, build temples of wood rather than stone, and you shut out the sacred. Instead of permitting the divine personality to shine it is summarily erased, thereby making it almost impossible to believe that you are praying to anything other than the wall. It seems to me that if there is a crisis of faith in Western Christianity, it is because in making the sacred space purely functional, the Christian churches have, as Scruton describes it, polluted ‘what is holy, by dragging it down to the sphere of everyday events’.37 In so doing, they have masked the face of God, thus alienating religious people from the object of their worship, and thus from each other as subjects. The relationship between beauty and the sacred is rooted in the fact that they lift our drives and needs from ‘the realm of transferable appetites’, and focus them on the individual subject. When I look upon my beloved, I do not see

10

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton an object for my gratification, one that could be substituted for any other. My desire is directed towards this unique and irreplaceable free being that is revealed in her flesh. Similarly, to pray before a sacred object is to perceive in the materials ‘something precious and mysterious, which reaches out to us with a claim that is in some way not of this world’.38 For example, you could not say to a worshipper, ‘Sorry, this tabernacle requires maintenance, would you mind if we put this biscuit box in its place?’ Human subjects, beautiful and sacred objects inspire love, devotion and reverence for the very reason that they cannot be substituted. As Scruton so often remarks, people are not ‘interchangeable as objects of desire, even if they are equally attractive. You can desire one person, and then another – you can even desire both at the same time. But your desire for John and Mary cannot be satisfied by Alfred or Jane; each desire is specific to its object, since it is a desire for that person as the individual that he is, and not as an instance of a general kind.’39

Does this mean there is a Eucharistic element to Scruton’s phenomenology of the sacred? Leaving aside the question of whether he believes in what Catholics term the ‘Real Presence’, it can be plausibly argued that his work endorses and justifies the experience of the Eucharist as that through which God, as he says in Philosophy: Principles and Problems, is conceived ‘as a self-conscious subject who confronts other subjects directly, and who allocates their place within the mystic communion’.40 Through the Eucharist, worshippers encounter God as a person, a pure subject – the ‘I Am Who Am’. In Holy Communion God makes His home among us, thus forming One Body through the person of Christ. This can, of course, be explained in purely anthropological terms as an endorsement of the cult, something that Scruton convincingly achieves in various contexts with reference to both Durkheim and Wagner.41 For believers, however, the anthropological understanding of the Eucharist, like the scientific understanding of the human being, is only one half of the picture – and certainly not the most important half. For example, you could not say to someone who objects to Holy Communion being received in the hand: ‘Why are you so upset? It is, after all, only bread’. That would be like saying: ‘Don’t worry about killing off your mother. She is, after all, only flesh’. To the believer, belonging as he does to the religious Lebenswelt, the Eucharist, as ‘the very substance of the truth it offers’, overflows with meaning. It is, as Scruton describes it, a direct ‘encounter with the subject in a world of objects’.42 Science and anthropology seek to explain this archetypal sacred experience, as a purely natural phenomenon. They tell us that this experience, like every other, ‘has a natural and not a supernatural cause’. However, as Scruton



Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion

11

repeatedly insists, ‘those who seek for meanings may be indifferent to causes, and those who communicate with God through prayer should be no more cut off from him by the knowledge that the world of objects does not contain him, than they are cut off from those they love by the knowledge that words, smiles and gestures are nothing but movements of the flesh’.43 That is why, as he writes, ‘the Mass – the mediated sacrament, with its moment of “transubstantiation” – is such a decisive experience, and why it provides us with so persuasive an example of embodied meaning’.44 Be that as it may, desecration, ‘desacralization’, depersonalization and profanation, are all-pervasive features of our contemporary world. Through pornography, human or ‘embodied’ subjects are stripped down to their ‘animal essentials’, dragged from the transcendental realm into the world of objects. And, when so reduced, one body can very easily substitute for another. The result is that the sexual bond is removed ‘from the realm of intrinsic values’. That the same can be said for works of art is, according to Scruton, because contemporary artists, architects, directors and musicians, have taken ‘flight from beauty’ in ‘acts of aesthetic iconoclasm’. Why they purposely cultivate this ‘posture of transgression’ is in order to provide a ‘defence against the sacred’, to destroy the judgement it makes on our lives. This is not to say, as Scruton is quick to clarify, that works of art are sacred things – though ‘many of the greatest works of art started life in that way’. What he does say, however, is that they are, ‘or have been, part of the continuing human attempt to idealize and sanctify the objects of experience, and to present images and narratives of our humanity as a thing to live up to, and not merely a thing to live’.45 Consequently, for those who would seek to ignore the transcendental, rather than rise to its claims, they become ripe for repudiation. For Scruton, our need for beauty is not something ‘we could lack and still be fulfilled as people’. That is because it is ‘a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared public world’. This is especially so in the case of architecture, that art form which, more than any other, constitutes the thin lining of the Lebenswelt. When, in 1994, Scruton published The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in the Age of Nihilism, he framed the discussion specifically in terms of what he calls ‘sacred architecture’. The classical Orders, he wrote, ‘are the quintessence of sacred architecture, and through them the divine idea dwells among us’. That is because ‘the stone of the temple is the earthly translation of the god’s eternity, which is in turn the symbol of the community’s will to live’. From this concept of the temple, arose that of the colonnade, and ‘thence of the single column as the unit of meaning’. To study

12

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

the classical Orders is, in other words, to ‘study the procedure whereby a visually ordered unit acquires maximum sacred power, while laying down a law for the whole building that derives from it’.46 Consequently, the Orders affirm ‘what is sempiternal in the midst of change’: They endorse our right of settlement, membership and belonging – not temporarily, but forever. That, says Scruton, ‘is the secret of their civility’: they invite us to see a smiling face and a home, where Modernism offers only ‘bulks of lightless concrete’.47 If modernism is a desecration, it is because ‘nothing of the sacred’ remains in its building types. To think the sacred with Roger Scruton is to perceive intimations of transcendence all across the surface of our world. To perceive a subject where science perceives only an object, or where the modernist sees only ‘blank facades’, is to see the surface shine with the light of subjectivity. However, it also means justifying the world that faith has made, the world, as he writes in A Political Philosophy, ‘of secure commitments, of marriage and love, of obsequies and Christenings, of real presences in ordinary lives and exalted visions in art’.48 In being both ‘a ritual affirmation of membership and stance towards the transcendental’, religion regularizes or normalizes the mystery of how I can be both subject and object, a being that stands at the intersection of ‘the timeless with time’.49 Take that experience away, strip the world of beauty and the sacred, and the result is not enlightenment or liberation, but a profound transformation of the Lebenswelt. The old experience of home gives way to homelessness, estrangement and alienation. When the human face is scrubbed from the surface of the world, when the catch-cry is ‘Let nothing be sacred: neither god nor man’,50 we can no longer identify with, or feel at ease in the surrounding environment. We can no longer see into the subjectivity of one another or into the subjectivity of God. It is then that we are tempted to see the human person as pure object, or worse, a ‘thing to be assaulted, ravaged and consumed’. Moreover, the institutional framework that sustains the intergenerational dialectic between the living, the dead and the unborn, simply withers away.51 Such, alas, is our present predicament. Scruton writes despairingly of ‘a culture of widespread desecration, in which human relations are voided of the old religious virtues – innocence, sacrifice and eternal vows – and in which little or no public acknowledgement is afforded to the ideas of the sacred, the holy and the forbidden’. The result is a rejection of the ‘human form divine’ for ‘an entirely novel product, from which the idea of human distinction, of the sacred nature of our form and the consecration of our loves has been driven away’. This is not just a matter of casting aside our traditional beliefs. In losing religion, we



Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion

13

profoundly alter the appearances to the point where we experience the human body, not ‘as something removed from nature’, but as ‘an animal, rooted in the natural world and obedient to its dark imperatives’.52 However, despite all attempts by evangelical atheists to stamp on the ‘coffin in which they imagine God’s corpse to lie’, Scruton believes that people ‘have an innate need to conceptualize their world in terms of the transcendental’.53 That is why, as he puts it in one of his most arresting phrases, they continue ‘to look for the places where they can stand … at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental – the places from which breezes from that other sphere waft over them’.54 There is, he says, a ‘growing movement of revulsion against the prevailing nihilism’.55 Prompted by the enduring religious needs of our species, a need to ‘live out the distinction between the sacred and profane’, this movement is fired by the conviction that we can, ‘at any moment, turn away from desecration and ask ourselves instead what inspires us and what we should revere … We can turn our attention to the things we love – the woods and streams of our native country, friends and family, the “starry heavens above” – and ask ourselves what they tell us about our lives on earth, and how that life should be lived. And then we can look on the world of art, poetry and music and know that there is a real difference between the sacrilegious, with which we are alone and troubled, and the beautiful, with which we are in company and at home.’56 There is, in other words, a way back ‘to the place that protects us’ – a way back to those ‘cooling streams’, in which freedom, love and duty ‘come to us as a vision of eternity’, for to know them ‘is to know God’. Thinking the sacred with Roger Scruton is to see, that in this ‘labour of piety’, as in so much else, it is he who points the way.

Notes   1 Roger Scruton, GR, p. 221.   2 Ibid., p. vii.  3 See The Face of God and The Soul of the World. My purpose here is to show that these recent works merely make explicit what lies at the heart of all Scruton’s writings.   4 See my Introduction to The Roger Scruton Reader, ed. Mark Dooley, entitled ‘A Philosophy of Love’ (London and New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2009 and 2011), pp. ix–xxiv.

14

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

 5 Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, p. xxiv.   6 Ibid., p. 206. Hegel features in many of Scruton’s writings, but most especially in AA, pp. 237–56; HMP, pp. 169–84; SD, pp. 348–61; PDB, pp. 31–55; MP, pp. 286–91. He also hovers in the background of UP and GP.   7 See Scruton, TNL, pp. 31–44; AU, pp. 261–86; MP, pp. 458–80; MC, pp. 135–48; APP, pp. 103–17. See also, Mark Dooley, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (London and New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2009), Chapters 1 and 2.   8 Scruton, PDB, p. 101.   9 Ibid., p. 102. 10 Ibid. 11 Scruton, PP, p. 95. 12 Scruton, PDB, p. 111. 13 Ibid., p. 112. 14 Scruton first employed the concept of ‘intentionality’ in Chapter 1 of SD, pp. 1–15. In an appendix to that book (pp. 377–91), entitled ‘Intentionality’, he provides a systematic analysis of the concept. 15 The concept of the Lebenswelt first appears in Chapter 1 of SD. 16 Scruton, AA, p. 248. 17 See Dooley, Roger Scruton, Chapter 1. 18 Scruton, PP, p. 23. 19 See Scruton, SD, pp. 348–61. 20 Scruton, PDB, pp. 8–9. 21 Ibid., p. 8. 22 ‘The Return of Religion’, in Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, p. 132. 23 Scruton, PDB, p. 9. 24 Ibid. 25 Scruton, KI, p. 110. 26 Scruton, OH, p. 79. See also XD, pp. 150–72; and Dooley, Roger Scruton, Chapter 1. 27 Scruton, SD, p. 357. 28 Scruton, PP, p. 96. 29 See Scruton, ‘The Unobservable Mind’ in Technology Review, available online at www.technologyreview.com. 30 Scruton, ID, p. 101. 31 Ibid., p. 113. 32 Scruton, APP, p. 137. See also AR, pp. 79–122; OH, pp. 62–79; NS, pp. 61–92; GR, pp. 85–120, and Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, pp. 208–17. 33 Scruton, Beauty, p. 57. 34 Ibid., p. 48. 35 Mark Dooley, Why Be a Catholic? (London and New York: Continuum/ Bloomsbury, 2011).



Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion

15

36 Scruton, PDB, p. 116. 37 Scruton, Beauty, p. 52. See also Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 115–35. 38 Ibid., p. 177. For more on sex and the sacred, see Scruton, PP, pp. 127–39, and ‘The Philosophy of Love’ which constitutes Chapter 5 of DDH, pp. 119–59 (an abridged version of this essay appears as Chapter 7 of Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, pp. 99–114). See also Dooley, Roger Scruton, Chapters 1 and 2, and Section 3 of Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader. 39 Scruton, Beauty, p. 44. 40 Scruton, PP, p. 91. 41 See especially Scruton, DDH, pp. 3–14; and APP, pp. 118–45. 42 Scruton, PPP, p. 107. 43 Ibid. 44 Scruton, PDB, p. 123. 45 Scruton, Beauty, p. 182. 46 Scruton, CV, p. 108. 47 Ibid., p. 109. See also Scruton, PC; and Dooley, Roger Scruton, Chapter 3: ‘Gazing Aesthetically’. 48 Scruton, APP, p. 133. 49 For Scruton on T. S. Eliot, see ‘Eliot and Conservatism’, in APP, pp. 191–208. See also his chapter on ‘Music’, in PP. pp. 141–52, which I reproduce in The Roger Scruton Reader, pp. 175–83. 50 Scruton, CV, p. 110. 51 For Scruton’s debt to Edmund Burke, see especially ‘How I became a Conservative’ in GR, pp. 33–56 (an abridged version of which appears in Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, pp. 3–19). 52 Scruton, PP, p. 135. 53 Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, p. 133. 54 Ibid. 55 Scruton, CC, p. 107. 56 Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, p. xxiv.

2

A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental Roger Scruton

In recent work, I have tried to weave together the two themes of aesthetic judgement and the religious frame of mind, and to show that the two phenomena draw on similar cognitive resources for comparable ends. That, very briefly, is the theme of The Face of God and The Soul of the World. It is also embodied in the character of Father Pavel in Notes from Underground, and informs my writings about architecture, sexuality and country life. My treatment of those many issues, subsuming them under a single theory of ‘cognitive dualism’, will naturally provoke a sceptical response from the informed philosophical reader. Am I not giving too much credit to a set of metaphors, and treating a mere hope for the transcendental as an actual proof of it? In this paper, I want to address that doubt head on, by giving a transcendental argument for the view that we need transcendental categories, since without them our world is not merely impoverished but lacking features essential to a full understanding of human subjects and their needs. From this we can deduce that those categories have as much objectivity as philosophy can bestow on them, and that the attempt to live life without them, or as though they were mere ‘projections’ of our inner yearnings, is to overlook what is actually there before us. However, my way of justifying ‘transcendental’ categories is somewhat heretical. For it makes no claims about any transcendental objects to which they might be taken to refer. I suggest rather that these categories are woven into the way the world appears. And I take the task of philosophy in our time to be one of ‘saving the appearances’, not because there is some reality that threatens to demote or undermine them, but because they are the reality. By ‘transcendental categories’ I mean concepts like those of the sacred, the holy, the redemptive, the transcendental which cannot be fully explained in empirical terms, but which seem to refer always beyond the limits of our

18

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

world. We reach for these categories when endeavouring to make sense of the irreplaceable value for us of the things and people that we love. They dominate our discussion of art, poetry and music; and they are invoked at every point in the language and liturgy of our religions. And they seem to feed upon our core experience as persons: the experience of being self-knowing centres of consciousness, who relate to each other I to I. The questions that interest me therefore are two: whether we must use those categories in order to make sense of our world; and if so, what do they tell us about the nature of our world and our own place within it? We human beings make sense of our experience in many ways, two of which stand out as fundamental: the way of explanation, and the way of justification, corresponding to two distinct applications of the question ‘why?’ The way of explanation looks for causes and theories: it shows how one event can be predicted from another, and how the laws of nature unfold before us in a continuously changing tapestry of appearances. The way of justification looks for reasons, through which to hold each other to account for what we are, what we think, what we feel and what we do. It provides reasons for action and feeling, about which our opinions can converge and through which we can find endorsement in the actions and feelings of our fellows. It shows how to make sense of the world as our shared home. In recent writings, I try to show that the human world – what Husserl calls the Lebenswelt and Sellars the ‘space of reasons’ – is ordered through concepts and conceptions that vanish from the scientific description of nature. Like secondary qualities, such things as purity, innocence, tragedy, comedy, elegance and refinement are not mentioned in the book of science. They describe how the world appears to us, and they identify the occasions of action and emotion. But they drop out of every scientific theory, including the theories that explain our belief in them. (Evolutionary psychology is such a theory: it purports to show, for example, that the belief in a distinction between the pure and the impure is an adaptation, which serves the ‘reproductive strategies’ of our genes.) Given this, a hard-nosed empiricist will say that, like secondary qualities, those ‘tertiary qualities’ on which our human relations, our religious sentiments and our aesthetic experience all depend, are not part of the natural order.1 We ‘read them into’ the world: they are part of how the world appears to us, but not part of how it truly is. They stem, as Hume put it, from the mind’s capacity to ‘spread itself upon objects’. But they have no ‘objective basis’, and our belief in them can be explained by theories that do not suppose them to be features of the underlying reality. The case is no different from the case of aspects, like the



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

19

face in the picture, which is there for us in the pigments, but not really there, as the pigments are. Now that response is fine, so far as it goes. But it is imbued with the metaphors that it seeks to discard. It tells us that there is an ‘underlying’ reality, that the mind ‘spreads itself ’ on things, that we ‘read’ things into the world, and so on. It is through and through saturated with the image of a world that we know ‘objectively’ through science, but colour ‘subjectively’ by projecting features of our point of view. But it contains no independent argument for thinking that the ‘scientific image’ (as Sellars dubbed it) is an image of all that there is. The most interesting version of the response, historically speaking, was given by Feuerbach, in his ‘materialist’ rejoinder to Hegel. Feuerbach’s philosophy of religion, as expressed in The Essence of Christianity (1841), is an attempt to undermine the intentionality of our religious thoughts. These thoughts seem to be about God, Christ, the Virgin Mary and so on. But those divine persons, Feuerbach argued, are merely ‘projections’ of the true subject matter of religion, which is man himself, in his species-being (Gattungswesen). Religious thoughts, which seem to be about God, are really about man. And by projecting our species-being in this way outside ourselves, we are alienating our nature, separating it from ourselves, bestowing it on the fictions that suck our lifeblood and deprive us of our moral strength. In contemplating the Holy Trinity, we are really contemplating universal features of the human condition. However, by attributing those features to specific persons of the Deity we also discard them, so amputating an essential limb of our humanity. Feuerbach set this idea in the context of a materialist theory of mind, and an anthropology of ‘fetishism’ that was to prove immensely influential over the writings of Marx and the Marxists. He also inspired Wagner, who attempted to restore the gods to their human context, and to show them to be exactly what Feuerbach had postulated, projections on the screen of Valhalla of the passions that burn here below. And, in a manner that has never been emulated, Wagner used that idea to illustrate fundamental and universal truths about love, power and domination. By treating the gods as projections of our human passions, through which we mortals try to fathom the vast impulses that govern us, Wagner understood the gods for the first time. All subsequent anthropology of religion has been footnotes to the Ring. In The Soul of the World I distance myself from evolutionary explanations of our psychological repertoire, on the grounds that they will always fall short of explaining the intentionality of our mental states. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that an evolutionary psychologist would dismiss Feuerbach’s

20

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

theory of religion as a non-starter, since it has the implication that religious thoughts and experiences are maladaptive. If we were really alienating ourselves from our ‘species-being’ through thinking religiously, the religious humans would long ago have been replaced by the vigorous materialists, for whom life and virtue are things of this world. But religion is an enduring universal, which has been expelled from human minds only here and there, by the costly energies of eccentric elites – a fact suggesting that religion is adaptive after all.2 That thought suggests another. There may be benefits from the religious way of thinking that are accessible to philosophical reflection, and which do something to justify the thoughts that confer them. That is my contention in this paper, and I build my account on two foundations – first, the theory of cognitive dualism that I advance in The Soul of the World, and second the Kantian method of transcendental argument. These are shaky foundations, but what philosophical foundations are not? There are as many ways of conceptualizing our world as there are uses for our classifications. We have concepts of functional, aesthetic and visual kinds; we have the technical jargon of skills, arts and occupations; we have the language of secondary qualities, aspects and pictorial imagery. And probably few if any of those ways of classifying things would survive in a unified science of the universe. However, one particular way of conceptualizing the world has a special claim over our cognitive powers. This is the way presupposed in interpersonal understanding, in which the ‘I’ concept plays a central role. In The Soul of the World I take seriously the suggestion that there is an interpersonal conceptual scheme, that this scheme is indispensable to us, that it is incommensurable with the language of science, and that it is in some way comprehensive – giving a complete account of at least some of the objects to which it is applied. Here is how I summarize the point: Central to inter-personal dialogue is the practice of accountability. We hold each other to account, not only for our actions, but also for our thoughts, feelings and attitudes. The question ‘why?’, addressed from me to you, is not as a rule asking for an explanation, and certainly not for the kind of explanation that a neurologist might give. It is asking for an account of how things are, from your first-person perspective, that will render you intelligible, and in the normal case acceptable, to me. Sometimes you might be able to offer a justification for your actions and feelings. At other times your account of them will fall short of justifying them, but nevertheless acknowledge your accountability. (Think of a dialogue in which the first move is ‘Are you angry with me?’) So vivid and central in our lives is the I-You encounter that we are naturally tempted to believe that it is an encounter between objects, and that these objects



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

21

exist in some other dimension than that containing ordinary physical things. It is this, I believe, rather than the mysteries of the ‘inner’ life, that prompt people to espouse some kind of ontological dualism, and to believe that the human being is not one thing but two. I have suggested rather that there is a cognitive dualism, but not an ontological dualism, underlying our response to the human world. The I-You encounter is precisely not an encounter between objects, and therefore not an encounter between objects of a special and ontologically primitive kind. It is an encounter between subjects, and one that can be understood only if we recognize that the logic of first-person awareness is built into the concepts through which our mutual dealings are shaped.

Much has to be added to that picture if I am to show that the conceptual scheme governing our interpersonal dialogue contains a complete account of our nature – our nature, that is to say, as persons, rather than as human organisms. But one purpose of The Soul of the World was to make the first moves in that direction, and to show the many ways in which our understanding of each other and of the Lebenswelt that contains us, is based at every point on first-person accountability, and therefore on the peculiar privileges of self-awareness. The I-You encounter lies at the heart of moral reasoning, and this encounter transfigures the world of those who enter it. The primary application of moral thought is not in resolving the dilemmas and quandaries of the all-benevolent reformer, but in sorting things out between you and me. Derek Parfit has made a powerful case for objective reasons for action, rooted in principles that tell us when an action is wrong.3 But, as Stephen Darwall has argued, moral reasons are also, by their nature, reasons through which we hold each other to account, and the primary forms of wrongdoing are actions by which a person is wronged.4 Such is the foundation of the ‘calculus of rights and duties’ that I hold to be central to the life of persons. I try to show that we experience not only human society but also the Lebenswelt as a whole, in terms that owe their sense and application to the accountability of persons to each other. And many of these terms are associated with categories of the sacred, the transcendental, the redemptive, the wholly innocent and the wholly pure. Now it is here that my argument confronts the spectre of Feuerbach. I grant, he will say, that we humans are disposed by nature to project our longings into the sphere of the supernatural. Our first-person being, which situates us on the edge of the natural world, tempts us to suppose the existence of other such beings, who face us from the beyond with some simulacrum of our own emotions. But consciousness is a material process, which occurs in a body, and bodies belong to the natural order. All ideas of the supernatural are merely

22

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

fetishisms, ways of animating the material reality with the ghost of our own intentions. Every attempt to provide a real content to our thoughts must lead us to the material process or material object that gives rise to them. If it does not do so, then this is merely a proof that we are dealing with fictions – imaginary objects and processes with no role in the world order. A modern scientific realist would add that the world order is the order of nature, that nature simply is what scientific investigation describes, and that the idea of a supernatural realm is not merely unjustified but in a deep sense incoherent, since it involves both applying and withholding the concepts through which we explain our experience. Such a scientific realist will say that, since supernatural objects lie outside the causal order, no event in the natural world can provide evidence for their existence. The very description of them as ‘supernatural’ situates them in the realm of fictions. Hence, no number of sightings of the Virgin Mary will provide an answer to Feuerbach. But there is another way of answering him, which is to construct a transcendental argument for the use of transcendental concepts. Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’, as I understand it, proceeds in the following way. We are self-conscious beings, for whom the ‘I’ accompanies all our representations. This means that we are aware of an original unity – the transcendental unity of apperception, according to which my knowledge that this thought, this desire and this sensation belong to one thing, is immediate and criterionless. I can have this kind of immediate knowledge of my own unity only if I deploy a concept of identity over time, and this is possible only if my experience exhibits the order of substance and cause. In short, it is only because I think according to the categories that I can enjoy the self-consciousness that defines the human condition. Hence, I can know a priori that my world exhibits the order contained in the categories – and notably that it is a world of substances and causes, united under universal laws. The argument is subtle, convoluted and open to both an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ reading. It could be understood as concluding that we must think of the world in a certain way, or as concluding that the world must be a certain way if we are to be conscious of ourselves as part of it. At first sight, those look very different. But only at first sight. For the peculiarity of transcendental arguments is that they confiscate the ground from which their opponents might mount a counter-offensive. If it is really the case that we must think in a certain way in order to enjoy self-consciousness, then the sceptic, whose argument begins from the assumption of self-consciousness, must also think in that way, so that his attempts to reject our ordinary notions of objectivity will in fact covertly reaffirm them. The transcendental argument precisely transcends the position



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

23

of the reasoner, to say something about the situation that makes reasoning possible, and therefore something about which conclusions he must draw if he is to reason cogently. There is then no logical room left for the supposition that the world might be other than he thinks it to be. For there is no point of view from which that thought can be properly spelled out. This is not the place to comment on the validity of Kant’s argument, though I have a great respect for it, and believe that it is one of a family of arguments that has removed the sting from Humean scepticism. My present concern is to suggest a parallel argument for transcendental categories. Any attempt to deduce, from the facts of experience or the incompleteness of science, that these categories denote objects and persons in a supernatural world will encounter Feuerbach’s objection, that we have no criterion for distinguishing a supernatural reality from a fictional projection, and also Kant’s own argument, that our concepts cannot reach beyond the realm of phenomena so as to refer successfully to ‘things in themselves’. But suppose we sever the concept of the supernatural from any ontological claims, and treat the sacred, the supernatural and the transcendental without supposing that we are thereby referring to specific persons or things, but rather to the ways in which our experience seems to ‘reach beyond’ what is given to us. It is then open to us to argue that these concepts are necessary to us in some way, and that even those who mount an argument designed to debunk them, will be covertly seeing the world in the terms that they lay down. That is the suggestion adumbrated in The Soul of the World, and that I want now to make explicit. Kant was right to believe that self-consciousness – the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ – presupposes a world. I exist as a subject, that is, as a selfconscious being with immediate knowledge of an inner realm, only because I exist in a world of objects that I can identify as other than myself. Reference in turn presupposes others, with whom I share language and therefore the firstperson perspective. And language presupposes a shared world, a Lebenswelt, in which others appear as subjects like myself – centres of self-conscious reflection, who address me I to You. We become self-conscious and free agents through our mutual dealings, in which each person attributes authority to the first-person reasons of the other. This process, described in controversial though brilliant terms by Hegel, is spelled out more cautiously in The Soul of the World. It leads me to postulate the ‘overreaching intentionality of interpersonal attitudes’. Here is what I say about this feature of our condition:

24

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton In all our responses to each other, whether love or hate, affection or disaffection, approval or disapproval, anger or desire, we look into the other, in search of that unattainable horizon from which he or she addresses us. We are animals swimming in the currents of causality, who relate to each other in space and time. But, in the I-to-you encounter we do not see each other in that way. Each human object is also a subject, addressing us in looks, gestures and words, from the transcendental horizon of the ‘I’. Our responses to others aim towards that horizon, passing on beyond the body to the being that it incarnates. It is this feature of our interpersonal responses that gives such compelling force to the myth of the soul, of the true but hidden self that is veiled by the flesh. And because of this our interpersonal responses develop in a certain way: we see each other as wrapped within those responses, so to speak, and we hold each other to account for them as though they originated ex nihilo from the unified centre of the self. You may say that, when we see each other in this way, we are giving credence to a metaphysical doctrine, maybe even a metaphysical myth. But it is not Descartes’ doctrine of the soul-substance, nor is it obviously a myth. Moreover, a doctrine that is enshrined in our basic personal emotions, which cannot be eliminated without undermining the I-You relationship on which our first-person understanding depends, cannot be dismissed as a simple error. It has something of the status that Kant attributes to the original unity of consciousness – the status of a presupposition of our thinking, including the thinking that might lead us to cast doubt on it. Indeed, on one understanding of the matter, the adherence to this presupposition, and the practice that flows from it, is what Kant’s transcendental freedom really amounts to.

We have to think of each other in that way if we are to build the world of human relations, the Lebenswelt that is also a ‘space of reasons’. But, for this very reason, we must deploy transcendental concepts – which reach beyond the natural order – if we are to understand the world as it truly is. These concepts come tumbling into our perspective along with the overreaching intentionality with which we address each other. They are not projections on to the human world, but invitations from it. That, briefly, is the lesson I take from aesthetics. When aesthetics came fully into being as a branch of philosophy it was in the wake of the Enlightenment, and with the first stirrings of the Romantic Movement in art and literature. Art then came to fill the god-shaped hole in the scheme of things that had been made by science. Our civilization needed a source of meaning, after the old source offered by religion had been destroyed. Art offered a new kind of meaning – not transcendental but immanent, a meaning wrapped into the



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

25

very surface of the material world. Philosophers turned their attention to the beautiful with the same emotional and intellectual hunger that they had once addressed the divine, but without the illusion that they gained knowledge of a transcendental reality. All this is brought explicitly into consciousness in Kant’s third Critique and in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics. There is truth in that snippet of intellectual history. But it is not the whole truth about aesthetics. Works of art present meaning in sensory form, but the meaning transcends the form, containing intimations of the supernatural. We cannot understand the music of Bach, the painting of Botticelli or the poetry of Wordsworth if we do not see that these works are about the transcendental and the sacred, and that they address us from a place beyond the horizon of the empirical world. Through exploring the aesthetic experience, therefore, we come to understand the transcendental as a ‘real presence’ in our lives. The concepts that were once the foundation of the religious worldview gain a new solidity from art. Through the aesthetic experience, we encounter the elusive first-person perspective that shadows us and calls us to account. That is why art is so consoling and so disturbing: it looks on us with the eye of judgement, but from a place beyond the horizon of our world. I have always been conscious of this in my own artistic endeavours, whatever their merits. It is, I think, impossible to say in plain prose what we do to each other and to ourselves when we shake ourselves free of love and look on children as disposable by-products of our lust for power and pleasure. But in the truthful artistic presentation of this fact the spiritual disaster becomes apparent and judgement hovers there before us in the unseen eyes that are no one’s. That is what inspired me to write The Minister. But of course, man does not live by art alone, and some people are entirely untouched by it. A transcendental argument needs to show that all rational beings, whatever our beliefs and interests, must deploy concepts of the transcendental if we are to understand our experience fully. To me, this observation is confirmed by our interpersonal relations, which take off and come to fruition only in those who see them as reaching beyond the natural order in which we are as though imprisoned. Among the many illustrations of the point, sexual desire is surely one of the most eloquent. Hence, in Sexual Desire (1986) and Death-Devoted Heart (2004) I have argued that the object of desire, as this emerges in a society of mutually accountable beings, is the individual person, conceived as another subjective viewpoint on the horizon of my world. This is not how animals conceive their mates, nor is it how all humans approach the objects of their sexual interest. For the individualizing intentionality of our

26

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

sexual emotions is an artefact, brought about through elaborate stratagems of mutual dealing, whereby the ‘I’ is placed at the very centre of the narrative, coaxed into the flesh in the moment of arousal, and offered to the other as a gift. There is a process here in which I-thoughts and mutual accountability govern all that passes between lovers. Sexual behaviour, and the intentionality of the feelings on which it depends, are malleable, and can change direction as a result of cultural and other influences. The change of focus of sexual interest from subject to object, from the other person to his body parts – a change of focus already implied in the Kinsey reports and in the orgasm-obsessed writings of Wilhelm Reich – has led to a new kind of sexual interest, marketed around the globe in the form of pornography, and effectively destroying for many young people the experience of sexual love. The temptation was always there, as I point out: The tree of knowledge that caused the fall of man is surely wrongly described as giving us the knowledge of good and evil. Rather, it gave us the knowledge of ourselves as objects – we fell from the realm of subjectivity into the world of things. We learned to look on each other as objects, and to sweep away the face and all that the face stands for. We lost what was most precious to us, which is the untorn veil of the Lebenswelt, stretching from horizon to horizon across the dark matter from which all things, we included, are composed.

It is surely evident that the person who, in the sexual act, approaches the other as an assemblage of body parts, or as an instrument of pleasure replaceable by any number of functionally equivalent alternatives, is missing something. That missing thing is the interpersonal relationship, which cannot be built in this way. If you see desire in the terms that have become fashionable – as the pursuit of pleasurable sensations in the private parts – then the sphere of sexual relations becomes entirely ‘demoralized’. The outrage and pollution of rape, for example, then become impossible to explain. Rape, on this view, is every bit as bad as being spat upon: but no worse. In fact, just about everything in human sexual behaviour becomes unintelligible – and this is the condition that we are fast approaching, in which people no longer know what they are doing, when they make or give way to sexual advances. Our world is now full of people (women especially) seeking revenge for sexual affronts that they never anticipated, since they lacked the concepts that would have enabled them to envisage before it happened, the shame and humiliation of an unwanted moment of arousal. The overreaching intentionality that ought to be at the centre of our sexual emotions makes highly specific demands on us. It requires us to acknowledge



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

27

the a priori innocence of children; it requires us to distinguish pure and impure, clean and dirty, the sacred and the desecrated; it elicits reluctance and hesitation, including the strange ‘shame of the body’ that is described by Potone, Plato’s sister, in ‘Phryne’s Symposium’ (the last of the Xanthippic Dialogues, 1992). All those ways of thinking, which are embedded in the idea of the supernatural, come into play in our sexual encounters, and are often dramatized there. Through them we understand what is forbidden to us, and what we may decently pursue. They isolate the other in the way that saints and divinities are isolated in their shrines, ‘set aside and forbidden’, as Durkheim put it. They transform sexual desire from an impulse to a life-project. Of course, such states of mind over-reach themselves, and their transcendental intentionality does not cancel their mortal imperfection. Incarnate beings cannot live up to their immortal longings. But if they do not try to do so then they fall short of what they are, and the loss shows itself in a kind of enslavement, as bodily appetite takes over from spiritual longing. In Sexual Desire I argue that the normal course of sexual conduct leads us to understand the object of desire in that individualizing and personal way. It is therefore inevitable that our emotions towards the object of desire will lead us to see him or her in terms that have a transcendental meaning. If we purge sexual experience of all ideas of innocence, pollution, guilt, shame, desecration and the sanctity of the other, then we arrive precisely at the situation paraded each day before the American law courts, in which bewildered victims of their own cognitive dysfunction seek revenge for they know not what. If that is true then we have the basis for an interesting transcendental argument. The self-conscious experience of sex as a ‘going out’ towards the other presupposes transcendental categories: the sacred, the redemptive, the innocent, the pure and the polluted. It is not enough to think of our sexual relations merely in contractual terms, as though the only relevant question from the moral perspective is the question of consent. For offences against innocence, decency, purity and the sanctity of the other can be as well inflicted by consent as by coercion. To describe these wrongs we must make use of transcendental categories. I don’t mean that we apply those categories to items that are not of this world. We apply them to each other, on the understanding that only in this way do we capture the distinctive focus of our emotions, which reach out towards the edge of things. Nevertheless, transcendental categories point to the very edge of nature, and contain a kind of intimation of the ‘beyond’. They are not projections in Feuerbach’s sense, since they do not commit us to any belief in a realm

28

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

of transcendental beings. But, like the ‘I’ concept, they shine a light towards the horizon, and their sense is contained in this. Moreover, if we do not use these concepts, or other concepts from the same family, our sexual encounters will suffer the ‘fall’ that I described above: we will relate to each other as objects, not subjects, and to that extent fail to relate. Our growth as self-conscious subjects will be truncated or distorted – as we see today, among young people in the grip of the pornographic vision of themselves. Moreover, when this fall occurs it does not really occur. The objectifying view of the other is no more really available than is scepticism available to the user of the categories. If Kant is right, then the sceptic’s attempt to state his position will always require him to use the concepts that subvert it. Likewise, the attempt to experience sexual relations in purely objective terms will always subvert itself, leaving a confused residue of interpersonal feeling, ‘th’expence of spirit in a waste of shame’, as Shakespeare put it, the shame here involving precisely a reaching out to those ideas of the sacred, the redemptive and the transcendental that demand recognition when one person stands accountable before another. This confused invocation of the transcendental is surely what we are now seeing, in the young women who struggle to understand how they have been wronged by the man to whom they yielded, and who describe what seemed at the time like a consensual transaction in retrospect as domination, abuse or even ‘date rape’. Sure, the parallel with Kant’s transcendental deduction is not exact. It would be possible to live in another way, as though sex were not a form of personal relation. So far human beings have not succeeded in this, though in Brave New World Huxley tries to suggest that they might. And our world is certainly moving in that direction. Still, the argument suggests that the idea of the sacred may not, after all, be vulnerable to Feuerbach’s debunking of it. It may have an indispensable cognitive role not in leading us towards transcendental objects, but in showing us what is immanent in our world. Moreover, Feuerbach is precisely wrong in thinking that the popular belief in gods, saints and holy persons involves an alienation of the human essence. On the contrary, it is through these beliefs that people down the centuries have been able to acknowledge the human essence, to continue to see each other as free subjectivities in all the encounters of everyday life, and to attribute to those whom they love the sacred and redemptive character that makes love something more than a need of the body. The belief in gods, saints and holy persons provides a frame within which the human possibilities are displayed. We strive to fill that frame, and demand that others fill it also. Take the frame away,



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

29

deprive people of the transcendental intentionality of their loves and judgements, and it is precisely then that they are alienated from the human essence, no longer certain that the life of the accountable person is worth leading or that others are really anything more than self-deluded animals – animals deluded into a belief in the self. Kant attempted to underpin the scientific worldview, by showing that all self-conscious creatures have to bring their experience under the categories of scientific explanation, and therefore to accept the ‘scientific image’. My argument aims to show that all persons, in other words all who can relate to others by situating them in a shared Lebenswelt, have to bring their experience under transcendental concepts, and therefore to see the world as a revelation of an ineffable beyond. They do not have to theorize this revelation in terms of any specific religion or metaphysic, any more than they have to spell out the scientific image in terms of some particular physical theory. The revelation lies incipient in their interpersonal dealings, and governs their conduct and decision-making in ways that profoundly affect what they are for each other and for themselves. Of course, sceptics will deny that they use concepts of the transcendental, just as Hume denied that he meant by ‘cause’ what Kant argued that he must mean if he was to think coherently. The labour of philosophy – my kind of philosophy – is to show the way in which concepts of the transcendental are embedded in the worldview of those who claim to reject them, surfacing not merely in interpersonal attitudes like praise, blame and love, but also in what I shall call the experience of apartness. Religious people live with the awareness that they are exiles in this world, that their home is elsewhere, and that their passage through life is a pilgrimage. They are in the empirical world, but not of it. Many people claim not to understand this apartness, but its reality is abundantly proved by art. The ineffable meaning in a work of music – the voice that inhabits another space, and which calls to us from regions that we can never enter – reminds us that our most intense experiences do not link us to the empirical world but lift us out of it. Architecture too reminds us of this. The discipline of architecture, as I have tried to show in my writings on this theme, is not a discipline of the eye only, but a discipline of the soul. It is an attempt to create the city as a sacred place, and to relay the ‘real presence’ of the unseen observer in the smallest details of a shed or a wall. We are home-building creatures, only because our home is not really here. Our religious experience is often encapsulated in stories which tell the tale of exemplary human beings and of the gods and angels who guide them. Those

30

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

stories are stories of redemption. They contain deep truths about the human condition, and about what we must do in order to find sense in our mortality. God enters the stories through the prayers and beliefs of the human beings whose stories they are. In himself he remains transcendental, not part of the world of cause and effect, and inaccessible to scientific enquiry. The temptation is to say, therefore, that the transcendental is simply ineffable, and that, while our concepts point beyond the world of nature, they do not reach beyond it. Such, indeed, is the message of Kant’s first Critique. To call something ineffable, however, is not to dismiss it as unreal. Every enquiry into first principles, original causes and fundamental laws, will at some stage come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions? And the answer is that there is no answer: or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock. The question supposes an answer, but the answer is ineffable. The ineffable, in other words, is sometimes real – and indeed, the ultimate reality. In reflecting on this puzzle, the aesthetic again provides a measure of guidance. Something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words: Fauré’s F sharp Ballade: the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. Wordsworth would describe our experience of such things as ‘intimations’, which is fair enough, provided you don’t add (as he did) further and better particulars. Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter. Like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. There are many who, like Feuerbach, dismiss it as an illusion. But there is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to such people. Moreover, this aspect is of the first importance. Our loves and hopes in some way hinge on it. We love each other as angels love, reaching for the unknowable ‘I’; we hope as angels hope: with our thoughts fixed on the moment when the things of this world fall away and we are enfolded in ‘the peace which passes understanding’. Putting the point that



A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental

31

way I have already said too much. For my words make it look as though the world beyond the window is actually here, like a picture on the stairs. But it is not here; it is there, beyond the window that can never be opened, and before which we cannot linger, for we are prisoners of time and our steps trudge always onwards and up. Paying due respect to what I earlier said about the cognitive value of our ideas of the transcendental, we can surely conclude that the religious sensibility is not as empty a thing as Feuerbach and his modern followers suppose. Armed with a concept of the sacred that is a necessary part of our interpersonal understanding, and an idea of the ineffable that is nurtured on aesthetic experience, we can listen to the deeper meaning of our religious stories, and hear what they tell us about the sacrificial meaning of our lives. Not only is that better than nothing. Nothing, in all its many forms, is the only alternative on offer.

Notes 1 By ‘tertiary’ qualities I mean such qualities as aspects, meanings and affective features – the kinds of qualities that Sibley has called ‘aesthetic’, whose logic I explore in AI and which I argue to require imagination, and not just sensory perception, if they are to be observed. The term is also used by commentators on Locke and Kant to denote those ‘powers’ of physical substances that are not bound up with sensory perception. See, for example, R. Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 148. 2 On which point see, among others, David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 3 Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4 Steven Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Part One

What Is the Sacred? Some Philosophical and Theological Responses

3

What Is the Sacred? John Cottingham

1 The sacred and the transcendent Roger Scruton, describing the experience of a great work of music, speaks of ‘sacred’ moments, moments ‘outside time, in which the deep loneliness and anxiety of the human condition is overcome’, and ‘the human world is suddenly irradiated from a point beyond it’.1 I think we have all had such moments, though different people may come up with different examples. Music provides one example. Another example concerns those transfiguring experiences when we are overwhelmed by the beauty of the natural world: those ‘spots of time’ as the poet William Wordsworth called them, when the drabness of our routine everyday existence is dissolved, and we glimpse something that, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘lifts us up, when fallen’, bestowing a sense of peace and blessing.2 But is it not possible to acknowledge these moments, these intimations of the transcendent as one might call them,3 while firmly resisting a religious interpretation? Rather belatedly, the so-called ‘new atheists’ have started to realize that they might have done better in their propaganda war if they had climbed on this bandwagon. Christopher Hitchens, towards the end of his life, declared in a debate: I’m a materialist … yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent … It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work, and without this we really would merely be primates. It’s important to appreciate … that, and religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture.4

Similarly, Sam Harris, another of the ‘four horsemen’ of the new atheism, has observed ‘spiritual experiences often constitute the most important and

36

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.’5 So the suggestion is that the ‘sacred moments’ are available to the non-believer as well as the believer; but a further and philosophically more interesting claim is that they can be accommodated and recognized without stepping outside a secular worldview. Scruton’s discussion of the sacred, in his book The Face of God, seems to me to illuminate many aspects of the landscape here. One of the key points he brings out is that the sense of the sacred ‘puts a brake’ upon the instrumental attitude that treats everything as a commodity to be used. This I think is something the new atheists have missed, or at least, it is a dimension of the sacred that they have not fully taken on board. They are now very keen to proclaim that they too enjoy beautiful sunsets as much as any theist, and Richard Dawkins has even cheerfully declared (on what possible scientific evidence is not vouchsafed to us) that the precise selfsame impulses that lead poets like William Blake to mysticism ‘lead others of us to science’.6 Be that as it may, it is obviously true that experiences of awe and wonder at the beauty of nature and great art can come to everyone irrespective of religious allegiance or its lack. I would say they are part of our human birthright, not frequent or everyday, but nevertheless universal, in the sense that they are available in principle to all whose lives have not been blighted by deprivation or oppression. But there is far more to such experiences than simply saying ‘wow’ when you watch the sun dipping below the horizon. The crucial thing about a response of awe, a genuine sense of the sacred, is that there’s something that says ‘keep off!’ ‘Do not draw nigh,’ God says to Moses: ‘Put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’ (Exodus 3.5). Scruton gets this exactly right, in my view, when he suggests that to understand the sacred properly is to understand its obverse side – the possibility of desecration. Had Moses blundered in and trampled on the holy ground he would have blinded himself to its significance, just as we do nowadays, as we elbow our way into churches and temples to chatter and gawp, or worse, do not even bother to gawp, but randomly click away with our iPhones so we can upload our holiday pictures onto Facebook. In our modern secularized world, the eagerly sought, but ultimately wearisome, experience of ‘sightseeing’ has become a mere commodity, and in purchasing it not only do we desecrate the holy, but we desensitize ourselves. In Paradise Lost, John Milton plays on an ancient etymological connection between the holy and the accursed (in Latin sacer), when Adam calls the fruit of



What Is the Sacred?

37

the forbidden tree ‘sacred’: that sacred Fruit, sacred to abstinence.7 It was sacred precisely because it was set apart from the other fruits of the garden, the one they were not to touch; and in failing to keep off, they have made it accursed; its taste has, as Milton puts it, ‘brought death into the world, and all our woe’.8 The true sense of awe that is the basis of the religious impulse, here as elsewhere, is not (as it is sometimes mistakenly or maliciously represented as being) a superstitious servility towards an arbitrary and tyrannical divine command, but rather a recognition that there is something in the world that demands our respect: a value that confronts us whether we like it or not, that calls us to refrain from grabbing and grasping, and which is not simply there for us to control and commodify.

2 Foundations of the sacred There are of course important philosophical questions to be raised about how exactly this sense of the sacred is to be interpreted. How do we construe the intimations of the ‘transcendent’ – and indeed is talking of a ‘transcendent’ dimension (with or without a capital ‘T’) simply a façon de parler? I take it that for the hard-core materialist-atheist, talk of the sacred or the transcendent is indeed no more than a way of talking – an expression one uses without any real ontological basis. On this view, the natural world studied by science is, ontologically speaking, all that there is; and though there may be heightened or altered states of consciousness, like those Sam Harris is now keen on studying (produced, he says, by fasting, meditation and ‘psychotropic plants’),9 these are understood as purely subjective effects of various brain changes, generated as by-products of evolved physiological processes connected more or less tightly with the needs of survival in the ordinary natural world. The idea of anything more to the story than this, anything ontologically extra that transcends the material world, is for Harris an illusion, arising from the fact (famously highlighted by David Hume) that we are ‘deeply disposed to broadcast our own subjectivity onto the world’.10 One step up from this is the ‘expansive’ naturalism (as Fiona Ellis has termed it) developed by John McDowell.11 This is not as rampantly atheistic as the Harris-Dawkins line, but it is still firmly non-theistic. But unlike the hard-core materialists, those who take this enriched naturalist position acknowledge the genuine reality of moral and aesthetic value – it is, in one sense, part of the natural world. On McDowell’s view, the term ‘nature’ is ambiguous: it can merely mean

38

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

the brute facticity of the natural processes and events as described by physical science; but in a richer sense it can refer to a reality we become aware of through the development of human culture, including our systems of morality. Because these are perfectly ‘natural’, in the sense that they were developed out of our ordinary contingent activities as biological and social creatures of a certain kind, they do not require us to posit any transcendent or supernatural properties or entities. But they are nonetheless for McDowell genuine realities, aspects of the real world to which we gain access by being inducted as children into a certain ethical culture; and in virtue of the access thereby gained, we do indeed become subject to moral requirements and demands. As McDowell puts it: ‘the rational demands of ethics are not alien to the contingencies of our life as human beings … [o]rdinary upbringing can shape the actions and thoughts of human beings in a way that brings these demands into view’.12 It is instructive, I think, to compare this position with Scruton’s. On the McDowell view, although our experience of moral and aesthetic value is supposed to put us in touch with something genuinely and objectively real, this ‘something’ does not require us to posit anything that transcends the world of nature – where ‘nature’ is now understood in a properly enriched sense, so as to include what McDowell calls ‘second nature’. Through culture, through Bildung, we acquire habits of thought and action, which ‘open our eyes’ and make us responsive to the demands of ethical and other reasons. But there’s no genuine transcendence here, since on McDowell’s picture the ‘reality’ of the moral demands to which we are subject is in the end simply a function of a given human culture with a given biological and social history. In McDowell’s phrase, we are ‘initiated into the space of reasons by ethical upbringing’.13 Now it is clear, I think, from Scruton’s work, especially his more recent work, that while sharing the broadly Kantian perspective of someone like McDowell, he does have a certain hankering to reach beyond the limit of this kind of ‘acculturized naturalism’, as one might call it; he wants to interpret our intimations of the sacred as allowing us to glimpse genuinely transcendent demands, demands that are placed on us irrespective of our contingent inclinations, and even irrespective of what our prevailing cultural sensibilities incline us to recognize. In the concluding chapter of The Face of God, he offers a sympathetic reading of Aquinas’s notion of Being as characterized by truth, unity and goodness, the so-called ‘transcendentals’.14 Truth, unity and goodness, with the possible addition of beauty, says Scruton, are ‘a priori features of being, and ways in which being makes itself known to us’.15 And he goes on to suggest that ‘the message of religion in all its forms’ is that what had appeared arbitrary and contingent in the world



What Is the Sacred?

39

… is referred instead to the being upon which all depends. Being then makes sense to us, not as mere being, nor as ‘being there’, but as ‘being given’. We receive the world as a gift, by relating it to the transcendental subjectivity, the primordial ‘I’, in which each thing occurs as a free thought.16

The upshot of this, as I understand it, is that the sacred dimension to which we humans are attuned is in the first place far more than a mere subjective effect; on top of that it is more than just a Kantian-style interpretative grid in terms of which we process the flux of our experience. Although tentatively, and with due Kantian caution about whether we can really get this far, Scruton wants to say that there is a genuine ‘metaphysical foundation’ for the sacred. What this metaphysical foundation really amounts to is the key, I think, to whether Scruton’s recent work can be thought of as authentically theistic, or whether instead it in the end reduces to a McDowell-style acculturated naturalism.17

3 The sacred and the primordial ‘I’ If our reflections so far are on the right lines, then despite certain ambiguities or vacillations, we can nonetheless detect an important strand in Scruton’s recent thinking that points us towards a robust metaphysical foundation for the sacred. The metaphysical foundation that Scruton has in mind clearly connects with what he calls the ‘primordial I’ – the transcendental subjectivity, which corresponds to what, for the theist, is the divine presence that underlies all reality. The theistic tradition has since ancient Hebrew times stressed the hiddenness of God; and consistently with this, I think, Scruton points out that subjects, bearers of personal subjective experience and able to encounter others in an authentically interpersonal way, are not and cannot be located as objects in the world as studied by science; and this explains why the divine ‘I’ is invisible to scientific inquiry. Subjects have no place in those laws [of physics, of cause and effect] not because they are mysterious or supernatural, but because they exist only for each other, through the web of interpersonal accountability. Look for them in the world of objects and you will not find them. That is true of you and me; and it is true too of God.18

The thought is quite close to that of Thomas Nagel, recently recapitulated in his latest book, Mind and Cosmos: ‘the physical sciences will not [and can never] enable us to understand the irreducibly subjective centers of consciousness that are such a conspicuous part of the world’.19

40

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

But I think there is one worry about these personal subjects or centres of consciousness that urgently needs to be confronted here. Elusive as subjectivity may be, all the evidence we have points to its being something that supervenes on or arises out of the complex nervous systems of complex animals. The idea of a divine transcendental subjectivity, a supreme subject or ‘primordial I’, that floats free from physical and biological complexity, just does not seem to gel with what we know of the rest of reality. In other words, the materialist will insist that, for all the difficulties of understanding subjectivity and the interpersonal dimension of our human experience, these complex perspectival states and encounters are properties that cannot be ‘primordial’, because they arrive on the scene late, in evolutionary terms, and always derivatively from impersonal, non-subjective, physical, chemical and biological processes. Any metaphysical basis for theism, it seems to me, will have to take some account of this basic principle of the dependency of the subjective on the physical. The God of traditional theism appears to violate that principle; and merely to point out that the character of subjectivity is not disclosed in the causal realm is not enough to dispel the suspicion of an irreconcilable tension between scientific and religious interpretations of reality as a whole. Granted, we do not and cannot encounter subjectivity in the operations of the brain or the configurations of the molecules; but all the evidence is that subjectivity cannot happen without those physical configurations and operations. This point aside, there are other interesting parallels and contrasts between the worldviews of Nagel and Scruton. One area of common ground (shared I think by an increasing number of philosophers nowadays) is a commitment to the objectivity of value. Scruton would agree, I think, with Nagel in regarding our human consciousness as (in Nagel’s words) ‘an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value’.20 But there would, I think, be a clear disagreement between them as to what might ground this ultimate value. Thomas Nagel is, of course, profoundly antipathetic to traditional theism: not only does he not think it true, but, as he once remarked in a strange and curiously revealing aside, he does not want it to be true: ‘I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’21 Instead, Nagel proposes that in order to account for the phenomenon of subjectivity and objective value we have to imagine a radical overhaul of natural science as it now stands, and posit some kind of teleological process at work at the cosmos – by which he seems to mean something mind-like that is operative from the outset and increasingly manifest in the unfolding of the universe over time. ‘We should seek a form of understanding that enables us to see ourselves and other



What Is the Sacred?

41

conscious organisms as specific expressions simultaneously of the physical and the mental character of the universe.’22 Though Nagel does not mention Spinoza, the Spinozistic flavour is unmistakable: the cosmos has a mental as well as a physical character. But, presumably, just as with Spinoza, there is nothing of the benevolent, nothing of concern for us humans or our salvation, nothing that could be the object of religious worship in anything like the traditional sense. In the case of Scruton, by contrast, I think it is clear that he would like to be much more theistic than this. In his 2010 Gifford Lectures, he spoke approvingly of ‘the only thing that can sustain the truth of what we feel [in our experiences of the numinous], namely “trust in a personal God who reveals himself ”’.23 So the divine is more than a mere objective domain of value not explicable through the modern scientific naturalist worldview. It is something altogether more numinous, more mysterious – and indeed more personal, a being, whose ‘face’ we somehow glimpse through encounters with the sacred, where ‘we sense a bottomless chasm in the scheme of things’.24 Admittedly, Scruton insists, with due philosophical caution, that we cannot reason from the numinous to its transcendental metaphysical origin – that would be impossible, for Kantian reasons. Indeed, to describe the sacred as an encounter with the transcendental is ‘automatically to put it outside the reach of causal reasoning’.25 But he goes on to say that we can ‘present a picture of the world that enables us to interpret the religious experience in that way’.26 Let me conclude by considering the kinds of experience that might be so interpreted.

4 The sacred and the primacy of the moral The examples of the sacred that Scruton feels most at home with here, reasonably enough, are human examples: he notes that sex and death provide us with two of our primary experiences of the sacred and, concomitantly, ‘with a primary threat of desecration’.27 But I think the more significant example, if we are asking about Scruton’s theistic orientation, is the idea of the world as gift. This idea is prominent in the work of the Danish philosopher Knud Løgstrup (not mentioned by Scruton, as far as I know), who became a Professor of Ethics and Philosophy at Aarhus in Denmark within months of Scruton’s birth, and whose The Ethical Demand was published in the following decade. The interesting point here (brought out in an acute analysis by Robert Stern)28 is that Løgstrup too starts from a human experience – in this case our experience of what happens when we are shaken out of our moral complacency by a direct personal

42

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

encounter with a fellow creature in need. It is here that we are suddenly made vividly aware of a compelling ethical demand that requires a response from us. But what is it that makes the demand one I am compelled to acknowledge and respond to, whether I like it or not (though of course I may turn away and try to stop my ears to it)? Løgstrup’s answer is that the demand is absolute, because it does not flow from a human system of rights or contracts, it does not depend on my acceptance or even my own reciprocal needs or self-interest, but arises from that utter dependency that is an inseparable part of the human condition. All that I am, all that I depend on, I have received as a free and unmerited gift; and it is this that denies me any basis for refusing the cry of my fellow creature whom I encounter as a vulnerable dependant like myself. This is the moral core that lies at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. You must care for the poor and needy, says the Hebrew Bible, for you were once slaves in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 15.15). A key question that arises about Scruton’s ‘theistic turn’ (if that is what it is) is whether he would accept the fundamental primacy of the moral here: that is, would he accept that the religious or theistic outlook gets its ultimate force and validation from the irresistible phenomenology of the ethical demand, rather than, say, from the analogue of musical experience, which he develops with such skill at the close of The Face of God? For with the greatest respect for Scruton’s own musical creativity and expertise, I think there is a risk that the ideas he invokes in this kind of context offer us an over-aestheticized, or perhaps over-romanticized analogue for religious awe, as when at the close of his book he talks, with Wagnerian overtones, of ‘a falling away into the transcendental, and ourselves poised on the edge’.29 The Judaeo-Christian tradition makes room for such transcendental vertigo, but it is always ultimately linked to the ethical demand. If the ethical is indeed the authentic core of traditional theism, then sooner or later it is bound to occur to someone to ask whether we really need to add the religious flesh on top of the ethical kernel? Why not let the ethical stand alone? Løgstrup himself said that he proposed to interpret the proclamation of Jesus to love one’s neighbour as oneself in strictly human terms. What, if anything, makes it a more convincing interpretation to add the language of theism to this – to speak of the proclamation as coming from God, or to speak of Christ, who made the proclamation, as being himself the ‘icon of the invisible God’, as St Paul puts it (Colossians 1.15)? The answer, I think, is that the ethical demand is far more than a mere rational moral injunction. The central affirmation of the Christian faith is that self-giving love, despite all that the world can show, is the key to meaning and



What Is the Sacred?

43

fulfilment in our lives, and that in the demand for us to strive to imitate Christ in this respect, we glimpse a reality that gives us grace to transcend ourselves – to become what we are not yet, but which at the deepest level we somehow grasp as our true goal and destiny. There is nothing in a scientific or philosophical analysis of human nature that could possibly yield this result. But the core Christian message is that the pattern to which we are called, and in which alone we can find rest and fulfilment, is that found in the life of Christ. As the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins so vividly puts it: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.30

Nothing, on the face of it, could be more undignified than this ‘Jack’ – a common, ordinary fellow, of undistinguished worth; this ‘patch’, a mere fool or ninny; this potsherd, a broken fragment, like that with which the wretched Job scraped his sores (Job 2.8); weak and feeble, as perishable as matchwood. Yet all at once, by Christ’s sharing in our bodily nature, this paltry individual becomes ‘immortal diamond’ – of infinite worth and dignity. And the ethical corollary of this is that anyone we meet, however wretched, shares this dignity. ‘Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters’, says Christ at the Last Judgement, ‘You did it to me’ (Matthew 25.50). In sum, it seems to me that Scruton’s brilliant project of seeking to recover the sacred dimension in our world deserves to be warmly applauded. But if the project is to be properly articulated in terms of the religious tradition that (as I think Scruton would agree) is the lifeblood of our Western culture, then what needs to be added, I think, is the uncompromising Christian corollary: that the primary locus for our understanding of the sacred must always be neither the Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’,31 nor the Wagnerian ‘fallings away’,32 important intimations of the sacred though these are, but the encounter with our fellow creature in need, in whose ravaged face we are commanded to see the true face of the divine.33

Notes   1 ‘The Sacred and the Human’ [2010], http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/gifford/2010/ the-sacred-and-the-human.

44

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

  2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 11, line 265 [1805 version], in S. Gill, ed., William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). See further John Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter 3.  3 Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion, Chapter 3.   4 Christopher Hitchens, in debate with Tony Blair [2010], quoted in Jules Evans, ‘The New Atheists are actually transcendentalists’, http://philosophyforlife.org/the-newatheists-are-actually-transcendentalists, posted 24 January 2014.   5 Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), cited in Evans, ‘The New Atheists’.   6 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), cited in Evans, ‘The New Atheists’.   7 John Milton, Paradise Lost [1667], Bk IX, lines 921–5:    Bold deed thou hast presum’d, adventrous Eve    And peril great provok’t, who thus hath dar’d    that sacred Fruit, sacred to abstinence    Had it been onely coveting to Eye    Much more to taste it under banne to touch.  8 Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk I, line 3.   9 Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 210. 10 Sam Harris, ‘The Mortal Dangers of Religious Faith’, interview at: http://www. amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=542154 [accessed 5 August 2014]. Compare Hume’s observation that ‘the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects.’ A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], Book I, part III, section xiv. 11 See Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). It should be added that Ellis herself develops a theistic variant of ‘expansive’ or ‘enriched’ naturalism. 12 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 83. 13 McDowell, Mind and World, p. 84. 14 Scruton cites Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate [1256–9], q1, a1, which discusses the relation between truth (verum) and being (ens), but with no explicit reference to ‘transcendentals’. 15 Scruton, FG, p. 168. 16 Ibid., p. 169. 17 That Scruton might sometimes be drawn to this latter fall-back position seems to be hinted at in some parts of his work, for example in the stress, in Chapter 5 of The Face of God, on the aesthetic value (of landscapes, of towns) that accrues through the inherited purely human structures of interpersonal accountability and



What Is the Sacred?

45

ownership – the underlying idea being, if I grasp it rightly, that it is our human shaping that brings such value into view. 18 Scruton, FG, p. 166. 19 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 42. 20 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 85. 21 Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1997), pp. 130–1. 22 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 69. 23 From the typescript of the Gifford lectures, delivered 2010, lecture 6. I cannot locate this exact phrase in the revised version of the lectures eventually published as The Face of God. 24 Scruton, FG, p. 160. 25 Ibid., p. 165. 26 Ibid., p. 166. 27 Ibid., p. 161. 28 Robert Stern, ‘Løgstrup’s Ethical Demand: Religious or Secular?’: typescript presented at Conference on Morality and God, Heythrop College, University of London, 14 June 2014. 29 Scruton, FG, p. 160. 30 G. M. Hopkins, ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’, Poems (1876–1889), no 49, final stanza. 31 See opening two paragraphs of this chapter. 32 Scruton, FG, p. 160. 33 It needs to be added that the Christian message of love for humanity and compassion for the vulnerable is deeply rooted in the earlier teachings of the Hebrew Bible. For this theme, see Nicolas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), Chapter 3. Compassion is also of course a fundamental divine attribute in Islam.

4

The Great Absence Anthony O’Hear

It is this great absence/ that is like a presence, that compels/ me to address it without hope/ of a reply. R.S. Thomas, The Absence God has withdrawn from the world: that, we know and we Czechs perhaps know it more vividly than others. Our world contains an absence, and we must love that absence, for that is the way to love God. Pavel Havranek1 When you hold something to be sacred then there is a kind of faith which comes with it, a sense of infinite freedom, as though myriad worlds opened before you in the here and now… Take away the Christian metaphysics, and the rest is truth. We live now or never. And God is another dimension in the now. Alzbeta Palkova In The Face of God Roger Scruton says this: Human beings suffer from loneliness in every circumstance of their earthly lives. They can be lonely on their own, or lonely in company; they can enter a crowded room of friendly people only to find their loneliness deepened by it; they can be lonely even in the company of a friend or a spouse. There is a human loneliness which stems from some other source than the lack of companionship, and I have no doubt that the mystics who have meditated on this fact are right to see it in metaphysical terms. The separation between the self-conscious being and his world is not to be overcome by any natural process. It is a supernatural defect, which can be remedied only by grace.2

48

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

In his Gifford and Stanton lectures, Scruton shows himself to be unparalleled in evoking the ways in which human beings feel the absence of God in their lives, or perhaps even more the ways in which their lives to-day are bereft precisely because they do not feel it. One of the great non-meetings of minds in modern philosophy was that between Pascal and Hume, whose starting points were so similar and yet whose conclusions were practically and temperamentally so different. Pyrrhonian sceptics both, they despaired of the power of reason. And both realized that life was not livable in a state of scepticism. But then they diverged. Where Pascal waited on grace (and was granted it in his nuit de feu – and none of us has the right or the warrant to deny that), Hume sought solace in animal belief and the diversions afforded by his clubbable fellows. For Pascal, by contrast, divertissement was our besetting temptation. All our problems arise because we cannot abide sitting quietly and alone in our room. In The Face of God and The Soul of the World, Scruton shows us how much is lost if the sacred and its prohibitions and interdicts are wiped away from our dealings with each other, and we treat each other as co-constructors of agreements, and for all our talk of persons as ends, as vehicles for mutual satisfaction, as means to each other’s ends, and ultimately as objects: ‘By remaking human beings and their habitat as objects to consume rather than subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both.’3 And he adds that while postmodern people will deny that the disquiet which arises from this degradation has a religious meaning, he hopes in his two books to have shown how wrong this is. What I want to do here is to assume that Scruton is right, that our existential disquiet is at root religious, and to see what conclusions might be drawn from this: or rather to see what conclusions Scruton draws, and to suggest some disagreement. Scruton says that the defect, which manifests itself in our loneliness, is a supernatural one, which can be remedied only by grace. This sounds like Pascal, and following that line of thinking through, it also suggests that what we need is not something we can actively reach out for. If we reach out, the direction in which we are reaching may be towards our own version of what we need, which may not be what we need at all. I am reminded here of the Barthian adage that religion is the most dangerous enemy man has this side of the grave, a mist or concoction, often strongly flavoured with sexuality, swirling around between us and the ‘wholly other’; and also of Simone Weil’s uncompromising view that a certain type of atheism is purer and more truthful than many forms of religion, in which men and women have erected idols representing their own fantasies occluding any genuine interaction between themselves and the divine. Then there is also the George Herbert poem ‘Love’, dear to Simone Weil and many others,



The Great Absence

49

in which Love comes to me, unbidden, unexpectedly and from whom I recoil as unworthy, before being overcome by His gentle, welcoming power. But, it will be said, and Scruton does say it, how can what is wholly other come to us or be known to us at all? Before dealing with this question directly, though, he speaks about the relationship between the world of scientific causality and the human world, the Lebenswelt of the phenomenologists. Here he takes up a broadly Kantian position, invoking what he calls cognitive dualism (though, as we will see, rejecting Kant’s idealism). We can regard any object before us as part of the physical world, subject to whatever laws and necessities obtain therein. But if that object is a human being or something produced by a human being acting in an expressive mode, we can also regard it in another way. Thus a human being before us is a physical object, to be sure, but he or she is also a person, with a face, a subjectivity, a soul, to whom we attribute intentions, desires, beliefs, a moral dimension, and a Thou with whom I can engage on a basis of I-Thou relationships, all subject to a regime of reasons, orthogonal to that of causes. Actually, I do not accept this. I am not a physical object, if by that is meant something fully determinable and explicable by the laws of physics. When I die, the body which had been me, and is no longer me or mine, is a physical object, in that reductive sense. But for now, I am a person, with powers and capacities not explicable in terms of physics, or indeed, of science more generally. So seeing me as a being with those powers and capacities is not a matter of a cognitive dualism, but rather a matter of seeing me in the one way which is correct. And, I would add that I do have an identity in the world of objects, because the world in which objects exist is also the world in which people, like you and me, exist. There is only one world, in which there are beings on different levels of existence. But, to continue the cognitive dualist line of thought: if a pigmented canvas before us has been painted by a human being, we may see what we see either as a purely physical object, daubs of paint etc., or as a landscape, a portrait, the Mona Lisa or whatever subject we see in it. Similarly the acoustical waves before me, as such formless and meaningless, may also (actually) be the opening of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, a piece of music with its own character, force and aesthetic logic, and with something of its own personality and gesture. The dualisms Scruton sees in the person, the painting and the piano concerto are for him precisely that, dualisms, and not ascents through different levels of reality, with top-down causation. Although in our existence in the Lebenswelt we are interested in things on that plane, we are not to infer that that plane somehow suppresses or moulds what is going on at the physical-causal level, which does of course raise a question as to whether the real productive work

50

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

is being done at the physical level. After all, if my intentionality is perforce expressed in my raising my arm, moving my lips, etc., and these movements, as movements of a physical organism, are determined by my physical and biological make-up, does the human level do any real work – or is it at bottom simply an epiphenomenon of the physical, and the intentional stance just that, a convenient device for moving around in a world at root causally closed and completely explicable in scientific terms? Are the dualisms involved here purely cognitive, or are they, at least in some cases, and in some sense ontological too, with orders of being connected, to be sure, but in part mutually independent? I may be wrong about my reading of Scruton, but in The Soul of the World he denies that the cognitive dualisms he is discussing involve ontological dualism; there is only one thing, not two.4 I agree that there is only one thing, not two, but I draw a different conclusion from him. The fact that I, as a person, am just one being implies that my human, rational powers, which are part of that personhood, have dominion, sometimes, over the material stuff of which I am constituted, one entity with different levels of activity. By contrast with this, in The Face of God Scruton says that physics gives a complete explanation of the world of objects.5 It is just that completeness I am querying, as he also insists that he is a realist. So is there just one reality, that given by physics, which can also be looked at as if it were the human world, with physics (in the doubtless anachronisitic Austinian phrase) wearing the trousers? Putting to one side for now questions about the dualisms in our world, the big question raised by Scruton’s lament for the disenchantment of our world, is whether any attempt to re-sacralize it, re-enchant it, can amount to more than treating the world as if it had a divine, transcendent source. As Scruton himself observes, to describe an experience I or Pascal might have as an encounter with the transcendent is automatically to put it outside the reach of causal reasoning. In response to at least some versions of the cosmological argument, it is simply not cogent to treat God as a cause in any sense akin to worldly causes, as Kant surely demonstrated. At this stage in the argument, Scruton, having spoken of cognitive dualisms in the human world, extends this talk to thinking of God. Physics has no use for the idea of creation,6 and secular morality can found no obligations not based in defeasible contracts. But, in our moral life and in some artistic moments we find another world ‘behind our daily negotiations … certain experiences cause this world to erupt through the veil of compromise and to make itself known’.7 We can think of the world, in all its scientific completeness, as a gift, as a site of sacred awe and duty. All this leads the believer to speak of God, to search for



The Great Absence

51

God, in a way analogous to that when within this world we search for the other person. But here, of course, we reach an awful paradox: God has to be conceived as outside what Scruton calls the causal envelope, and yet our Godward thoughts seem to demand an encounter within the envelope, an eruption of a supernatural cause into the natural order, something Scruton terms as close to contradictory.8 He admits that he cannot solve the mystery as to how this could be possible – God outside the causal envelope, but breaking into it as well – but, as if the problems are analogous, he asks how you and I can be both an organism in the realm of causes and a free subject in the space of reasons. Indeed, in the personal case, this unanswerable nature of questions like this is part of what cognitive dualism commits us to (and why I am led to reject at least one interpretation of it). But, in Scruton’s scheme of things, just as cognitive dualism allows us to think of ourselves as both causally determined and acting in the domain of reasons, it allows us to understand our one world as the entity described completely in science and as a gift in which we are called to make sacrifice in turn, and can encounter the divine. And it is particularly in the presence of death that we are asked to see God, ‘as we pass into that other domain, beyond the veil of nature’.9 But, ever the scientific realist, Scruton sternly forbids us to entertain hope of an afterlife; what we pass into at that point may be a redemption, but (to misquote Wittgenstein) if it – and God – is not nothing, it is not a something either. Faith asks us to live with these mysteries, for the cost of not doing so is to ‘wipe away the face of the world’, provoking the disquiet Scruton says is the fate of postmodern man. That cost, tragic though it is, may be required of us, because there simply is no sacred or divine source of our or of the universe’s existence. We can live as if there is; certain aspects of our make-up and culture might make it better to live in such a way; we can mourn its passing. But if we cannot believe, really believe that there is or could be a voice to respond to those yearnings, a voice that does irrupt into this world, then our engagement in religious ritual and submission to religiously inspired interdictions is bound to be empty, a husk of former practices without the core necessary to sustain them. And this is what disenchantment is. So where does Scruton stand on this, and where should we stand? Cognitive dualism is not enough; in the divine case, we need at least ontological dualism, or a realistic hope in such a thing, to found our faith. Moreover in the divine case, it is not just a question of looking at the same thing in different ways; although the believer does indeed look at the world in a different way from the non-believer, he also believes that there is a reality different from and apart from the world, which he sees as in some sense the expression of that

52

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

reality’s will. So if to talk of cognitive dualism implies just one reality looked at in two ways, in this case it is highly misleading. To return to Scruton’s formulation of the predicament of our deep loneliness, we could note first that there is there an implicit rejection of the Humean solution. Backgammon is not enough, decidedly not enough. Such diversions may, as Pascal observes, mask our angst for a time, but in masking it, it will return with a vengeance. The defect is, as Scruton observes, not to be remedied by any natural process, but only by grace, and it is one in which each of us is confronted with his or her ultimate loneliness. He refers to the defect as a supernatural one, but this is not quite right. It is as natural as anything could be, in that it arises directly from the separation my self-consciousness forges between me and the rest of creation, my original sin, if you like. Self-consciousness is the root of original sin, because everything that Rousseau condemns as amour propre – that self-love, fuelling vanity and competition, which goes beyond the mere fulfilment of my animal desires (amour de soi) – arises from my selfconscious separation from me and everything else; and so does the mimetic desire, the desire to do better than my fellows for its own sake, which René Girard sees as the source of internecine violence and hatred in the human world. As is well known, Girard envisages the sublimation of internecine violence between people within a group as involving their self-identification with each other, against a sacrificial scapegoat and against other groups who do not share the same identity which the sacrifice forges. In Girard’s picture, then, mimetic desire, which stems from my individual self-consciousness, has the sting taken from it when I begin to feel an identification with a community, and its consoling embrace. Without suggesting that Scruton accepts the Girardian picture in any close sense, I do think that, having spoken so eloquently of our individual existential loneliness, he then makes a Girardian move. Religion, he says begins in the experience of community and in the desire to be reconciled with those who judge us and on whose love we depend. Each religion ‘wraps the individual in the comforts of an enduring community’.10 In Our Church he says: Religion is a way of life, involving customs and ceremonies which validate what matters to us … it is a way in which the ordinary, the everyday and the unsurprising are rescued from the flow of time, and re-made sacrosanct. A religion has its accumulation of dogma; but dogmas make no real sense when detached from the community which adheres to them, being not neutral statements of fact, but collective bids for salvation.11



The Great Absence

53

Dogmas may not be neutral statements of fact, but, logically at least, they are separable from the ceremonies and communities in which they are embedded. And for the communities which engender and mould them, they must mean something, and specifically something about the transcendent. It is true that Scruton also speaks of religion promising one-ness with the cosmos (but, cosmos, note, not the will or face behind the cosmos) and even an identification with a transcendental ‘I AM’. Christians have a duty to hope, and hope in a way to ‘reach beyond the bounds of our earthly life, to engage with the final meaning of the Cosmos’.12 But we must have this hope, tempered by the thought that this eternity does not come after anything, ‘and therefore not after death’.13 Being, for the believer, is a gift; but is there a giver in Scruton’s framework? He also speaks of ‘people’ coming face to face with God in self-sacrifice,14 but the model for the meeting is provided by moments in Wagner’s Ring, the work, says Scruton, of one who was not a Christian, but an agnostic, under the influence of Feuerbach. So which people come face to face with God, or is this God-unveiling experience an experience granted only to believers, before which the rest of us suspend admiring judgement? In his essay on Rainer Maria Rilke and Nietzsche, Erich Heller says this: ‘Neither Rilke nor Nietzsche praise the praiseworthy. They praise. They do not believe the believable. They believe. And it is their praising and believing itself that becomes praiseworthy and believable in the act of worship. Theirs is a religio intransitiva.’15 Heller goes on to speculate that this form of worship may come to be seen as the distinctive religious achievement of modern Europe, but it is a trap. For what Rilke in particular gives us is a self-created reality. Rilke exploits a marginal position, precariously maintained on the brink of catastrophe, by a dazzling acrobatics of soul and mind in which external reality is lost, a point made crystal clear by Rilke himself in his last German poem (entitled ‘For the Feast of Praise’, and untranslatable, according to Heller, but here goes anyway): ‘It is the recalled heart, the most lived / freer, through conflict / rejoices in its mastery / the all-encompassing arches itself over nothingness. / Ah, the thrown, the risked ball / Does it not fill our hands differently on its return? / Clean, on its return it is more?’16 Yes, it is more, and we have made the move urged on us by Scruton, but in the end there is only us, our daring, our throwing and return from flight over the abyss. Or, as Nietzsche put it, we have art to ‘affirm, bless and deify existence’, because we must affirm, bless and recognize a deity, even though truth insists there is no such thing, but only existence, disenchanted. In contrast, ‘in the great poetry of the European tradition the emotions do not interpret; they respond to the interpreted world’.17 And, I would say, in the great religion of the European tradition too.

54

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

My question for Scruton is whether his is not at root a religio intransitiva. He saves himself from the extreme individualism, the artistic creativity always about to tip into ever more precious and precarious idiosyncrasy as it gazes into the void below, which we find in Nietzsche and Rilke, by rooting his religion in a community.18 He saves himself from that, but on the other hand, the community may itself subtend an evasion of our ultimate loneliness, something to which neither Nietzsche nor Rilke were ever in danger of succumbing. The all-too-human may not be the atheism of Nietzsche and Rilke, but the church (or Church) in which one finds all-too-human consolations – and, as we are made ever more painfully aware, defects. As Scruton says, what we need in the loneliness that is, or which results from, original sin is not human companionship, but grace. And this takes us back, with a vengeance, to the aporia already mentioned: how can a transcendent God break into the world of cause and contingency? Are immanence and transcendence mutually exclusive? And is the two or three millennia old attempt to have them interpenetrate now seen, conclusively, to have failed? I have not the time, or indeed the ability or confidence to do more at this point than to say this. The absence of God in the world, in the empirical world, which is so emphatically attested to by science and by secular rationality may be no more than a necessary step to a viable form of religion. To put the point in the words of Simone Weil: [A] blind mechanism, made of chance, produces the rhythm of the day and night, the changing seasons, the trees and flowers. It produces all these without knowing. Yet it itself produces them. God has entrusted creation to necessity. Otherwise God would be in the process … his presence would then bring all creation to nothing, or else God would himself not be goodness.19

That then, is the dimension of transcendence. God, were God to exist, is not in the empirical world, which, because it is ruled by necessity and chance, is full of blind destruction and of what Weil speaks of as ‘malheur’ permeating the surface of our terrestrial globe. God is not in the empirical world, as that world is revealed to us in science and ordinary life. God, if God is to be revealed, must be on a different level. What then of the aching loneliness with which we began? In Platonic mode, in the passage just quoted, Weil goes on to speak of necessity having been conquered by ‘the persuasion of wisdom’, and that everything beautiful in the world ‘is the trace of that persuasion of wisdom which has conquered necessity’. Again it would take us too far afield here, but it seems to me to be not surprising



The Great Absence

55

that our (postmodern) world is one which repudiates any ideal of beauty, where the main function of establishment art is seen to be to scoff, to denigrate and, in Lawrence’s terms, to do dirt on life, precisely to guard ourselves against the sacred which we fear, to shut out God’s silent but insistent importuning of us. But it is surely worth considering whether a Platonic conception in which even a God absented world might not still bear within it traces of that original persuasion of wisdom, and, to continue in Platonic-Pythagorean mode, traces of the Law to which even the gods are subject. In the words of Sophocles (at the end of the devastation which concludes The Women of Trachis), there is nothing here which is not Zeus, but here, where we are, is necessarily a realm in which Zeus’s presence is manifested precisely in his withdrawal (transcendence). The Platonic view just sketched could conceivably be expressed in a form of cognitive dualism. At least we could say that there are two ways of looking at the world: on the one hand as a manifestation of God’s absence, which can, on the other, be seen as vibrant with the persuasion of wisdom. In such a world, one could feel at one with the dimly and otherly discerned harmony of the universe, but in an impersonal way, a way hardly assuaging a deep sense of loneliness, as one contemplates the impersonality of the transcendent Ideal and has one’s own personality burnt away by the Sun of Plato’s image. But what Christianity promises (offers?) is something directed to the person and from the Person, the possession of a person by the Person of the divine, which is why Pascal sewed his nuit de feu vision into his coat, and why Simone Weil refers so frequently to George Herbert’s Love. She also wrote that in her experiences ‘space seemed to be torn open … all space is full of a dense silence which is not an absence of sound, but a positive object of sensation … the secret word, the word of Love, which from the beginning has held us in his arms’.20 Further, ‘Christ himself came down, and He took me’; ‘He came into my room and said: “Come with me and I shall teach you things of which you know nothing …” ’21 Experiences of this sort, with their edge of transcendence, take one beyond any consolations offered by communities, even by ecclesial communities, and certainly beyond cognitive dualism. As a philosopher I am tempted to say that without at least the sense that they are possible and real, with real ontological weight, a religious stance is, at its heart, delusory; but I am drawn back from this temptation to force belief, as it were, by Father Pavel’s advice: ‘The important thing is not our belief, but His grace’, and that is what we fear because the cost of it is, in Eliot’s words, ‘not less than everything’.

56

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Notes   1 In this paper, I am commenting on Roger Scruton’s view of the sacred, as developed particularly in four recent books: The Face of God, The Soul of the World, Our Church, and his novel Notes from the Underground. Pavel Hradanek (Father Pavel) and Alzbeta Palkova, referred to here, are characters from the novel.   2 Scruton, FG, p. 153.   3 Scruton, FG, p. 178.   4 Scruton, SW, p. 48.   5 Scruton, FG, p. 166.   6 Scruton, SW, p. 176.   7 Scruton, SW, p. 178.   8 Ibid., p. 184.   9 Ibid., p. 198. 10 Scruton, FG, p. 155. 11 Scruton, OC, p. 6. 12 Scruton, OC, p. 184. 13 Ibid. 14 Scruton, FG, p. 177. 15 Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 171. 16 The full German text of the poem is quoted by Heller. 17 Ibid., p. 172. 18 See particularly, Scruton, OC. 19 From an Unpublished Fragment of Simone Weil, quoted in J.-M. Perrin and Gustave Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 33. 20 These passages from Simone Weil are quoted (and translated) in Jacques Cabaud, Simone Weil (London: Collins, 1964), pp. 170–1. Cabaud is drawing particularly on Weil’s La Connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 238. 21 Ibid., p. 238.

5

Locating the Sacred Robert Grant

Roger Scruton’s recent adventures in divinity are extensions of his previous ‘humanistic’ phenomenology. His fundamental premise has always been that the human world of persons, values and culture, though perfectly real, eludes natural-scientific explanation. However, that merely shows the limitations of science, which ‘works’ only on those phenomena specifically adapted to its methods and presuppositions. Persons, values, ideas, art, morality and God (if he exists) are all features of the non-scientific Lebenswelt, which is as intelligible as the natural world, only in an utterly different way. ‘It is just as absurd,’ Scruton writes, ‘to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step in the search for God.’1 This is true, literally, but also quite a leap, if it is somehow meant to suggest that a search for God must necessarily succeed, in the same way as we readily agree that the Mona Lisa must be more than paint, or as we come to recognize the existence of mortal persons other than ourselves (and indeed, reciprocally and simultaneously, to recognize ourselves as persons like them). To invert Madame du Deffand’s bon mot about the martyred St Denis, it is the distance (to God) that counts, not the first step, for that, as Scruton shows, is relatively easy.2 The sacred lies outside the everyday world, and is marked off, often under penalty, as being special. Sometimes it irrupts into the everyday world spontaneously, as when God addresses Moses from the burning bush, and tells him to remove his sandals, because he is standing on what is now holy ground.3 At other times, as if by a reverse process, it is institutionally distinguished from the everyday, in the form of designated rituals, services, festivals, temples, holy days, fasts, vestments and so on. Such marks of the sacred are reserved to specified places and occasions; when promiscuously or carelessly mingled with everyday

58

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

business, as by the money changers in the Temple,4 there is felt to have been a desecration. Spontaneous irruptions, such as the original Pentecost, come to be formally commemorated, in this case by the Whitsun festival, through which the Pentecostal experience may (so to speak) be permanently banked and subsequently drawn on, i.e. relived. When William Blake tells us that ‘Everything that lives is holy’, or the mystic Thomas Traherne describes his ecstatic childhood universe as though it were Heaven,5 I think we must call these outpourings rhetorical exaggerations, born simply and rightly out of gratitude for existence. After all, if everything living, even a plague bacillus, really is holy, then nothing is; and Traherne does say that later, ‘with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world’. Such a counter-epiphany, as we might call it, of the profane, would only throw the sacred into greater relief and make it still more precious. With that said, however, there remains a sense, as we shall see, in which the everyday can be elevated or redeemed by the sacred, rather than profaning it; a sense, that is, in which Blake and Traherne may be right. The profane is an ambiguous term. In its neutral sense, it means merely whatever is normal and unsanctified. In its pejorative sense, however, it means whatever desecrates the holy, whether deliberately, or negligently, or even innocently, as when Philoctetes, in Sophocles’ play, unknowingly violates the sacred precinct (or rather, has done so before the action begins). His innocence, of course, is no excuse, so he is still punished in the most frightful way. The sacred overlaps with the sublime, but is distinct. According to Kant, in the sublime we confront an overwhelming natural, rather than divine, force; and our consciousness of our own righteousness and innocence in the face of it at once enables us to master our terror and itself achieves sublimity. In some obscure way this neutralizes the threat and reconciles us with its source, so that we participate in its power and (perhaps) gather from it intimations of an ultimately benevolent cosmic order.6 But the sacred, though awesome and even terrifying, especially in a sudden irruption, is seen as good rather than merely powerful.7 It demands our submission, but it is also (at least in its Judaeo-Christian versions) a protecting, consoling and redemptive force, to which we respond, as we would to a person, with gratitude, love and trust. There is also its diametrical opposite, the diabolic, which is evil, and, unlike the everyday, which lies opposed to it in a different way, the two categories, the sacred and the diabolic, do seem to share a metaphysical dimension and to have structural similarities. From the individual subject’s point of view, an obviously seductive parallel antithesis, exploited by countless Freudians and others, is between the Father (sacred) and the rebellious son and brother (diabolic).



Locating the Sacred

59

The diabolic too can be terrifying, but differs from the sacred and the sublime in offering no substantial rewards to its subscribers, unless you count as one (which is everything) a narcissistic delusion of superiority, for example that of the British Moors Murderer Ian Brady, or the Chicago murderers Leopold and Loeb in the nineteen-twenties, all of them professing to be acolytes of Nietzsche. Like the sacred, the diabolic also seems to underlie everyday appearances, but not as a meaning, rather as an asserted lack of meaning, somewhat like Roquentin’s vision of the chestnut root in Sartre’s Nausea.8 It tends not to have durable structures and rituals, but to be parasitical on the sacred, often by way of parody (e.g. the Black Mass).9 The diabolic does not generally take permanent institutional form, possibly because institutions are communal constructs, whereas the devil is an egoist. True, diabolic totalitarian regimes have been bolstered by communal enthusiasm and mass solidarity; but it is not hard to see through this pseudo-love to the underlying selfishness of both rulers and subjects, greed and powerhunger on the one hand being matched by cowardice, weakness and fear (and often greed too) on the other. People have sacrificed others to evil causes, but the idea of knowingly sacrificing oneself to an evil cause surely verges on the absurd. Self-sacrifice has a morally self-valorizing quality, even when virtually deranged, like Gilda’s for the worthless Duke of Mantua in Verdi’s Rigoletto.10 Like the diabolic, the sacred has something in common with the uncanny, a category to which Freud devoted an essay (1919). He finds significance in the fact that the German word heimlich, homely, also means secret or concealed, which thus approximates it to its opposite unheimlich, uncanny.11 This seems suggestive. The uncanny is disturbing, at once alien and familiar, something dislocated or out of place, animate where we expect the inanimate, and vice versa. There is a sense of a boundary’s being crossed, as in Mary Douglas’s conception of pollution.12 But then, so there is also in the divine or sacred. A dead body is uncanny.13 It should be alive, it looks like a person, it once was but no longer is. Nevertheless, and perhaps originally out of embarrassment or uncertainty, we still accord it the respect due to persons. We do not eat it, mutilate it, or have sex with it (or rather ‘on’ it, since its capacity for ‘withness’ is extinct). An automaton is similarly uncanny: it has never lived, but looks alive.14 And a zombie or a vampire, a corpse that still thinks and moves as if alive, excites yet more unease. And now we have cyborgs too to top up the frisson. In the case of the divine or the sacred, the boundary that has been crossed, or at least, across which we sometimes fancy we can peer, is that between our world and another, which we call ‘transcendent’, but for which, in reality, there

60

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

neither is nor could be a name. (Just as God identifies himself to Moses only by a tautology: I AM THAT I AM.)15 And somehow it is this other world which underwrites our own, investing it with value, and our highest values with ultimate value, not leaving us hanging in the void, in a state of Geworfenheit or ‘thrown-ness’ (Heidegger’s word for contingency). The diabolic, by contrast, cancels all value. It denies that anything can be better, more beautiful, truer or more objective than anything else, which is simply a way of abolishing those categories altogether. It laughs at our loves and pieties, and rubs our nose in the apparently irrefutable fact of our cosmic superfluousness. Sometimes it does so only obliquely and diplomatically – the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, when it suits him – but it remains, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles says of himself, the spirit of perpetual negation: ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint.16 The diabolic canonizes that definitive sickness of modernity, that Schiller and after him Weber called ‘disenchantment’ (die Entzauberung der Welt). Disenchantment signifies the evacuation of human meaning from our world and thus of sacred meaning too, since the sacred is perceptible only to us. There is a fine illustration of it in Proust, in Marcel’s reaction to his loved mother’s departure from Venice: The town that I saw before me had ceased to be Venice. … I saw the palaces reduced to their constituent parts, lifeless heaps of marble with nothing to choose between them, and the water as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, eternal, blind, anterior and exterior to Venice, unconscious of Doges or of Turner. … I could leave nothing of myself imprinted upon it, it left me diminished, I was nothing more than a heart that throbbed …17

A key stimulus to disenchantment has been science, since science cannot be pursued without discounting the human meanings of its proper object, natural phenomena. But science is neither diabolic nor value-free. Though it must bypass the beautiful and the good, it cleaves to the remaining value, objective truth. The diabolic, by contrast, denies truth, without seeing, or perhaps caring, that, like Klingsor and his magic castle in Parsifal, it must thereby be swallowed up into the very illusoriness to which it has consigned everything else. For the diabolic you may here read post-modernism, deconstruction and the like. Their predecessor, Modernism, like science, was hostile not to truth, only to the aesthetic realist’s belief that truth lies at or near the surface of things. Science, however, deals in only one kind of truth. For science, there are no Doges and no Turners. (Nor any Mona Lisa, only a smear of pigments.) To safeguard its clarity of vision, science must overlook non-material things and



Locating the Sacred

61

judgements, as also whatever is unique, subjective or otherwise unclassifiable. Science is not hostile to the sacred, merely blind to it, and not out of spiritual tone-deafness, but simply as a precondition of its own particular heuristic. It follows, I think, that whenever the claims of religion overlap or clash with those of science, as nowadays (at least, at a sophisticated level of religion) they only rarely do, it is religion that must give way, and be the stronger for its surrender. I have said that we mingle the sacred with the secular only under penalty. But this needs serious qualification. To deepen the boundary between them into a positive, unbridgeable gulf only furthers the work of disenchantment. Why have temples, rituals and sacred observances at all, if the only place in which to locate them, the world, is intrinsically, irremediably corrupt, and therefore liable to contaminate them? To isolate the sacred totally strips the world of meaning, and hence of worth. The devil himself could scarcely ask for more. There will remain only lifeless heaps of marble and soulless human organisms (that is, neuro-psychological automata). There is something of this in extreme Protestantism, whose rise accompanied that of science. The Puritan poet Milton, in his so-called Nativity Ode (1629), triumphantly celebrates the demise of paganism, as anyone might who considered only the extinction of cruel divinities such as Baal and Moloch. But, and even Milton regrets this, the gentle nymphs and dryads of classical antiquity have been banished too.18 There is a fine line, often noted, between extreme Protestantism and atheism.19 A God who is wholly absent from Nature, so abstract, remote and unworldly, might as well not exist. The Protestant horror of idolatry expels God from his creation. A step further, and God will be expelled even from thought. The artists of the Counter-Reformation took the opposite tack. Still-lifes by Spanish Metaphysical painters such as Zurbarán depict ordinary objects with a luminous, minutely textured hyper-realism. It is uncanny, in the sense just given. Objects are transfigured, as if lit from inside or possessed of a soul. They are rescued from their inert materiality, and, to borrow Scruton’s idiom, given a face. So far from polluting the sacred, they are sanctified and ennobled by it. They offer themselves to us, look at us and speak to us. And the effect is intensified if the objects concerned are embodiments of the Real Presence, bread and wine. In this particular mingling of the everyday and the sacred, there is no profanation. The Creator shines through his creation, in all its diversity, glory and humble ordinariness. There is a similar effect, and message, in the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry. Nature’s rich variety, its ‘dapple’ and changefulness, paradoxically testifies to the unity and permanence of its Creator.20 The felling of a poplar

62

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

grove is sacrilege, and like a massacre or rape. Like persons, the trees are irreplaceable, composing a ‘sweet especial rural scene’ that is forever ‘unselved’, or killed, by their destruction.21 The Austrian poet Rilke, by contrast with Hopkins, had no explicit religious belief. For him, however, as often for the Spanish Metaphysicals, it is everyday human artefacts, rather than nature, or art, or anything specifically labelled as sacred, which speak of the transcendent.22 A jug, a bridge, a tower, a fountain, a fruit-tree, a violin – these things have been shaped and used by human hands and are charged with human meaning. Utensils are more than mere utensils. They speak of settlement, co-operation, community and permanence. Without being so identified, in their unassuming way they are sacred. What they transcend, however, is not the human, but the material and the mechanical. From having once, perhaps, been means, they have become virtual ends. Existence, says Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus, is still enchanted for us, despite the triumph of the machine.23 For Scruton, the human body is sacred, since it is the embodiment of the soul, and its conduit of communication with other souls. When people die naturally, or (more particularly) are killed in war, then we consecrate a space, often nearby, to receive them (or the idea of them), with monuments to remind us of their invisible presence and to demand our respect. And it may be that, where atrocious crimes have been committed, we wish either to memorialize them – for example, by leaving Auschwitz standing – or conversely, in the case of numerically lesser crimes, to muffle their lingering vibrations, by razing to the ground the site of their perpetration. The houses of the serial murderer and torturer Fred West, and of the kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro, were both demolished.24 Few Soviet labour camps have been preserved in their original state. Almost unbelievably, however, there is an official scheme afoot to turn more than one in Siberia into tourist attractions, despite the fact that tens of thousands perished there of cold, exhaustion and hunger.25 To their great credit, some Russians have protested. All of this suggests that it is we, and not God or something ‘out there’, who consecrate things and places. Without monuments and the like, and ignorant of what happened there, we should be like Philoctetes, and not know that a place was sacred. (Unless, perhaps, it seemed especially beautiful in its own right; or maybe appropriately bleak, like Glencoe.) And this brings me finally to Scruton’s notion of the interface between the human and the divine. In two chapters of his brilliant new novel Notes from Underground, set mostly in post-Stalinist but still Communist Czechoslovakia, Scruton celebrates the pious, largely agricultural life of the pre-war German-speaking Sudetenland,



Locating the Sacred

63

later ravaged by Stalin’s victorious troops, and then, under the restored Czech government, before the communist coup in 1948, the scene of the greatest upheavals suffered by any ethnic group in post-war Europe. Some three million people were expelled and their property seized, the crime being accompanied by the usual revanchist massacres. But, in Scruton’s novel, the lands they left behind them, whether subsequently collectivized or let run to waste, their churches, houses and possessions, all retain their aura of previous, loving occupation and use, rather in the manner of Rilke. They serve as a religious resource to the ethically compromised and otherwise agnostic heroine Betka, who has inherited her stolen house from her father, and is only the more respectful of its numinous quality for being acutely aware that it is not truly hers. And it is not only objects, but people simply as persons, who serve as foci and reservoirs of the sacred (no matter how profane their behaviour). Our search for the sacred in others, says Scruton, which is simply for an otherness, and a reality, matching and confirming our own, leads us collectively to seek the ultimate Other, God, who is also a person. So much was the burden of Scruton’s Gifford Lectures, and especially of his Stanton Lectures, both now re-written as The Face of God and The Soul of the World respectively. Like the entire cultural Lebenswelt, personhood eludes natural-scientific description, but is nonetheless, and undeniably, real. At least in the original Stanton lectures (which I attended), Scruton, as I began by saying, seemed tempted to suppose, or rather to wish, that God must somehow exist in the same way. The search for God is an extension of the search for the other person. Scruton calls this ‘over-reaching intentionality’. But my feeling is that he has, or at least had then, jumped the gun. The person is something we know, both in ourselves and in others. God is only something of allegedly similar kind that we ‘reach out’ towards, and in my view a possibility at which we can only guess. The human person, though not scientifically explicable, is at any rate physically embodied and intersubjectively apprehended. According to Scruton, however, God spends much of his time hiding, or at best playing peek-a-boo with us. That is not how we earthlings interact. No doubt we ‘over-reach’ ourselves in the direction of God, but that is not to say that we must arrive at any such destination. (The human propensity constantly to overreach has a name, hubris.) It is more realistic, I think, simply to rest content, or discontented, with the insoluble conundrum of a God at whom experience hints, but whom, except sporadically and for some, in moments of private illumination or public ritual invocation, it fails to deliver. Scruton has recently seemed, in a radio talk, to backtrack from his overreaching to a previous position, that of Richard Wagner, to the effect that

64

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

‘it is the task of art to supply what religion can no longer offer us – namely, the experience of sacred things’.26 And this is precisely what he has undertaken in Notes from Underground. In it we observe how the sacred rises into the contemporary consciousness only when effectively outlawed, and dwindles under conditions of political freedom, material comfort and modern medicine, as we see from later episodes set in post-communist Prague and liberal American academia. It may be, therefore – let us hope not – that injustice, suffering and oppression are actually necessary to get the best out of us, despite the moral corruption they also spawn. As Scruton would doubtless say, all are invitations to self-sacrifice, the disposition to which – call it love – makes us fully human. In Scruton’s theological writings there is much concerning sacrifice generally,27 but it seems to me that the only truly valuable kind is self-sacrifice, and that his latest fictional excursion bears this out.28 The reader by now will doubtless have identified the author of the foregoing reflections as a ‘pious agnostic’, or something similarly oxymoronic. But better an oxymoron than a real one, for whom the idea, the reality and the importance of the sacred are a permanently closed book.

Notes   1 Scruton, SW, p. 40.   2 Concerning the legend that, after decapitation, France’s patron saint walked two leagues with his head in his hands, she wrote: ‘La distance n’y fait rien; il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte.’ (See Letters of the Marquise du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, London: Longman, 1810, p. 157; also Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 39, note 100.)   3 Exodus 3.2-5.   4 Matthew 21.12-13 (and similarly, with variations, in the other Gospels).   5 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, final sentence; Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, III, §3.  6 Kant, Critique of Judgment, Part 1, esp. II B, §28.   7 The Aztecs’ horrific human sacrifices sometimes exceeded 10,000 victims in a day, and turned even the hardened Cortés’s stomach. But it may be that the Aztecs saw them as actively good, rather than prudentially compelled by fear of the sun’s extinction. Most victims, to be sure, were slaves or prisoners of war, but some were honoured volunteers from the Aztec nobility, their impending deaths being celebrated in advance by a year’s tour of ceremonial feasting. Some few decades ago it was suggested that it was not the losers of the famed Aztec ball game who were



  8   9

10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19 20 21

Locating the Sacred

65

sacrificed, but the winners, something which, if true, must clearly overturn many conventional assumptions about human nature. J.-P. Sartre, Nausea, trans. L. Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 127ff. The bizarre antics of the occultist Aleister Crowley, once labelled by the tabloids ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’, strike us today as largely laughable, though they would not have done so had they involved murder, like the fantasies of the Marquis de Sade, or Brady’s and his accomplice Myra Hindley’s actual deeds. It says much for poor innocent Gilda, and also about her sheltered life, that although she knows the Duke, her first and only love, is faithless, she does not think him worthless (though he is), since she is prepared to, and does, die in his place. Perhaps there is a distant echo here of Christ’s self-sacrifice for sinful humanity, though most of us, I hope, are less absolutely undeserving than the Duke. Much fêted by deconstructionists, an earlier essay by Sigmund Freud, ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ (1910), draws attention to this general phenomenon. One might note in the present context that the French word sacré (sacred) also means ‘damned’ (in its expletive sense). Rossini jokingly said that he didn’t know whether to call his Petite Messe Solennelle ‘la musique sacrée’ or ‘la sacrée musique’ (sacred music or ‘damned’ music). Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). From personal experience, I exempt the corpses of friends or loved ones from this generalization. Freud cites E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, featuring the mechanical doll Olympia, who resurfaces in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and Delibes’ ballet Coppélia. A diabolic parallel is perhaps the Witches’ reply to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when he asks them what they are doing round their cauldron: ‘A deed without a name.’ (Macbeth, IV, i) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, Scene 6, line 1338. Marcel Proust, Albertine Disparue, Chapter 3. Two centuries on, in a deliberate echo of Milton, and using the same verse form, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley deplores the very same loss, referring ironically to Christianity as ‘killing [i.e. murderous] Truth’: see the chorus ‘Worlds on worlds’ from his 1821 verse drama Hellas. Milton was taken to task by Dr Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, for making no public religious observance (‘To be of no church is dangerous’). See especially his mini-sonnet, ‘Pied Beauty’ (effectively a manifesto). G. M. Hopkins, ‘Binsey Poplars’.

66

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

22 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (1922), esp. no. 9. 23 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 10 (‘Alles Erworbene bedroht die Maschine …’). If given a frankly religious twist, the ‘message’ of this poem (1922) approximates very closely to that of Hopkins’s sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877). 24 In the case of Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter as a sex slave for twenty-four years, only her actual prison, the basement, was destroyed, by being filled with concrete. The same was done to the basement of another Austrian rapist and jailer, Wolfgang Přiklopil. After his suicide, weirdly, the remaining house was inherited by his victim, who still lives in it. 25 Guardian, 26 March 2014. 26 A model of clarity and succinctness, ‘Wagner and German Idealism’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 20 May 2013, as part of the series The Essay. The text is on Scruton’s website, www.rogerscruton.com/articles/8-art-and-music/96-wagnerand-german-idealism.html [accessed 5 August 2014]. 27 Despite his preoccupation with the notion of sacrifice (not least in Death-Devoted Heart, his 2004 book about Wagner’s Tristan), Scruton has yet to disentangle its various meanings. Many are so radically distinct as barely, if at all, to merit the same name. There are worlds of difference between sacrificing others’ lives, property, interests, freedom and the like, and one’s own, to a deity, a cause, an ideal, an institution or a person, and doing so in propitiation, in payment, in hopes of reward, or simply out of love (for its own sake, as it were). And it is far from clear that all such sacrifices can be regarded as the ‘making sacred’ of anything. ‘The sacred’ is a designation which can be used to protect many of its perversions, and some outright abominations, from scrutiny. (Consider D’Annunzio’s sacro egoismo, or the late Ronald Dworkin on a woman’s allegedly sacred ‘right to choose’ abortion.) The contemporary world may be lacking in the genuinely sacred, but it is awash with the pseudo-sacred, that unfailing instrument of enlightened cultural engineering and Pharisaical hypocrisy. 28 Not that even self-sacrifice is a simple matter. Betka informs on her dissident friends – that is, sacrifices not only their security, but also her own scruples and her naturally loyal inclinations – in order to get medical treatment in the US for her dying child, where she would certainly never have done so for herself.

6

Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications Brian Hebblethwaite

1 Roger Scruton’s Gifford Lectures are of great interest to philosophers of religion. His refutation of materialist reductionism and his defence of personal identity, freedom and responsibility are very powerful and set very definite limits to the scope of natural science. But he remains rather coy about the metaphysical implications of this position, due largely to over-reliance on both Kant and Wittgenstein. Kant’s restriction of the category of causality to cause/effect relations within the phenomenal world has to be rejected if we are to speak meaningfully of transcendence and of the dependence of the world on God. The relation of dependence that binds the world to God does not only give the reason why things are as they are. In an extended sense of ‘cause’ it is a causal relation – the relation between Creator and creature – that accounts for there being things and persons at all. Right at the end of The Face of God, Scruton himself mentions the difficulties involved in coming up with a ‘cogent theology of creation’.1 But these difficulties have to be faced. To think seriously about creation means recognizing that reasons and causes cannot be sharply separated. Creation is a relation of ‘dependence’ that includes both ‘reason’ and ‘cause’. Again, Scruton’s sharp contrast between ‘object’ and ‘subject’ has to be questioned. Certainly, both Kant and Wittgenstein go some way towards enabling us to articulate the viewpoint of the thinking and acting subject, the ‘I’, which Scruton so powerfully defends against the neuroscientist’s treatment of human beings in purely objective terms. But, in a wider sense of ‘object’, persons, precisely as Scruton describes them, are among the objects that the universe has come up with in the course of cosmic and biological evolution and

68

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

we have to think out the metaphysical implications of this fact. In doing so, we have to move beyond cosmology and biology. Natural theology, in its various modes, attempts to argue that the very existence of our contingent universe, with its capacity to evolve life, mind and personality, points beyond itself to a transcendent, necessary, ground. Given the fundamental laws of nature and given the fundamental stuff of the universe, with all its astonishing powers and potentialities, natural science can, increasingly, tell the story of our eventual emergence. But it cannot account for the laws, the stuff or their potentialities. Metaphysics attempts to spell out their transcendent ground and natural theology to offer hints about the giver. I concentrate on the design argument rather than the cosmological argument here. For it is the capacity of the universe to evolve persons that is particularly suggestive of design. This is all the more the case if the so-called ‘anthropic principle’ holds, that is to say, if the initial conditions had to be so very precise if ever life and eventually mind were to appear in the evolving cosmos.2 But the argument does not depend on the anthropic principle. It does not even depend on the ‘big bang’ picture of the one universe’s temporal beginning. The very fact that the stuff of the universe, or indeed of many universes, has the properties and power to come up with intelligent, personal, life is something science itself cannot explain. Science can only take those capacities and the laws governing them as given. To postulate a transcendent ‘giver’ is to go beyond science – to metaphysics and, most plausibly, to theology. For a universe able to produce minds, not just animal minds like those of my cats, but rational and personal minds, is better explained in terms of purpose and design, than in terms of chance. Indeed chance is no explanation at all. It astonishes me that a philosopher like Thomas Nagel, who argues just as powerfully as Scruton does against the neuroscientists and for the irreducibility of mind, fails to appreciate the genuine metaphysical, indeed theological, implications of his views.3 Contrast the position of Derek Parfit, who, in Reasons and Persons,4 observes that atheist philosophers have been unwilling to spell out the implications of their views. They should, he claims, give up traditional conceptions of personal identity and adopt something more like the Buddha’s ‘no-self ’ doctrine (early Buddhism being, of course, an atheist religion). I wish to claim that the reverse argument holds. Conviction of the irreducibility of the person implies theism. Many thinkers have pursued this argument. It was most straightforwardly expressed by William Temple in his Gifford Lectures where he argued that the process that has led to the emergence of mind and spirit here on earth is best



Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications

69

evaluated in terms of its highest product, namely mind.5 The very fact that the cosmos has it in it to come up with mind and personality and with the objective values of truth, beauty and goodness that our minds discern, suggests that behind this whole process lies absolute mind, itself endowed with absolute truth, beauty and goodness. It is this line of thought that lies behind both Absolute Idealism in the history of philosophy and also, more intelligibly and plausibly, the school of Personal Idealism. For it is difficult to understand mind in its fullest sense except in personal terms, as Scruton would surely agree. I select as an example of this school the Oxford philosopher and theologian, later Dean of Carlisle, Hastings Rashdall. Rashdall’s philosophy is sketched out in his contribution to Contentio Veritatis in an essay entitled ‘The Ultimate Basis of Theism’, in which he argues first that the world requires a rational mind and will as its ground and then that the moral values it contains point inexorably to the personality and goodness of God.6 Rashdall is more of an Idealist in philosophy than Temple. Indeed his argument is very close to that of Bishop Berkeley. But once you admit that a universe capable of evolving minds and persons is inexplicable except as the creation of transcendent mind, it follows at once that such a universe could not exist at all unless created and held in being by, and therefore known by, that transcendent mind. And that is the gist of the first stage of Rashdall’s argument. The second stage moves from the objectivity of the good – and there parallel arguments from the objectivity of truth and beauty – to the absolute goodness of the mind and will behind the whole process. Another, more recent, Gifford Lecturer may also be cited by way of comparison with Scruton, namely John Macmurray, whose The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation also spell out the irreducible nature of the personal, where subjectivity, agency, morality and mutuality are concerned.7 All this leads Macmurray, at the end of his second volume, to reflect on ‘the personal universe’. Like Scruton he is suspicious of metaphysical arguments, but he goes much further than Scruton in suggesting that our agency and inter-agency presuppose what he calls a practical belief in the reality of God. The fact that this is a personal universe means that we have to think of it as ‘the act of God, the Creator of the world, and ourselves as created agents’.8 I would certainly want to develop this kind of approach in more specifically metaphysical terms. In other words, I do not see how Macmurray’s suggestion can be regarded as only a practical belief. But he is surely right to focus attention on the presuppositions of personality, agency and inter-agency in the universe. Scruton himself does consider some of these presuppositions in the first chapter of his Gifford Lectures, but his Kantian scepticism about access to the

70

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

transcendent prevents him from pursuing metaphysical arguments at all. He appeals to Anthony Kenny’s The God of the Philosophers,9 but fails actually to engage with the difficulties that fuel Kenny’s agnosticism. I would want to claim that there is no such thing as ‘the God of the philosophers’. The metaphysical arguments for a creative mind and will behind a universe capable of evolving persons simply point in a certain direction to what, indeed, has to be filled out in terms of revelation and experience. But the language of religion that Scruton goes on to explore in a very positive way, as we shall see, surely needs metaphysical support if the reality of God is to be taken seriously. Metaphysics and religion can only be reconciled if both are to be allowed their say. Kenny’s difficulties have to be addressed philosophically, not just confronted by the fellowship of believers. Kenny himself, incidentally, is not convinced of the incoherence of theism. If he were, he would be an atheist, not an agnostic. What he remains agnostic about is precisely this question of coherence. Well, the concept of God that we meet in, say, Aquinas or Karl Barth, to say nothing of the fellowship of believers, has certainly not been shown to be incoherent, and defenders of the coherence of theism, such as Richard Swinburne,10 have to be reckoned with, not ignored. I am not denying the ultimate ‘incomprehensibility’ of God. Our grasp of the infinite is, of course, highly limited by our finitude. But concepts such as cause, explanation, mind, will and creation, not to mention person and love, are not wholly restricted to this-worldly application. As Aquinas and many others have shown, analogical predication permits at least some extended use of these terms in respect of the transcendent, and yields at least some, albeit indirect, understanding of what is revealed and experienced more directly in religion. Let us turn to what Scruton does say about God in the final chapter of his Gifford Lectures. Having written memorably and persuasively about the face of the person and the face of the earth he turns, at last, to the face of God. He approaches this subject, not metaphysically – he has ruled that out – but from the standpoint of participation in a religious community that enables us to interpret reality in personal terms. Here Scruton goes much further than Macmurray. Moreover, his is not just a sociological view, à la Durkheim, of the function of religion as a means of uniting people in an interpersonal fellowship with rites of passage and rituals of worship. It is also a very positive view of religious experience of revelation, grace and sacrament. And he acknowledges the power of Christianity’s idea of the incarnation of God in the person of Christ as ‘showing that sacrifice is what life on earth is all about’. He also recognizes the fact of numinous and mystical experience in the world of the religions. But he remains coy about what these experiences are experiences of. I quote:



Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications

71

The philosophical question is not whether we can connect the experience of the ‘numinous’ case by case with some transcendental origin – for that is impossible – but whether we can present a picture of the world that enables us to interpret the religious experience in that way. If we can get this far, then we have made way for the only thing that can sustain the truth of what we feel, which is trust in a personal God who reveals himself.11

But Scruton’s reluctance to pursue the path of metaphysics makes me wonder how far his commitment to the truth of Christianity goes. Consider again his phrase ‘the power of Christianity’s idea of the incarnation of God in the person of Christ’. Is this just a powerful idea? I am reluctant to compare Scruton with Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,12 but I can’t help thinking of the following exchange between Charles Ryder and Sebastian in that novel: ‘But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.’ ‘Can’t I?’ ‘I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.’ ‘Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.’ ‘But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.’ ‘But I do. That’s how I believe.’ No doubt this comparison is unfair to Scruton. But Christianity is not just interested in the idea of incarnation. And Scruton has no business adopting Thomas Nagel’s phrase, ‘the view from nowhere’13 in speaking of God. Most philosophers of religion would surely prefer to speak of God’s eye-view as ‘the view from everywhere’. I shall pursue these questions and these doubts in turning to Scruton’s more recent book, Our Church. A Personal History of the Church of England.

2 Lovers of the Church of England, its traditional liturgy, its music and its fellowship, will be greatly attracted and moved by this personal account of the author’s membership of, and participation in, his church. The book contains an informed and attractive account of the history of the Church of England and its place in the life of the nation as well as a sharp and persuasive picture of the relation between Church and State in Christianity’s case as compared with the virtual equation of State and religion in that of Islam. The book also contains a very moving account of the author’s own journey into renewed membership of the Church of England. It is good to think of him playing the organ in his village church, uplifted by the language of the Prayer Book and the King James version

72

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

of the Bible. And I particularly enjoyed his enthusiasm for the traditional service of Nine Lessons and Carols from the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. Reading these pages, I have to confess, I was reminded of the following passage in the diaries of James Lees-Milne: I firmly believe that the most beautiful lines in the English language come in the Benedictus – ‘And thou, Child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways … Through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness, … and to guide our feet into the way of Peace.’ What does it matter if these truly divine words mean little? In fact they mean a lot to me, but if they didn’t, they are magical, numinous and enough to turn the sensitive atheist into a member of the Church of England.14

Clearly, for both Lees-Milne and for Scruton these are more than just aesthetic perceptions. Indeed, Scruton himself insists that the beautiful words of the liturgy transport us ‘beyond the things of this world, into the timeless and placeless presence of the Creator’.15 In the remainder of this essay I want to explore the meaning of this and similar remarks that are to be found in the first and final chapters of Our Church. Scruton allows that for most of his adult life he was seldom more than a half believer. Now the concept of half belief is not to be despised. It was discussed interestingly in Peter Baelz’s 1975 Bampton Lectures, The Forgotten Dream,16 and I have myself explored its significance in a recent essay on ‘Doubt in Religion and Theology’ in Roy Calne’s edited collection, Scepticism.17 But the question before us now is how far Scruton has moved beyond half belief, despite his Kantian scepticism about theology and doctrine. As in Face of God, there is, in Our Church, much very positive talk about God, Christ, incarnation, sacrifice and sacrament. That these ideas can mean a great deal to participating members of the Christian community without their bothering their heads too much about doctrine is undoubtedly the case. But it is equally the case that these ideas have strong doctrinal implications crying out for theological exploration. It is not enough to say that incarnation ‘is not something that we can explain in words: it is a mystery of the same order as that of creation’.18 And it is quite unfair, after writing warmly of the lines in Charles Wesley’s magnificent hymn, ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity!’, to say, ‘But this intrusion of abstract theology into English worship was accommodated and neutralized by singing.’19 The doctrine of the Incarnation is not abstract. It expresses, however haltingly, the whole point of Wesley’s hymn,



Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications

73

as it does that of the Christmas carols so beautifully sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. The same is true of the closing blessing of that service of Nine Lessons and Carols: ‘Christ, who by his incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with peace and goodwill and make you partakers of the divine nature, and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always.’ This blessing includes the key element that Scruton almost endorses in his very positive treatment of sacrifice and sacrament. But he remains unwilling to explore what it means doctrinally. Consider the following passage: Christ was the sacrificial victim who accepted his role and who went through with it in a spirit of forgiveness. He showed us what is possible, and led us to see that life can be lived as a gift and in a spirit of love. That this is the meaning of the universe, the reason and purpose of its being, is not something that we can prove, and certainly not something amenable to argument. But it is revealed to us in Christ’s sacrifice and that is what we mean by his oneness with the Creator.20

There is a whole host of concrete, not abstract, doctrine encapsulated in these words. Only if Christ is indeed God incarnate can his sacrifice reveal the meaning of the universe. Only if Christ is in reality ‘one with the Creator’ can the sacrament of Holy Communion ‘take us into the divine nature’. Doctrine is not primarily a matter of proof or argument. It is a matter of prayerful reflection on the meaning of what we are committed to when we share in the fellowship, and in the liturgies and music, of the Church. Doctrine does involve argument, however, as Scruton shows in his brief history of the formulation of the Nicene Creed. I share Scruton’s preference for the gentle, tolerant and undogmatic arguments of theologians like Richard Hooker. But we should not forget that the liturgies of our Church still include the Creeds, affirming belief in creation, incarnation, resurrection and eternal life. The promise of eternal life may be the most problematic of the credal doctrines, but it is there in the Creed, inextricably bound up with sure belief in the reality of God. It is no good speaking of ‘a transcendental nowhere’ or ‘a paradisal nowhere’ as Scruton does when in his more sceptical, Kantian, vein, any more than that of ‘a view from nowhere’ as he did in the Gifford Lectures. ‘Utopia’ – nowhere – is a term appropriately used of illusory thisworldly visionary ideas, but not of the transcendent. Dante’s vision at the end of Il Paradiso and Edmund Spenser’s ‘Faire is the Heaven’ (beautifully set to music in Harris’s anthem) are positive attempts to articulate at least something

74

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

of the admittedly incomprehensible, transcendent, ultimate future to which the personal universe will be translated in the end, according to the Christian faith. Faith does indeed involve trust, but it involves belief too. As Austin Farrer remarked, you cannot just trust God to exist.21 The source of Scruton’s scepticism about metaphysics and doctrine is, as I say, the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I have already questioned Kant’s treatment of causality – and the same goes for substance – as a category of our understanding restricted to the way we view the phenomenal world. Even more implausible is Kant’s treatment of space and time as forms of our intuition rather than as relational properties of the evolving universe. Indeed Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space and time is one of the most implausible doctrines ever put forward by a great philosopher. In my view, Kant’s epistemology is no more acceptable than that of Hume. Admittedly, it goes much better with an understanding of the person such as Scruton offers than does Hume’s epistemology. But surely, our conceptual framework is a much more flexible product of experienced interaction with a real space-time world environment than Kant allows, and our reflection on experience is surely capable of much greater analogical extension in metaphysics and doctrine than either Kant or Scruton allows. My recommendation, then, is that, as members of the Christian community, we should extend our enthusiasm for the language, liturgy and music of our Church to their metaphysical and doctrinal implications, as explored in our Church’s critical and developing theology.

Notes   1 Scruton, FG, p. 177.   2 On this, see Martin J. Rees, Just Six Numbers. The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999).   3 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).   4 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). This book is mentioned by Scruton, in another context, in his later book, Our Church, to be discussed in part 2 below.   5 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1934).  6 Contentio Veritatis: essays in constructive theology, by six Oxford tutors (London: John Murray, 1902).



Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications

75

  7 John Macmurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) and Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).  8 Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 222.   9 Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 10 Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 11 Scruton, FG, pp. 165ff. 12 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: the sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949). 13 See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 14 James Lees-Milne, Through Wood and Dale: Diaries 1975-1978 (London: John Murray Ltd, 1988), entry for Friday, 4 August 1978. 15 Scruton, OC, p. 173. 16 Peter Baelz, The Forgotten Dream. Experience, Hope and God (London: Mowbrays, 1975). 17 Roy Calne and William O’Reilly, ed., Scepticism. Hero and Villain (New York: Nova, 2012), pp. 197–204. 18 Scruton, OC, p. 177. 19 Ibid., p. 121. 20 Ibid., p. 181. 21 Austin Farrer, Saving Belief. A Discussion of Essentials (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p. 15.

7

That Obscure Object of Desire Fiona Ellis

1 Introduction Why go back to 1986 and Sexual Desire? After all, Scruton was a reluctant atheist in those days, he wasn’t particularly interested in the question of God and the metaphysical framework within which he was working has long been abandoned. That’s the official line, but the reality is rather more complex. For a start, Scruton has always been interested in the question of God, understandably so given that he shares Nietzsche’s radically religious nature.1 Second, Sexual Desire is, at one level, a deeply religious work, yet it also provides the perfect antidote to such an approach – the idea of the soul is exposed as a metaphysical illusion, and we are returned fairly and squarely to our (merely) animal places. The ‘merely’ here will be significant, but the tension should be apparent, and it can be traced back to a residual, and sometimes explicit, commitment to a form of ontological dualism. Scruton explicitly rejects ontological dualism in his recent work, and he has become a somewhat reluctant theist (the Nietzschean influence again). However, there lurks a version of the original tension, and it is encapsulated in his commitment to the following three claims: (1) The Beyond is in our midst:

The self-conscious experience of sex as a ‘going out’ towards the other … presupposes transcendental categories … [which] point to the very horizon of nature, and contain a kind of intimation of the beyond.2

(2) The Beyond is irrevocably beyond (ontological dualism):

[M]y words make it look as though the world beyond the window is actually here, like a picture on the stairs. But it is not here; it is there,

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

78

beyond the window that can never be opened, and before which we cannot linger, for we are prisoners of time and our steps trudge always onwards and up.3 (3) There is no Beyond:

[The concept of the supernatural is to be] severed from any ontological claims … the supernatural refers to a feature of our experience.4

The first quotation testifies to the ongoing significance of the themes of 1986, and I have suggested already that a version of the tension is more explicitly expressed in this earlier work. Let me then turn without further ado to this version, allowing its theistic relevance to emerge in the course of the diagnosis. The context is the problem of how we are to conceive of the individual object of desire – the human beloved.

2 Scruton on the human individual Scruton claims that: [i]t is widely supposed that, in my own case, I have, by virtue of the privileged awareness of my own subjective condition, a kind of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ of a pure individual, whose ‘this-ness’ is incorrigibly and immediately presented to the consciousness whose identity it shares … Many arguments have been given to combat this illusion – the illusion that the privileges of self-reference provide some special guarantee of my existence as an individual ‘substance’. Kant’s argument, given in the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’, is designed to show that, in identifying ‘myself ’ I am identifying no more than a point of view upon the world, and not an entity within it.5

According to Scruton then, self-awareness leads me to think of myself as an individual substance. The reference to Kant suggests that this involves thinking of myself as an immaterial soul, and that it is this with which I take myself to be acquainted when I look within.6 The further claim is that I am not entitled to think about myself in these terms, at least, not on the basis of the materials that are presented at the level of self-awareness. The temptations and limitations of self-awareness in this context have been noted by John McDowell. His target is likewise the claim that I exist as an immaterial soul – or a Cartesian ego as he puts it – and he makes a similar connection with Kant. Hence:



That Obscure Object of Desire

79

[i]t can easily seem that we had better draw Kant’s conclusion: the idea of persistence that figures in the flow of “consciousness” had better be only formal. If we allowed that it is an idea of substantial persistence, the continuing to exist of an objective item, we would be committed to understanding self-consciousness as awareness of a Cartesian ego.7

McDowell treats as deeply suspect the idea that the self can be comprehended using purely introspective resources, and claims that by rejecting this assumption: ‘[W]e make room for supposing that the continuity of the “I think” involves a substantial persistence, without implying that the continuant in question is a Cartesian ego.’8 On McDowell’s position, I am permitted to think of myself as an embodied being among others – I am an individual substance in this sense – but this requires that I move beyond the limits of introspection so as to conceive of myself in third-personal terms. This does not mean that the ‘I’ must be dropped from the equation – after all, the embodied beings with which we are to be identified are capable of reflecting upon themselves. The point is simply that this perspective cannot be treated as self-standing lest we succumb to the aforementioned Cartesian temptation, or alternatively, to the Kantian conclusion that there can be no metaphysics of the self. The implication here is that the Cartesian position must be rejected, although it is unclear whether it has been shown to be false, or whether the point is simply that its truth or falsity lies beyond the limits of possible experience – introspective or otherwise – and philosophy. The latter conclusion would return us to Kant’s position, although McDowell’s insistence that the self be comprehended as an objective continuant in the world suggests that he has exceeded Kant’s parameters in one obvious sense. It remains to be seen whether one could accept this metaphysics of the self while leaving it open, albeit indemonstrable, that we are also Cartesian souls.9 This weaker position might be thought to suit Scruton’s purposes. For having made the point that there is no metaphysical ground for thinking about our selves as ‘pure individuals’, he claims that there is something in our interpersonal attitudes which demands such an approach. Hence: [w]e tend to think of persons as quintessential individuals, constituted by their inviolable subjective perspective … Although there is no metaphysical ground for the thought that this perspective is what you essentially are, it is nevertheless true that I demand you to sustain it in existence, as the true invariable focus of my attitude towards you … Hence in the eyes of others, my present unity of consciousness is associated inevitably with the idea of my unbroken temporal

80

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton continuity as an agent. I appear as a ‘centre of responsibility’ and an enduring ‘initiator of change’ … Thus it is that our interpersonal attitudes become structured by a peculiar metaphysical idea.10

Scruton is conceding here to the ‘wider context’, which, for McDowell, grants us the right to say that the first person is also a third person, for our interpersonal attitudes are at issue. He insists, however, that these attitudes are structured by a conception of the self for which there is no metaphysical ground. This suggests that the being with which I must identify myself and with which you must identify me is something rather different from the embodied beings which figure in McDowell’s ontology – beings which, from his point of view, are appropriate objects and subjects of the relevant interpersonal attitudes. The following extract gives us a clue to what is going on: In the perspectiveless eyes of science, we are no more than animals … with the limited individuality which that implies. In our own eyes we are ‘points of view’, and what we are for ourselves we are for every other creature with a ‘self ’ like ours … We are, as Kant persuasively argued, the victims of transcendental illusions … We must therefore take the idea of the metaphysical individuality of the self both less seriously than those philosophers who would endorse it – for it is an idea that has no place in the scientific description of the world – and more seriously than those who would reject it out of hand – for it denotes an indispensable feature of the intentional understanding by which we live. It is, to put it succinctly, a ‘well-founded illusion’, which we could remove from our consciousness only at the cost of consciousness itself.11

Scruton makes it sound as if his position provides the only alternative to one according to which we are mere animals. Thus, assuming that the relevant conception of the self remains metaphysically ungrounded, he is claiming that its acceptance is a condition for capturing the distinction between ourselves and (other) animals. McDowell agrees that we must move beyond the limits of scientific understanding if we are to do justice to the relevant differences. However, he denies that our status as selves requires that we are anything more than highly sophisticated animals, and would therefore reject Scruton’s claim that thinking about ourselves as selves involves a metaphysical illusion. It may well involve an idea that has no place in a scientific description of the world, but McDowell denies that such a description is exhaustive of reality – reality being the ordinary natural world in which we live and move and have our being. Scruton takes us beyond the limits of science, but his insistence that the self can be accommodated only in terms that are metaphysically problematic



That Obscure Object of Desire

81

suggests either a commitment to scientism or a position which is contentious even by McDowell’s anti-scientistic lights. Some such position can be read into his claim that the self is to be identified with a Cartesian soul, although we have been told already that there is no metaphysical ground for thinking of ourselves in these terms, but that they can be relinquished only at the cost of consciousness itself. He claims also that we are the victims of a transcendental illusion in this context, although it is unclear whether the illusion in question is of supposing that our status as selves can be known, or whether it is an illusion even to think of ourselves in these terms. The latter claim implies that there can be no such thing as the self, and if its postulation is a condition for our being self-conscious beings, then Scruton is suggesting – somewhat paradoxically – that we are not, after all, self-conscious beings. By contrast if we accept the weaker interpretation of his position – that our status as selves cannot be known – then we must conclude that there is a sense in which we remain irreducibly mysterious to ourselves, and, of course, to each other. This tension comes to the fore in Scruton’s conception of the aim of sexual desire, for he offers a version of the claim that the self of the other serves as the elusive goal of an infinite quest. The theistic dimension is present but downplayed, and at least some of what is said suggests that the relevant quest is infinite, not simply because the self must elude our attempts to grasp it, but because there is nothing there to be grasped.

3 Man as a useless passion? The context for discussion is the aim of sexual desire, and Scruton is going to argue that the ‘well-founded illusion of [the beloved’s] metaphysical individuality impedes … the formation of a truly coherent purpose’.12 To begin with we are told that what I want from the other is for him to have ‘knowledge of me in my body, and to delight in me there, as I delight in him … there is the desire to be “present as a body” to the other, and to observe one’s presence through his eyes’.13 So our efforts are concentrated on making ourselves present in bodily form. The body is ‘tangible, seizable: I can touch it, squeeze it, bite it … It responds as a unity to my presence … I rejoice in this unity, and in the fact that I have in my hands the single thing which is you’.14 However, this single thing that is you is: identified in my thinking with another unity, that of the perspective which ‘peers’ from its face … Thus there arises … a peculiar thought … I seek to unite

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

82

you with your body. I seek to summon your perspective into your flesh, so that it becomes identical with your flesh … I wish you to be your body, not in the straightforward sense in which this is always true, but in the metaphysical sense in which it can never be true, the sense of an identity between your ‘unity of consciousness’ and the animal unity of your body.15

Hence: We are engaged in an impossible but necessary enterprise. We are attempting to unite our bodies with a non-existent ‘owner’, who is unable to possess the individuality for which he craves … The trouble [of desire] derives from the attempt to unite the illusory individuality of the other’s self with the real but resistant individuality of the animal with which he is identical … In my desire I am gripped by the illusion of a transcendental unity behind the opacity of flesh, the repository of infinite moral possibilities, and the promise of that perfect enfolding presence that would – if it could be obtained – justify the turmoil of sexual pursuit.16

We can summarize the picture as follows: the focus of my desire is the single embodied thing which is you. This embodied thing possesses an animal individuality, but I identify you with a different unity, which is tied up with your first-personal perspective. The aim of my desire is to unite this unity with your body so that it becomes identical with it. That is to say that I want you to be your body; not in the sense that you already are, namely, qua possessor of a limited animal individuality, but in a sense which involves identifying this animal individuality with the unity of your first-person perspective. This aim is said to be impossible, for it involves uniting your body with something non-existent, namely, the self. However, it is an aim that I am compelled to pursue in so far as I am gripped by the illusion of a unity behind your body and the promise hereby of a presence which would justify the trouble of desire by holding out the possibility of its satisfaction. The distinction between animal individuality and the individuality of the self is familiar from what has gone before, and it can be variously interpreted, depending upon how we conceive of the distinction between ourselves and animals. According to one option, we have an animal individuality, but it is to be distinguished from that of non-human animals, and it accommodates our status as selves. This is McDowell’s position, and there is no implication that the self thus conceived is illusory. On this position then, we must seemingly deny that the aim of desire involves an incoherence, for the object of my desire is you, and the perspective I seek to summon into your flesh can be made present in tangible form, assuming, of course, that you are suitably disposed towards me.



That Obscure Object of Desire

83

Scruton distinguishes animal individuality from the individuality of the self, and implies that there is no such thing as the self. In fact, he makes this claim unambiguously, but there is equal evidence to suggest the weaker claim that the self is simply ungraspable. So there are two possibilities: first, the self of the other is non-existent and her individuality is on a par with that of any non-human animal. This would make desire insatiable in the sense that its aim cannot be completed. It would also make a mystery of its very possibility, for as Scruton himself concedes, mere animals do not feel sexual desire. On this position then, we have left behind the very idea of desire – troubled or otherwise. According to the second option, the self exists, but it is ungraspable. It is ungraspable in the sense that it cannot be brought into relation with the animal unity of a person’s body. And yet ‘[s]o powerful is the paroxysm of desire that it seems to me as though the very transparency of your self, is, for a moment, revealed on the surface of your body, in a mysterious union that can be touched but never comprehended’.17 The theistic undercurrents are clear, and the connection is made explicit with the claim that we are faced here with the mystery of incarnation: ‘It is part of the genius of Christianity that it invites us to understand the relation between God and his creation in terms of a mystery that we have, so to speak, continually between our hands. The mystery that we confront in the sexual act, we can neither resolve nor abjure.’18 Christianity tells us that the mystery of God’s Incarnation in Christ is the supreme instantiation of His omnipresence in all things, and that this omnipresence is expressed at the level of creation.19 So we can grant the connection between Incarnation and creation, but Scruton’s further claim, which may or may not depend upon the truth of Christianity, is that we confront this mystery – or a version thereof – in the sexual act. We do so in the sense that the self is seemingly and fleetingly revealed on the surface of the beloved’s body in a union that defies comprehension – the self is made flesh. Herein lies the difficulty as far as Scruton is concerned, for, made flesh, the beloved is now ‘lost in her body’: the smile that draws me on becomes a mouth, hence the supposed disparity between the transcendent aim of desire and the merely immanent means through which we may try to achieve it.20 It is part of the genius of Christianity that it offers an understanding of God’s Incarnation in Christ which promises to circumvent this difficulty. For God and Jesus are not two mutually distinct entities who vie for control of the whole – as if Christ is some kind of hybrid amalgam whose parts remain in permanent opposition.21 Rather, the claim is that God and Jesus remain distinct, but not as two distinct beings, and in such a way that Jesus can be said to be wholly human

84

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

and wholly divine. We can allow then that there are two natures in Christ, and this is thinkable (albeit neither provable nor fully graspable) because we have here the supreme instantiation of God’s omnipresence to the world – an omnipresence which entitles us to deny that divinity and humanity are mutually incompatible, while also accommodating God’s transcendence. Hence, the claim that God remains hidden in His revelation of himself. There is a question about whether this theistic model is wholly appropriate to an understanding of the relation between self and body, for it suggests that there is more to the self than what is revealed at the level of its embodiment. I shall return to this important thought below. At this stage, however, we can note that the model lends justice to the idea that the self can be made present in bodily form, with no implication that what is revealed at this level falls short of the self itself. Why then does Scruton insist that the self can be made flesh only at the cost of its disappearance – that the beloved is fated to become ‘lost in her body’? He seems to be operating with a framework according to which self and body are mutually independent entities which correspond, respectively, to the soul and to the animal. He insists that there is no metaphysical ground for postulating the self thus conceived, and goes so far as to claim that it is non-existent. He then falls back on the thing which clearly does exist, namely, the animal, only to conclude that it falls short of exhibiting self-involving individuality. The assumption here is that the self could only ever be a separable something else, and once it is granted that this something else is non-existent, then we are left with no way of accommodating our status as self-conscious desiring beings, and the idea that we must think of ourselves in these terms becomes wholly mysterious. The obvious conclusion to draw is that our animal individuality already suffices to accommodate our status as selves, not least because the only reason for rejecting this possibility is that the self must be a separable something else, and we have been told already that it can be no such thing. It remains to be seen where this leaves the ‘trouble’ of desire and the putative mystery surrounding its subject and object.

4 Back to the drawing board Let us grant that we are different from other animals, and that this difference is real rather than illusory. Let us grant also that we are fully fledged, embodied, selves, and that we are capable of desiring other such selves. This much is indisputable, but there is a question about how we are to comprehend the aim



That Obscure Object of Desire

85

of desire, and, in particular, whether we should concede anything to Scruton’s claim that its object – the self of the other – is ungraspable. For Scruton this grasping has a cognitive dimension – I want knowledge of you in your body. Now if we accept that the object of desire is already a fully fledged self, then the knowledge I desire is already at my disposal in one obvious respect – after all, I have in my hands the single thing which is you.22 But if this is so, then we have surely made a mystery of the ‘trouble’ of desire, and we have also removed any putative mystery from the self that serves as its object. Perhaps these ideas are groundless, or to be explained in terms which involve nothing inherently mysterious. After all, mysteries are to be eliminated rather than revealed, and it takes a sober philosopher – preferably one not in love – to see through these transcendental illusions. The score is familiar enough, and it should be equally familiar that such claims are neither demonstrable nor obviously defensible. Witness the conception of mystery that is fundamental to the Christian faith and articulated in the claim that God remains hidden in his very revelation of himself. This claim is fundamental to Scruton’s position under one aspect at least, although his sober inclinations lead him to take it back in two crucial respects. First, God’s Incarnation in Christ is substituted for the self ’s incarnation in the body; second, the supposedly hidden self is exposed as illusory. That is to say that the mystery is eliminated, albeit not consistently so. The idea that the self remains hidden in its revelation is what Scruton really wants to say, and he surely can say this without courting the difficulties he is so anxious to avoid. After all, it involves making no dogmatic claims about its nature, and it is consistent with, and indeed demanded by such a picture that the self itself is revealed in bodily form (compare what we said about God’s Incarnation in Christ). Does this accommodate the ‘trouble’ of desire? In one obvious sense it does, for it suggests that its object cannot be wholly contained in the bodily form in which it is revealed, and hence, that the desiring subject is engaged in an endless, albeit not futile quest. This is what Scruton seems to be getting at when he tells us that she is ‘touched but not comprehended’. The claim is reminiscent of what Descartes says about our relation to God, and Scruton’s reference to ‘the promise of that perfect enfolding presence’ which, if obtained, would justify the turmoil of sexual pursuit, calls to mind Augustine’s claim that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. However, it is not clear that Scruton is talking about God in this context, nor is it clear that he would accept that God is the ultimate object of desire. Nevertheless, he grants a version of the claim that we are related hereby to the life of God, for we are said to have the mystery of the Incarnation ‘continually between our hands’.

86

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

5 Conclusions (1) Scruton’s position has a theistic dimension both then (1986) and now. (2) Then, he is tempted – ambivalently – in the direction of scientism (there is no self, and presumably no God). (3) I have recommended that we reject the dualism of self and animal, in line with what Scruton really wants to say. (4) It is unclear where this leaves the theistic dimension of his position. Assuming that we can do for God what we have done for the self, it implies that the Beyond is in our midst. (5) There is evidence for this position in Scruton’s recent work, but a lurking ontological dualism suggests that a version of the original tension remains, and that God is in danger of being squeezed out of the picture.

Notes   1 Compare Erich Heller’s description of Nietzsche: ‘He is, by the very texture of his soul and mind, one of the most radically religious natures that the nineteenth century brought forth, but is endowed with an intellect which guards, with the aggressive jealousy of a watchdog, all approaches to the temple’, The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 11.   2 See Scruton above, p. 17, ‘A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental’.  3 Ibid.  4 Ibid.   5 Scruton, SD, pp. 113–14.  6 See Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A361.   7 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 101.   8 Ibid., pp. 101–2.   9 P. F. Strawson concedes this possibility. Thus, in the context of discussing the concept of a pure individual consciousness, he claims that ‘though it could not exist as a primary concept to be used in the explanation of the concept of a person (so that there is no mind-body problem, as traditionally conceived), yet it might have a logically secondary existence. Thus, from within our actual conceptual scheme, each of us can quite intelligibly conceive of his or her individual survival of bodily death.’ He concludes that disembodied survival may well seem



That Obscure Object of Desire

87

unattractive, and that it is no doubt for this reason that the orthodox have wisely insisted on the resurrection of the body, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959), pp. 115–16. 10 Scruton, SD, pp. 117–18. 11 Scruton, SD, p. 118. 12 Ibid., p. 125. 13 Ibid., p. 127. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 128. 16 Ibid., pp. 129–30. 17 Ibid., p. 128. 18 Ibid. 19 John McDade defends this position in his unpublished piece ‘Creation and Salvation’. See also Brian Davies who claims that God is ‘present to his creatures as their sustainer or preserver. He is “omnipresent” and “ubiquitous”’, ‘Miracles’, New Blackfriars, Vol. 73 (2007): 104. 20 Scruton, SD, pp. 128–9. 21 McDade spells this out in his ‘Creation and Salvation’. See also my God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Chapter 7. 22 I am assuming for the purposes of the discussion that you want me to have knowledge of you in your body.

8

A Glance at the Face of God Michael Pakaluk

Roger Scruton in his Gifford Lectures, The Face of God, does two things. One is to explore the phenomenology of embodiment, beginning with the human face, but then considering also a series of remarkable analogies between face and body; body and temple; temple and dwelling; dwelling and world-dwelling (that is to say, oikumenē). Another thing that he does is to propose a dualistic metaphysics or worldview, broadly Kantian, with debts to Thomas Nagel, to develop an attack on the new atheism. In Scruton’s mind, the two tasks are related: the phenomenology reveals what is lost if the new atheism is accepted. But as I see it, the two tasks are independent: the valuable phenomenology stands on its own, but the metaphysics is problematic and should be abandoned. More than that, I think the metaphysics tends to undermine the phenomenology. In this brief paper, I will briefly state what I take to be the lasting value of the phenomenology, and then I will state my objection to the metaphysics. Scruton has made it clear that he is interested mainly in the broadly aesthetic character of human experience, and that, for him, the category of the sacred falls incidentally out of his aesthetic, and that he has not intended to develop a ‘philosophy of religion’ in the typical sense. Be that as it may: to others it looks like a philosophy of religion, or a philosophical theology, and so the question arises of what lasting significance it can have, if it is taken in that way. To answer that question, one needs to look to particular religious communities, since I agree with Scruton, that religious or quasi-religious beliefs have vitality only if they are accepted within a community of believers. Now the phenomenology of embodiment, which Scruton investigates, finds a natural home at least in Roman Catholicism: that is what I wish to argue for, as follows. Scruton is aware that a verse from Psalm 26: 8: Vultum tuum, Domine, requiram, ‘Thy face, O Lord, will I still seek’, has been frequently meditated

90

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

upon within the broader Catholic tradition as expressing the desire to see God in the beatific vision; as such it involves what theologians call ‘eschatology’, the grappling with the so-called ‘last things’, which, important though it may be, is not of particular interest to Scruton, and does not particularly coincide with his concerns. However, in the last few decades a complementary line of reflection has received attention, in which contemplating the face of God actually includes contemplating the human face, here and now. This development is based on the simple theological consideration that, if Christ is God, then to contemplate the human face of Christ is already to contemplate the face of God (as in ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father,’ John 14.9); also that, if Christ through his incarnation has in a way united himself with the entire human race, then the face of any human being can reflect the face of Christ and therefore the face of God.1 Yet, as a matter of theology, not popular piety, words have not quite been found so far to express this viewpoint. Here are two facts from the writings of John Paul II which show this to be the case. First, when John Paul II set down what he regarded as the ‘programme’ for the Church to follow in the New Millennium, in a document called Novo Millennio Ineunte, he said that the Church should focus its efforts around the contemplation of the face of Christ. Yet when he went on to explain what he meant by this (nn. 16–28), he simply recounted in a fairly typical fashion stories and incidents from the life of Christ.2 Yet surely contemplating the face of Christ has to mean something more than contemplating the life of Christ. The second fact is this: Wojtyła was a professor of moral philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, and, when he was elected Pope, he took along with him to Rome a manuscript that he had recently completed, and he read its chapters from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica at weekly audiences over the course of five years. These lectures were collected together and published, and have since become famous as presenting the ‘theology of the body’.3 Now, here is a curious thing: in this vast and profound investigation of the theological significance of the human body – consisting of 129 lectures, with titles that seem to correspond to themes in Scruton’s Gifford Lectures, such as ‘A Fundamental Disquiet in All Human Experience’; ‘The Human Body as Subject of Works of Art’; ‘The Depersonalizing Effect of Concupiscence’; and ‘The Sacredness of the Human Body’ – there is not a single discussion, not so much as a single mention, of the human face. Although man is in the image of God, the theology of the body, in its original presentation, does not include a theology of the image that a man is in his face. I think that this is astonishing, and arguably this absence of



A Glance at the Face of God

91

a theology of the face has had detrimental effects on more popular expositions of the theology of the body, as for example those offered by Christopher West.4 These expositions typically do not connect the theology of the body to broader ideas about human culture and art. Also, as Alice von Hildebrand has trenchantly argued, sometimes they take on a certain immodesty and even crassness, from an excessive preoccupation with sex and sexual pleasure.5 So my appraisal of the Face of God, as regards its phenomenology of embodiment, is that it begins to find words and concepts that complement the theology of the body. Scruton has faced, or begun to face, this important idea of specifically contemplating the face. So I think that Scruton’s work, when taken in a way that he does not intend, as religious or theological speculation – as it inevitably will be taken – can and will make a lasting contribution to the broader Catholic tradition as a first inquiry into the phenomenology of the human face. But now I turn to the second thing that Scruton does in those lectures, namely, sketch a metaphysics in which he wishes to embed his phenomenology. That metaphysics is familiar to students of Scruton: the world divides into objects and subjects; objects are related to one another in a network of cause and effect that is both deterministic and complete; subjects are points of view, which, in the case of human beings, involve persons who address one another and offer reasons. Subjects should in no way be treated as objects and should not be taken, either in themselves or in their actions, to enter into the causal network of objects – just as a ‘God of the gaps’ should not be invoked to remedy incomplete causal explanations. Similarly, objects should in no way be treated as subjects and taken to enter into the space of reasons among persons, in the way, for example, that it would be misguided to claim that the brain (an object) has willed something (which is the act of a person, a subject). So far, this metaphysics is similar to Thomas Nagel’s. But Scruton adds a Kantian twist: as there can seem to be a question as to how subjects and objects are related to each other, Scruton, in the spirit of Kant, brings in a transcendental argument and says something like the freedom which is a precondition of persons actually requires that objects be experienced as bound by universal and necessary laws. I must admit I am baffled by Scruton’s commitment to necessitarianism in the laws of nature. He says various things about this matter that tend in different directions, but none seems compelling. Yet, presumably, only a strict necessity can justify the adoption of strict necessitarianism. It cannot be physics which convinces him, since, as Scruton points out in his Gifford Lectures, physics gave up necessitarianism long ago and lives happily now with indeterminism and singularities. In any case, do not scientists today

92

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

simply design mathematical models and look for correlations that those models predict? But as Russell vigorously insisted, correlation is not causation. It cannot be Kant’s Second Analogy, because no one has ever construed that argument in a convincing way. Indeed, Scruton refers to Kant at this juncture as if appealing to an authority, along the lines of, Kant thought he saw how the one thing implied the other. Is it the sharp distinction, then, which Scruton wishes to draw between reasons and causes? But a cause need not be a determining cause, as Anscombe taught us.6 Furthermore, persons do cause things all the time – since if they did not, they would not have to justify their actions by giving a reason; and ‘reasons’ as well as ‘causes’ are used to account for physical objects, as is the case when scientists invoke principles of conservation or symmetry. Besides, do physical objects even cause anything at all? Is it not the case that physical objects are inert and, as Plato and many others have insisted, persons are the only true causes of anything? When the moon and earth are attracted to each other, which is the cause? If it is neither, but rather the law that is the cause, then that is not an object, and how, in any case, can there be an effective law without a lawgiver? If the reason is that Scruton hopes for a truce with the new atheists – ‘I won’t insist on a God of the gaps if you won’t claim that the brain causes an act of the will’ – it is unreasonable, surely, to think that the atheists would keep their side of such a bargain. So what remains for me is a suspicion that Scruton is attached to necessitarianism because, for him, it serves to isolate and highlight aesthetic experience. The same necessitarian web of connections, among causes and effects, which would block anything from intruding into the world of objects, would also seem to block these objects from, as it were, extricating themselves from that web and extruding upon appearances, and then one looks free to say – as Scruton has emphasized that he wishes to say – that these appearances are reality, or at least are their own reality. However, my main objection to Scruton’s necessitarian, and the dualistic metaphysics in which it finds its place, is that this part of Scruton’s philosophy is at odds with the other: Scruton’s metaphysics seems to undermine his phenomenology of the sacred, because, as a result of holding to that metaphysics, I think he hesitates to affirm the capacity, or power, of persons as agents really to act upon the world, and either to create something (as with God), or to shape and change it (as with human persons). His hesitation takes both a more obvious and a less obvious form. The more obvious form is that he denies the possibility of creation and of miracles: God is merely the basic reason for the universe,



A Glance at the Face of God

93

Scruton holds, not a cause. Similarly, as conservation is continual creation, God would not be the cause of each thing’s remaining in existence, and thus the existential contingency of each creature taken on its own disappears. It follows that God cannot work miracles, and, indeed, Scruton even adds that God would never want to debase himself by working a miracle. Now Scruton in holding such things is certainly saying something familiar; he favours a rational religion like a good nineteenth-century German philosopher, or a good Deist in an earlier age. However, an initial trouble is that the phenomenology of the sacred, for many believers, includes the concept of creation and of the miraculous, and their beliefs hinge essentially on claims of miraculous events and interventions. ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel’ – which was Naaman’s confession, after he was healed of leprosy from dipping in the Jordan seven times, at the suggestion of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 5.15) – is fairly typical of a certain sort of religious consciousness. If the waters of the Red Sea did not pile up to the right and to the left like a wall, and if there was no pillar of cloud, and no burning bush and no shekinah, then why should the ‘I am who I am’ be a revelation of God, and the tabernacle his dwelling place? Uttered by a person who is other than a creator, ‘I am who I am’ would indeed have to mean, as Scruton takes it, ‘I am a person, like you’, rather than, as in the Septuagint’s rendering and implicit interpretation, ‘I am the existing one’. This view from somewhere which somehow revealed itself to Moses without any miracles as ‘I am a person, like you’, presumably then, as being a person, also suffers from existential loneliness, as we do, and the guilt which is the price of self-consciousness, and therefore, one would think, has no claim to be a god. Most people can succeed in thinking of existence as a gift, too – the topic of Scruton’s final Gifford lecture – only by thinking of each good, existing thing as made to be theirs by God. That God is the basic reason for the world’s existence obviously does not to come up to that. But then this consideration leads another, although less obvious, way in which Scruton’s necessitarianism affects his phenomenology, namely, that he tends to choose characterizations of persons who do not involve their acting but rather only their feeling and interpreting. Consider love. Scruton cites approvingly St Thomas Aquinas’s definition, taken from Aristotle, that to love is velle bonum alicui, ‘to wish good to someone’. In both St Thomas and Aristotle, ‘to wish’, velle, or boulesthai in Greek, is essentially active and effective. Yet Scruton’s gloss of the formula is that to love someone is to endorse him – an extremely odd expression, as to endorse means to sign on the back, like when we endorse a cheque.7 Piety, our response when

94

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

the good that is our existence has been effectively wished to us by another, is also misconstrued by Scruton. He gives piety a Kantian slant and says that it is a posture of submission and obedience towards authorities that you have never chosen.8 Piety is that – as a consequence – but piety’s first act, surely, involves the grateful recognition that parents, ancestors, and the gods have caused your existence. Indeed, nothing can even be sacred unless a divinity has caused it to be sacred by consecration: something originally not sacred must be set apart, either directly, as in ‘take off your sandals, because the ground you are standing on is holy’, or indirectly, as when effected by a priest or prophet who is an agent of the deity. If it is by us, only, then a putative act of consecration is play acting or false religion. The very notion of a subject as a point of view, Scruton’s favoured and basic idiom, implies that persons are perceivers, not doers, who have control mainly over their own interpretations. What it is like to be Nagel’s bat is what it is like to experience a thrill ride on a chiropteran machine. Along these lines, the difference between human sacrifice and ant sacrifice, Scruton tells us, is that we happen to be points of view that can understand our sacrifices by ‘concepts like gift, sacrifice, duty, sanctity’.9 Yet as regards causation, Scruton also holds, the evolutionary explanation is as good for us as for the ant. We are not actually doing anything different from the ants. Even intention becomes a matter of interpretation for Scruton: ‘Intending something means being certain that you will do it, and being prepared to answer why.’10 Intending is a matter of forming an attitude, then, towards an action already underway, not effecting the action. In a summary statement Scruton remarks: ‘We are called upon to justify our conduct, to be truthful in revealing our states of mind and our goals, and to be aware of the community that stands as though on a balcony above our projects.’11 Are we also called upon to make sure that what we do, and how we affect the world, is good? Surely, but Scruton uses the one description and not the other. So there is a tilt towards a certain aestheticism and even sentimentalism in Scruton’s description of the phenomena, which interferes, I believe, with his giving a fully accurate phenomenology of embodiment. One last example is Scruton’s description of our experience of a corpse: In death we confront the body voided of the soul, an object without a subject, limp, ungoverned and inert. The awe that we feel in the face of death is a response to the unfathomable spectacle of human flesh without the self. In fact,



A Glance at the Face of God

95

the human body is not so much an object as a void in the world of objects … The sight is uncanny, ‘unheimlich’.12

Scruton alludes here to the principle of abjection and Menninghaus’ theory of disgust, according to which a corpse is unsettling through its falling away from an order of symbols and of interpretation. Yet the account seems wrong. Immediately after death, if death involved no mutilation or disfigurement, a corpse seems, rather, ‘at rest’ and even beautiful. The absence that an onlooker may experience is that the body is no longer animated; no longer made to be alive; that an active presence, indeed, the ‘first act’ of the body, is no longer there to act and thereby communicate.13 In conclusion, then: I have concentrated on Scruton’s necessitarianism and not attended to his Kantianism, on the ground that, after all, there is no art to finding the mind’s construction in the Face of God. On the other hand, I have argued that, remove the unyielding mask of The Face of God, and you may indeed find under cover of that book the face of God.

Notes  1 See Pastoral Constitution On The Church In The Modern World — Gaudium et Spes, promulgated by Pope Paul VI (Vatican City: 1965) para. 22.   2 Catholic Church, and John Paul II, The new millennium, Novo millennio ineunte: Apostolic letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to the bishops, clergy and lay faithful at the close of the great jubilee of the year 2000 (Montréal: Médiaspaul, 2001).   3 Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman he Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. M. Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006).   4 C. West, The Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John II’s Man and Woman He Created Them (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2007).   5 A. Hildebrand, ‘Dietrich von Hildebrand, Catholic Philosopher, and Christopher West, Modern Enthusiast: Two Very Different Approaches to Love, Marriage and Sex’ found online at: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/document.php?n=999 (last accessed 1 August 2014).   6 G. E. M. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).   7 It is perhaps telling that the recent practice of using the word in this way outside a legal or argumentative context was not so long ago decried by Fowler as a solecism. One need not be an Oxford ordinary language philosopher to worry that what

96

  8   9 10 11 12 13

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton we are saying is unsound philosophy because we find ourselves saying it through unsound English. Scruton, FG, p. 158. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 161. I should say that in the Gifford lectures Scruton is aware that he needs to account for what is known as ‘agent causation’, and he spends some pages worrying about it, but he never resolves that worry and simply drops the topic and moves on.

Part Two

Recalling the Sacred: Philosophical and Theological Sources

9

On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard Christopher S. Morrissey

Introduction: The common structure of myth Roger Scruton has been able to express how atheism and impiety, despite a pretence of rationality, are in fact irrational, because piety and the belief in God are rational, although ‘not amenable to reason’.1 This phrase neatly recognizes the sacred boundary drawn for reason. Insight into the meaning of that boundary is what we may find illuminated for us in art and in myth. Thus in ‘Perictione’s Parmenides’, the second of the Xanthippic Dialogues, Scruton has Plato’s mother, Perictione, argue for the rationality of belief in the seemingly irrational. Life has three stages: wholeness; alienation; and a return at last to ‘a higher and more glorious form of the original innocence’.2 Perictione explains how rational beings spontaneously attach themselves to myths and expect an eschatological reward for their sufferings because they want to return to their original state. The sufferings of the hero are rewarded at journey’s end. The hero achieves final unity and supreme consciousness in the afterlife. Scruton, through Perictione, explores how myths and stories differ in detail but nevertheless possess this kind of common structure. Apparently, this common structure is their truth, and its apprehension the source of their beauty. René Girard’s own theory about the origins of the common structure discernible in myth has been a constant fascination for Scruton since he first encountered it.3 Perhaps Girard’s essay on ‘Nietzsche and Contradiction’,4 with its interpretation of Wagner’s Parsifal, has made the deepest impression on him, because of the way Girard’s theory helps unveil the meaning of that work’s truth and beauty. However, Scruton’s philosophical evaluation of Girard is ambivalent. On the one hand, he seems to be convinced by Girard’s fundamental insights: for example, in the ways in which Girard’s theory can enhance our appreciation

100

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

of the greatest works of art. On the other hand, in some places Scruton seems to distance himself from Girard. Scruton’s most recent stance on Girard maintains that, despite whatever beauty and truth may be found in him, nonetheless he ultimately offers only a ‘myth of origins’, because his theory must assume what it sets out to prove.5 In response to Scruton’s reservation that Girard seems to offer only a ‘myth of origins’, I would wish to make three points. The first point would be to distinguish, with the scholastics, per se causality from per accidens causality, which disposes of the infinite regress that Scruton sees in Girard’s scapegoating scene: the alleged infinite regress of assuming the presence of the thought of the sacred in the first humans that they are able to identify subsequently in their experience. The second point is that while this scholastic distinction illuminates the truth in Scruton’s view of the presence of God (‘The knowledge of his presence comes with the failure to find him’6), it allows us to go beyond the Kantian limits Scruton places on our knowledge of God, since the distinction affirms we can reason from visible effects in this world to the unseen cause of all actuality, as Aquinas does in his Five Proofs for the existence of God. My third point is that the first human thought is the thought of the sacred (i.e. the first inner word is ‘God’), generated at the original moment of scapegoating when sacred and profane are first distinguished in the primary act of ratio: i.e. setting off the sacred over and against the profane, a mental act which then becomes the foundation of all later evolution of syntactic thought, which is species-specific to humans.7

1 Per se causality: Disposing of any per accidens infinite regress Edward Feser explains the distinction between per se causality and per accidens causality: ‘In the former sort of series, every cause other than the first is instrumental, its causal power derived from the first.’8 For example: the stick that the hand uses to push the stone has no power to push the stone on its own, but derives its stone-moving power from the hand, which uses it as an ‘instrument.’ … By contrast, causes ordered per accidens or ‘accidentally’ do not essentially depend for their efficacy on the activity of earlier causes in the series. To use Aquinas’s example, a father possesses the power to generate sons independently of the activity of his own father, so that a series of fathers



On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard

101

and sons is in that sense ordered per accidens rather than per se (though each member of such a series is also dependent in various other respects on causal series ordered per se).9

This distinction is the key to seeing the truth of the premise, invoked by Aquinas in his demonstrations of God’s existence, that there can be no infinite regress when it comes to explaining the actuality asymmetrically animating reality (i.e. esse, the actuality of existence, which is found in a per se causal series, traceable back to the divine source that activates actuality through primary causality). The same scholastic distinction is also key to realizing how there is no infinite regress in Girard’s scapegoating scenario. The effect of scapegoating (the external human recognition of the sacred: first in the deified victim, then in myth and ritual) does not circularly presuppose the cause (the internal human knowledge of the sacred as distinguished from the profane). Properly understood, Girard’s scenario explains how the first human thought that the first human had was ‘God’. It was thereby a syntactic thought, setting off God from the environmental Umwelt in a ratio.10 One can think of it metaphorically as a ‘fraction’, with the profane world as the numerator and the sacred as the denominator. But it is the fundamental fraction (the ratio, the syntax) of human thought that allows the fundamental rational distinction between an object and a thing: the object is what it is for my perception, as interpreted by my mind-dependent interests, whereas things (i.e. subjects) are in principle mind-independent. In their substantial reality, subjects are entirely independent of my interests or cognition.11 The tip of the iceberg is the object of our awareness, but the iceberg below the surface is what we can anticipate as rational creatures, thanks to our foundational syntactic ability to add a formal relation of identity to any object in the environment and thereby turn it mentally into a thing (i.e. a subject) as well, detachable from the environment.12 John Deely has argued that this is what Aquinas meant by the activity of the active intellect.13 The iceberg object we encounter in experience can then be, thanks to intellect, a thing (i.e. a subject) imaginable in its, as-yet, unknown depths and, further, imaginable even as multiplied on other planets in other galaxies of the universe. The first thought of ‘God’, set in motion this pattern of intellectual activity: the syntax of thing and object, patterned after the original ratio of sacred and profane.14

102

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

2 The presence of God: From effect to cause, beyond Kantian limits Although Scruton thinks ‘there can be no causal connection between God and our thoughts of him’ and that ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time … is not discoverable to physics’,15 I would point out that it is only with ‘the failure to find him’ on the level of secondary causality that ‘knowledge of his presence comes’.16 We can come to distinguish mentally the nature of primary causality. Primary causality is distinguished from secondary causality only when we realize that God and God alone can be the source of the actuality in any secondary, intramundane nexus of cause and effect. He alone is the per se cause of the actuality of everything that is. This mental recognition can be realized intuitively, in a comprehensive breadth of vision, as in the mysticism of Father Pavel (styled after that of Simone Weil) in Scruton’s Notes from the Underground. But in technical scholastic language, this is exactly what Aquinas means by distinguishing the special type of per se causality that is proper to the actuality of causality: God is present in all be-ing (esse) in this world. ‘The knowledge of his presence comes with the failure to find him’ on the level of secondary causality; which then allows us to grasp what primary causality is, even if we do not formulate that insight with scholastic precision. But it is possible to grasp primary causality. Consider the physical fact-based middle terms,17 which hold even after modern physics,18 by which the premises of Aquinas’ Five Ways logically draw their conclusions about God. They may be enumerated as follows: in the First Way, potency and act as the universal conditions for the activation of motion (the most fundamentally typical natural fact); in the Second Way, any physical operation of efficient agency (embracing the plurality of all possibilities of causes that activate actual effects); in the Third Way, all degrees of material contingency (which any Grand Unified Theory must comprehensively encompass); in the Fourth Way, degrees of formal perfection (whereby even strange effects of quantum entanglement are mind-dependently subordinate to the formal causal activity of observers); in the Fifth Way, intrinsic natural teleology (whereby temporal directionality and natural purposes are embodied within the most fundamental structures of diverse natures).19 Aquinas’s First Way takes its bearings from the physical study of condition and conditioned, because its argument from motion is based on the fundamental physical observation that act asymmetrically conditions potency in our observable universe. With reference to this fundamental physical observation



On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard

103

of the First Way (i.e. due to the fact that it addresses typicality at the most fundamental level, viz. of potency and act), the causal analyses of Aquinas’s four other ways may then be updated with the latest physical observations. The Second Way is updated by considering the Big Bang as an efficient cause event within the framework of all possible universes, thus pushing consideration of plurality to the limits of the multiverse. The Third Way makes an analysis of the material causality correlative to the formal configurations of a changing universe, thereby pushing the thought experiment of reduction to its limits. The Fourth Way considers how intelligence and freedom mark the highest degree of actuality of form in an ordered universe of forms, thereby putting the formal relationality of quantum field theory in perspective. The Fifth Way is updated by an analysis of how temporal directionality and purpose is adumbrated by the universal constants that condition a low entropy universe in which interesting teleology is possible, i.e. our actual universe, as described with uncanny accuracy by general relativity.20 Thus, we can see that Aquinas’s causal analyses of being still affirm our ability to reason from effect to cause and know God. ‘The knowledge of his presence comes with the failure to find him’ on the level of secondary causality. The human creature is eminently capable of performing this rational act of distinguishing cause from effect, because the species originated when this inference was done in the first act of syntactic human thought. In Girardian terms, this is when the dead scapegoat (generating the effect of an uncanny sense of communal peace) is transfigured into a god (the mentally posited per se cause of that effect). The inference is of course mistaken, but it is nonetheless a felix culpa: the birth of rational thought, in the syntactic distinction of a self-identical substance. In its first instance, this is the thought of a divine subject detached from the environmental Umwelt.21 Although at first mistaken, this fundamental syntax of reason, the ratio, will later afford the correct demonstration of God’s existence to be made in the type of thinking to which the Five Ways point: the distinction of primary causality. At least, this is how I am able to understand the matter, wishing both to affirm the ability of natural human reason to know God as sacred, while still wishing to acknowledge, with Girard, the evolutionary origin of the necessary material conditions for such distinctively human knowledge.

104

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

3 Distinguishing sacred and profane: The birth of linguistic syntax The notion of Umwelt was developed by Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and Josef Pieper (1904–97) gives an excellent introduction to the notion in his Leisure: The Basis of Culture for which Scruton in the new translation, after T. S. Eliot for the old, wrote an introduction.22 Girard’s scapegoating scenario permits us to see at what point the human must have evolved within the gradualist unfolding towards the fundamentally syntactic thought (sacred vs. profane), by what is repeated (within the semiotic web of the Umwelt)23 on the way from animality to humanity proper.24 Here in outline is what is repeated: Table 1: The Semiotic Scene of Scapegoating’s Sacrificial Logic (1) SYMPTOM: The fearful contagion of mimetic crisis increases undifferentiation. (2) SIGNAL: Contagion is dangerous and therefore comes from a culpable source. (3) ICON: Anyone still differentiated is designated by that stark iconic difference. (4) INDEX: Violence indicates the one victim, and, by extension (i.e. via the NAME of the god), unanimous community. (5) SYMBOL: Reversal of the mimetic crisis deifies the victim, as a symbol of peace.

I suggest that, eventually, the fourth step within the semiotic scene of scapegoating permits the leap from animal to human. It is at this point that extensional indexicality could have entered into animal consciousness.25 That is, it would have occurred at the point when the animals doing their scapegoating recognized that their violence was not just indexically designating their victim in a productive way that brought them social peace afterwards. It would have occurred when they realized that by extension the scapegoat (who at first, for thousands of years, was deified symbolically, in an unconscious, animal way by them) was now a deity understood as symbolically pointing back at them: i.e. designating them as one unified human community. In other words, the first consciousness of the sacred in explicit contrast with the profane would now accompany the scene’s transition from the fourth to the fifth step. This distinction of sacred and profane would have been the first properly abstract, human thought. The thought of humanity’s communal God, language’s first inner word, may then have subsequently been externalized, at ‘food-sharing and “totem” feasts’, as language’s first outer word – the name of God as uttered.26 This evolution of the species-specific model of humanity is distinguished by the thought of, and the naming of, God. Foundationally, it would have enabled further syntax. It would also have imbued the symbolism of animal prohibitions



On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard

105

and rituals that had evolved around scapegoating with a fresh and important significance. In sum, Girard’s hypothesis is more than a ‘myth of origins’. It should motivate the search for the conditions according to which the explosion of human culture – which we observe suddenly occurring perhaps fifty to sixty thousand years ago – is made possible.27 I argue that the origin of human culture is a non-mythical event in which, paradoxically, myth is born. This paradoxical event can be made intelligible with the help of Girard’s theory. This means taking the origin as the extension of animal scapegoating rituals into the first word of language, ‘God’. This word is first heard only silently in the mute syntactical separation of sacred and profane in thought. Language, in Sebeok’s sense, is thus at the very root of the distinctively exapted human modelling system.28 Because of the limits of the scientific method with respect to history, there is an inescapably speculative dimension to Girard’s hypothesis. Yet Girard, I believe, is correct to maintain his speculation that only the event of a con-specific victim of scapegoating violence would be sufficient, at some point (even if that point is not directly observable now), to motivate effectively the evolution of indexical modelling into extensional indexical modelling. Only the community’s con-specific victim generates an epiphany powerful enough to allow that scapegoated victim to be given the name of God.

Excursus: The Garden of Eden, a stimulating myth of origins Like any good working hypothesis, Girard’s ‘myth of origins’ can stimulate creative thought. It has the potential to initiate new ways of reading the historical sense of the mythical account in Genesis, which might, in turn, open new avenues of possible empirical investigation. Consider the following speculation: let us name Adam and Eve as the hominins that became the first humans. Perhaps they were part of a group of hunter-gatherer hominins that had a scapegoating ritual which both concluded the hunt and re-enacted it, effecting a social cohesion around the hunt animal, e.g. a bison. Violence could thus have been regularly discharged on the bison in a ritual that would indexically mark the bison by their blows. It is possible that one day Adam became human when he realized that the bison was also, by extension, pointing back at its violent attackers: the bison himself was a sign (effectively, a name) for the social cohesion (the divine power) his sacrifice achieved. As a symbol, then, of social peace and order, the bison is consequently able to be named (by extensional

106

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

modelling) as the god, the totem, of the tribe. But it seems more likely that the epiphany effecting such extensional modelling would have to take place within the context of a more momentous and unusual event, i.e. the scapegoating of a con-specific hominin. Girard’s hypothesis could thus be kept in mind and weighed against future empirical research as a fruitful path of examining the evidence. Furthermore, if we allow our speculations to be stimulated by the Girardian hypothesis, a theological point may also motivate a philosophical investigation of the meaning of history. We could speculate that Adam and Eve’s original sin was to have transferred the name of the (bison) god to the con-specific victim in a new scapegoating ritual, executed in similar manner to the old bison hunt (i.e. the ritual already familiar to their hominin species). In other words, the first murder of man by one of his fellows could have given birth to a transcendental notion of the sacred, including the knowledge of the victim’s innocence. After death, the victim would be recognized retrospectively as ‘one of us’, but one who did not share the violent motivations of his killers.29 But this transcendental thought could have quickly degenerated into a purely intramundane notion of the sacred, like the loss of ‘innocence’, a loss to the first human awareness of the victim’s independent standing as a con-specific subject. Human consciousness would then have fallen back into its ancient animal pattern, the scapegoating pattern that misattributes sacrality to the victim of violence, thus initiating the need for mythical clothing of the new victim’s con-specific nature. The idea captured in this speculation can be explained with the help of metaphor. Adam and Eve, historically understood along the lines of this speculation as innocent, would have been allowed by God to eat of the ‘fruit’ of any ‘tree’: i.e. the flesh of any animal, like the bison. The flesh of his fellow man (a con-specific), however, is ‘forbidden’. The original sin thus exalts the con-specific (the one who is like Adam and Eve) into the role of the tribal god. Effectively, this would be how Adam, Eve, and their fellow species-members could have become ‘like gods’. Therefore, the power of scapegoating could have been deployed in a new way at the root of a uniquely human culture. This new culture alone knows the name of god. It is human culture that possesses ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ which then becomes buried in human consciousness. By going beneath the layers of myth that distort the true memory of this cultural origin, the myth of the Garden of Eden can help us to retrieve an awareness of culture’s origin. In this Girardian speculation, I am suggesting that perhaps the fabled Edenic desire to ‘be like gods’ is to be found historically in that first horrible moment when man slays one of his fellows, a



On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard

107

con-specific (but not yet human) scapegoat which then falls out of conscious awareness by succumbing to the temptation of the first mythical denial of murder. The murdered con-specific hominin would thus have become transfigured by the original sin of the nascent human culture into a transcendentally false but intramundanely efficacious god.30

Conclusion: Birth, sexual union, marriage and ordinary death I return now to Scruton’s own speculations on wholeness, alienation and return as the common structure of myth. With a Girardian eye, we can see this common structure paralleled in the scapegoating scene: the recurring pattern of social cohesion, social dissolution and sacrificial restoration. Scruton, however, would have us direct our attention to the presence of the sacred in birth, sexual union, marriage and ordinary death. He argues that such rites of passage are more important to human life than any scapegoating ritual.31 During times of peace, I would readily concede the point. Any individual naturally prefers to focus on his or her own journey of membership within society. Nevertheless, I believe Girard is right to discern that only the initial foundation of peace makes possible such meaningful, cultural activity. Collective peace precedes the individual within society. Furthermore, these cultural events, to which Scruton redirects our attention, must be understood as highly significant events for individuals precisely because they derive their sacred power from the scapegoating scene that enables their social significance. Thanks to that semiotic scene, our human species is able to achieve the mental recognition of the actuality that primary causality has in the development of human culture as it unfolds. We can thus witness what reason alone allows us to witness. In the environmental Umwelt, the objective dance of causality is visible to the rational eye, but so is the invisible syntax of the subject, metaphysically supporting that vision. In this way, we witness the generation of meaning: in birth and death (efficient causality, from origin to demise, transmitting the mysterious actuality, the gift of the uncaused cause, that plays itself out in the individual person); in sexual union (material causality, the material preconditions that perpetuate the circulation of actuality on the intramundane level of secondary causality); and in marriage (formal causality, the highest degree of actuality in the lives of bodies with minds), whereby we subjects shape ourselves as persons, to attain our spiritual destiny (the final cause), that of persons seeking the face of the beloved.

108

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

The causal patterns and semiotic significances discoverable in our individual lives are more than mere myths. The truth and beauty of René Girard’s hypothesis is that these may be seen as variations on a common structure, a foundational syntax of themes. In a neat twist, reason itself can learn to recognize, in the violent music of its very own origins, the strange material from which our redemption is to be composed.

Notes   1 The phrase ‘rational but not amenable to reason’ is from Roger Scruton, PP, pp. 118, 124.   2 Scruton, XD, p. 84.   3 The references made to René Girard by Roger Scruton in his books are found in Scruton, WR, pp. 37–8; DDH, pp. 166–74, 180; GR, pp. 228–31; APP, pp. 126–30, 140–1; CC, p. 88; ID, p. 170; Beauty, p. 213; UP, p. 192; GP, p. 213; OC pp. 15, 133, 181, 196 n.9, 198 n.34; FG, p. 162; SW, pp. 18–22, 88, 180–2. See also Scruton, ‘The Sacred and the Human’, Prospect Magazine (1 August 2007): http://www. prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/roger-scruton-on-religion/ [accessed 5 August 2014].   4 René Girard, ‘Nietzsche and Contradiction’, Stanford Italian Review 6 (1–2): 53–65. Girard’s other sustained discussions of Nietzsche are found in Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Mimesis, Literature, and Anthropology (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 61–83; René Girard, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (Crossroad, 1996), pp. 244–61; René Girard, ‘The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche’, in Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard, ed. Paul Dumouchel (London: Athlone Press 1988), pp. 227–46; and René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), pp. 170–81.   5 Scruton, FG, p. 162; SW, p. 21. By ‘myth of origins’ Scruton means one of those incomparably suggestive ‘imaginative explorations of the dark origins of religion in the first human communities’ (Scruton, APP, p. 128).   6 Scruton, SW, p. 10. This paradox is also explored in Scruton, NG.   7 The notion of syntax I use is the special sense given to the word by Robert Sokolowski in Phenomenology of the Human Person (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also my discussion of this notion of syntax in Morrissey, ‘How Agent Intellect Enables a Syntactic Interior Word: Aquinas’s Contribution Within Neoplatonism’, Quaestiones Disputatae: A Journal of Philosophical Inquiry and Discussion, 2 (1, 2) (Spring–Fall 2011): 165–84.



On Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard

109

  8 Edward Feser, ‘A first without a second’ (4 July 2011), blog post: http://edwardfeser. blogspot.ca/2011/07/first-without-second.html (accessed 8 September 2015): ‘God is “first” cause not in the sense of coming before the second, third, and fourth causes, but rather in the sense of being absolutely fundamental, that apart from which nothing could cause (because nothing could exist) at all. As serious students of the Five Ways know, the sorts of causal series Aquinas traces to God as First Cause are causal series ordered per se, not causal series ordered per accidens.’ See also Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008), pp. 69–73.   9 Edward Feser, ‘Edwards on infinite causal series’ (23 August 2010), blog post: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2010/08/edwards-on-infinite-causal-series.html (accessed 8 September 2015). 10 Cf. John Deely, ‘Umwelt’, Semiotica 134 (1–4) (2001): 125–35. 11 Cf. John Deely, Purely Objective Reality (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009). 12 The terminology matches Scruton’s emphasis on human persons as subjects (cf. Scruton, FG and SW), although the distinction between objects and subjects in the Thomistic sense extends in principle to all beings. 13 John Deely, Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2007). 14 See note 8 above. 15 Scruton, SW, p. 8. 16 Ibid., p. 10. 17 Cf. William A. Wallace, ‘Some Demonstrations in the Philosophy of Nature’, in The Thomist Reader, Texts and Studies, 1957 (Washington, DC: The Thomist Press, 1957), pp. 90–118. See also his masterpiece, The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), for a complete account of how demonstrative reasoning works in science. 18 Wolfgang Smith, The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1995; San Rafael, CA: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2005 [3rd edn]) explains how modern physics vindicates a Thomistic philosophy of nature founded on the distinction between potency and act. See also Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, Germany: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). 19 Cf. Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), pp. 62–130. 20 This is my way of organizing my own thoughts about the Five Ways, in response to the terminology employed in the essay by the physicist Dr Robert B. Mann, ‘Physics at the Theological Frontiers’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (25 June 2012): http://www.csca.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ PhysicsAtTheTheologicalFrontiersMann2012.pdf (accessed 8 September 2015). But

110

21

22

23 24

25

26

27 28 29

30

31

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

I have also been influenced by the defence made of the Five Ways by Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), pp. 90–119. For more on my thoughts, see my ‘Aquinas’s Third Way as a Reply to Stephen Hawking’s Cosmological Hypothesis’, Études maritainiennes – Maritain Studies XXVII (2011): 99–121. Cf. John Deely, ‘The Thomistic Import of the Neo-Kantian Concept of Umwelt in Jakob von Uexküll’, Angelicum 81 (4) (2005): 711–32; originally presented as a colloquium at the Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, 19 February 2004. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbury (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), pp. 80–9. Scruton’s introduction in this edition is found at pp. xi–xiii. See note 10 above. On what biologically marks this transition, see John Deely, ‘The Primary Modeling System in Animals’, in La filosofia del linguaggio come arte dell’ascolto: sulla ricerca scientifica di Augusto Ponzio / Philosophy of Language as the Art of Listening: on Augusto Ponzio’s Scientific Research, ed. Susan Petrilli (Bari: Edizione dal Sud, 2007), pp. 161–79. I am indebted to the terminology of and distinctions made by Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 85–107. The entire book carefully outlines how to distinguish iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity. Cf. René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014), pp. 85–91. I am using Sebeok’s idiosyncratic but technical distinction between ‘language’ and ‘speech’; see Sebeok and Danesi, The Forms of Meaning, pp. 83–5, and also Deely, ‘The Primary Modeling System in Animals’ (cited respectively in notes 24 and 25 above). Cf. Sebeok and Danesi, The Forms of Meaning, pp. 83–5, 162–5 (cited in note 25 above). Cf. note 26 above. Note how this part of the semiotic scene of scapegoating fits perfectly with Scruton’s own metaphysical speculations on the origin of our idea of the sacred; cf. Scruton, FG, pp. 160–3; SW, pp. 21, 183. This section, and the preceding section on the semiotic scene of scapegoating, both recapitulate as well as rework some arguments found in my chapter, ‘Deferral of War: The Religious Sign System of Ritual Violence’, in Gabriel R. Ricci, ed., Faith, War, and Violence. Religion and Public Life, Vol. 39 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014). Some of these speculations were first presented in a public lecture at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre, ‘The History of Human Desire’ (4 December 2010): http://youtu.be/PpRErIouCp0 (accessed 8 September 2015). Scruton, SW, p. 21.

10

The Problem with Plato James Bryson

The human form is sacred for us because it bears the stamp of our embodiment. The wilful desecration of the human form … has become, for many people, a kind of compulsion. And this desecration … is also a denial of love. It is an attempt to remake the world as if love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is what is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture: it is a loveless culture, which is afraid of beauty because it is disturbed by love.1 Roger Scruton, Beauty Like Plato, Roger Scruton sees eros as a fundamental and urgent philosophical problem. Plato looms large for Scruton, but he also cuts a deeply ambivalent figure, whose incomplete account of eros obscures what it is to be fully human – what Scruton calls the incarnate subject. On Scruton’s reading, Plato’s failure to give a complete doctrine of love bleeds into his entire philosophy, especially his vision of the ideal political order, where the institutions in which love has traditionally flourished – religion and the family – are remade or discarded for the sake of a kingdom governed solely by reason. This is Plato the intellectual ancestor of Enlightenment rationalism. But Scruton is also attracted to Plato the ‘philosophical anthropologist’.2 Plato rightly flags the dangers of our erotic impulses, understands them as social artefacts that govern our most intimate and important relationships, and recognizes that eros is at the root of our religious instincts – our desire to return to a primeval condition when the world was good and entirely ours. Interestingly, Scruton identifies an offshoot of the Platonic tradition – a tradition that considered the Platonic dialogues sacred texts – through which Plato’s theory of eros might be rescued from the dualism it ostensibly promotes between our animal and rational natures. Scruton claims

112

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

to agree with ‘at least one tradition of neo-platonism’ that upholds erotic love as a form of desire and also as a form of love.

The Problem with Plato In Sexual Desire, his most philosophically rigorous discussion of eros, Scruton says that a major purpose of the work is to combat the ‘moral and philosophical impulse’ that leads Plato to consign desire to the animal part of our nature.3 True eros, Plato argues, according to Scruton, comes about only through the conquest of desire, and therefore sexual attraction is merely a premonition of a more refined beauty or, alternatively, it may deteriorate into lust. This is why, Scruton claims, Platonic eros takes place principally between members of the same sex, since only then does sexual desire have nothing to do with its aim. The logic of Platonic love leads either to an intellectual love of God or to a spiritual union with another in beatitude – a relationship that closely resembles religious devotion.4 Plato’s account of eros makes it impossible to see how sexual desire can be an expression or form of love. In short, Plato makes desire a mere structure of bodily appetite that can only realize itself by ceasing to be love of an incarnate human being. Scruton concludes his most explicit criticisms of Plato by expressing his distaste for what he calls the most ‘intolerable’ part of Diotima’s revelation to Socrates: that ‘erotic love, which begins in warm enjoyment of the human individual, ends in dispassionate contemplation of the divine universal’.5 What Scruton finds intolerable in the Platonic ascent to the beautiful is that it involves a move away from the concrete to the abstract. In practice, this kind of love could become completely indifferent to the person who first moved the lover to ascend in the first place. Scruton illustrates this criticism of Plato dramatically in his satirical yet deeply philosophical Xanthippic Dialogues. Plato the character is a callous lover who makes a sexual conquest of an unsuspecting woman and hates himself for it, not for how he treats his lover, but for being a slave to his sexual passions. We also discover that Plato had an ambivalent relationship to his mother and exhibited the psychology of a child from a broken home, hence his hostility to the family and his misunderstanding of the nature of loving relationships. This youthful Plato (Scruton puts him at eighteen) announces his grand plans to remake the Athenian polis to his mother, Perictione, who represents the institution of the family. Naturally, she thinks him ridiculous. She is particularly critical of his insistence that the passions ought to be subordinated to reason,



The Problem with Plato

113

rather than organizing them in concert with reason to develop what she calls the ‘right emotions towards the right objects in the right degree’.6 Plato lacks what his mother thinks most important: style. This is illustrated most poignantly when we discover the real reason that Plato was not present during Socrates’ last hours: his favourite rock band was in town!7 Like Plato, Scruton is a master of irony. Much of what he criticizes Plato for – especially for what he claims Plato leaves out – are principal themes of the dialogues. For example, Scruton contends (using Xanthippe, the mother of Socrates, as his mouthpiece) that because Plato sees no place for the family in his reimagination of the political order, children will not learn the virtue of sacrifice that comes from loving another person: Xan: You will concede that no virtue tends to the good of society so much as the virtue of sacrifice, and it remains only to establish how that virtue is to be learned. Soc: I am impatient to hear your theory, Xanthippe. Xan: Does a child learn physics by studying the latest theories, and sitting with those who debate them? Soc: By no means. Xan: In general, I think, a child must begin with the simplest and most immediate examples: such as that apples fall from trees? Soc: I cannot deny it. Xan: So a child will learn the virtue of sacrifice only if there are reasons for sacrifice which can be understood by a child? Soc: So it would seem. Xan: Now your Plato offers no such reasons. Oh, I grant that the little monsters in his crèche will be beaten into a kind of discipline. But that means only that they behave well out of self-interest, being afraid of punishment, and by no means for the sake of another’s good … let me come quickly to the point. A child finds his first motive to sacrifice through love, and through love alone. This is the thing which causes him to set the good of another above his own desires. Soc: I don’t like the sound of this.8

Of course, for Plato, sacrifice lies at the heart of the philosophical life. The death of Socrates and the manner in which it came about is a testament to this. Diotima’s revelation to Socrates is not the conclusion of the Symposium. One might read on to discover Alcibiades’ witness to the virtue of Socrates, who risked his life in battle to save him and then refused to be rewarded or formally acknowledged for his heroism. This is the kind of selfless virtue that has won Socrates the

114

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

admiration of Christians down the centuries. I quote the Oxford Platonist and spiritual mentor of George Herbert (one of Scruton’s favourites), Thomas Jackson: The Christian modesty I have learned long since of the heathen Socrates, to beseech my God he would vouchsafe me such a portion of wealth, or whatsoever this world esteems, as none but an honest, upright, religious mind can bear … that of all my labours under the sun, I may reap the fruit in holiness, and in the end, the end of these my present meditations, everlasting life.9

This is Socrates the very embodiment of the erotic life. But perhaps Scruton would answer that Plato does not believe in sacrifice for the right reasons. Socrates does not lay down his life for his wife, children or a friend; he dies for his commitment to the ‘examined life’.10 Scruton wishes to defend the unexamined life, as he puts it, the spontaneous certainty that arises from loving another person.11 One of the many highpoints of Scruton’s parody of the Symposium is his reimagination of Aristophanes’ speech, delivered by perhaps the most virtuous of the women in attendance at the party, Plato’s nurse. She takes a very dim view of what eros will drive people to, and explains that it is particularly hard on women and children, especially when it goes wrong, as it often does in her experience. To explain our enslavement to desire, the nurse offers an account of our original condition of unity with the opposite sex. Following in a tradition prominent in the Renaissance that took Aristophanes’ speech as evidence that Plato had read Moses, Scruton conflates and reinterprets Genesis and the Symposium. The original human was neither a man who needed a companion, nor a hermaphrodite: she was a pregnant woman bearing a son. The breakup of this original condition and the attempt to recapture it govern all subsequent romantic and family dynamics good or ill. For Scruton, this is the genius of Platonic reminiscence: it is the attempt to recall a primeval condition of lost innocence, the irrational ground of our desire to return to this original state of being. Importantly this is an irrational need of rational creatures, underlying our need for myth, as well as our need for metaphysics.12 It is precisely at this point, I think, that Scruton finds common ground with the Neoplatonic tradition.

Eros and Neoplatonism In his treatise on eros, Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, offers his own exegesis of the Symposium. Perhaps the most important aspect of love, for Plotinus, is that



The Problem with Plato

115

it tells us something about our origins: our longing for the beautiful is, in the first place (as Scruton also puts it), literally irrational – alogon. We intuit that eros belongs to us. Plotinus calls it an intimate kinship that points beyond itself to its archetype – its cause in the good and the beautiful. Romantic love, he argues, must be tempered by recollection, otherwise the lovers will not know what is happening to them. By understanding it as the condition of our being, one can suffer love, for Plotinus, through the virtue of moderation. Love structures the entire Neoplatonic cosmos. The very nature of reality is erotic, beginning in heaven with Nous (the most immediate emanation of the One), which both desires the One above it and, as a result, produces the world soul beneath it. Like Nous, the nature of human love is to work in two directions; it is directed both to earthly things like romance and marriage and upwards to its origins in heaven. As Scruton puts it, quoting one of the great twentieth-century Neoplatonic poets, T. S. Eliot, the erotic soul lives at ‘the point of intersection of the timeless/ With time’.13 While Plotinus certainly accepts Socrates’ correction of Agathon’s speech that eros cannot be a God, because it is defined not by what it has but by what it lacks, he takes the myth about love’s origins – that he was born of poverty and plenty – to describe the soul’s amphibious condition. I quote from Ennead III, 5, 9: And [the soul] is a mixed thing, having a part of need, in that he wishes to be filled, but not without a share of plenitude, in that he seeks what is wanting to that which he already has; for certainly that which is altogether without a share in the good would not ever seek the good.14

This Plotinian doctrine lives on in the Christian tradition through Augustine who echoes Plotinus in the Confessions when he says that he would not seek God if he had not in some sense already found him.15 For the Neoplatonist, it is the nature of eros to tend back to, and therefore be a sign of, its origins. Plotinus also reads Plato through the lens of Aristotelian hylomorphism. For him, the natural condition of the soul is embodiment. In the terms of Plato’s mythology, the body represents the part of eros that is in need. In philosophical terms, the body has the character of matter, which is to say that it is indefinite, hence in every way in need, completely lacking reason and form, which it must be given by the soul. But by no means is embodiment a bad thing. Indeed, matter is potentially the receptacle of the Good, the means by which the soul may return to its origins through its natural capacity to receive. However, because of its indefinite nature, the body must be directed towards good and beautiful things. As is the case for Scruton, for the Neoplatonist, nothing matters more than what and indeed whom we love. And like Scruton, Plotinus

116

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

justifies the use of myth because it offers us a hermeneutical vehicle to put back together in our imagination what is separated by our reason. As is well known, the goal of the philosophical life for Plotinus is mystical union with God. While Scruton and Plotinus agree on the importance of myth for the human imagination and its desire to return to an original state of being, and on the unique opportunity the soul’s embodiment provides for eros, he is reluctant to embrace the mystical goal of Neoplatonism. Scruton expresses his ambivalence in Sexual Desire: A neo-Platonist theologian might argue that our incarnation is necessary because of its epistemic opportunities: for it presents us with the opportunity to know ourselves and others as individuals, and so to feel the pathos of eternal loyalties. Similarly, he might justify the ardour of desire, as the most important moment in our need both to unite as individuals and to recognise the endlessness of the vow which springs from our union. We, who lack that serene vision, must accommodate the trouble of desire in other ways.16

How should we understand Scruton’s ambivalence to the Neoplatonic solution to the problem of desire? It seems to me that there are at least two related problems in the Neoplatonic tradition that make it difficult for Scruton to accept its understanding of desire. The first is that Neoplatonism does not distinguish the creature from God as two beings set over and against one another. This is the assumption lying behind the thesis of Bishop Nygren, for which Scruton has some sympathy, that whereas pagan eros involves a kind of acquisitive desire, Christian agape, by contrast, is characterized by a selfless, beneficent giving or neighbour-love.17 I quote Scruton’s interpretation of the Nygren argument from The Face of God: In Plato eros arises in a god-like way – that is to say, as an external and invading force, which overwhelms the psyche. But it ascends like a fire, and carries the subject heavenward, to the realm of the forms which is the kingdom of God. St Paul, by contrast, emphasizes agape, which comes to us from God, rather than raising us to him. The downward turning love of the almighty fills us with gratitude, and we reciprocate by spreading it outwards to our neighbours here on earth.18

The Neoplatonists also belong to a tradition of mystical thinkers who, as Scruton puts it, ‘pursue dark thoughts at the edge of language, and who cast shadows over all they approach’.19 For Scruton, the mystical tradition of the medieval Abrahamic religions is the logical outcome of eros in the Platonic



The Problem with Plato

117

tradition and is perhaps the best that can be hoped for from it; but this tradition is by its very nature extreme and dangerously reduces the incarnate subject to a kind of existential need, oblivious to his fellow man. The essence of the mystical tradition is captured artistically, for Scruton, by Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Her face is eclipsed, her body a mere appendage, and her very self is ‘like a place abandoned and falling into ruin’.20 Scruton’s worry about a metaphysics of transcendence and immanence is consistent with his criticism of this mystical tradition. He writes: The paradox of the transcendent God who is immanent in the world of his creation, of the eternal and immutable who moves and changes in time, of the remote sustainer who is an object and subject of love – this paradox is symbolized in the rituals of the temple and also resolved there. Do we just say that these are things we cannot understand, and that the ritual is there to rescue the incomprehensible by re-presenting it as a mystery? That is often said of the Christian Eucharist. But it makes the dividing line between faith and scepticism too fine.21

One might answer that separating the transcendent from the immanent, agape from eros, God from creature, runs the very risk that Scruton sets out to avoid. As Scruton himself points out at a different stage of his argument, agape without eros can be impersonal. It does not make the intimate investment in its object that the erotic lover does. Once again, Scruton helpfully clarifies his point by turning to art. The smile of an angel on a medieval cathedral, for example, representing agape, can make us uncomfortable; it is not a ‘tender smile, the smile of the flesh that one lover confers on another or that a mother confers on her child. It has a willed and abstract quality.’22 This is the form of love that Socrates practises from Scruton’s point of view: the love that looks through and subordinates the individual to the abstract universal. To argue as Scruton does with the help of images, one might challenge the need to separate the Greek from the Christian, neighbour-love from desire, the transcendent from the immanent, and God from creature with a painting roughly contemporaneous with Bernini’s Theresa: Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus in Santa Maria del Popolo. Here we also find an eclipse of the face as the result of the subject’s encounter with the transcendent, but the viewer is also meant to be aware of Paul’s subsequent history preaching Christian love. This is the Neoplatonic interpretation of Paul, the fusion of the transcendent and the immanent, that entered into the Christian tradition through a fifth-century Greek theologian posing as a disciple of St Paul, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite.

118

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

This mysticism often can be misinterpreted as promoting some kind of ecstatic paradox in which the mystic forgets the world around him. Caravaggio preempts this objection by making the horse and the groom oblivious to what is happening to Paul. While at first blush Paul initially seems to be undergoing a real physical ordeal, Caravaggio makes it clear that his experience in fact must be internal, since the horse and groom do not notice it. Dionysius provides the metaphysical apparatus for Caravaggio’s painting. It is beyond the scope of this essay to offer a full-blooded account of the Neoplatonic metaphysics that Dionysius inherits. It is enough to say here that Dionysius argues for our ontological dependence on our creator, who freely creates from his ecstatic love for his creatures; and as the basis for their constitution, he simultaneously returns his creatures to himself through his love that brought them into being, and they return to him by receiving it. Here is how Dionysius interprets Paul’s conversion: Wherefore the great Paul, having come to be in possession of divine love (eros), and participating in its ecstatic power, says with inspired mouth, ‘I live, and yet not I, but Christ lives in me’, as a true lover and, as he says, ecstatic to God, and living not his own life but the life of the beloved, as greatly cherished.23

For the Neoplatonist, the mystical experience is not an obscure paradox, but a precise metaphysical truth, perfectly consistent with the faith that Scruton defends, the faith required to accept with piety our condition of dependence – the givenness of our being.

Conclusion The metaphysical account of the mystical experience that the Neoplatonist offers should allay some of Scruton’s concerns about the Platonic tradition and indeed about Plato himself. Certainly, Scruton’s philosophy of desire must and does engage deeply with Plato and his Neoplatonic successors. Reading Plato through the lens of the Neoplatonic tradition makes it easier to see how central a place both myth and sacrifice have for Plato, even if he appears hostile to the institutions in which these are traditionally nurtured. Moreover, Platonism provides the metaphysical backbone to much of the art and literature through which Scruton develops his own philosophical worldview, including the works of Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, George Herbert and T. S. Eliot, among so many others. Perhaps its cultural contribution, never mind its metaphysical coherence and ethical potency, is reason enough to reevaluate what a metaphysically informed mystical tradition can offer to a philosopher of eros.



The Problem with Plato

Notes  1 Scruton, Beauty, p. 178.   2 This is how Scruton describes his own philosophical method in SD, p. 14.   3 Scruton, SD, p. 2.   4 Scruton offers the example of Dante’s love for Beatrice, ibid., p. 217.   5 Ibid., p. 223.   6 Scruton, XD, p. 50.   7 Ibid., p. 108.   8 Ibid., p. 34.   9 Thomas Jackson, The Eternal Truth of the Scriptures (London: 1613), To The Christian Reader. 10 Scruton, XD, p. 12. 11 Ibid., p. 50. 12 Scruton, XD, pp. 80–2. 13 Scruton, SD, p. 357. The lines are from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. 14 Plotinus, 7 vols, ed. and trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1966–88). 15 Augustine, Confessions, Book I. 16 Scruton, SD, p. 136. 17 A. Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. P. S. Watson (London: SPCK, 1953). 18 Scruton, FG, p. 101. 19 Ibid., p. 74. 20 Ibid., p. 106. 21 Ibid., p. 53. 22 Ibid., p. 103. 23 The Divine Names, IV, 13, 712A, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. C. Luibheid and P. Rorem (London: SPCK, 1987).

119

11

Hierophany or Theophany? Douglas Hedley

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn Roger Scruton is an eminent member of a tradition of English thought about aesthetics that extends from T. S. Eliot to Coleridge, Burke and Sir Philip Sidney. In all of those writers the role of religion is prominent and clear. They may, as in the case of Eliot and Coleridge, have involved journeys from Unitarianism to Christian Orthodoxy. Yet, with the possible exception of Burke, none of those figures are empiricists. As Scruton admits on the first page of his book on Imagination, aesthetics tends to be the stronghold of Idealism, especially in its Platonic form.1 He, by contrast, is working within an Empiricist mode. Yet aesthetics for Scruton is a relentless struggle against the reductionism of contemporary scientism.

122

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Sartre on imagination In his first book, Art and Imagination (1974) Roger Scruton developed a precise and masterful theory of the imagination and put it to the service of an aesthetic theory. While he uses the style and techniques of analytic philosophy, there is nevertheless the imprint of Sartre on this early work. Scruton uses the language of Wittgenstein (‘seeing as’) and Frege (‘unasserted thought’) but his theory resembles that of Sartre in various ways. Scruton admits to a deep but highly ambivalent attraction to Sartre, obviously one of his deepest influences. Yet consider his remark: ‘[i]f ever I were to read Sartre again, I would look for a 1964 Burgundy to wash the poison down. Small chance of finding one, however.’2 We can draw a broad distinction between generic or universal and a special theory of the imagination. Kant and Hume constitute typical examples of a generic theory of the imagination as pervading perception. Sartre and Wittgenstein represent instances of the special theory. On such a special theory, imagining constitutes a very special form of perceiving. Scruton strongly supports such a special account. Sartre in his work L’imaginaire: psychologie phenomenologique de l’imagination3 presents a critique of both Descartes’s limited view of imagination as ‘decayed sense’, and Husserl’s conflation of imagination and perception. In opposition to these inadequate extremes, Sartre attempts to establish a tertium quid. First, for Sartre, the imagination is not an extra component to consciousness and the image is not spatially ‘within’ the realm of consciousness. Imagination is, rather, a different kind of consciousness: indeed a mode of, or act of consciousness, rather than a container, as it were, of quasi objects. This is what he famously calls the ‘illusion of Immanence’. Second, the imagination, for Sartre, is a quasi-perception – it has perceptual characteristics but differs from perception. For example, we cannot be surprised by the imagination. There are no surprises and disappointments when we are imagining. Further, the object of imagination is itself ‘nothing’. This nothingness is the basis of freedom. As Mary Warnock observes, ‘it is impossible to exaggerate the importance which Sartre attaches to the power of denial, of asserting not only what is but what is not the case’.4 Mankind is the ‘l’être par qui le néant arrive dans le monde’.5 Without the capacity to imagine, Sartre avers, life would be dictated by the real. It is because consciousness is able to posit the irréel, that it can escape the dictates of the world. Fourth, we have the passivity of perception. We discover the



Hierophany or Theophany?

123

object of perception. Imagination is spontaneity, but a pre-volitional spontaneity. Imagined objects disappear as soon as we stop thinking of them. Sartre uses the example of Peter as imagined. If he actually comes into the field of vision, the ‘image’ of Peter in the imagination disappears. Sartre is concerned to posit a distinctive region of the imaginary. This provides a basis for his theory of art. His study of the imagination reveals an objective human activity grounded in our capacity to find consolation in the irréel. The work of art and the aesthetic object are irrealities: beauty is a value that can only ever be applied to the imaginary.6

Sartre and Scruton When turning to Scruton’s theory of imagination, let us remind ourselves that the arguments of Sartre depend upon contrasting imagination and perception. The radical distinction between imagination and the items of belief is key to Scruton’s theory. He stresses the distinctively ‘aesthetic attitude’: the aesthetic response is characterized by the fact that we are not responding to a real object but an imaginary one. He writes, ‘My experience of a work of art involves a distinctive order of intentionality, derived from imagination and divorced from belief and judgement.’7 Scruton identifies imagination as ‘unasserted thought’: it should not be identified with what is ‘given’ to the senses, but with what we can summon. Imagination is a rational endeavour and there are appropriate employments of it: In aesthetic appreciation we might say that the perception of an object is brought into relation with a thought of the object … this is one of the main activities of the imagination … an aesthetic attitude towards a present object will lead to the thought and emotions characteristic of imagination … the object serves as a focal point on which many different thoughts and feelings are brought to bear.8

Scruton’s special theory of the imagination guarantees the unique status of human beings. If we have this capacity to posit unreal objects and to dwell upon aesthetic realms, then this is a capacity that distinguishes us from other animals. It is grounded in the consciousness of the irreality of its objects. However, if we conflate imagination and perception, this central aspect of human life, the ability to conjure the unreal and to contrast it with the real, becomes lost. An animal can see but cannot imagine. Scruton emphasizes the voluntary nature of imagination as giving a key to the creative imagination. He employs the example of Flaubert who:

124

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

[w]hen he set himself to imagine what it would be like for someone of a vain romantic disposition to be married to a country doctor in provincial France, he did not tell a story about the likely consequences of such a marriage. He chose the details of his story in the light of what he thought to be most revealing and expressive of the provincial state of mind, whether or not such details were in any way likely to occur.9

The quality of the imaginative is that which goes beyond the facts. From this source, on Scruton’s account, we have the capacity to have moral and aesthetic experience. This is foundational for Scruton’s contrast between Fantasy and Imagination. Imagination is a way of understanding reality through art, whereas fantasy is a flight from reality. Fantasy is based upon feelings that are real and genuine generated by unreal objects. For the imagination, there is a contrast, where ‘neither feelings nor the Objects are real. The feeling is an imagined response to the imagined object that compels it. In fantasy there is a real feeling which, in being prohibited, compels an unreal object for its gratification.’10 In Scruton’s work, we find both an existential restlessness complemented by profound and illuminating explorations of sexuality and death. Beauty and the sacred point to the spirit that hovers over our world. Perhaps there is a Scruton who is caught up in the world of Sartre between the en-soi and the pour soi and haunted by the transcendent like Baudelaire, a world in which there are real correspondences between our yearnings and the ultimate structure of the universe. Sartre was a savage critic of Baudelaire’s inauthenticity, his failure to develop a properly Promethean view of life. Yet Sartre was captivated by Baudelaire’s view of art as le spirituel. Christina Howells notes the deep affinity between the aesthetics and the metaphysics of both writers and Sartre’s profound admiration for ‘le fait poétique baudelairien’.11 She points to Baudelaire’s sense of the agonistic relationship between mind and world. One might consider the proximity of Baudelaire’s ‘Imagination is the queen of truth’, or ‘what is virtue without imagination?’12 The aesthetic object is determined by the imagination and the imagination can generate a healing of the rift between thought and being. Art can present a relationship en-soi-pour-soi (Being both subject and object) – the coalescence of being and existence.13 In his excellent recent work The Soul of the World, Scruton writes the following: For Sartre there is no God to provide the reason for my existence; hence it is I who must provide it, and in doing so I lean on the interpersonal intentionality that points in a religious direction, but to which Sartre gives quite another



Hierophany or Theophany?

125

and infinitely bleaker and more solitary slant. An alert reader of Being and Nothingness, which to my mind is a great work of post-Christian theology, will recognize that its true subject matter is the order of creation, in which annihilation and sacrifice confront us at every turn. In this work, Sartre is also looking for a way of being that can be espoused completely, in the awareness that, if annihilation comes through “commitment”, it comes rightly and as a gift from the void.14

Scruton is surely correct to point to the theological dimension of this celebrated atheist. One obvious source is Augustine. Augustine lies behind the great debates of the seventeenth century and Pascal, behind Kierkegaard’s theory of anxiety and Heidegger’s Being and Time. The forlorn peregrine soul longing for the fullness of Being while wallowing in the mires of the regio dissimilitudinis: Augustine’s Neoplatonic theology provided the inspiration and backdrop of the ‘existentialism’ of Pascal, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. For Augustine, the contrast is between the plenitude of true being and privation of being in the fallen world. Yet there is another, quite distinct, sense of nothing, one that also emerges out of the Neoplatonic tradition. This is the emphatic nothing of the nihil per excellentiam: ‘nothing’ as paradoxical expression of the failure of finite language to capture the majesty and plenitude of true being. Yet Scruton compares Sartre’s view of self-consciousness as nothing with the Neoplatonic view of the Deity in John Scot Eriugena (nihil per excellentiam). As he claims: It is interesting to note that Scotus is saying of God just what Sartre says of the subject of consciousness. He is locating God in the realm of le néant.15 Sartre’s contrast is between en-soi (that which is in itself) and pour-soi (that which is self aware). Le néant is not an element in the realm of en-soi but pour-soi. It is only in the domain of pour-soi that le néant is significant because for self conscious creatures absence and deficiency is a part of lived experience.16 It is from the capacity to detach from the plein d’être realm of en-soi, and to find deficiency or lack in the world, that the desire to reform the world emerges. Sartre finds the justification for his humanism in such awareness of le néant that is determinative for self-conscious free agents. Is Scotus saying of God what Sartre says of the subject of consciousness? This is implausible. Scotus develops the idea of the world as a theophany. The nihil of John Scot is a nihil per excellentiam, that is a God who is no-thing by virtue of his absolute transcendent plenitude: ‘God is the beginning, middle, and end of the created universe. God is that from which all things originate, that in which all things participate, and that to which all things eventually return.’17 Thus, John

126

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Scot’s vision is the Neoplatonic overflowing of Divine goodness and the free return of the creature to transcendent Goodness through love.18 How does this vision of great theogony relate to Scruton’s cognitive dualism: the radical factvalue distinction that permeates The Face of God or The Soul of the World? The Platonic Imagination is an imagination of the image. The world is an enigmatic image or reflection of its source that cannot, by definition, be represented. God is no-thing and yet imprinted upon all creation. Hence to imagine God is both to strip away all the properties of finite existence and to see God in the world that bears His image. For Sartre le néant is the only respectable palliative to the brute realm of the en-soi. Scruton notes wistfully: There is an appealing idea about beauty which goes back to Plato and Plotinus, and which became incorporated by various routes into Christian theological thinking. According to this idea beauty is an ultimate value – something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations. Why believe p? Because it is true. Why want x? Because it is good. Why look at y? Because it is beautiful.19

Scruton is, of course, well aware of the assumption ‘made explicit in the Enneads of Plotinus that truth, beauty and goodness are attributes of the deity’.20 The theory that Scruton is referring to is that beauty is identified with the intellect (Nous) or the realm of the ideas. This is the domain that Middle Platonism identified with the Divine Mind. For Plotinus, the domain of ideas is subordinated to the supreme Unity; but for the sake of argument, the mind of God suffices as a description of the realm of the ideas. They are not abstract universals but the creative energies and powers of the transcendent source of Being. Eriugena’s theory of the world as theophany is following Plotinus in asserting that the world is an image of its source. That is to say that the cosmos participates in its transcendent source.21 In the Neoplatonic account of participation, the effect bears the image of cause. Plotinus thinks of the cosmos as a mirror-reflection of the divine rather than as a picture or artificer-image. The polished metal mirrors of the ancient world (katoptra) were murky by modern standards. Nevertheless, as A. H. Armstrong often remarked, the language of reflection suggests intimate and unmediated relation of becoming to Being: the closeness of the image to its archetype and thus the presence of the Divine in the physical cosmos. The lower is an image,



Hierophany or Theophany?

127

shadow, dream or trace of the higher: ‘sense-perceptions are dim intellections, but the intellections there are sense-perceptions’.22 Thus, for Plotinus there is continuity between sense and intellect. Vision is not a metaphor for a Platonist! Rather, sensation and intellection belong on a continuum. Is it anachronistic to speak of Plotinus’s aesthetics? His concern is beauty. One might think of Platonists as very dismissive of images. For Plato, we should distinguish between the distinctively human knowledge and animal sense perception. The philosopher turns from sensation to the contemplation of the intelligible world and should not be distracted by such lowly sensibles.23 However, there is a surprisingly positive account of images in Plotinus. Suzanne Said offers a neat explanation of the contrast between the good and the bad image.24 She has explored in some detail how the philological and philosophical development in ancient Greek thought from the Homeric period to Byzantine theology formed the foundation for the contrast between icon and idol in their modern senses, i.e. positive and pejorative respectively. The defenders of icons saw their enemies as iconoclasts while being accused of idolatry. From the eidola of Homer to Plato’s Republic, the idol is often a snare or bait – it pretends to be something that it is not. The icon, by way of contrast, even in Homeric literature, has the sense of representing the invisible through the visible. In a sense, beauty is still a bait – it lures the mind towards the intelligible. Plotinus likes to employ images as models for non-discursive intuition. He insists upon this point while maintaining the provisional nature of these images. The process described is one of meditating upon the image and purifying the image. John Dillon has argued convincingly that there are two imaginations in Plotinus.25 There is a legitimate imagination of the noetic as well as the imagining of the sensible. This higher imagination revolves around what Dillon calls ‘dynamic images’; these require the active, creative use of the imagination for a clearer grasping of a truth which transcends all sense perception, though one must start from physical images in one’s ascent to understanding. These are not propositional imaginings (like considering Othello’s jealousy or a world without secondary qualities) but are the deliberate thoughts with specific images. Some of these images are traditional mythological images. The mythic image of the keen-eyed Lynceus ‘who saw into the inside of the earth’, is an important example of this.26 In a discussion of the expression of the Intellect in matter, Plotinus says: What image of it, then, could one take? For every image will be taken from something worse. But the image must be taken from Intellect, so that one is

128

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

not really apprehending it through an image, but it is like taking a piece of gold as a sample of all gold, and if the piece taken is not pure, purifying it in act or word by showing that not all this sample is gold, but only this particular portion of the whole mass; here it is from the intellect in ourselves when it has been purified, or if you like, from the gods, that we apprehend what the intellect in them is like.27

The term for image is eikon. Yet Said’s contrast does not work. For Plotinus it the use of the image not any fixed semantic distinction between ‘eikon’ and ‘eidolon’ that counts. Indeed, eidolon is frequently employed for the soul, which would be puzzling if generally a negative term for Plotinus: ‘So much, then, for the beauties in the realm of sense, images (eidola) and shadows (skiai), which so to speak, sally out and come into matter and adorn it and excite us when they appear.’28 Plotinus’s terminology is quite fluid. It is the context and the metaphysical direction of the terms that is really significant. If pointing away from the transcendent and sacred source, the image can generate delusion. As an instrument of anagogy or ascent of the soul, however, an image can be a vehicle of imaginative insight. An immensely important part of Roger Scruton’s philosophy is the idea of the sacred. Yet his cognitive dualism means that the sacred is consigned to a liminal realm. There is a sense of the sacred that emerges from a Durkheimian conception of the necessary bonds of society. There are occasions when Scruton seems to be upholding a Durkheimian stance: We know that we are animals, parts of the natural order, bound by laws which tie us to the material forces which govern everything. We believe that the gods are our invention, and that death is exactly what it seems. Our world has been disenchanted and our illusions destroyed. At the same time we cannot live as though that were the whole truth of our condition.29

Referring to the puzzlement felt by many contemporaries about the idea of God, Scruton refers to Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life as providing an ingenious answer to this question. The loyalty and sacrifice required by membership of a community generates the sense of the sacred: One who is a member sees the world in a new light. All about him are events and demands whose meaning transcends their meaning for him. The destiny of something far greater – something, nevertheless, to which he is intimately bound – is at stake in the world. This thing is something that he loves, and that lives in him. But he is not alone in loving it. He has the support of his fellow members, and he shares with them the burden of a collective destiny. This,



Hierophany or Theophany?

129

Durkheim suggests, is the core religious experience. And it translates at once into a conception of the sacred.30

Coleridge defines imagination as the ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.31 The human imagination as repetition is a reflection or mirror of the infinite, and it is often fired by the intimation of transcendence in the experience of beauty and the holy. To see with the eye of imagination is to grasp truth, even if its reality is obscure or invisible to empirical perception. As a young man, Coleridge was wandering the Quantocks and, amidst the verdant glory of the hills of Exmoor and cerulean splendour of the Bristol Channel at Culbone, conjured a vision of Xanadu. Yet even the milk of paradise (or the opium!) was working upon a real landscape of ‘forests ancient as the hills’ and ‘caverns measureless to man’. The ‘deep romantic chasm’ of the Somerset ‘cedarn forests’ overhanging a place ‘as holy and enchanted’ shows that Coleridge sees the eternal in the temporal. For Coleridge, as for any other Platonist, the sacred is not the cement of social life or the taboos that bond individuals into a community: the sacred is the beauty of holiness, that beauty which the poet has always considered his special privilege. If there is a legitimate sense of the holy and sacred – and Scruton is one of the eloquent advocates of its centrality in human experience – it must be grounded in a transcendent source. Otherwise, once exposed as a merely social or anthropological fact, it will wilt and wither. Hierophany, if it is not ultimately theophany, is an ignis fatuus.

Conclusion Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust Two souls dwell, ah! In my breast Goethe, Faust Scruton has been a fierce critic of theories of the imagination that conflate perception and imagination. That is the basis of his commitment to the Sartrean-Wittgensteinian special theory of the Imagination. The imaginatio vera of a Coleridge or Ficino is the intermediary between thinking and being. While the absolute source of all being remains inaccessible, or as Eriugena says, ‘nihil’, it is manifested in the created order. The human imagination can have a noetic value in so far as it apprehends through symbols the veiled essence of the Divine. The mistake of design arguments for the existence of God is to claim too much. God is not revealed unambiguously from the world, nor

130

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

can He be inferred from the world, but must be imagined as its source and telos. And if the world is the product of a contemplating mind, it is art that recognizes this. Imagination, on this view, is a means of mediating between Being and Becoming. Rather than the either/or of reality and unreality in Scruton’s empiricism, the Platonists offer a both/and of a world that bodies forth its divine archetype. Imagination in its highest sense – ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ as Wordsworth in The Prelude has it – is the capacity to see the archetype in the image while recognizing the integrity of the image as an instantiation or particular. The particular privilege of art is to point to and thus reveal the spiritual dimension, the awareness of the sacred that Scruton’s work has done so much to rehabilitate. More than any other contemporary thinker, Scruton has shown how Imagination is also an important source of transformation: ‘the possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination’, as Emily Dickson so eloquently put it. The transformation of self is important for Scruton’s theory of art: he notes in relation to the Wagnerian change of Fafner the giant into Fafner the dragon that this imaginative metamorphosis is both metaphysically impossible while truthful at the spiritual level. But poetry and music cannot redeem. If the imaginative engagement with such truths is to be more than a Sartrean palliative of existence, then the sense of the sacred must be grounded in a transcendent reality, however dimly perceived. Hierophany requires theophany.

Notes   1 Scruton, AI, p. 1.   2 Scruton, ID, p. 192.   3 J.-P. Sartre, L’imaginaire: psychologie phenomenologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).   4 M. Warnock, ‘Introduction’ to J.-P Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 1972), p. xvi.   5 J.-P. Sartre, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 60.   6 J. Bonnemann, Der Spielraum des Imaginaren (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), especially pp. 421ff.   7 Scruton, AI, p. 77.   8 Ibid., pp. 154–5.   9 Ibid., p. 99. 10 Scruton, AI, pp. 149ff.



Hierophany or Theophany?

131

11 C. Howells, Sartre’s Theory of Literature (London: MHRA, 1979), pp. 48ff. 12 ‘What a mysterious faculty is this queen of the faculties … Imagination is the queen of truth, and the possible is one of the provinces of truth. Imagination is positively related to the infinite’, C. Baudelaire, from Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 298ff. 13 Howells, Sartre, pp. 52ff. 14 Scruton, SW, p. 188. 15 Ibid., p. 189. 16 The locus classicus of Sartre’s view is the café scene in L’Être et le néant, pp. 44ff. 17 Eriugena, Periphyseon III 621a–622a. 18 H. Mooney, Theophany: The Appearing of God According to the Writings of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); See also E. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany: SUNY, 2007). 19 Scruton, Beauty, p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. 4. 21 N. Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 318. 22 Plotinus, Ennead, VI 7, 38, lines 30-31. 23 See Phaedrus, 247aff. 24 ‘Deux noms de l’image en grec ancien: idole et icône’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Année, Volume 131, Numéro 2 (1987), pp. 309–30. 25 J. Dillon, ‘Plotinus and the Transcendent Imagination’, in Religious Imagination, ed. J. P. Mackey (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1986), pp. 55–64. 26 Plotinus, Ennead, V 8, 4, 26. 27 Plotinus, Ennead, V 8, 3, 12–14. 28 Plotinus, Ennead, I 6, 3, 34–36. 29 Scruton, MC, p. 73. 30 Scruton, HMP, p. 122. 31 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Princeton: Bollingen, 1983), 1, p. 304.

12

Beyond Dover Beach1 Alexandra Slaby

‘I am a French intellectual, a born Englishman, a German romantic, a loyal Virginian and a Czech patriot; and […] I may be a bit of a Jew.’2 I propose to look at the first aspect of Roger Scruton’s intellectual identity as he defined it in 2012, and to elucidate and justify his claim. That Scruton, a quintessentially English philosopher who spent his life building his material, intellectual and spiritual home in England, should choose to define himself first as a French intellectual may come as a surprise. Indeed, after reading his reviews of works by Foucault, Lacan3 or Derrida – whom he sees as doing ‘the Devil’s Work’4 – or still his wine recommendation to ‘wash down the poison’5 of Sartre, one could be forgiven for believing that if Scruton’s thought were to develop in relation to French ideas, it would be largely in reaction to them. Matthew Arnold wrote his famous poem ‘Dover Beach’ on the ferry from Dover to Calais.6 A century after that poem was published, Scruton took the same route, and by following his physical and intellectual travels beyond Dover Beach, I would like to show how much his thought on the sacred owes to his experience of France and French thought. I would also like to show how the development of his thought about the sacred and his own development as an intellectual mirror one another. The starting point of Scruton’s quest as an intellectual is ‘Dover Beach’, that is, England, but he also begins from a particular standpoint towards the world adopted by a tradition of cultural criticism rooted in late Victorian pessimism and marked by the loss of faith but ‘imbued with religious melancholy’.7 The tradition of affirming the religious foundations of culture begins with Matthew Arnold and is perpetuated by Christopher Dawson, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, who understood the task of culture as being no less than ‘sacred’, offering access to ‘real presence’. As the most recent heir to that tradition, Scruton has, throughout his works – from Art and the Imagination to The Soul of the

134

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

World – tried to approach and define the implicit sacred roots of culture, and to make sense of what Mark Dooley calls ‘the latent religious impulse that lies at the heart of all cultural awareness’.8 His journey to an understanding of faith and sacredness through intellectual endeavour started in the ‘great cathedral of culture’, the ‘spiritual home’ of his Cambridge years where, in an epiphanic moment, all humane disciplines converged to produce interconnected meaning.9 But Scruton was not to dwell on Dover Beach. Beyond Dover Beach, France would provide him with a spiritual and intellectual horizon in which he would experience consecration and desecration, real presence and real absence, in their most concrete and heightened forms. His reading of French thinkers would also provide him with vital concepts to comprehend the workings and functions of sacredness, moving him to defend a sacred view of culture and transform him into an intellectual in the French mould.

In search of the sacred in France Pushing open the ‘creaking mouths’ of the Catholic churches in southwestern France while spending a year there in the mid-nineteen-sixties, Scruton soon ceased to look at them merely from an aesthetic perspective and engaged with the Catholic Church in an ‘act of dialogue’,10 joining the local assembly in following the sacred liturgies and letting himself be irradiated by real presence.11 His words about Mass suggest that he was particularly receptive to that experience of real presence: ‘the Mass, the mediated sacrament, with its moment of ‘transubstantiation’, is such a decisive experience’.12 That other epiphanic moment is filled with intense religious emotions: awe, and persistent guilt before literal and figurative acts of desecration that led him to blame himself as a ‘voyeur of holiness’, and to step back to the threshold of the Church.13 Yet, the dialogue with the Catholic Church continued, as he admitted to being ‘drawn more to the Roman than to the English Church’ for most of his adult life.14 And that attraction was due to the immediate and tangible experience of sacredness as distinct from holiness – an understanding of sacredness that allowed the consideration of real presence as ‘embodied meaning’.15 Scruton would then go on as ‘a believer in belief ’, ‘rejecting, for intellectual reasons, the idea of the existence of God as defined by metaphysics’, while ‘accepting to borrow the sacred rituals’ and ‘waiting to be possessed by “holiness”’.16 To explore the experience of the sacred and its complex relationship with belief, it was natural that Scruton should turn to French sociology and



Beyond Dover Beach

135

anthropology because that was where the sacred was theorized. In early twentieth-century France, shortly after the laws of separation of Church and State were passed and the future of religion in society called into question, Émile Durkheim wrote Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) in which he famously contended that religion could and should endure because it performs social functions. The sacred is a human construct serving to unite a community as it accomplishes rituals and liturgies and performs the defining act of separating the sacred from the profane. In this task, which consists for the community in projecting feelings and superhuman powers onto objects and thus defining them as sacred, that is pure, set apart and forbidden, Durkheim sees ‘social effervescence’.17 Those functions and emotions would remain at the core of Scruton’s thought about the sacred. Indeed, he often stresses ‘the human need for membership’,18 a membership defined by a sacramental bond, a ‘mystic communion with the other subjects who worship at his side’.19 In the light of that sociological view of the sacred, religion would then become for Scruton essentially a social fact. He writes: ‘religion is not something that occurs to you; nor does it emerge as the conclusion of an empirical investigation or an intellectual argument. It is something that you join, to which you are converted, or into which you are born.’20 Sixty years after Durkheim’s theorization of ‘social effervescence’, René Girard, in La Violence et le sacré (1972), pursued the study of the emotions arising from the experience of the sacred. For Scruton, the main interest of Girard’s observations seems to lie in the theorization of religious emotion. In Scruton’s words, the ‘sigh of relief at the death of the scapegoat which assuages the hostilities and brings peace and reconciliation, renews and purifies the community’; in Girard’s anthropo-theology this is the ‘primal emotion from which our sense of the sacred derives’.21 Although Scruton laments that Girard stops short of providing an explanation for that ‘primal emotion’, both share the sentiment that the core of religion is not belief in transcendence but precisely that emotion which is a social emotion.22 Both maintained, for a period of their lives, an ‘anthropological distance from the trappings of religious observance’, feeling ‘religious emotions without theological beliefs’.23 Scruton’s religious experience in France and his interest in Durkheim and Girard put the social and moral importance of sacred rituals at the centre of his thought, however disconnected they may be from belief in transcendence. Durkheim and Girard’s theorization of the act of separation between profane and sacred things, and of the emotions that surround that defining event, also provided Scruton with a new empirical understanding of how culture grows from religion:

136

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

It seems to me that the art of our high culture – and not only of ours – has drawn upon and amplified the experiences which are given in less conscious form by religion: experiences of the sacred and the profane, of redemption from sin and the immersion in it, of guilt, sorrow and their overcoming through forgiveness and the one-ness of a community restored. Art grew from the sacred view of life.24

Making aesthetic judgements and exercising cultural criticism are replications of that primal critical act which gives form to emotions and builds communities. But what happens when those distinctions are no longer upheld, when the sacred view of life is under attack? Or when the good sacred is replaced by the evil sacred, as Durkheim and Girard had warned? Or when Bourdieu attacks ‘the sacred, separate and separating character of legitimate culture, the icy solemnity of great museums, the grandiose luxury of operas and theatres, the décor and decorum of concerts’?25 If France remains on Scruton’s intellectual and emotional horizon, it is also because it appears in his personal journey as the field of battle between the forces of consecration and of desecration – with determining consequences for culture.

From real presence to real absence ‘The Devil’s Work’,26 ‘the witches’ brew’, ‘books of spells’, ‘speaking in tongues’27 are just some of the expressions used by Scruton to suggest that the developments in French intellectual life he has witnessed since his stays in France in the nineteen-sixties amount, not only to acts of desecration and repudiation of an inherited culture held in reverence and founded upon distinctions considered untouchable, but also to the erection of a new counter-religion with its own rituals and membership: real presence being substituted by real absence. The meaning of the sacred began to flesh itself out in France for the young English intellectual as he was thrust into the midst of the barricades and flying cobblestones. To understand how Scruton envisaged the sacred dimension to the cultural wars playing out on the streets of Paris in the nineteen-sixties, it is necessary to retrace the development of his philosophical thought from the primal, anthropological and immanent experience of the sacred – which defines a common culture through rituals separating profane from sacred and building membership – to the aesthetic experience which offers a glimpse of



Beyond Dover Beach

137

transcendence, and finally to a restored understanding of the human subject. In a synthesis of Girardian anthropology and Kantian philosophy, Scruton sees human beings as ‘steeped in a religious form of life, surrounded by supernatural powers, and living, as it were, on the threshold of the transcendental’.28 Then, whereas for Kant, the construction of the subject was an individual pursuit and demanded that subjects treat one another as subjects, Hegel saw the Self as developing dialectically by going through a confrontation with the Other, and introduced the idea of a dissymmetry between Self and Other to be resolved only when both treat the Other not as a means but as an end. The particular destiny of the Hegelian conception of the Other in France – as an end, surrounded with a halo of sacredness, or as negation of Self – was identified by Scruton as a critical moment in French intellectual life, producing positive and negative interpretations, the latter leading to the Paris riots of 1968. In his ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile’, he importantly notes that the lectures on Hegel delivered by Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris between 1933 and 1939, were attended by ‘Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Lacan, Bachelard, Levinas, Bataille, Aron, Merleau-Ponty – and many more’.29 The interpretations those thinkers would make of the notions of Self and Other are decisive, because the stakes are nothing less than the sacred dimension of the human subject to which culture bears witness. One interpretation is offered by French phenomenology after Levinas introduced Husserl’s thought in France in the early nineteen-thirties. Although Scruton seems to distance himself from Levinas in approach and style, this phenomenology of the face in The Face of God owes much to Levinas’s famous concept of ‘face-to-face encounter’.30 Coming to it from Kant’s definition of the transcendental subject, it is no surprise that what interests Scruton in Levinas’s concept is that ‘[t]he face, writes Levinas, is “in and of itself visitation and transcendence” by this he seems to mean that the face comes into our shared world from a place beyond it, while in some way remaining beyond it, always just out of reach’.31 Scruton explores that thought and takes it further. For Levinas and Scruton, the encounter with the other’s face remains an encounter with fundamental alterity – with mystery. But what Scruton sees in the face does not come from a place beyond the world; the face is ‘the vehicle for the subjectivity that shines in it’;32 and ‘the lamp lit in our world by the subject behind’.33 This may be why Scruton takes the phenomenology of the face further than Levinas. For Levinas, the face is just one part of the body that may be chosen among others as locus of the demand made on the Other. The Scrutonian face, through which

138

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

the transcendent ‘I’ shines, is subjected to a much more thorough phenomenological analysis – of glances, blushes and smiles, for example. More obviously for Scruton than for Levinas, the face is sacred: it is the thin veil through which ‘the subject appears in our world, and it appears there haloed by prohibitions. It is untouchable, inviolable, consecrated.’34 Therefore, ‘[i]n describing the role of the face in inter-personal relations’, Scruton took ‘the first steps towards a theory of the sacred’ which would prompt him to seek to re-enface the world.35 Levinas moved Scruton to see, and invite us to see in turn, the world as enfaced, that is, to recognize and respect subjectivity in it. It is an invitation, as writes Dooley, to ‘see the world as person and God in the world’,36 and to ‘perceive intimations of transcendence all across the surface of the world […], to see the surface shine with the light of subjectivity’.37 Recognizing sacredness is then a human stance towards the world: ‘[i]n seeing places, buildings, and artefacts as sacred, we in effect project onto the material world the experience we receive from each other, when incarnation becomes a “real presence”, and we perceive the other as forbidden to us and untouchable’.38 In an enfaced world, a culture develops in which meaning is preserved, the subject treated and represented in its sacredness, and placed in a worthy habitat. The importance of seeing the world as enfaced becomes more apparent when Scruton shows the consequences that follow the obliteration of the face: wipe away the face, remove subjectivity from the world and the world becomes desecrated, commodified, alienated and heartless.39 The contemplation of what happens when the world is defaced takes us to the other interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic of Self and Other held in France. In order to illustrate the mechanism of this distortion of the Hegelian notion of the Other, Scruton applies Girard’s theory of primitive violence. After the ‘betrayals and capitulations’ of World War Two, a ‘guilt-ridden’ generation of French intellectuals needed a scapegoat, and the bourgeoisie was identified as the Other who had to be sacrificed. As Scruton shows, Kojève’s Marxian reading of Hegel’s idea of the Other would have important cultural consequences, inspiring a whole new literature, or what Scruton calls meta-literature. As Scruton sees them, ‘Kojève’s lectures served to provide intellectual and psychological foundations for a widespread movement of repudiation.’40 From the rue Bérite in St Germain des Prés where he was staying in May 1968, to the rue Descartes near the Sorbonne, Scruton watched a new form of membership coalescing to attack the structures of authority, in obedience to Michel Foucault. And if what resembles a new counter-religion has spread, it is because, as Scruton sees it, it has succeeded in inventing counter-rituals and



Beyond Dover Beach

139

in building and retaining membership. The new rituals and logic of sacrifice were seen by Scruton to be abolishing ‘sacred rites of passage’ – the admission into a cultural community – and as exposing the very idea of the sacred as a sham.41 Scruton sees those events as the founding moment of no less than a theological project: the voiding of meaning, and the replacement of rational argument by ‘magic incantations’ or ‘mantric formulae’ repeated by the ‘priests of deconstruction’. In this new counter-religion, we are in ‘the Real Presence of Nothing’.42 We are faced with the negative of Scruton’s ideal of ‘purity of utterance’: meaning is dissolved in ‘obscure’, ‘self-referential’ and ultimately ‘unintelligible’ prose. The culture that arises from this counter-religion is no longer based on a sacred view of the subject. Gilles Deleuze was aware of this when he wrote that ‘God is retained so long as the Self is preserved.’43 In much of the modern art reviewed by Scruton in Modern Culture and in his BBC documentary ‘Why Beauty Matters’, the subject is treated as an object, which amounts to no less than, in the words of Dooley, ‘an act of desecration – a squandering of his personhood and a denial of his subjectivity’.44 As a result of this obliteration, postmodern culture becomes a culture where the sacred distinctions no longer apply, and are replaced by relativism, sentimentality and kitsch.45 The moral implications – the consideration of the human subject – of this new culture produced by the religion of real absence moved Scruton to take part in this clash of forces by setting out, pen in hand, ‘purity of utterance’46 in mind, to slay the ‘monsters of unmeaning’47 that loom in the prose of the soixante-huitards. Terry Eagleton writes that, in the postmodern age, culture has ceased to be a surrogate for religion; it has lost its redemptive powers. In saying so, Eagleton puts an end to the tradition of Kulturkritik developed by Schiller, Eliot, Leavis, Steiner – and Scruton.48 Although he dismisses as ‘imaginary’ the ‘organic society of the Scrutineers’,49 Scruton’s intellectual engagement shows in a very real sense that he is, in Dooley’s words, ‘a philosopher who seeks to mend the world by restoring its meaningfulness’.50 By travelling beyond Dover Beach, Scruton left behind an atmosphere of religious mourning and cultural pessimism to arrive on the scene of cultural wars over the inheritance of a sacred view of the world, one that acknowledges that we are not its creators. As Dooley puts it, ‘[t]hus began a lifetime defending the sacred from the poison of the profane, the beautiful from the ugly and the good from the wicked’.51

140

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

In defence of the sacred view of culture: Portrait of Roger Scruton as an intellectual in the French mould In his engagement with French intellectual life, Scruton not only stood in the darkness of real absence, but also found his model of an intellectuel engagé that he would appropriate to defend a sacred view of culture – one that preserves and passes on inherited meaning, represents the world in its subjectivity and maintains membership. Why should Scruton wish to become a French intellectual? Surely there is more to that aspiration than his envy of French intellectuals roaming the streets and cafés of Paris, as opposed to British intellectuals who more often than not remain on campus, enjoy less prestige in the public sphere, and are held in lesser esteem by their government.52 At first blush, it may seem surprising that Scruton should look to ‘the black sun of French intellectual life’,53 Jean-Paul Sartre, as his model of intellectuel engagé. Sartre, however, represented for him the versatile intellectual ‘making sense of the “this-ness” of modern life’ through the association of literary culture and philosophy. Like Sartre, Scruton has devoted his writing career to developing ‘a response to the modern world that will make sense of it […]: showing the meaning that is revealed in appearances, exploring the invitations to be, to act, to feel that come to us from the way the world seems’.54 Like Sartre, Scruton believes that to be faithful to what it is to live here and now, one must compose across genres. Scruton writes of Sartre: ‘[w]orks of abstract argument and enormous philosophical subtlety, like L’Être et le néant, exist in his oeuvre side by side with novels, stories, plays, and those beautiful fragments of autobiography such as Les Mots which describe what it is, not just to write like Sartre, but also to be Sartre’.55 Scruton has composed even more widely across genres than Sartre did and, paraphrasing, few would dispute that Gentle Regrets describes what it is, not just to write like Scruton, but also to be Scruton. Still, if there is an affinity between the intellectual profiles of Scruton and Sartre, I would suggest it does not go much further than comfort in a variety of genres. As engagé intellectuals more broadly, much separates them, and in fact, Scruton is in that respect closer to Raymond Aron. Like Raymond Aron, regarded as ‘l’intellectuel lucide’ while Sartre was ‘l’intellectuel fourvoyé’ (misguided),56 Scruton responded to the imperative of engagement, or rather counter-engagement, to defend the Western world against communism. Virtually alone among philosophers, both have repeatedly alerted public opinion to its dangers: Aron in Le Grand Schisme and Scruton most recently in Notes



Beyond Dover Beach

141

from Underground.57 And just as Aron in L’Opium des Intellectuels58 confronted intellectuals sympathetic to communism with their denial of reality as it was unfolding in Korea and Eastern Europe in the nineteen-fifties, Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope (2009) points to the fallacies of lingering utopian thinking. Among many other more recent French intellectual connections with whom Scruton has been compared, either in profile or in pursuit, and who have something to say about the defence of the sacred in a wider cultural sense, are Alain Besançon and Alain Finkielkraut. The distortion of the sacred and the creation of a new counter-religion are themes developed by Alain Besançon, a French historian and former communist, whose analysis of the totalitarian society of Nineteen Eighty-Four59 in theological terms, founded on ‘transcendental negation’, was commended by Scruton. Alain Finkielkraut is also a philosopher/homme de lettres who was influenced by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas before becoming an anti-soixantehuitard, writing eloquently, as in La Défaite de la pensée, or in Le Coeur Intelligent, where he turns to literature, rather than to God, for the wisdom to defend the transmission of a sacralized cultural inheritance at a distance from, but in profound respect to, religion. What then has the experience of France contributed to Scruton’s thinking of the sacred beyond Dover Beach? It is apparent that Scruton was in France at the right stage of his intellectual odyssey to witness both reverence for, and attacks on, the sacred in very concrete ways, ranging from religious epiphanies, the discovery of the mechanisms of sacred rituals, the destiny of phenomenology in France and its theological and moral implications, and the cultural wars over the sacred view of life in the streets of Paris. The experience of France seems to have been definitive for his intellectual formation and trajectory, articulating a personal quest and worldview across the fields of philosophy, literature and politics – the defining characteristic of the French intellectual – and a thinker who ‘not only thinks, but gives substance to his thinking’.60 That experience would then move him to write works of cultural criticism in which he would defend a view of culture that revered the representation of man as subject, the narratives and traditions that make up the Lebenswelt and a style of writing that lives up to his ideal of ‘purity of utterance’. It is tempting to suggest, dialectically, that Scruton’s intense experience of consecration and desecration in France played a part in bringing him back to England and the Church. But it may indeed have been the primal feeling of membership as theorized by Durkheim and Girard that eventually moved him to return to the Church of England where he was ‘welcomed home at last by

142

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

[his] tribal religion’.61 Ultimately, intense oikophilia notwithstanding, Scruton qualifies eminently as a bi-cultural intellectual: equipped with such a fine and thorough understanding of French intellectual and cultural politics, and having slain the ‘monsters of unmeaning’, he has uniquely succeeded in reconciling the ‘deep differences between our two cultures’: ‘English-speaking common sense’ and ‘French literary panache’.62

Notes   1 I wish to acknowledge the support of the University of Caen Lower Normandy, France, in the form of a sabbatical leave that provided the ideal conditions for researching and writing this paper, and the financial assistance provided by the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill to attend this conference. I have also greatly benefited from the encouragement and guidance of Mark Dooley, and as a token of gratitude for his luminous insights, stylistic ‘purity of utterance’ and friendship of the highest Scrutopian quality, this paper is humbly dedicated to him.   2 Roger Scruton, ‘My Intellectual Identity’, http://www.rogerscruton.com/articles/1politics-and-society/82-my-intellectual-identity.html [accessed 2 May 2014].   3 Scruton, PC, pp. 191–9.   4 ‘The Devil’s Work’, in MC, pp. 135–48.   5 Scruton, ID, p. 192.   6 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, in Poetical Works (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 226.   7 Scruton, GR, p. 30.  8 Dooley, Roger Scruton, p. 70.   9 Ibid., p. 30. 10 Ibid., p. 58. 11 Ibid., p. 59. 12 Dooley, Roger Scruton, p. 123. 13 ‘Stealing from Churches’, in GR, pp. 57–83. 14 Scruton, OC, pp. 110–11. 15 Dooley, Roger Scruton, p. 123. 16 Scruton, GR, pp. 59–61. 17 Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) (Paris: PUF Quadrige, 2013), pp. 51ff. 18 OC, p. 12. 19 ‘God’, in PP, pp. 85–96. 20 GR, p. 221. 21 FG, pp. 161–2.

22 23 24 25

Beyond Dover Beach

143

DDH, p. 7. Ibid., p. 3. MC (2005), p. 40. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), p. 35. My translation. 26 ‘The Devil’s Work’ in MC, pp. 135–48. 27 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile’, Roger Scruton’s website, http:// www.rogerscruton.com/articles/1-politics-and-society/83-confessions-of-asceptical-francophile.html [accessed 2 May 2014]. 28 DDH, pp. 6–7. 29 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile’. 30 FG, p. 88; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 31 FG, p. 74. Scruton quotes from Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism and the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 44. 32 Ibid., p. 81 (emphasis mine). 33 Ibid., p. 72 (emphasis mine). 34 Ibid., pp. 109–10. 35 Ibid., p. 109. 36 Dooley, Roger Scruton, p. 71. 37 See above, Mark Dooley, ‘Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion’. 38 DDH, p. 179. 39 SW, p. 186. See also Stephen Pattison, Saving Face. Enfacement, Shame, Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 40 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile.’ 41 MC, p. 132. 42 Ibid., p. 144. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 58. 44 PDB, p. 12. 45 MC, p. 91. 46 GR, p. 30. 47 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile.’ 48 Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (Newhaven: Yale, 2014), p. 182. 49 Ibid., p. 182. 50 PDB, p. 39. 51 PDB, p. 14. 52 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile.’ 53 ID, p. 190. 54 Scruton, ‘My Intellectual Identity.’

144

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

55 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile’. 56 Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997), p. 608. 57 Raymond Aron, Le Grand Schisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); Roger Scruton, NG, 2014. 58 L’Opium des intellectuels (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955); Roger Scruton, UP, 2009. 59 Alain Besançon, La Falsification du bien (Paris: Julliard, 1988), cited in APP, p. 182. 60 See above, p. 3, Mark Dooley, ‘Roger Scruton as a Philosopher for Religion’. 61 OC, pp. 110–11. 62 Scruton, ‘Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile’.

Part Three

Sensing the Sacred: Aesthetics, Art and Religion

13

Religious Thought and the Sensory World Mark Wynn

In his book The Aesthetics of Architecture, Roger Scruton is not centrally concerned with matters of religion. But at a number of points, he makes observations that are, at least, deeply suggestive for an account of the nature of religion. For present purposes, I shall cite just two of these passages. I shall then seek to draw out their significance. Here is the first passage: It is clear from Abbot Suger’s account of the building of St Denis … that the architects of the Gothic churches were motivated by a perceived relationship between the finished church and the Heavenly City of Christian speculation. Sir John Summerson has further suggested that the Gothic style aims at a certain effect of accumulation. Each great church can be considered as a concatenation of smaller structures, of aedicules, fitted together as arches, chapels, windows and spires, and so can be seen as an assembled city, rather than as a single entity minutely subdivided. … we certainly can so see it [a Gothic church] as an accumulation of aedicules, formed into an harmonious city of contiguous parts. But the ‘interpretation’ here is not a ‘thought’ that is separable from the experience – it is there in the experience, as when I see the dots of a puzzle picture as a face, or the man in the moon.1

On this account, a certain religious thought (here, the thought of the heavenly city) can guide our construal of a physical object (here, a Gothic church). And if the thought guides the construal in the required way, then the content of the thought can be, in some measure, inscribed in the appearance of the object, so that the thought’s content comes to be imaged by the object. To take the case that Professor Scruton describes here, the conceptual distinction between ‘a single entity sub-divided’ and ‘an assembled entity’ has a phenomenal counterpart, and the thought of a city can therefore be

148

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

imaged by a church, when the observer of the church takes on the requisite perceptual gestalt. This is, I think Scruton would agree, a relatively simple example, but it carries potentially far-reaching implications for our understanding of the nature of religion. Among other things, it suggests that religious thoughts can be entertained, and reckoned with, not only in abstractly conceptual terms, but also in so far as they enter into the appearance of the everyday sensory world, so that their content is bodied forth in the sensory appearances. And in turn this suggests that what is at stake in religious commitment is, potentially, not simply a body of creedal claims, supplemented perhaps by various feelings and practices, but a way of experiencing the everyday world. On this view, religious belief makes a difference to a human life not only creedally and behaviourally, but also perceptually. And it is not least for this reason that religious traditions have commanded such deep-seated loyalties, and at the same time provoked such fierce antagonism – because what is at stake in a person’s religious affiliation is not just a theory of some kind, but what the person sees, quite literally sees, in their dealings with the everyday sensory world. And from this it follows that religious commitments matter in the deepest possible way for a person’s identity – because they concern the practical, affective and perceptual demeanour that the person can bring to bear, and will habitually deploy, in their dealings with other people and the everyday world, and not simply their assent to some abstractly theoretical conception of the nature of things. The position that Scruton sketches here is also of interest because it points to a view of the relationship between religious and aesthetic commitment that is instructively different from a number of the better-known accounts of these matters. For example, this position is different from the stance that sometimes goes by the name of ‘theological aesthetics’.2 According to that view, as developed in a Christian context, there is a distinctively Christian standard of aesthetic excellence, and the aesthetic judgements of Christians ought therefore to be subordinated to their theological commitments. I do not find this view in the passage I have just quoted. Given the account provided there, it may be that, for some purposes, we should start out from religious thoughts (here the thought of the heavenly city) and allow those thoughts to infuse our experience of a physical object. And it may also be that we can assess the adequacy of a religious thought, considered as an aesthetic interpretation of such an object, by asking whether the perceptual gestalt that is enabled by this interpretation is aesthetically satisfying. But this is not to say that there is a distinctively Christian, or some other tradition-specific, standard of aesthetic value; it is just to say that some aesthetically rich experiences may be available only to the



Religious Thought and the Sensory World

149

person who entertains the relevant religious thoughts, and who is able thereby to enter into the relevant perceptual gestalt. In this way, Scruton’s account acknowledges, and helps to articulate, the aesthetic seriousness of religious thought, without committing itself to a tradition-relative conception of the standards of aesthetic excellence. It allows us to say that what is at stake in religious life is, potentially, not only our membership of a perceptual world, but also our access, in experience, to certain significant aesthetic values. So here is one central good that attaches, potentially, to membership of a religious tradition: namely, access to the correlative, aesthetically rich perceptual world. A religious tradition can surely cease to be vital not only when its creedal claims are under challenge, on epistemic grounds, but also (and I would say: more fundamentally) when its adherents cease to see how that tradition enables their participation in a perceptual world that it is worth inhabiting, for aesthetic as well as other reasons. It may be objected that I am reading rather too much into this relatively simple example of the Gothic church. After all, the relevant religious thought in this case (the thought of the heavenly city) concerns a spatially extended item; and it is unsurprising if such a thought should be capable of structuring our experience of spatially extended items in the everyday world. But some fundamental religious thoughts – for example, the thought of God, to take just one evidently important case – do not concern a spatially extended realm. And we have been given no reason to think that the significance of these basic thoughts can be understood in the same terms. To address this objection, let me introduce a second passage from Scruton’s book. He writes: one might think of a Romanesque cloister in terms of the industrious piety of its former inhabitants: in terms of an historic identity, a way of life, with which this habit of building was associated. But were a man to present this as his reason for looking favourably on some particular cloister, say that of S. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome, then the onus lies on him to show exactly how such an idea finds confirmation in an experience of the building. Perhaps he could go on to refer to the variety of forms employed in the columns, to their fine industrious detailing, and to the way in which none of this abundance of observation disturbs the restful harmony of the design. He might trace the rhythm of arcade, and describe the Cosmatesque mosaic, with its bright and childlike inventiveness that never transgresses the bounds of sensible ornamentation. In all this, he might say, we see how energetic observation and monastic piety may be successfully combined. A certain idea of monasticism becomes a visible reality: … we see it in the details of the building.3

150

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Here again, we are concerned with the question of how a thought with religious content (now, the thought of a certain kind of monasticism) may be inscribed in the appearance of a physical object, so that the appearance presents an image of the thought’s content. But of course, in this case, the thought does not concern a physical object, but a way of life. We might well ask: how is it possible for the appearance of a physical thing to image something that is not itself directly visible, at least not in the way that a concrete particular, extended in space, is directly visible? If we take the example that Scruton has provided here, two considerations seem to be relevant. First of all, it matters that we can speak, without equivocation, both of parts of the building and of the order’s way of life as ‘energetic’ and ‘industrious’, and at the same time as ‘restful’. It follows that, as in the case of the Gothic church, so here, a physical object can image the content of a thought, when relevant features of the object become salient in our perception of it: in the case of the church, relevant parts of the church need to be salient, on first inspection, so that the building can be seen as an ‘assembled’ structure, rather than as a single ‘entity sub-divided’; in the case of the cloister, it is the ‘industrious detailing’ that needs to be salient, and at the same time the ‘restful harmony of the overall design’. So the case of the cloister is to this extent relatively complex: we need here a dual focus, both upon the ‘industrious detailing’, and at the same time upon the location of that detailing within a larger structure that exhibits restful harmony. In so far as it is these features of the cloister – considered in this way, in combination – that are salient, then the cloister will present an image of the way of life of the order. Why? Because that way of life is also both energetic and restful. In each of these examples, that of the Gothic church and that of the cloister, the imaging relation holds because we are able to view the object in accordance with the requisite perceptual gestalt, one that foregrounds relevant features of the building. In the case of the cloister, the image is of something that is not itself a concrete particular. But because the monastic way of life shares with concrete particulars properties such as ‘energy’ and ‘restfulness’, we can use the same general account to understand both cases (that of the heavenly city, and that of the way of life), appealing in each case to the relevant pattern of salient perception. The objection that Scruton’s example of the Gothic church is of no general interest, for an account of the nature of religious thought and experience, because it concerns the special case of a thought that has as its object a spatially extended thing, can, I think, be turned aside, for these reasons. The account I have just given draws on the observation that terms such as ‘energetic’



Religious Thought and the Sensory World

151

and ‘restful’ can apply, without punning, both to the cloister and to the order’s way of life. There is a second consideration that emerges in the example of the cloister that is also worth mentioning. Not only can we say that both the way of life of this monastic order and the building are energetic, but we can also say that it is because this way of life is energetic that the building is energetic: less energetic monks would not have observed nature in such detail, or would not, we might suppose, have wished to record such detail in the design of the building. Similarly, an order that lacked their commitment to ‘restful harmony’ would not have produced a building that exemplifies these same values. So the case of the cloister is different from that of the Gothic church in so far as there is in the first case directly a relation of causal dependence: it is the energetic quality of the order’s way of life that gives rise to the energetic quality of the building. By contrast, the features of the heavenly city that are imaged in the church are not directly the cause of the character of the building (although they are perhaps indirectly the cause, if we allow that there is a heavenly city, and that the designers of Gothic churches had an accurate understanding of its character, so that the heavenly city serves in this way as a template, or ‘formal cause’, for their work). This difference between the two cases means that we can say that the Gothic church images the heavenly city, but cannot say – not without some strain anyway – that the heavenly city itself appears in the church. By contrast, we can say that the order’s way of life is not only imaged by the cloister, but also that it appears or is made manifest there. Or to put the matter otherwise, we can say that the way of life is not only imaged by the cloister, but can be ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’ there. To appreciate this point, it may be helpful to introduce another example. Consider the following text. Here, Fritjof Capra is describing an experience he had when sitting, as he says, ‘by the ocean one late summer afternoon’: I knew that the sand, rocks, water, and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles. I knew also that the Earth’s atmosphere was continually bombarded by showers of ‘cosmic rays’, particles of high energy undergoing multiple collisions as they penetrated the air. All this was familiar to me from my research in high energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams, and mathematical theories. As I sat on the beach my former experiences came to life; I ‘saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles

152

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ‘saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in the cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva.4

Of course, Capra cannot literally ‘see’ the atoms and molecules to which he refers. But his use of an insistently perceptual vocabulary (as when he speaks of ‘seeing’ the atoms and ‘hearing’ the rhythm of the cosmic dance) indicates that he takes himself to be reporting the content of an experience, and not just describing a theoretical insight. Indeed, the burden of the passage is precisely that a certain theoretical insight can be rendered in experience. As with the case of the monastic way of life, so here, we are dealing with something that is not directly observable. And Capra’s example shares the two features of the example of the cloister that we discussed just now. He prefaces the passage that I have just cited by noting that he was ‘watching the waves roll in’, and it is natural to suppose that in so far as he ‘sees’ the fundamental particles to which he refers, this is, first of all, because the behaviour of the waves can be characterized in the same terms as the behaviour of those particles: in each case, we can speak of a process of interaction that involves creation and destruction. But of course, it is not only that we can use the same words, without equivocation, to talk about the behaviour of the particles and the waves: it is also the case that the behaviour of the particles is fundamentally the cause of the behaviour of the waves. Hence it is not only that the waves’ behaviour presents an image of the behaviour of the particles – we can say, in addition, as Capra does, that in seeing the waves we can in a sense ‘see’ the particles. So Capra’s text bears out the thought that Scruton’s example of the cloister turns on this same combination of considerations: first, the fact that we can, without equivocation, use the same vocabulary to describe the cloister and the order’s way of life, and second, the fact that the second can be taken to be the cause of the first. It is for these reasons that we can speak of the order’s way of life as ‘visible’ or made manifest in the cloister, when it is viewed according to the requisite perceptual gestalt. I want to conclude by citing one final text. In the Varieties of Religious Experience, William James notes that first-hand reports of conversion experience frequently record not only, if at all, that the convert has acquired a new set of beliefs, or has undergone some elevated experience that has as its focus a ‘supernatural’ realm, but also that the appearance of the everyday world has changed, so that it becomes in some way newly alive. James cites a wide range of reports to this effect, but here is one that is particularly of interest for us, since it is



Religious Thought and the Sensory World

153

written by Jonathan Edwards, the American divine, who is not known for his levity in his use of theological language, and who describes his own experience in these terms: The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything: in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature[.]5

The same framework of understanding that we used when thinking about the examples of the cloister and Capra’s experience of the sea can be applied in this further case. To put the point briefly, Edwards can say not only that the sensory world images the divine nature, but also that the divine nature ‘appears’ in the grass and flowers and trees, because both of these claims hold true: the sensory world (when viewed in the requisite way) and the divine nature can both be described, without equivocation, as ‘calm’ and ‘sweet’; and ‘the sweetness’ of the divine nature is ultimately the source of the physical world, and of its appearance. In Edwards’ text, we find, once again, a reminder of the need to conceive the religious life not only in creedal and behavioural but also in perceptual, and indeed aesthetic, terms. We also find in this text a way of articulating a theme that is at the heart of Scruton’s reflections on the ‘transcendental’ dimension of human life. In his ‘A Transcendental Argument for the Transcendental’, he alludes to this theme by citing Oscar Wilde’s comment that ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances’.6 Scruton’s point is, of course, that as well as the third-personal perspective on the world that is given to us in the sciences, there is also a first-personal perspective. This further perspective deals in ‘appearances’ and it is here that the sacred, which is never going to be registered in a purely scientific account of the nature of things, is manifest. Jonathan Edwards is making the same kind of point when he proposes that the divine nature can ‘appear’ in the sensory order. I have argued that Scruton’s discussion of architecture provides a way of understanding how it is possible for the divine nature, or the ‘transcendental’, to be presented to us in this way, here and now, in the sensory appearances, and thereby provides a way of understanding how the religious life is possible, since that life depends upon precisely this sense that it is possible to encounter the sacred here and now, under the conditions of space and time, without holding the sacred to be a spatio-temporal item. In this brief discussion, I have been exploring how two examples taken from Roger Scruton’s text The Aesthetics of Architecture point the way to a richer

154

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

conception of what is at stake in religious commitment than is evident in much of the contemporary philosophy of religion literature. By directing our attention to these matters, in the Aesthetics of Architecture and in many other writings, Scruton has enlarged our appreciation not only of religion, but of the human form of life, together with its distinctive responsibilities and possibilities.

Notes 1 Scruton, AA, pp. 74–5. 2 For a clear formulation of such an approach, see Jeremy Begbie, ‘Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts’, in D. Treier, M. Husbands and R. Lundin, eds, The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), Chapter 2. 3 Scruton, AA, p. 109. 4 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (London: Flamingo, 3rd edn, 1982), p. 11. 5 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911), pp. 248–9. 6 The text is taken from Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, first published in 1890.

14

The Aesthetic Education of Mankind Thomas Curran

Towards the conclusion of his investigation into beauty, Roger Scruton insists that: ‘aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history’.1 This bold and uncompromising prescription bears an obvious affinity with Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. This affinity is clearly evident to Scruton, and he has drawn attention to it repeatedly in his writings over the decades. I suppose the most striking instance is a summary that Scruton provided in his Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey.2 In a brief allusion to German Classicism, Scruton provides this assessment: ‘Schiller went further, arguing that the “aesthetic education” of man is his one true preparation for rational life, and the foundation of any ordered politics.’3 This is not an entirely exotic theme if one takes into account what is often said about the importance of the civically sponsored performance of Greek tragedy for the coherence and unity of the Athenian polis. No doubt historians will inform us that this is a highly idealized and confident account of an ‘Athenian Golden Age’ – but it is one to which German Classicism and Romanticism were certainly partial. That ‘aesthetic education’ belongs to our maturity as persons and is a condition for life in a stable community in city and state seems a proposition that anyone would want to take the trouble to analyse and explore; and I thank Professor Scruton for giving us the opportunity to do just that through this leitmotif found in his publications. Schiller makes his central concern clear with the epigram that serves as the preface to the 1795 collection of his Letters: ‘If it is reason that makes the human being, it is sentiment that guides him.’4 This maxim (and précis) conforms precisely to S. T. Coleridge’s famous definition of poetry, viz. ‘the best possible

156

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

words, in the best possible order’ – since it encapsulates in thirteen (French) words the fundamental substance of Schiller’s long and complex thesis. The basic moral dilemma that the Aesthetic Education of Mankind addresses is provided, immediately and authoritatively, by Immanuel Kant’s Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), published just ten years before these ‘Aesthetic Letters’. Obviously, I am not going to do Kant justice here, and the tiny selection that I am considering is just a fragment, but it does, in my opinion, reflect the substantial quandary with which Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals presented Schiller. For instance, acts of charity and largesse which accord with an individual’s inclinations and which give his beneficent nature satisfaction, are entirely devoid of moral worth. Only when acts are performed purely because of duty – in actual opposition to benign inclinations and motions of the human spirit – are we allowed to ascribe any moral content whatsoever to these actions. In a shameless employment of synecdoche, I impel a single quotation, almost chosen at random, to stand in place of the whole of Kant’s complex (and imperishable) argument: Suppose then the mind of this [former] friend of mankind to be clouded over with his own sorrow so that all sympathy with the lot of others is extinguished, and suppose him still to have the power to benefit others in distress, even though he is not touched by their trouble because he is sufficiently absorbed by his own; and now suppose that, even though no inclination moves him any longer, he nevertheless tears himself from this deadly insensibility and performs the action without any inclination at all, but solely from duty – then for the first time his action has genuine moral worth … he is beneficent, not from inclination, but from duty.5

To recapitulate this extraordinary moral stance – as it informs Schiller’s conundrum: the world of human morality can only appear properly where there is a direct antagonism between inclination and duty, so that the fiercer the opposition, the more absolutely and certainly duty is able to (and must) suppress all sentiment; in this way alone can the true moral worth of the action – stripped of all sentimentality – come to enlighten each of us. In a simplistic summary of Schiller, this does not, prima facie, appear to be an appraisal that caters to the needs of the whole human person. For Schiller, and for his understanding of the aesthetic experience, the integrity of the human person (body and soul, the sensitive and the intellective, the profane and the sacred, the sensuous and the rational) is the central concern; what is at stake here is this apparent enmity between inclination and duty.



The Aesthetic Education of Mankind

157

Scruton – two centuries later, and in numerous publications – has sufficiently explored how ‘the beautiful’ represents some kind of confluence of spirit and matter. Therefore, beauty exists for intellectual judgement, but is combined with something appropriated through the senses, whether this appropriation is by way of the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, our fingertips or indeed some combination of any or all of the senses above. I also find in Scruton’s writings precisely that Coleridge style of formula that enables the reader to grasp in the fewest possible words the depth of our (moral) dilemma. I refer the reader once again to Scruton’s magisterial Modern Philosophy, where our guide lays out the stark opposition between beauty as a matter of (personal) ‘taste’, and beauty as an actual moral teacher: This [quotation from Kant] suggests that there can be no reasoned argument for an aesthetic conclusion: the judgement will always be in some sense ‘groundless’. Hence there can be no right and wrong in matters of taste: all that matters is the immediate pleasure of the observer. So we derive the opposite conclusion from the one above. Both conclusions are compelled by our theory of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience cannot issue in an objective judgement; and it must issue in an objective judgement.6

We seem to be entering rather strange territory here, but it is a world of thought with which Schiller is entirely familiar; indeed I want to go much further than that and say explicitly that this is precisely the terrain where Schiller chooses to stake his own claim. Schiller’s celebrated Eighteenth Letter of the Aesthetic Education explores this question of an alliance between aesthetic and moral judgement, and Schiller does so explicitly with reference to Beauty (in Schiller’s language: Die Schönheit). The first thing that is required for us to proceed is that there must be such a thing as ‘Beauty’ in order for us to be able to identify it, to classify it, to analyse it and to live our lives in pursuit of it. The language that Schiller employs in this Eighteenth Letter actually manages to open up a new (and necessary) Lebenswelt: Beauty, it was said, couples two conditions which are diametrically opposed and can never become One. It is from this opposition that we must begin; and we must first grasp it, and acknowledge it, in all its unmitigated rigour, so that these two conditions are distinguished with the utmost precision; otherwise we shall only succeed in confusing but never in uniting them [sonst vermischen wir, aber vereinigen nicht]. In the second place, it was said, beauty unites [verbindet] these two opposed conditions and thus eliminates the opposition [hebt also

158

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

die Entgegensetzung auf]. Since, however, both conditions remain everlastingly opposed to each other, there is no other way of uniting them except by the simultaneous operation of nullification and retention [so sind sie nicht anders zu verbinden, als indem sie aufgehboben werden].7

In an absurdly concise discussion of one of the most important topics in nineteenth-century German-language philosophy, please allow me to make two preliminary remarks which will colour everything else I have to say: first, it seems to me incontrovertible that this discussion of Beauty in the Eighteenth Letter is Schiller’s version of the Chalcedonian Definition;8 second, Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters (which Hegel read) never managed to deliver their full promise; in fact, I suggest that the Aesthetic Letters ‘peter out’, because Schiller was unable to complete the genius of his own original insight. Schiller was certainly a theoretician and a critic, but in the end, the intuition which appears here in the Eighteenth Letter so profoundly cannot be given its properly philosophical articulation. That belonged to the next generation. It is my contention that Schiller managed to alter the ‘mindscape’, available to German-language philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with this fundamental emphasis on the vocabulary of Aufhebung (as a noun) and aufheben (as a verb). For Hegel, this word’s ambiguous, paradoxical, even contradictory character shows that language itself is ‘speculative’; since language is the instrument of thought, it must in itself contain, even in an embryonic form, the extreme reaches to which thought may aspire. Schiller’s employment of this terminology (aufheben) proves that language itself gives us the tools to acquire the ‘speculative’ insights that will enable us to find a reunion of body and soul, sentiment and duty. Without such a reunion, there is no hope of an integrated self (or an enlightened citizen for that matter). Through the language of aufheben (meaning respectively ‘to pick up’, ‘to cancel’, and ‘to preserve’,9 that is to say to keep for some future date) we are invited to adopt a vocabulary by which it might be possible to do full justice to the totality of the idea of Beauty (die Schönheit) in all its aspects. Schiller is telling us that we need a new way of thinking to make Beauty both the object (and the subject) of our affective and our rational life: it must be two things at once, not exclusively, but together. In the language of Hegelian dialectic: Beauty must become ‘the union of union and disunion’. This ‘union of union and disunion’ is what we must discover, if Beauty is to fulfil its role as the completion of our aspiration for an aesthetic education, which can then, in turn, serve as the basis for a moral and ethical life.



The Aesthetic Education of Mankind

159

Schiller does, indeed, inform us that we must in and for ‘aesthetic education’ adopt a new way of thinking, and that we must allow ourselves to be tutored by the vocabulary of Aufhebung. That is to say, two conceptual worlds, which appear inimically opposed, must be thought in their unity and inseparability, while respecting their difference in origin and perspective. We are asked, in this way of speaking, to square the circle, and to solve Zeno’s Paradox. We need to discover that the discrete and the continuous are two realities that can each alone, but then only together, yield an entry into the world of Beauty to which we aspire. Without this shift in our mental principles and vocabulary, we shall never have the capacity to discuss and analyse the Beauty that fills us with longing, inspires us, attracts us, and gives shape and order to our lives. This, in my opinion, is how the legacy we can receive from Schiller responds to Scruton’s mandate: ‘Aesthetic experience cannot issue in an objective judgement; and it must issue in an objective judgement.’ Beauty must – to begin at a most primitive level – be some appropriate, fitting, persuasive and coherent unity of form and content; these two are not the same; in some respect, these two are intellect and matter, or spirit and letter. They are, in Pauline terms, something free and something fixed (or established, or given). Yet it remains essential that each inform the other. And the beauty of the union must also become evident to us, so that the conjunction of what was distinct is now understood to bring about ‘the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’.10 Two principles that must remain distinct, nonetheless, in overcoming their differences, are able to create something unique, which is more than the sum of its parts. So in any unique expression of the beautiful, the form and content cannot be two distinct entities. Each becomes ‘a mathematically curious entity: not one, but half of two’.11 The easiest way available to me in demonstrating how the form actually assists the content, and the content, in turn, establishes the form is by my turning to Dante’s Divine Comedy. In that great epic poem, the authority of Dante’s vision would be unthinkable without its complex structure, cartography and endless divisions and sub-divisions; without these, the allegory would remain only a curiosity. Equally, if the whole were not united by a central, systematic theological (or philosophical) insight, the unity of Dante’s vision would not survive the elaboration of its parts. My rather dubious authority for this shift to Dante’s Comedy, at this point in the discussion, is a piece that Scruton wrote for the Times Literary Supplement.12 This recovery of an article ‘midway on the journey of our life’ has no other purpose than to demonstrate how beauty can be recognized, analysed and

160

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

reproduced when the poet finds a way of making form and content respectively, each half of two. I purport to discover in Scruton’s discussion of Dante precisely this analysis and insight: Dante’s verse … ranges freely through all human experience, and is never so far advanced in abstraction as to lose contact with a particular place and a particular time … [Dante’s] universality is of a higher order, precisely because the vision stems from and makes room for what is most ephemeral … This reconciling of fragmented experience with a redeeming ideal … one and the same thing can be seen both in time, and outside time; its aspect, but not its essence, changes with the point of view … For Dante, then, love is both the eternal origin and the historical essence of mankind … Dante’s versification and his thought are inseparable.13

As Scruton suggests repeatedly, in Dante, there has been such an interpenetration of form and content, that the one is essentially ‘incomprehensible’ without the other. But Scruton also makes evident that there is indeed in Dante an affinity with the great German-language thought of the nineteenth century. Hegel offers this account of his own philosophical activity in the ‘Preface’ to his Philosophy of Right: he makes it clear that philosophy has nothing to do with predicting the future or forecasting inevitable consequences. Hegel says explicitly and repeatedly: ‘To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy … every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts.’14 There is actually some forecasting going on in The Divine Comedy, but only because Dante is making his pilgrimage in the year of Jubilee, 1300, and Dante, the poet, is recording this vision well over a decade later. Dante has, I believe, actually fulfilled the philosophical task of apprehending his own time in thought; but as Hegel also explains, this, at the same time as the actual apprehension, makes for a tragic vision. Hegel continues the argument by saying that philosophy always comes on the scene too late to give ‘instruction to the world’,15 so that what is grasped is already understood as something ‘that came to pass’; the world has moved on, and philosophy must do its best to pass on with it. The Divine Comedy is Dante’s world truly comprehended in thought, and I am going to press Scruton’s younger self to agree with me at least on this point; from the same Times Literary Supplement review, I find the following assertion: Dante was unconcerned to be of any time except his own, and he wished to understand his time completely, describing a highly specific historical condition in terms of the eternal truths to which he was a witness.16



The Aesthetic Education of Mankind

161

In Dante’s great epic poem, we find this aesthetic co-incidence of opposites, where, for instance, time and eternity are never confused, but always united by means of a ‘nullification’ that is also their retention. In this history of the apprehension of Beauty, I am tempted to suggest that in Dante, the form of the poem and its content are set before us: ‘without confusion … without division, without separation; the distinction of [beauty as recognized in two natures] being in no way annulled by the union[.]’17 Many years ago, a colleague suggested that Proclus’ definition of dialectic is as follows: the discovery of similarities in things that appear dissimilar, and the discovery of dissimilarities in things that appear similar. I have always found this an admirable and compelling addition to understanding Schiller’s Eighteenth Letter. Proclus seems, in this definition, to be advocating precisely what Schiller also requires. That is to say, the apprehension of the chiaroscuro (sometimes defined as ‘the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities’18) that is everywhere present in our lives. How are we to begin to approach the principles of Beauty without this dialectic of similarity and dissimilarity, unless we begin to adopt some measure of the demands of speculative thought, advocating the simultaneous operation of nullification and retention? This is what I ultimately understand by the demand for ‘aesthetic education’: viz. an endeavour to think things together and at once, without thereby annulling the distinction between objects and subjects that have now become – by this method – ‘half of two’. I cannot really improve on the critic who has described what we are advocating (with Hegel) as ‘the union of union and disunion’. What then exactly is this desired ‘aesthetic education’? First, there must be a moment in our coming to ourselves as mature adults and citizens, where we learn that there are aspects of our lives that are not for the sake of anything else; their worth does not reside in what they may ‘effect or accomplish’, but they are like Kant’s good will: ‘it is good in itself ’.19 In my mind there is an association between Scruton’s aesthetic endeavours and the famous assertion by the poet W. H. Auden: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives[.]’20 That must be one moment in an ‘aesthetic education’, but another moment is just as important, which Schiller brings out beautifully in his Ninth Letter. There Schiller addresses the young friend of truth and beauty21 [dem jungen Freund der Wahrheit und Schönheit], and directly offers this advice: ‘Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to fulfilment [so wird der ruhige Rhythmus der Zeit die Entwicklung bringen].’22 That, in my opinion, is the exacting content (and vision) of ‘aesthetic education’. It also explains why Schiller would absolutely, two centuries earlier,

162

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

have agreed that ‘aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history’. If W. H. Auden is right, then, the beauty of poetry is always present to us, and shall also survive us. This poetic manifestation of beauty – not excluding all the others – richly deserves all the philosophical acumen that Scruton has devoted to its consideration over decades. We hope that he will continue to help us in ‘our aesthetic education’ to full maturity and citizenship.

Notes  1 Scruton, Beauty, p. 156.   2 Of course, I applaud English understatement and reserve, but, even by those standards, I find this title rather unprepossessing for a work of such breadth and profundity.   3 MP, p. 449.   4 ‘Si c’est la raison, qui fait l’homme, / c’est le sentiment, qui le conduit,’ in Friedrich Schiller, Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz et al. (Frankfurt am Main: DtKV, 1992), p. 556.   5 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. J. W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 11–12 (my emphasis).   6 Scruton, MP, p. 448 (Scruton’s emphasis).   7 This largely reproduces the authoritative English translation (and edition) of Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 123–5. I have allowed myself to tinker with the translation (indicated in bold) as a matter of emphasis only. I am trying to highlight how the use of the German verb aufheben in this passage offers the cornerstone for a Hegelian dialectic. See Schiller, Theoretische Schriften, p. 623.   8 Please consider some of the famous language of the Chalcedonian Definition (ad 451) when discussing the ‘person’ of Christ: who is ‘recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved …’, in Documents of the Christian Church, ed. H. Bettenson and C. Maunder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 54–5.   9 Leo Rauch, in his translation of G. W. F. Hegel: Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), discusses the difficulty of translating Hegel in general, but the challenge presented by the term Aufhebung, in particular (p. xi); Aufhebung could be translated as negation, nullification, elevation, transcendence,



The Aesthetic Education of Mankind

163

retention, and Hegel ‘works with positive as well as negative connotations’ of the same vocabulary at one and the same time. 10 At least according to The Book of Common Prayer (1662): ‘The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony’. 11 Niels Bohr, according to Michael Frayn in Copenhagen (New York: Anchor 1998), p. 29. 12 Times Literary Supplement 26 September 1980: ‘The Significance of Dante’, reprinted in PC, pp. 121–35. 13 Ibid., pp. 122ff. 14 Georg W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 11. 15 Ibid., p. 12. 16 Scruton, PC, p. 122. 17 See the Chalcedonian definition above. 18 At least according to the 11th edn of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster, 2004), p. 213. 19 Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 7. 20 W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Part II), in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. 245–7; here p. 246. This has been beautifully translated into German as: ‘Denn Dichtung bewirkt nichts; sie überdauert ….’ See Luftfracht: Internationale Poesie 1940 bis 1990, ed. Harald Hartung (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1991), p. 42. By a trick of reverse translation then I am able to sharpen my point: Poetry isn’t for anything else; it doesn’t establish anything; it doesn’t accomplish anything; it is always present. 21 Keats also has a place in these early decades of the nineteenth century: consider the confidence of the conclusion of Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ 22 Wilkinson and Willoughby, Aesthetic Education, p. 59; Schiller, Theoretische Schriften, pp. 585–6.

15

Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God Férdia J. Stone-Davis

Introduction In the preface to The Soul of the World Roger Scruton says: ‘I have come to see more clearly that the positions that naturally appeal to me in aesthetics also demand a theological foundation.’1 In this chapter, I will examine this claim in relation to Scruton’s music aesthetics. In a recent chapter, entitled ‘Music and the Transcendental’,2 Scruton makes a set of connections that explicitly allows the two to be related: [T]here seems to be, contained within our ordinary inter-personal attitudes, an element of over-reach, a direction on the world that looks through the world to that which cannot be contained in it. There is, in our outlook on the world, a kind of hunger for the transcendent – a reaching beyond what is given to the subjectivity that is revealed in it. This hunger is satisfied only when we can sense ourselves to be in the ‘real presence’ … by which what is transcendent makes itself manifest in the here and now.3

Music is one such ‘real presence’, for Scruton, that offers a sacred encounter. I will sketch the moves by means of which Scruton draws music and the transcendent into relation, and I will then examine the character of these connections with respect to the theological foundation that he believes his music aesthetics ultimately demands.

The relationship between music and sound The relationship between music and sound is of a piece with the cognitive dualism Scruton upholds, that is, the recognition that the world can be

166

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

understood in two incommensurable ways, ‘the way of science, and the way of inter-personal understanding’.4 He suggests that, although music is constituted within and through the physical realm it is not explicable solely by means of it, something a ‘resolutely physicalist approach’ would maintain.5 Rather, music emerges from sounds and becomes more than them. According to Scruton, sounds are not reducible to their causes and are, therefore, secondary objects. ‘They are produced by physical disturbances, but are not identical with those disturbances, and can be understood without reference to their physical causes.’6 It is on this basis that Scruton posits sounds as ‘pure events’.7 Sounds are ‘things that happen, but which don’t happen to anything’8 and it is this that enables humans to ‘impose upon them an order that is quite independent of any physical order in the world’.9 Moreover, it is their detachability (in this sense) that grounds music: The ability of pure events to stand in perceived relations to each other independent of any perceived relations between their causes is a deep presupposition of music, in which note follows note according to the internal logic of the musical line, giving rise to a virtual causality that has nothing to do with the process whereby sounds are produced … music is an extreme case of something that we witness throughout the sound world, which is the internal organisation of sounds as pure events.10

On the basis of the detachability of sound from its source, Scruton holds that our experience of music is ‘acousmatic’.11 In music, Scruton maintains, people focus on what can be heard in sounds: ‘[w]hat they then hear is not a succession of sounds, but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that resides in the musical line’.12 Thus, ‘[t]he first note of the melody brings the second into being, even though the first sound is produced by someone blowing on a horn at one end of the orchestra, the second by someone pulling a bow across a cello string at the other’.13

Analogy between the music experience and inter-personal understanding It is this relation between music and sound that enables Scruton to make an analogy between music experience and the inter-personal understanding that arises between human subjects. In each case, experience emerges in response to something that appears at the edge of the empirical world. In the case of



Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God

167

inter-personal understanding, I am addressed by another human person who, as such, is not only an object in the world but is also a subject. That is, like me, she is self-conscious. Within this interaction my awareness of the person extends beyond what is immediately evident, beyond the observable, and reaches towards an intentionality that can neither be captured by nor reduced to purely empirical investigation and causal explanation. As Scruton writes: ‘Each human object is also a subject, addressing us in looks, gestures and words, from the transcendental horizon of the “I”. Our responses to others aim towards that horizon, passing on beyond the body to the being it incarnates.’14 Similarly, within its acousmatic space, music exhibits intentionality, operating by means of the freedom and necessity implied by its virtual causality. That is, at least according to Scruton, in ‘successful’ works of music, wherein ‘there is a reason for each note, though not necessarily a reason that could be put into words. Each note is a response to the one preceding it and an invitation to its successor.’15 It is on this basis that the analogy between musical intentionality and human intentionality is made: [Music] moves as we move, with reasons for what it does and a sense of purpose (which might at any moment evaporate, like the purposes of people). It has the outward appearance of inner life, so to speak, and although it is heard and not seen, it is heard as the voice is heard, and understood like the face – as a revelation of free subjectivity.16

Nameless intentionality, music and the sacred It should be noted, however, that whereas the intentionality of a subject before me is to some extent identifiable, that of music is not. Music’s intentionality is nameless: and it is this namelessness that encourages its connection to religious experience and the sacred. For Scruton, the experience of sacred things is a kind of inter-personal encounter: ‘[i]t is as though you address, and are addressed by, another I, but one that has no embodiment in the natural order’.17 Thus, according to Scruton, the intentionality of the ‘religious frame of mind’18 and the ‘religious moment’19 involves a ‘reaching out’,20 a ‘reaching beyond’,21 one built into reason itself and revealed in ‘religious faith, erotic love, friendship, family ties and the enjoyment of art, music and literature’.22 In each case, ‘we address the horizon from which the other’s gaze is seeking us’.23

168

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Each of these encounters yields a ‘real presence’.24 The ‘real presence’ supplied by engagement with human subjects arises from the question they implicitly pose: ‘How can this thing which is not a thing but a perspective, appear in the world of objects where it occupies no place?’25 In the case of music, a ‘real presence’ arises from the fact that, since tones are more than the physical reality of the sounds, and seem to exhibit intentionality, they also seem to offer some sort of perspective. This is because music does not have a subject as such. Rather it exhibits ‘a pattern of pure intention, each step an answer to the one before’.26 Nor does music have an object: ‘it is not, in your way of hearing it, unfolding a thought about a specific thing, or addressing some identifiable target’.27 Hence, in our response to musical tones, Scruton explains, ‘we hear beyond them, so to speak, to the subjectivity that they reveal. Yet it is a subjectivity without a name.’28 Further specifying anything about the nameless subjectivity is of course problematic, for two reasons: first, the theological application of the term transcendent maintains not only that God transcends the world of creation but also any attempt to define or describe him.29 Second, musically, it is hard to determine between ‘a piece of music that presents us with the transcendental, and a piece that presents us with feelings towards the transcendental’.30 Despite this difficulty, for Scruton, music ‘offers an icon of the religious experience’.31 It does so because of the ‘nameless intentionality’ that is attributed to it. The space of music is a ‘sacred space’,32 mediating between that which is ‘not of the world’33 but appears on its edge, ‘looking … into our world, so as to meet us face-to-face’.34

Connections Having outlined the basis upon which Scruton draws music, religious feeling and the sacred into relation, I will now take a step back and examine the nature of the connections that are made. Although Scruton ostensibly maintains a cognitive rather than an ontological dualism, thereby seeking to maintain a wholeness of mind and body, spirit and matter, his understanding of music depends ultimately upon its abstraction from the physical world. This abstraction lays emphasis upon a ‘purity’35 which, it can be argued, only partially reflects the realities of music and only partially pays witness to the theological frame that Scruton seems to have in mind (namely one that is Christian).36 This abstraction is present within Scruton’s recent consideration of music in relation to the transcendent. Considering the aesthetic application of the notion



Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God

169

of transcendence, Scruton suggests that music allows empirical phenomena to be presented in a transcendent way. In doing so, he makes clear that aesthetic presentations give expressions of emotion ‘a completeness and purity that, in everyday life, they could never attain’.37 He says: ‘Always our feelings are mixed, contaminated by other concerns, by needs and distractions. Never in everyday life can we give ourselves completely to love, joy, forgiveness, grief or worship.’38 It seems that these ‘concerns, distractions and needs’ are a less than ideal element of the human condition and it is thus that the importance of music emerges, since within the musical realm aesthetically presented emotions ‘conjure a pure world of sympathy, in which they exist in their completed form, unsullied by self-interest’, such that they form ‘objects of contemplation which bear their meaning entirely within themselves’.39 An acousmatic understanding of music, wherein tones peel off from their physical production, clearly facilitates abstraction from the messiness of the human condition and enables the connection to the religious attention with which Scruton is concerned. This is further facilitated by a particular type of listening, which Scruton prioritizes. In order to fully appreciate that which is presented musically, the attentive listening condition becomes paramount, enabling the listener to fully enter into the experience. As Scruton writes: ‘maybe listening in motionless silence is a sophisticated latecomer to the repertoire of musical attitudes. But it might, for that very reason, provide us with the laboratory conditions, so to speak, in which we can best study what is involved, when rational beings hear sounds as music.’40 The ‘silent’ and ‘motionless’ listening of the concert-hall facilitates a purity of focus. In sum, just as music yields ‘unsullied’ forms of expression, so the concert-hall listener extricates herself from the worries and concerns of the everyday, something enabled by the ‘atmosphere of reverential attention’.41

Bearings and implications How does Scruton’s account bear upon the phenomenon of music and how does it relate to the theological foundation to which Scruton wishes to appeal? Before entering into this, there is one criticism often levelled against Scruton that needs addressing: the type of music that informs his aesthetics. Indeed, it is clear that the Western-European classical tradition is paradigmatic of ‘music’ for Scruton and that popular forms of music are not held in the same esteem. However, this is obviously not a reason for discounting the arguments Scruton makes.

170

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Indeed, as Philip Bohlman notes, the process of canonization is inevitable when thinking about music: Very few of musicology’s endeavours fail to exhibit some investment in canons and canonising. Whatever else one might say about the scholarly study of music, one has to say that musicologists through their diverse activities are in the business of defining musics, delimiting their internal patterns of coherence, and identifying their relations with some sort of external order.42

Bearing this in mind, what is more profitable than disagreeing with Scruton’s choice of music is to identify points of tension within his argument, thereby bringing to the fore matters that need addressing. I will therefore focus on the emphasis Scruton places upon music as acousmatic and the resulting priority he gives to the concert-hall style of listening.

Music as acousmatic There are clear reasons why Scruton adheres to an acousmatic view of music experience. It resonates with the Kantian inflection of his thought, and guards against the reductionism that can and does characterize certain approaches to the world. Moreover, it accurately captures something of the music experience. The word something is key here. Within any account of anything, one must make sure that justice is done to the phenomenon in question, and one might say that, although Scruton’s account of music captures something vital about it, namely its acousmatic aspect, it does so at the expense of music’s physicality. Scruton clearly does not completely disentangle musical experience from its physical ground, but the prioritization of the acousmatic is clear: Even if we are aware that music is a performance, and that in listening to music we are hearing the real actions of real people, putting themselves into the sounds that they produce, this awareness must be registered if it is to be musically significant. When a violinist strains to produce Bach’s great D minor Chaconne, it is not the strain in producing sounds that we appreciate, but the legacy of that strain in the virtual world of tones.43

The significance of the virtual musical realm means, for Scruton, that the acousmatic ought to be foremost in the formulation of music theories since it is this that grounds music. Hence Scruton argues that the person who hears only the acoustical properties of sounds (their position, loudness, physical causes and



Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God

171

effects) is not hearing music and that, by contrast, the one who is ‘absorbed in the musical line but has no idea of where the sounds are coming from or how they are made’ is hearing the music (even if also missing something).44 It is true to say that the physical aspects of sound are important in relation to the virtual causality of musical movement. However, it seems that the division between the acousmatic and the acoustic is a little too stark, and the question, simply put, is why the physicality of music must be cast to the periphery when formulating accounts of music. To do so is surely to overlook the way in which physicality is built into the musical ‘work’ so conceived.45 The strain conveyed by the Bach Chaconne, for example, does not simply result from the singular effort of a performer who negotiates the physical and musical challenges of a piece, but arises from the fact that the musical line of the piece, written for violin, is designed to convey intensity through the musical gestures it employs. One can see this ‘strain’ in the notated form of the Chaconne but it is fully appreciated only when the gestures that enable this are brought to life in performance. To explain: specific instruments afford different resistances, and these resistances have the power to effect or neutralize the virtual causality of a musical line. The power of Bach’s Chaconne arises from the resistances imparted by the violin’s physical structure. Thus the effect of the musical line when played on the violin is very different from when played on the piano (say, for example, in Busoni’s transcription of the piece). The sense of distance travelled in the lines of the piece seem more traversable on the piano, which can play in full chords with little sense of movement between low and high, since everything is within easy grasp. This contrasts the violin, which, due to the angle of its strings on the bridge of the instrument, has to sweep upwards in order to speak its melodic line as well as voice its accompaniment. The disjunction created in this process of sounding notes at the bottom of the violin’s range, while also moving with swift manoeuvre to the upper register creates a sense of effort, of a struggling to speak. This is enhanced by the bowing action of the performer which is far more dramatic than the movements that sound the musical line of the Chaconne on piano.46 These are not things that Scruton denies in overt terms; in drawing attention to them, I want to complicate the idea that the physicality of music is separable and subordinate to the virtual musical line. Yes, the efforts of the performer have an important impact upon the performance of the virtual musical space, but the connection is more integral than this, since the virtual musical space is bound up with material objects that, through the affordances and resistances of their physical structure, determine the way in which the

172

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

virtual is configured. The musical line is not detachable from the physicality of music. Indeed, it is changes in instrumentation that elucidate this all too clearly. It is how the line is sounded, conditioned by material parameters, that makes all the difference.

Concert-hall listening In the same way that the physicality of musical production is somewhat sidelined due to an emphasis upon the acousmatic, the type of listening embraced is one that is to some extent disembodied, since it involves the contemplative, abstracted mode of listening that is characteristically presumed to occur in the concert-hall. Scruton is careful not to exclude others engaged in music activity from the act of listening, acknowledging that they can be, for example, dancers or performers.47 In doing so, he implicitly allows for the fact that these other types of listener can provide insight into musical understanding. He says: ‘it is here that understanding resides, and it is through “taking up” a work of music in our own response to it that we show our grasp of its expressive power’.48 However, ultimately, this form of engagement is subordinated to concert-hall listening: Music is an action, and in certain circumstances it is also an invitation to action on the part of its listeners – for instance, in dancing. But this invitation can be resisted; and it is precisely when resisting, so as to contemplate the musical movement as something objective, outside us, occurring in a space of its own, that we feel its ‘transcendental gravity’. It is in these circumstances that music seems to lift us free from our ordinary preoccupations.49

In concert-hall listening, the separation of the musical experience from its embodied element is present. Of course, listening involves the body, but it does not necessarily follow that motionless listening is better than listening that emerges in action. To suggest this is to neglect the process by means of which the acousmatic space and its virtual causality arises, namely in real time with real people. Specifically, it overlooks the way in which music-making induces a musical contemplation that is related to concert-hall listening, but has an added benefit, since both the mind and body are incorporated within it. Thus, in practice and performance, the musician faces outwards both imaginatively and physically, caught up in the virtual movement of the acousmatic space that she is simultaneously involved in creating. The physical impact upon the instrument



Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God

173

moulds the sound that is produced and this transforms into music, which then feeds back into the physical process, shaping the next physical action and, thereby, the subsequent sound and direction of the musical line. In this way, the musician is caught up in the physical pattern, its sonic corollary and its musical outcome, and contemplation occurs in action rather than through some form of disembodied consumption.50

Music, embodiment and real presence If Scruton’s account does justice to the phenomenon of music but only partially, how does it stand in relation to the theological foundation that he thinks must bear its load? Within his account, the notion of ‘real presence’ deliberately evokes the Christian understanding of the Eucharist. Scruton writes: ‘in his self-emptying in Christ, God shows his freedom and makes it possible for us to address him as a Thou. This self-emptying is rehearsed in the Eucharist, the act of communion that is performed “in remembrance of me” – in other words, in recognition of God’s presence among us as an I.’51 In one sense, emphasizing an acousmatic understanding of music enables the opening of a space that can be designated as divine. Scruton says: ‘we enter another space from the one occupied by the performer, and in that space a kind of free causality opens to our perception’.52 The causality takes on a life beyond that of the physical causality that brings it about and this allows the transcendence traditionally ascribed to the Christian God. However, simultaneously, an emphasis upon the acousmatic perhaps does not act upon the full import of the Incarnation, to which the Eucharist is bound: the Eucharist involves the transformation of the physical rather than its cancellation. Moreover, the Eucharist relies upon a communal process that involves human actors. These actors are integral to the dynamic of call and response that stands at the heart of the Eucharist and the inter-personal encounter it manifests. In addition, by emphasizing the concert-hall mode of listening, a contemplative mode of attention is favoured. This reinforces the idea of the spiritual life as one that requires an extraction from the everyday. Janet Martin Soskice has questioned the legacy of this in the Christian tradition, suggesting that it rarefies the spiritual life, limiting devotion to those who can eschew the vexations that accompany worldly existence.53 She calls for a form of attention that involves not just the pursuit of the unchanging, but one that pays attention to ‘a changing world full of creatures of change’.54 Surely, an appreciation of the

174

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

more performed modes of engaging with music would go some way towards acknowledging this. To conclude: in order to maintain a convincing cognitive dualism, and to ensure the connection between music and the sacred via ‘real presence’, it seems that the physical can and should be more fully acknowledged. As Soskice says, we are ‘not Cartesian minds ontologically distinct from extended matter, but extended wholes’.55 This is something with which Scruton would agree. However, without placing more emphasis on the embodied aspects of music it seems that, despite our best efforts, we end up closer to Cartesianism than we might have intended.

Notes   1 Scruton, SW, p. vii. Scruton is referring particularly to Scruton, AA; CV; AM and UM.   2 Scruton, ‘Music and the Transcendental’ (MT), in Music and Transcendence, ed. Férdia J. Stone-Davis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 75–84).   3 Scruton, MT, p. 81.   4 Scruton, SW, p. 34.   5 Roger Scruton, ‘Sounds as Secondary Objects and Pure Events’ (SSO), in Sounds & Perception: New Philosophical Essays, ed. Matthew Nudds and Casey O’Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 50–68 (50). ‘Sounds, they [physicalists] argue, are identical with neither the waves that transmit them nor the auditory experiences through which we perceive them. They are identical with the events that generate the sound waves – physical disturbances in physical things, such as those that occur when the string of a violin vibrates in air,’ in Scruton, SSO, p. 51.   6 Scruton, UM, p. 5.  7 Ibid.   8 Ibid. ‘A car crash is something that happens to a car. You can identify a car crash only by identifying the car that crashed. Sounds, by contrast, can be identified without referring to any object which participates in them.’ Ibid.  9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 28. 11 Ibid., p. 5. 12 Ibid. Scruton maintains that within the musical experience a ‘double intentionality’ is at play such that ‘[y]ou hear a succession of sounds, ordered in time, and this is something you believe to be occurring – something you “literally hear”. And you



Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God

175

hear in those sounds a melody that moves through the imaginary space of music. This is not something you believe to be occurring, but something you imagine: just as you imagine the face in the picture, while seeing that it is not literally there.’ See ibid., p. 43. 13 See ibid., 48. 14 Scruton, SW, p. 74. 15 Scruton, MT, p. 82. 16 Scruton, SW, pp. 147–8. 17 Ibid., p. 24. 18 Ibid., p. 107. 19 Ibid., p. 26. 20 Ibid., p. 21. 21 Ibid., p. 26. 22 Ibid., p. 75. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 96. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 162. 27 Ibid. ‘If you can attribute an object to the aboutness of music, this is, as it were, an external fact – something that you bring to the music but which is not straightforwardly contained in it.’ Ibid. 28 Ibid., pp. 163–4. ‘Unless there are words or a dramatic context to tell us whose voice this is, the music seems to come to us from nowhere, and from no one in particular.’ Ibid., p. 164. 29 Scruton, MT, p. 76. 30 Ibid., p. 80. ‘In all musical communication sentiment is passed by sympathy from the music to the listener, but it is sentiment that is passed, not the thing it is about.’ Ibid. 31 Scruton, SW, p. 166. 32 Ibid., p. 140. 33 Ibid., p. 15. 34 Ibid. 35 Scruton, MT, p. 84. 36 Scruton’s analysis extends across different religions. However, his choice of ‘real presence’ as a means of talking about the sacred and its manifestation is significant, standing as it does as an expression of belief in the Eucharist within Christian traditions. See the section ‘Music, embodiment and real presence’ in this chapter. 37 Scruton, MT, p. 84. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

176

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

40 Scruton, UM, p. 21. 41 Scruton, MT, p. 75. 42 Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Epilogue: Musics and Canons’, in Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 197–210 (198). 43 Scruton, UM, p. 7. 44 Ibid., p. 8. 45 The notion of ‘work’ is used in musical, musicological and philosophical circles to refer to pieces of music in the Western-European repertoire. Scruton considers works within this tradition to be paradigmatic of ‘good’ music; such works underpin his discussion of both music as acousmatic and concert-hall listening. 46 The importance of the physical structure of instruments is discussed by Simon Waters, who observes that the move from middle C to the C above appears as ‘almost resistance-free switch selection’ when played on the piano. However, ‘the same pitch change on a bassoon, for example, speaks of immense difficulty – of a physical system at the upper limits of availability – and the same change on a cello generates the pull of the real distance travelled up the fingerboard in an equivalent response somewhere in our autonomic nervous system’. Simon Waters, ‘Touching at a Distance: Resistance, Tactility, Proxemics and the Development of a Hybrid Virtual/Physical Performance System’, Contemporary Music Review, 32 (2–3) (2013): 119–34 (123–4). 47 Scruton, UM, p. 51. 48 Ibid. 49 Scruton, MT, p. 78. 50 See Férdia J. Stone-Davis, Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), Chapter Seven. 51 Scruton, SW, p. 71. 52 Scruton, MT, p. 83. 53 Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Soskice notes: ‘It is curious that Christianity, whose central doctrine is the Incarnation, could be used to underwrite an epistemological programme in which man attempts to distance himself from the human condition … Augustine and many other Christian fathers prized a detachment from circumstances, distractions, and even the body itself which anticipates the privacy and self-mastery of the “man of reason”’, see ibid., pp. 11–12. This legacy, she maintains, is to be found in ‘a “received” view of the spiritual life as involving long periods of quiet, focused reflection, dark churches, and dignified liturgies’, ibid., p. 13. 54 Ibid., p. 26. In challenging the received view of the spiritual life as one set apart from the daily activities that are part and parcel of human existence, Soskice



Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God

177

suggests that such pursuits are an important means of manifesting attention to that which is other: ‘of life’s experiences, none is so “unselving” as attending to a baby whose demands are immediate, inconvenient, irrational, sometimes inexplicable, and wholly just’, ibid., p. 25. Thus, ‘[t]he body, no less than the soul, is the place where God acts’, ibid., p. 28. 55 Ibid., p. 26.

16

Art as Religion? Vanessa Rogers

At the conclusion of the second act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the ghostly statue of the Commendatore appears for dinner at the house of the Don. The statue gives Don Giovanni one last chance to turn from sin and choose a virtuous life, telling him ‘He who dines on Heavenly food / has no need for the food of mortals!’1 Intriguingly, Scruton quotes this excerpt in the Act I finale of his 2005 opera, Violet. As Scruton has long been concerned with matters of morality (and because he chose his musical quotations for Violet with such care), it is conceivable that this passage is more than merely a musical reference. Is it possible that Scruton, via the opera, is giving us ‘heavenly food’ and pointing us towards his idea of how one ought to live a virtuous life?2 The musical quotation is especially interesting in light of an interview that Scruton did with Aeon Magazine last year in which he outlined some of the ways he thought that art (or at least high culture) acts as a substitute for religion today.3 In Scruton’s opera Violet, the title character struggles to find spiritual nourishment. Violet’s endeavour for excellence in art (high art, that is – and in her case, early music) is the only pursuit which fulfils her spiritually. But when her head is turned by the possibility of erotic love, tragedy follows. Through Violet’s travails, we are shown what happens when humans fill the religious need, to which Scruton alerts us in The Soul of the World, with art and beauty.4 In Violet, Scruton poses the question: is art – even ‘great art’ – an appropriate replacement for religion? Though the aesthetic writings of Scruton have greatly interested scholars (especially recently), his musical compositions have been all but ignored by the academy.5 Despite this, it is clear that Scruton’s operas are central to understanding his overall philosophy of aesthetics.6 As we shall see, in Violet,

180

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Scruton considers the proper place (and the importance) of art and beauty in the modern world. Though he hints at his views before the appearance of Violet, they become fully articulated with the completion of his opera.7 For Scruton, art and morality are related; in many of his writings, he is clear that art should guide us towards a moral understanding of the world. In his Aesthetics of Music, Scruton explains that ‘music is a character-forming force’, and that the way we order sounds into musical forms reflects how we order our souls.8 Scruton argues further that preferences of taste are likewise not arbitrary, but (akin to choices concerning virtue) rational; a correct musical form is made up of suitable, ordered musical components and is therefore ‘the sum of those preferences that would emerge in a well-ordered soul’.9 Scruton holds that so-called ‘Great music’ shows us a higher and nobler world of feeling, where important values such as love, loyalty and self-sacrifice ‘are given their imaginative embodiment’.10 Great music, then, enlivens lifeless ideas; it brings into the here and now what exists otherwise only in the eternal realm.11 As Scruton discusses in The Soul of the World, great music can also be sacred: it can inspire noble feelings; transcendence; community, rituals, sacred objects; and beauty that nourishes our spirit. Great music or art shapes our emotions and educates us as to virtue. Scruton uses the opera Violet not only to debate the place of ‘great art’ in modern society, but also to explore the moral problems of erotic love and the temptations of music.12 The libretto is based on episodes in the life of the historical keyboardist Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Born into a family of wealth and social standing in 1872, Violet was identified as a child prodigy at the age of seven. Although she wanted to be a professional pianist, her father would never allow it; she realized that through marriage she would be afforded more freedom, and could dedicate her life to music. Shortly following this epiphany, Violet became engaged to Gordon Woodhouse and married him in 1895 with the mutual understanding that it would be a ‘chaste’ union.13 All according to plan, Violet did not give up her music after her marriage to Gordon. She immediately began lessons with Arnold Dolmetsch, learning harpsichord, clavichord and virginals, and enthusiastically following his research and publications.14 She also began arranging musical evenings in her home, and her reputation as an extraordinary hostess and unrivalled performer on historical instruments became solidified. It was around 1899 that Violet fell in love with Bill Barrington, later Lord Barrington (10th Viscount Barrington). When the two discussed the amorous



Art as Religion?

181

problem with Gordon, he agreed that Bill should move in to the marital home, which he did in early 1901. In 1903, Max Labouchère fell in love with Violet, and he also joined Gordon and Bill in living with her. Not long thereafter, Denis Tollemache, who had loved Violet since, as a schoolboy, he had first heard her play, made the group a ménage-à-cinq. They were to live together for the rest of their lives. Scruton’s opera Violet opens, present day, in the drawing room of Violet’s country house, where her great-niece, Jessica, is preparing an auction of her late aunt’s belongings. In the libretto, Scruton describes the room as having ‘the air of an abandoned shrine, with votive offerings to a forgotten god’. Jessica dismisses the accumulated objects as ‘debris’ when she speaks with the auctioneers, but when left by herself she invokes the spirit of Violet to teach her about life, and we (the opera’s audience) are transported, along with Jessica, back to Violet’s heyday in the build up to World War I. From Violet’s first appearance in the opera, it is clear that the story revolves around her desire for purity and chastity; this longing is represented by her obsession with the harpsichord and the well-ordered musical ‘classics’ of Renaissance and Baroque masters: ‘I love those great romantic works’, she tells us, ‘There’s no denying it. / But I love the classics more: / For depth and thought and soulfulness / Great Bach has no compare.’ Later, when agreeing to marry Gordon, she again mentions chastity, purity and self-control, and she links these qualities to the rigour of traditional musical counterpoint: Love freely given, chaste and pure, is good… Muddles come from self-indulgence; Happiness means self-control. Strict counterpoint resolves in cadence, As note meets note, so soul meets soul.

Violet’s chaste relationship with Gordon is also framed in religious terms. When Gordon proposes marriage, they sing together that they have found ‘The love that we were seeking … A love of spirits – heaven bound.’ Scruton’s depiction of Violet’s fascination with the music of the past has more than a slight resemblance to the central idea of several Wagnerian operas (this is not surprising as Scruton has written extensively on Wagner).15 In the Ring cycle, for instance, gold is a substitute for love; Alberich can only possess its magical power if he forswears love. With Violet, music (or art) is her substitute for erotic love, and through her chastity she possesses what she calls her ‘magic’ – and her power over men and women.

182

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Violet finds early music to be an escape, not only from sexual desire, but also from the modern age. Ethel Smyth, whom Violet dismisses as ‘[a] bit too late romantic’, must be avoided after she taunts Violet about her sublimated desires. According to the stage directions, in response to Ethel’s advances, Violet moves to the harpsichord and plays ‘frostily’, answering Ethel with: ‘I’m growing tired of Richard Strauss; / Cool Scarlatti fills this house[.]’ Violet makes her point: the harpsichord and the classics are her antidote to earthly passion and the ‘heaving sensual emotions’ of emerging modernism. Violet’s musical standards are made consciously in defiance of the modern age. We should recall here Scruton’s belief that – along with melody, rhythm and harmony – ‘the standards of taste and judgement’ are ‘the true subjects of musical aesthetics’.16 The character Violet very much agrees with Scruton. In fact, we might even consider her the archetype of a Scrutonian musical aesthete-critic. Through her passion for ‘classic’ music traditions, Violet’s character is clearly a metaphor for Scruton’s own musical preferences and his idea of high culture. The score draws liberally from the ‘classics’ and utilizes Wagnerian harmonies (especially the highly recognizable ‘Tristan’ chord), snippets of melodies from Mozart and musical allusions to Bach, Debussy, Schubert and Ethel Smyth. The musical quotations are most prevalent in the moments where Violet is at the keyboard; there she quotes Chopin and Liszt, explores a Rachmaninoff-like piano concerto and a fugue, and picks her way through the sparse harmonies of early harpsichord music. In addition to the art music, Scruton employs the melodies of two traditional English folksongs collected by Cecil Sharp in his score, solidifying its roots in the English musical tradition. In the opera, Violet’s emerging passion for the charming Bill soon overcomes her enthusiasm for great music. Their central love scene begins with Violet at the harpsichord, attempting to play a sarabande while ‘the orchestra constantly interrupts with jagged, disordered and passion-soaked chords’, according to the stage note. After she and Bill first kiss, music becomes more ‘disordered’ tonally (and the sounds of battle – World War I – can be heard). It is no accident that Scruton has juxtaposed the opening of the war, the destroyer of an old, gentle England, with their first passionate kiss, which also demolishes Violet’s world.17 When Violet gives up her chastity for Bill, yielding to the passion of sexual desire, she thinks she has lost her ‘magic’. As she tells Jessica at the end of the opera, ‘I wanted him, I wanted Bill, / And so my magic left me.’ She also is forced, unwillingly, into the modern age. Violet tells Bill, at the close of the opera:



Art as Religion?

183

How this world disgusts me, Bill, This new world made by scandal And by Freud. This world of lust And eager passions, Handfuls of dust In childish fashions … I practised to avoid it, And I failed …

Violet’s mention of ‘Handfuls of dust’ (an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) discloses her view that modernism and desire ought to be avoided. She considers her surrender to the changing times and her love for Bill to be a moral failure. Scruton, however, does not agree with Violet. For Scruton, erotic desire for a body is not something to suppress, but something that, coupled with a sacrificial sense of love, gives meaning to a person’s life.18 In Sexual Desire, Scruton argues against reducing eros to a mere animal appetite and thereby separating it from rationality.19 He also sees love, particularly erotic love for a person, to bring redemption and freedom: ‘Redemption does not consist in some Platonic ascent towards the transcendental. It consists in a changed perception of the empirical world—a recognition that freedom really does exist in this world and that we too possess it. And this freedom is discovered in the most earthbound of our passions—the passion of erotic love.’20 Although here Scruton is discussing Wagner, we can see that his view also applies to Violet. What Violet perceives as her failure is actually the sacrifice that is required for proof of her love.21 Redemption and purification, for Scruton, come after being carried forward by love to extinction. Through love, Violet might have found transcendence. But her selfish focus on her art and (later) the loss of her chastity, not only keeps her from making the ultimate sacrifice, it also prevents her from finding meaning in modern life.22 The idea that we might achieve redemption and purification through an act of loving sacrifice, of course, references Christianity, in which ‘the central ritual is a sacrifice – the sacrifice of God’.23 ‘When it comes to the transcendental’, Scruton writes, ‘all we can offer is ourselves – to make a gift of ourselves.’24 As we have already seen, Scruton’s opera shows us that Violet not only lacks the desire to sacrifice herself, but also selfishly demands endless sacrifices from her lovers. Throughout Act I, we see her accepting love and total devotion (from not only the men, but Ethel as well), but she never fully returns this love.

184

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Art takes the place of religion for Violet, and she creates around herself a kind of cult. Violet’s beautiful home becomes a temple to art; she has special keyboards built to play her music; she buys luxurious objects to decorate this temple; artists, literary figures and high society all make pilgrimages there in order to hear her play. Art is what makes life meaningful for Violet, and she positions herself as its high priestess. Like all sacred things, she is ‘removed, held apart, untouchable’.25 The men see her as a deity as well. Denis remarks to the other men that loving Violet is ‘a way of life, a style, an offering to her’. ‘There, you’ve hit on it’, replies Max, ‘She blesses us, and in return we give / ourselves to her.’ Although the men all believe that Violet’s ‘love is constant, undemanding, pure’, in reality she demands everything (in the case of Bill, she keeps him from marriage and children with the eligible women he meets while abroad). All the while, she holds herself apart. One of Violet’s sins is that she lacks humility, refusing to recognize the sacrifice of others, and this is why I think that Scruton connects her with Mozart and Da Ponte’s unrepentant sinner, Don Giovanni. At the end of Act I, Violet (like the Don), laughs in the face of respectable society (Gordon’s aunts) and tells her newest convert, Denis, to pull up a chair at the table and join the others in the cult of art and beauty. While Denis sings his serious declaration of love and Violet replies lightly, Scruton’s own Wagnerian-influenced harmonies revolve around themes appropriated from Mozart in the orchestra; particularly recognizable are the familiar chromatically rising phrases from the end of Don Giovanni. Soon, the audience hears Judgement (in this case, Ethel) knocking at the door (‘ferma un po’, she sings in her basso buffo voice, imploring Violet to ‘wait a moment!’).26 Mozart’s famous shattering diminished seventh chord inserts some dissonance into the scene, and the tone of the drama changes. Like Don Giovanni, Violet will soon fall into ruin. (Of course, this scene is not the end for Violet, though it depicts the destruction of Don Giovanni.) The second act of Violet opens with Max’s sacrifice on the battlefield. This, in Violet’s eyes, is a sacrifice to her: ‘My Max, forever mine!’ she cries, as he dies. The survivors – Violet, Bill, Gordon and Denis – enter their sizeable new home after the death of Gordon’s aunts, and Violet imagines another temple to art: We’ll have concerts, theatres, soirées, And Bill will run the farm, and plant The garden. And I’ll build A Palladian Temple In memory of Max.



Art as Religion?

185

Despite their attempts to regain the glory of the days before the war, the characters are bent and broken (especially Denis, who has lost his voice, and Violet, who is despondent). Violet’s cult of art and beauty has not brought solace. Art, beautiful objects and the ‘classics’ are all ineffective consolations in the face of modern reality. Violet shows us what happens when we sacralize art and beauty, make it our religion and rely on it exclusively for fulfilment. As we have seen, the failure is not Violet’s obsession with great music and beauty, but instead her refusal to love fully through sacrifice. As Scruton writes in Our Church, ‘Spiritual freedom comes from the recognition that we are called upon to give and not to take, to love and not to resent, to make sacrifices and not to impose them.’27 Does Violet show us that only loving sacrifice can fill the void of the human spirit? In Violet, Scruton reflects upon the possibility of art as a substitute for religion, appearing to finally reject the possibility when it no longer holds meaning or fulfilment for the characters. Perhaps, despite her best intentions, Violet’s music is the ‘food of mortals’ referred to in the quote from Don Giovanni. Violet thinks that she has found her ‘heavenly food’; she laughs, confident that she is heaven-bound. Then her head is turned by erotic love for Bill, and subsequently comes to see her life as a failure. Jessica consoles Violet at the end of the opera: ‘Not so, dear Aunt,’ Jessica protests, ‘That perfect tense you longed for / You achieved. You made / A moment of beauty.’ Violet succeeded in her aim – to create something of beauty – and yet she still felt a sense of failure. Is great art just as flimsy and unsatisfying as kitsch?28 Perhaps high art is a forgotten god, invoked when Jessica sees an ‘abandoned shrine’ as she looks at Violet’s house in the prologue. Maybe Scruton meant for Violet’s ‘great music’ to represent another sacred thing left behind by the modern era, like the other traditions with which he has been concerned in recent writings. Conceivably, this is the reason Scruton quotes the music of other neglected ‘gods’ such as Mozart and Bach in his score. Scruton leaves the central moral of Violet ambiguous, but Bill, at least, is clear about what matters, and seems to understand what Violet does not; as Act II opens, he sings to Gordon that ‘art and music, poetry and thought / Are nothing if detached from love’. Scruton tells us that it is not art, but love, that is the answer – at least in Violet.

186

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Notes   1 The libretto for Violet is now archived online at: http://www.clarionreview. org/2013/03/violet/ [accessed 6 August 2014]. All of the quotes without footnotes in this chapter can be found there.   2 The credit for the ideas regarding Violet, eros, and Plato must be given to Jacob D. Stump with whom I collaborated on an unpublished paper entitled ‘Opera, Eternity, and Roger Scruton’s “Perfect Tense” ’ for the Time Theories and Music Conference at the Ionian University (Corfu, Greece), 27–29 April, 2012.   3 The interviewer, Jules Evans, has archived the interview on his website: http:// philosophyforlife.org/roger-scruton-can-high-culture-be-a-substitute-for-religion/ [accessed 6 August 2014]. For the purposes of this essay, ‘art’ is equivalent to ‘high culture’ (which it is for Scruton), and in music it means the canon of so-called great works as imagined by him.   4 Scruton, SW, p. 177. Clearly an opera is the perfect medium through which to speak to us: ‘Music addresses us as others address us,’ he writes, and it ‘addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world’.   5 Exceptions to this include, Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill (eds.), Scruton’s Aesthetics (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Dooley, Roger Scruton; Special Issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (4) (October 2009).   6 Scruton has composed and staged two operas, first The Minister (1994) and then Violet (2005). He has also written two additional libretti and composed fragments for a third opera entitled Going Home. He has also set the poetry of Federico García Lorca to music in three art songs for soprano and piano.   7 See Scruton, CC, Beauty and SW, among a number of other recent articles, including ‘A Fine Line Between Art and Kitsch’, in http://www.forbes.com/fdc/ welcome_mjx.shtml; ‘On Defending Beauty’ (May, 2010) and ‘Music and Morality’ (February, 2010) in The American Spectator; and (especially) ‘Soul Music’ in The American (February, 2010).   8 Scruton, AM, p. 502: ‘Through melody, harmony, and rhythm, we enter a world where others exist besides the self, a world that is full of feeling but also ordered … That is why music is a character-forming force, and the decline of musical taste a decline in morals.’   9 Scruton, AM, p. 379. 10 ‘The aesthetics of music: An exchange between Horace W. Brock and Roger Scruton’, The New Criterion 17 (7) (March 1999): 31–8. Aristotle believed that art reveals essences, universals and truth. This view is also found in a different way in Hegel and the thinking of existentialist Heidegger (that art is one way that truth happens). (See Heidegger, ‘Origin of a Work of Art’, 1950.)



Art as Religion?

187

11 See Plato’s Phaedrus (250B-E), where Socrates argues that among the ‘forms’ beauty is the one shown most clearly in the visible world, reminding us of the reality of ideas. 12 Scruton has described his own musical temptations: ‘And if I tread warily across this territory, then this is not because I share Adorno’s contempt for [popular music], but because I feel its pull too strongly, and know that there are deep questions to be asked, concerning the nature of musical temptation, and the discipline that might help us to resist it.’ Scruton, UM, p. 18. 13 Jessica Douglas-Home, Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: Harvill, 1997), p. 35. 14 Ibid., p. 45. 15 See, for example, Scruton, DDH. 16 Scruton, UM, p. 3. 17 See Scruton, EE. 18 ‘Erotic love does not lead us to escape our guilt, but rather puts us in a position where we confront and expiate it’; ‘Love of the highest kind is a pilgrimage to a place of purification and sacrifice’, Scruton, DDH, pp. 11, 146. 19 Scruton, SD, p. 2: ‘I shall argue, not against the distinction between the animal and the rational (indeed, I shall uphold that distinction as crucial to the understanding of our condition), but against the moral and philosophical impulse that leads us to assign sexual desire to the animal part of human nature.’ 20 Scruton, DDH, p. 183. ‘In erotic love we aspire to it [redemption], and our lives are briefly irradiated by happiness as the physical and mental cherishing of another fills our hearts with a sense of freedom and uniqueness …’ (Scruton, DDH, p. 10). 21 Scruton, DDH, p. 190. 22 It should be noted that in the second speech of Socrates in Phaedrus, Plato defines the four types of divine madness, one of which is love, one of the great gifts of heaven. Violet chooses Aphrodite over the Muses, but still has the favour of heaven. 23 Scruton, OC, p. 54. 24 Ibid., p. 7. 25 Scruton, DDH, p. 179. 26 Intriguingly, Scruton writes the character of Ethel as a bass. This is an unusual ‘skirt’ role, common in modern British pantomimes for comedic roles, but seen rarely in operas (one notable exception is the Cook in Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges). Denis, the schoolboy, is a soprano trousers role. 27 Scruton, OC, p. 181. 28 See Scruton, Beauty, pp. 188–94. Scruton relates what he calls ‘the advance of kitsch’ to the desecration of art, and (more importantly) of religion and of the human soul.

Part Four

Conserving the Sacred: Common Law, Conservatism and Conservation

17

Law, Liberty and Polity Peter Bryson

For Roger Scruton, the law and church of the English both enjoyed a spiritual character that at once assumed and nurtured personal liberty. Because English law protected the subject, ‘constitutional crises … were experienced as violations of the law’.1 Similarly, religious crises were experienced as constitutional because ‘sovereignty and the national religion were ultimately identical’.2 English law was known as ‘common law’, because it was common to the kingdom – to the political community, as was the English church.

Character of English law In contrast to Roman law that is a deductive system beginning with first principles, English common law arises from justice done in particular cases. It is remedy driven rather than first principle driven. English law was not ‘made’ but ‘discovered’: But there is, from the spiritual perspective, a more important aspect of the common law. The final authority in English law was the particular case, which had to be studied with all its facts, in order to extract the law which was its ratio decidendi. Hence English legal thinking remained concrete, close to human life and bound up with the realities of human conflict. The cases show an acute awareness of this, with judges going out of their way to give the psychological and dramatic context that compels their verdict. Many of the leading judgments – Lord Denning’s for example – are also celebrations of the ordinary individual in his attempt to live by the law.3

A modern example will supply the proof of Scruton’s argument. He refers to Lord Denning. Let us rely on him. Here is a typical case involving a dispute

192

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

between the local cricket club and a neighbour. Lord Denning’s judgement begins: In summer time village cricket is a delight to everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in the County of Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. … Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there anymore. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, … a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket. … Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. … So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. … The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much the poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.4

Lord Denning’s pleasing narrative powerfully serves its forensic purpose. No legal principles have yet been mentioned and no legal analysis has begun. But we know from these words that this case is ending badly for the homeowner. This is the concrete and fact-driven process that Scruton describes. But with Lord Denning we are near the end of our story. Let us make an earlier beginning. Scruton takes us to Magna Carta in 1215. We can start there. He tells us that, ‘The English law exists not to control the individual but to free him. It was on the side of the subject against those – whether usurping politicians or common criminals – who wish to bend him unconsenting to their will. All the great constitutional crises of the English, therefore, were experienced as violations of the law.’5

Magna Carta With Magna Carta, the barons extort the great Charter from the King at Runnymede in 1215. It is at once a political, legal and ecclesiastical document. The first ‘advisers’ to the King in the document are the great Prelates of the Realm who are named, beginning with the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the principal earls and barons. The first clause assures the freedom of the church.



Law, Liberty and Polity

193

The Charter is not a statement of principles but rather a record of particular grievances and particular remedies. Its conservative character laments the decline of customary law and seeks that law’s restoration. Most of the clauses address baronial privileges and their violation by the King. The Charter is often described as a recitation of feudal rights. But it is not simply that. For example, it enjoins the King to hold a permanent court – in other words one that does not simply follow him around. The royal courts had obviously found favour with the aristocracy. Ultimately, they would be an unfeudalizing influence. The tendency would be to centralize and reinforce royal power. But the royal courts also loosen the hold of the barons on those who owed them fealty and service.6 Although the Magna Carta was clearly coerced from John by the barons, it takes the form of a grant from the King. So in legal form it is something that he gives – but the barons are also given a remedy – they can seize the King’s castles and distrain on his property if he breaches the Charter. This is not as shocking as it may seem. Primogeniture and hereditary kingship are just crystallizing at this time.7 The feudal relation was dependent on the oath – fealty was owed, based on a willed relationship, which implicitly acknowledges the freedom of both parties. But the oath also emphasizes its sacred character. No clear distinction exists in the thirteenth century between legal, moral and religious obligations. There is no notion of the unified sovereignty of the Nation state. Law existed as independent of the will of any particular ruler. The King’s judges may declare the law, but they do not simply implement his will. Nor does the thirteenth century know a divine right of Kings that might impair deposition of a King who has breached his oath. The right of revolt – to make war on your King – is personal and feudal. Magna Carta does not describe the remedy of an oppressed nation but of an oppressed vassal.8 But we see here many of the characteristics of English law that Scruton notices in his description of it. A constitutional crisis, involving a breach of the law is resolved by legal means. But what of liberty of the subject? The clause seized upon by later writers is this: No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.9

Much has been claimed for this clause. We must not overstate it. It hints at juries – but juries at this time were chosen for their knowledge of the facts – not their impartiality. They were both witnesses and judges. As neighbours, it was

194

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

thought they would know the true state of the facts. In this sense, justice is local. Free men have a sense of their own participation in it. This clause also protects what a free man possesses. But he does not yet own property. The feudal relationship was at once private and public, civil and political, exemplified by this simple question: when a tenant pays his Lord a fee for his possession of land, is that fee a rent or a tax? The answer is neither and both. The question assumes a distinction that has not yet fully emerged. So when we speak of liberty of the subject we must understand it in relation to things as they were. The subject did not hold property because he was a free man – rather he was free because he held property. Nevertheless, we can agree with Scruton about the essentials: Liberty as understood in the thirteenth century is protected by law that has a sacred and secular character. Breach of that law has constitutional implications. The King is not above the law and can be called to account by those whose rights he has transgressed. His sovereignty is circumscribed.

Conscience and the Tudor state Scruton argues that the ‘territorialization’ of the church in the reforms of Henry VIII was the conclusion of a long tendency.10 Certainly, the 1534 Act of Supremacy makes his point. It proclaims in part: the King … shall be taken … the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England … and shall have full power and authority to … order, correct, amend all such heresies, abuses … which by any manner, spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed [.]11

Here the church is secularized and the state is sacralized. Scruton sees this as a declaration of national self-sufficiency, and the primacy of secular law. But it is more than this. Secular law is primary, not by rejecting the sacred, but by embracing it. By Act of Parliament, the Book of Common Prayer becomes the law of the land. The two Gelasian swords of the Middle Ages, epitomized in Dante’s De Monarchia are overcome. With the Tudor reformation, there are not two polities but one: not two sovereignties but one. A unified kingdom implies a unified conscience. This makes the individual Christian’s relation to the merged polity not one simply of outward respect but inward belief. That has legal consequences as long as the Pope exercises – and claims to exercise – a worldly jurisdiction.



Law, Liberty and Polity

195

Two legal institutions defended the Tudor kingdom against its spiritual and political enemies. The Court of High Commission ensured religious conformity. The Court of Star Chamber tested for political allegiance. They were especially suited to directly confront the conscience of the accused, who was brought before the court by subpoena and compelled to answer questions under oath. At first, the common law courts took little notice. After all, these courts were defending the country against its enemies. Certainly while the freedom of England was imperilled by the immense power of Catholic Spain, these courts did their work relatively unhindered. They were also extremely popular with private litigants because the process was quick, inexpensive and effective. But in the end, their appropriation by the Crown doomed them to extinction. They represented too great a threat to the liberty of the subject, and disappeared in the Long Parliament of the sixteen-forties. However, in the sphere of private law, another court of conscience flourished and was ultimately embraced by the common law. It had always been the case that subjects of the Crown could appeal to the Chancellor for relief or justice in cases where the common law courts did not provide for it. Defendants were called before the Chancellor by way of subpoena and were compelled to answer under oath, failing which they could be committed to prison. The basis of the Chancellor’s jurisdiction was conscience. Sixteenth-century jurisprudence described it as a form of natural reason.12 The Chancellor’s jurisdiction was exceptional; he did not say that the common law rule was wrong or should be ignored. He simply said that it was inequitable – contrary to conscience – for this particular litigant to enforce the common law decision in this case. So for example if a contract were in proper form and under seal the common law courts would enforce it. It did not matter that it was obtained by fraud or deceit. But the Chancellor could intervene and decide that although the contract was in proper form, this particular party could not enforce it because of his fraud. This dispute between conscience and common law appears in an exchange between the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke and King James I regarding the nature of legal reasoning. Coke says the King asserted that ‘the law was founded on reason, and that he and others had reason as well as the judges’. Coke replied: his majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life or inheritance, or goods or fortunes of his subjects; they are not be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgment of law[.]13

196

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Coke clearly distinguishes between natural reason and the artificial reason of the law. One can readily see why he would be hostile to the Chancellor’s jurisdiction and his reasoning from conscience. This law is too direct and too immediate. It lacks the collective and historical wisdom of the common law that Coke defends. That Coke here shows himself to be a medieval man is apparent from a witness to this exchange with the King who observed that ‘The judges are like the papistes. They alleadge scriptures and will interpret the same. Judges alleadge statutes and reserve the exposition thereof to themselves.’14 This Protestant objection against the Chief Justice assumes a reformed conscience that requires no priestly mediation with his God, just as he requires no judicial mediation with the law. It is unsurprising then, that in a later dispute between the Chief Justice and the Chancellor, the King ruled in favour of the primacy of equity and the Chancellor. So what appeared a threat to liberty as a matter of public law (Star Chamber and High Commission), becomes a means of doing justice in private law.

The trust As Scruton argues, the most important creation of the Chancellor’s equitable jurisdiction is the trust.15 There are three types of player in a trust. A settlor who provides the property for the trust; the trustee, he who agrees to implement the terms of the trust; and the beneficiaries who enjoy the property held in trust on their behalf. The Trustee has legal title to the property, but he cannot treat it as his own. Notice that no ‘rights’ are involved. The settlor has no obligation to give money to anybody. The trustee has no obligation to assume the trust. Nor do the beneficiaries have any ‘right’ to any property. Trusts unite the past with the present and the future. They emulate the intergenerational political partnership that Edmund Burke evokes and Scruton cites: [O]ne of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is, lest the temporary possessors … unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters, … by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, [leaving] to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation—… SOCIETY is indeed a contract … the state … is … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.16



Law, Liberty and Polity

197

The ‘contract’ Burke describes is really a trust that acquires both a private and a public character founded on the principle of conscience. At its heart – and so antithetical to much modern thinking – are the concepts of duty owed, not rights claimed: of benefits freely conferred but neither earned nor deserved.

Trust versus social contract Burke’s use of the words ‘social contract’ conceals an important difference between a polity founded on intergenerational trust and one founded on Lockean contract. Scruton tells us that secular government, founded on consent of the governed, is necessary to freedom of conscience and moves us away from a ‘religious conception of the world’.17 But Scruton adroitly overcomes any trustcontract opposition by showing that they have a prior unity in the prepolitical community: The social contract begins from a thought-experiment, in which a group of people gather together to decide on their common future. [“We the people”.] But if they are in a position to decide on their common future, it is because they already have one: because they recognize their mutual togetherness and reciprocal dependence. … In short, the social contract requires a relationship of membership. … the social contract makes sense only if future generations are included in it. The purpose is to establish an enduring society.18

Here Scruton shows the common ground of Burkean and Lockean accounts of our polity. Challenging an orthodoxy of our time, Scruton adds that membership is not a question of democracy but of representation: The crucial feature of a Republican Constitution is not democracy, but representation, and this in turn requires a territorial jurisdiction, along with loyalties that feed it. These loyalties become durable through the three paramount virtues of the citizen: law-abidingness, sacrifice in war, and public spirit in peace time.19

The nineteenth-century English case of The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens illustrates these virtues.20 Survivors of a shipwreck succumbed to starvation and killed the weakest to survive by cannibalism. They were rescued soon after and the facts came out. At trial their defence was ‘necessity’. On a strict utilitarian logic, surely it would be preferable that one die and three survive rather than that all four should perish? Lord Coleridge readily dispensed with this argument:

198

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Though law and morality are not the same, and many things may be immoral which are not necessarily illegal, yet the absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; … To preserve one’s life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man’s duty not to live, but to die. … It is not correct, therefore, to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one’s life. … it is enough in a Christian country to remind ourselves of the Great Example whom we profess to follow. It is not needful to point out the awful danger of admitting the principle which has been contended for. Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what? It is plain that the principle leaves him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another’s life to save his own. In this case the weakest, the youngest, the most unresisting, was chosen. Was it more necessary to kill him than one of the grown men? The answer must be ‘No’.

In fact, in this case, the defendants were pardoned – a result beyond the jurisdiction of the court, which must judge according to law, not grace. The civic virtues Scruton ascribes to ‘membership’ are alive and well here. But that was one hundred and thirty years ago.

Our time Ominously, Scruton tells us that the ruling problem of Western society today is that the experience of membership required by the Enlightenment idea of the citizen is dwindling and a cultural repudiation is coming in its place.21 ‘When loyalty erodes, the sense of duty erodes along with it. At the same time, the erosion of duty is accompanied by no diminution in the call for rights’, which accelerate with the decline of Enlightenment values.22 Citing Professor Ronald Dworkin, Scruton notes ‘rights are trumps’. Rights are ‘rescued from the political process and become non-negotiable possessions of those who claim them’.23 Rights give precedence of the courts over legislation – conflict over negotiation and settlement. The economic historian Niall Ferguson joins Scruton’s lament about the pernicious effects of eroding loyalty on an enduring sense of membership. Like Scruton, he cites the decline of the partnership between the generations



Law, Liberty and Polity

199

described by Burke, ‘In the enormous inter-generational transfers implied by the current fiscal policies we see a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach of precisely that [intergenerational] partnership.’24 Matching this expropriation of wealth, Scruton notes the squandering of the earth’s resources in favour of its present temporary residents.25 Scruton observes that a decline of individual responsibility and private initiative is both a cause of state policy and the natural effect of it.26 Niall Ferguson provides statistical support for Scruton’s philosophical point. Contrasting de Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century praise of private initiative in America, Ferguson cites large declines in civic participation – membership in religious, charitable, political and beneficent organizations has suffered a drastic decline – as much as fifty per cent in the last thirty years.27 The civic decline regretted by Scruton and Ferguson coincides with a change in our contemporary understanding of rights. The new human rights culture is unlike the older culture of civil or political rights. Discourse about ‘human rights’ rarely arose before the nineteen-seventies. For example, the words ‘human rights’ appeared in the New York Times in 1977 nearly five times as often as in any prior year in the history of that publication.28 Similarly, human rights commissions and human rights acts are of relatively recent origin. They claim a universal morality beyond political allegiance which explains their international character and attraction for international organizations like the UN and the European Union. It also explains their resistance to political compromise. There is no need to compromise with a lesser sovereignty. Scruton recognizes that ‘rights … constitute a serious danger to the political process, as well as an absolute necessity if that process is to be founded in consent’.29 Rights therefore need to be carefully defined – but in today’s culture they are more likely to assume the form of particular interests. Indeed, Scruton’s grounding of rights in political communities is precisely what contemporary human rights movements seek to avoid. They claim an authority that transcends the merely political.30 Yet increasingly and ironically they make greater claims on our polity to implement their agenda. A decline in civic virtue and socialization of state power coincide with the disappearance of inner liberty, exemplified by responsible choice.31 Scruton reminds us that Locke distinguishes between liberty and licence. But the Lockean account of our polity will not do. If men and women create the state to preserve themselves, and self-preservation is the highest good of the state, why would anyone die for their country? Why should justice mean more than self-preservation?32

200

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

The freedom of Locke’s natural man is the beginning of a privatization of value that accelerates with the disappearance of Locke’s prepolitical community that assumed an uneasy alliance between the secular and a reformed Christianity. The privatization of value treats the state as external to our freedom. That privatization of value is now our public morality. For example, religion is valued not for its content but because it is an attribute of the autonomous individual. In this morality the good is the act of choosing, not that which is chosen. Judge Robert Bork makes that point when he quotes the Supreme Court of the United States on liberty as follows: At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of life.33

This anarchic vision is obviously not judicial but philosophical and ultimately spiritual. It represents an infinite demand; one that no polity can contain and no law can limit. It describes a community of one. The causes challenging contemporary liberty, polity and the law are ultimately spiritual. Scruton shows that we have become careless with our freedom. In this, the law can play only the diminished role of supporting cast. To paraphrase the American judge Learned Hand, liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; while it lies there it needs no law to keep it; when it dies there, no law can save it.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5   6

Scruton, EE, p. 121. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 116 (emphasis added). [1977] Q.B.D (Queen’s Bench Division) 966 at 976. Scruton, EE, p. 121. During the thirteenth century, land began to be heritable and alienable, usually upon a fee being paid to one’s lord; this monetizing tendency diminished the personal character of the feudal relationship: S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London: Butterworth, 1965), p. 105.   7 F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 96–7.  8 Maitland, Constitutional, p. 103.   9 Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 138–9; Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. I (London: Sweet and Maxwell Ltd, 1999), p. 317.



Law, Liberty and Polity

201

10 Scruton, OC, p. 56. 11 Scruton, OC, p. 55. 12 For example, see Christopher St. Germain, Doctor and Student (New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange Ltd., 1998). 13 Roland G. Usher, James I and Sir Edward Coke, The English Historical Review, 18 (72) (October 1903): 664 (emphasis added). 14 Ibid., p. 669. 15 Scruton, EE, p. 118. 16 Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ (1790), quoted from Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 43. 17 Scruton, WR, pp. 6–8. 18 Scruton, WR, p. 11 (emphasis added). 19 Scruton, WR, p. 55. 20 (1884) 14 Q.B.D. 273. 21 Scruton, WR, p. 67. 22 Ibid., p. 68. 23 Roger Scruton, ‘The Limits of Liberty’, in Liberty and Civilization: The Western Heritage (London: Encounter Books, 2010), p. 157. 24 Ferguson, Degeneration, p. 43. 25 Scruton, WR, p. 13. 26 Scruton, Limits of Liberty, p. 159. 27 Ferguson, Degeneration, pp. 119–20. 28 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 4. 29 Scruton, Limits of Liberty, p. 158. 30 I.e. Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 93. 31 Scruton, Limits of Liberty, p. 159. 32 George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1998), p. 62. 33 Robert Bork, ‘Individual Liberty as the Constitution Understands It’, in Liberty and Civilization: The Western Heritage (London: Encounter Books, 2010), p. 76.

18

The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism Daniel Cullen

Our most pressing philosophical need, it seems to me, is to understand the nature and significance of the force which once held our world together, and which is now losing its grip—the force of religion.1 Roger Scruton In a brief excursus on ‘the God of the philosophers’, Roger Scruton explains how the urge for an abstract conception of God’s character drove philosophy away from the religious experience that prompted reflection on the sacred in the first place. The ‘fearsome abstractions’ occasioned by this shift, from conceiving God as the supreme person to understanding Him as the supreme being, rendered God ‘philosophically respectable at the cost of jeopardis[ing] many of the things we spontaneously worship in him’.2 A similar shift can be detected in political philosophy’s abstract search for the universal ‘man’ in a condition that ‘no longer exists’ and ‘perhaps never existed’, but about which we must nevertheless establish ‘precise notions’.3 The strange result of this attempt to distinguish the human quality is the discovery of an ‘isolated individual’ who seems scarcely human. In what follows, I argue that Scruton’s conservatism is closely tied to his view of the sacred, sharing its sense that philosophy’s ‘clarifications’ have only distorted the human things. As Scruton sees it, modern political theory is vitiated by an un-philosophical reductionism. Marxism and similarly astringent ‘isms’ treat the human world as an object of suspicion, dismissing as ‘ideological’ many of the beliefs that are ‘woven into the fabric of social life’. We would do better, Scruton advises, with a self-consciously superficial approach to the human things, whose meaning is ‘rooted in the top-soil’.4 There is a remarkable congruence between the religious frame of mind, and ‘the conservative attitude’ that seeks to recover the Lebenswelt, both in thought

204

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

and experience, as our natural home.5 The touchstone of Scruton’s conservatism is the Durkheimian insight that the community depends on the religious sense. The normal tendency of the religious urge is towards ‘membership’, understood as ‘a network of relations that are neither contractual nor negotiated, but which are received as a destiny and a gift’. Scruton indicts modern political theory for its failure to account for relations of this kind: ‘the relations that precede political choice and make it possible’.6 As the attitude of piety emerges prior to, and independently of, beliefs in a transcendent being, so does conservatism arise from and rest upon the awareness ‘that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective’.7 The demand to justify the ineffable will merely lead to its loss. The salience of piety in the conservative critique of rationalism in politics is manifest in Scruton’s vindication of Edmund Burke.8 Piety ‘provide[s] the model for theories of political obligation which deny the possibility of a social contract’.9 In its concern for rights and duties, piety is related to justice without being dependent on it, because human obligations do not appear to the religious mind as objects of choice and consent. No ordinary commerce between people could hallow social relations, Scruton argues, ‘since ordinary commerce depends on negotiation, consent … and therefore assumes the subject to be alone and inviolable in his sovereign territory, shut up in a fortress which he alone can occupy’.10 But this assumption of an isolated individualism is a theory-induced misperception that distorts real human relations. By contrast, the ‘first-personal plural’ perspective summoned by the religious rite ‘overcomes this isolation’, subordinating considerations of justice without repudiating them. In the experience of the sacred, the solitary self is raised up to a new and transcendental perspective in which it shares ‘the subjective viewpoint which otherwise we know only as “mine”’.11 The religious sense exhibits a two-fold subjectivity. The emergence of the first-person plural awareness makes political community possible; but the sacred is also the essential background against which the individual self is revealed. According to Scruton, in a world of objects, ‘I’ can only see myself as a subject by adopting a transcendental perspective in which I regard myself as a being living under judgement. The way the world reveals itself to us requires moral categories to make sense of our experience of selfhood.12 As the portal to the transcendental, the sacred ‘confirms our freedom, providing the mirror in which freedom can be seen’.13 The implications of this philosophical anthropology ramify in Scruton’s political thought. Self-conscious beings ‘do not unite in herds’, but rather associate and congregate in relations of law and bonds of



The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism

205

membership respectively. The political significance of the sacred derives from the unique force of the latter tie, which sustains the political order in a way that mere politics cannot. The sacred should therefore be a matter of paramount concern to the political philosopher since it grounds the I-We relationship at the heart of political life. In so far as his plea is only to make room for the sacred in social life, Scruton does not dispute the justice of contractual relations so much as underscore their insufficiency.14 But this modest proposal unsettles the modern world picture, since the claim that the sacramental bond precedes political choice and makes it possible challenges the priority of principles to practice. In rejecting the premise that political relations are established by – or must be understood as if established by – human agreement, Scruton may fairly be described as a conservative radical, bent on uprooting the modern understanding that political life originates in the individual will.15 While a hypothetical social contract might be a heuristic device for conceiving a free society, an exaggerated emphasis on prepolitical or ‘natural’ rights undermines the very security it seeks. Scruton bemoans the ‘unnatural predominance’ of rights talk and seconds Burke’s protest against a generic constitution that ‘matches no particular social order, and answers to no particular historical identity’.16 Modern political concepts are the fruit of a negative anthropology that lays bare the so-called natural condition of mankind by stripping away all attributes of personhood. In the residual ‘state of nature’, the individual appears as neither political subject nor creature of God, but rather some tertium quid: a universal and intangible ‘man’.17 Belonging to no race, religion or country, this ‘naturally free’ individual depends on a social order that is the condition of his existence without being essential to his perfection. Society exists only to preserve such unencumbered individuals and facilitate their strivings. As Pierre Manent observes, this discovery of a ‘pure individual, outside of social bonds’ leaves human beings in a radically new situation. In the absence of links binding them to one another, people become ‘the authors of their own links, the artists of their own connections’. The pathos of modern individualism is its trajectory towards nothing beyond its own intensification: ‘for the self-aware modern to be an individual is to become an individual—and to become one to an ever-greater degree than before’.18 Liberalism mirrors the ‘negative theology’ of modern Protestantism that, Scruton argues, came close to discarding God in its war against the impure and the inessential in traditional Christian rituals.19 A similar dynamic seems at work in the drive towards an essential individualism that discards the real

206

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

attributes of personhood along the way. This abstract orientation, in Scruton’s judgement, disqualifies itself as political theory, since the view from nowhere cannot possibly suit a people that must always be located, historically and culturally, somewhere.20 Without a source of unity transcending the wills of isolated individuals, contract theory cannot account for citizens’ ‘own conception of their social nature’.21 Although resistant to abstract formulation, a nation’s sense of itself may be grasped by intuitions of meaning certain enough to supply the motive for common action. The conservative finds the significance of social life on its surface, in ‘this thing that is understood in participation but which may resist translation into words’. It is culture, not theory that endows the world with meaning, and makes us aware of our social nature as something given, not chosen. ‘There is’, Scruton declares, ‘something deeply self-deceived in the idea of a fulfilled human being whose style of life is entirely of his own devising.’22 Scruton traces the flawed concept of modern individualism to ‘the born free fallacy’ propagated by Rousseau, in whose writings ‘we discover what is really at stake in the contest between conservative and liberal in all the areas of social life’.23 Everything depends, therefore, on accurately capturing the meaning of this most elusive of political theorists. Scruton’s most sustained discussion of Rousseau is brief but incisive, zeroing in on the conundrum of social origins: ‘how can society be founded on a contract, when no contract can exist until society has been founded?’ Rousseau answers with a paradox: ‘We must live as if bound by a contract, while knowing this to be impossible.’24 What Scruton fails to adequately consider is the way this paradox also affects the Burkean prescription that he takes to be the antidote to Rousseau’s dangerous ‘a priorism’.25 Burke concedes crucial propositions of the contract theory he otherwise declaims against: human beings possess natural rights and that social authority rests, in principle, upon consent rather than divine will. But having made these concessions, Burke dismisses their relevance, affirming instead the ‘beneficent workings’ of the established constitution as the foundation of its legitimacy.26 One might say that Burkean conservatism relies on a ‘forced perspective’, distancing itself from fundamental principles and moving the established constitution into the foreground. Put another way, founding principles are relegated to a state of dormancy, leaving the origins of government covered by a ‘politic, well-wrought veil’.27 In the conservative’s judgement, the obscurity of social conventions is essential to their efficacy. It is this conviction that puts conservatism at odds with any revolution against prejudice, and rallies



The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism

207

the conservative to the defence of the sacred, but it is also, I suggest, its chief liability.28 The strength of Burkean conservatism is its subtle awareness of the manifold ways in which societies depend on non-rational prejudices; its obverse weakness is its treatment of natural freedom, which is handled with too much finesse, as if the question of the legitimate regime resolves itself into the requirements of the good polity. Scruton dates his intellectual migration to conservatism from his bird’s-eye view of democracy in the streets as the soixante-huitards made their ‘gestures of repudiation’ against French society and culture. Burke came to his rescue. His arguments are subsequently rehearsed in Scruton’s writings: society cannot be organized according to a plan, nor held together by abstract rights; tradition must be defended against enlightened reformers; and, most relevant to the present argument, while society can be viewed as a contract, it is only in the sense of a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn. It follows that popular sovereignty must bow before the ‘hereditary principle’.29 Freedom cannot be our primary value for it depends on a destiny. Supplying deftly woven arguments where Burke often relied on intuitions or polemical flourishes, Scruton brings the case for conservatism up-to-date, highlighting the need to account for the actual motives that create and sustain social unity.30 The insuperable fact that we must have an ordered social life for the human good gives the maintenance of that order primacy over the question of consent. To make consent primary, and then measure it abstractly by its supposed correspondence to principles derived from a hypothetical state of nature is, for Scruton, to reverse the scheme of subordination and superordination. The state should be construed as the cause rather than the effect of wilful resolutions on the part of abstract individuals. The moral does not emerge from the non-moral. Scruton’s critique of contract theory stresses two related points: one having to do with the construction of individuality, the other with the character of valid social conventions. Regarding the first, Scruton argues that the freedom of the state of nature is not freedom at all, but merely the absence of constraint.31 No real self-possession or agency can be attributed to the isolated self since, as we have seen, the human person knows itself as ‘I’ only by being accountable to others. ‘Accountability and reciprocity inform all the ways of human society’, according to Scruton; ‘laws, customs, institutions and conventional constraints’ are part of the very fabric of freedom and constitute its foundation.32 Natural freedom is illusory because genuine freedom implies obedience to authority. On the second point, Scruton maintains that we only have access to what is general or universal through our experience of the particular or local.

208

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Following the insight of Husserl that philosophic understanding originates in the commonsense grasp of the world that presents itself to us prior to all theorizing, Scruton faults modern theory for not recognizing that the universally valid principles of the social contract presuppose an existing membership: ‘take away the experience of membership and the ground of the social contract disappears’.33 The first-person plural is ‘the precondition of democratic politics’.34 Scruton’s conservatism can thus be viewed, not as a rejection of liberty in favour of order, but as an argument for ‘ordered liberty’; what it does reject is the aforementioned ‘born free fallacy’.35 Still, the notion of ordered liberty would appear to restate the modern political paradox without resolving it. What is the source of order in the life-world of the modern individual that now resembles nothing so much as ‘a society of strangers in which faith is dwindling or dead?’36 In these circumstances, the conundrum of the social contract becomes especially acute: ‘People need to identify themselves through a first-person plural if they are to accept the sacrifices required by society’, yet this disposition must precede the agreement that ostensibly brings it into being.37 The difficulty remains that in the modern world, this ‘consensual we’ supervenes upon the consent of the individual.38 By Scruton’s own admission, there is no returning from the society of strangers to the ‘warmer relations’ that enfolded the individual as if in a natural whole. Modern political theory simultaneously responds to, and hastens the exit of, ancestral authority by propounding a new authority.39 In holding that, consent must be obtained from a being defined in terms of separation from all traditional loci of belonging: liberalism acknowledges the moral equality entailed by natural freedom.40 By dislocating freedom from sacred and secular social contexts, or by relocating it in ‘natural condition’, the modern theory recognizes an equal freedom that trumps all existing social ranks. The ‘state of nature’ thought experiment can be viewed, in other words, as an attempt to clarify rather than undermine the moral relations of human beings in a new or modern situation. Its effect is negative in the sense that it undermines traditional ruling claims. Beyond that, the conjectural premise of dissociated human beings positively beckons the idea of popular sovereignty, simultaneously accounting for, and legitimizing, the transition from ‘I’ to ‘We’ in the founding of the state.41 In accepting the justice of natural right principles, but being unable to account for their genesis out of the Lebenswelt, Burkean conservatism faces a quandary.42 Scruton’s way out is the objection that ‘the liberal thought experiment’ is merely ‘an attenuated reflection of a particular kind of membership … that simply lacks credibility in societies where the political idea of membership



The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism

209

has failed to replace the warm demands of religion’.43 But the state of nature can be plausibly interpreted as a concept whose force derives from the emergent idea of natural freedom. This idea may be without historical precedent, but only because the philosophical and religious tradition overlooked it by focusing on a too-confident notion of human nature, as if nothing could be more fundamental.44 The assertion that human beings possess natural rights, which it is the task of government to secure, is now firmly rooted in the self-understanding of modern societies that have adopted a political idea of membership. And, interestingly, Scruton himself has portrayed the latter in terms of a series of separations from the Lebenswelt, culminating in a territorial jurisdiction that ‘sits uneasily’ on creedal communities.45 The social contract provides the ‘theology’ for the new jurisdiction community; but, Scruton cautions, ‘it does not, of itself, make such a jurisdiction possible’.46 Adapting one of Scruton’s own animadversions on our political fate, one might say that when the modern state entered the soul of mankind, it brought a new perspective to human relations, leaving behind a way of life that was more communal but less reasonable than political membership. The result is a new variant of the first-person plural, distilled in social contract theory.47 An analogy suggests itself: relations of justice are to communal ties what proofs of God’s existence are to the sense of the sacred. ‘People who are looking for God’, Scruton points out, ‘are not looking for the proof of God’s existence’. They seek a subject-to-subject encounter. ‘They are looking for love.’48 It bears repeating that the new perspective is abstract because of its universality. All human beings, regardless of history or culture, are endowed with rights. The social contract is a regulative rather than a constitutive idea, a non-religious yet transcendent truth.49 Accounting for both natural freedom and the order that subsequently secures it, the contract functions, in the words of one of its ablest exponents, as ‘a truth deeper and truer than the literal history it almost displaces’.50 The conservative is disposed to grant only that the social contract expresses a necessary, but grossly insufficient, truth about social foundations, even for a ‘society of strangers’.51 But a partial truth is not a fallacy to be suppressed, and a powerful case can be made that, the dissolving tendencies of social contract theory notwithstanding, conservative practices and institutions must cohere with it.52 Burke had already owned that the conservative position could be calibrated with the notion that society is ‘like a contract’. Moreover, he accepted that natural rights might be deemed original, provided they were not mistaken as fundamental.53 Abstract and rational principles could therefore play a role in

210

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

political thought, but they could not be the whole of it, and they were particularly inadequate to the task of organizing society. But while these nuances testified to the reflectiveness behind Burke’s polemics, they failed to dispel the aporia of conservatism, which merits restatement in full: Our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves.54

It has been said that the problem of Burke’s political philosophy (using the term advisedly) is ‘to design a theory that never intrudes into practice’, as if theory might ‘serve solely as a watchdog against theory and never be a guide’.55 Fearing the irruption of abstract principles into the ongoing cultural life of a nation, Burkean conservatism treats the question of constitution-making as an aberration to be forgotten: ‘the ground of the constitution must be unseen and unfelt lest it upset the constitution that rests on it’.56 But this obfuscation of the question of origins is no longer possible in modern circumstances.57 Modern conservatism must find a way to think the unthinkable. Straining to satisfy the conflicting demands of principle and prudence, modern politics gives rise to the temptation to dissolve the tension by eliminating one of its poles. Liberal and conservative attitudes satisfy the criteria of legitimacy and stability respectively at the expense of one another. Confronted by the prospect of a ‘complete revolution’ that threatened to purify the existing social world by destroying it, Burke responded with a complete argument for authority. In so doing, he paved the way for what has been called ‘the romantic solution’ to the modern predicament, which sought to reverse the dynamic of ‘becoming an individual’ by reabsorbing the individual as much as possible within culture.58 In its solicitude for the life-world, Scruton’s thought is predisposed to the Burkean tendency. But a modern conservatism must make its peace with ‘principles of political right’ that reflect natural freedom.59 And it is here that the case for conservatism might be enhanced by a more sympathetic study of Rousseau, whose a priori and paradoxical thinking results from a self-conscious effort to mediate between the antinomies of modern democracy, and whose political science aims at what can fairly be called a conservative politics of liberty.60 Burke famously had no sympathy for Rousseau; and Scruton, who does, nevertheless adopts Burke’s severe abridgement of his thinking. Rousseau held



The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism

211

no brief for rationalism in politics and famously opposed its destructive effects on healthy customs. Following Burke, Scruton virtually ignores the fact that Rousseau’s inquiry into foundational principles is complemented by a sociological treatment of the sources of unity, explicitly recognizing that rational principles are not self-sustaining. Rousseau wrestles with the very problem that occupied Burke (and which remains ours): how to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of consent and prudence, will and wisdom. What distinguishes the two thinkers is that, whereas Burke acknowledges the original social contract only to dismiss its relevance, Rousseau regards the conventional foundation of society as incontestable and wonders how prudence might be made compatible with it.61 In other words, Rousseau preserves the problem of theory and practice because two truths are contained in it; Burke’s conservatism, by comparison, moves too precipitously towards a ‘solution’. His famous polemic against the Enlightenment notwithstanding, Rousseau accepted that the modern world was theory-laden, an amalgam of practices and principles. It bears mentioning that these were generated in response to practical crises, especially religious conflicts.62 Abstract conceptions of human beings were constructed in an effort to deliver them from entrenched relations of domination and subjection. When Rousseau declared that ‘man is born free’, he expressed more pithily Locke’s assertion that ‘creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one among another without subordination or subjection’.63 Far from endorsing the complete revolution that Burke associated with the French revolutionaries, Rousseau strove to control the ramifications of popular sovereignty without suppressing the principle. He never intended the principles of political right to continuously transform society by eroding its customary practices. The purpose of politics, after all, was not to reproduce natural freedom within society but to establish freedom on a genuinely social foundation. No less than Burke, Rousseau emphasized that society depended on such customs, and he appreciated their fragility; but neither would he, for that reason, consign principles to the closet. Never sanguine about the constructive task of modern politics (as his proliferation of images of authority attests), he went so far as to propose a civil religion for the sake of social solidarity. The fundamental political question for Rousseau was how the principle of popular sovereignty might be respected while preserving social forms that only imperfectly honoured it. The sovereignty of the people had to be at least periodically acknowledged if popular freedom was to be upheld.

212

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

In light of the twin imperatives of modern politics, it would seem that a modern conservatism must be a hyphenated one, compatible with a politics of liberty as well as authority. Giving the moral postulate of individuality its due, even as it expounds a richer account of subjectivity, it must be a liberal-conservatism or, more precisely, a conservative-liberalism.64 It would behoove modern conservatism to acknowledge its paradoxical character and mind the gap between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’, which Rousseau lamented but refused to hide. Already persuaded of the case that liberty depends on moral authorities, conservatism might benefit from Rousseau’s reciprocal argument for the necessary limits of that dependence.65 However much the disabilities of modern politics may be attributable to its conceptual framework, the latter constitutes what Charles Taylor calls ‘the modern social imaginary’. The principle of individual consent has indeed relieved traditional institutions of much of their authority, and modern freedom is characterized by a self-conscious liberation from spiritual powers.66 Religious belief may endure as a personal experience in the mind of the believer, but it no longer structures his world. Human beings now live squarely in the city of man. In the final stage of this ‘progressive’ unfolding of human freedom, religious belief seems destined to become, like modern sexual habits, a matter of taste: perfectly free in so far as its consequences remain perfectly private.67 Scruton’s wide-ranging moral and cultural criticism addresses this prospect, more in sorrow than in anger, showing how our relationships are made poorer to the extent they are remade in the language of contract.68 As Scruton writes: We find ourselves confronted with that monstrous entity, the modern man, the person for whom all connection with an order greater than himself has to be won through an effort of his own, and who looks for that order, not necessarily in what is or has been, but more often in what will be or in what might be.69

Obligated only by that to which he has consented, this new man is incapable of reverence, which can be felt only with the awareness of one’s limitations.70 Modern individualism is purchased at the price of the sacred. Scruton’s conservatism is as timely as was Burke’s and, truth be told, surpasses it for persuasive power. Scruton resists the modern principle out of a fear that putting freedom first encourages a vision of human life as a project of technological mastery. The perversity of the modern vision is its redescription of the human world as a world of things. In emancipating us from prejudices, ‘enlightenment abolishes the sacred, the prohibited and the protected’.71 Still, Scruton urges, ‘the demoralized world is not the real one, and it is the task of philosophy to show that this is so’.72



The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism

213

In the final analysis, Scruton seems to have a residual confidence that ‘we can actually move on from our original nature, and create a flexible, reasonable and charitable “we”, which is not a collective “I” at all, but the by-product of individual freedom’.73 Here perhaps lies an opening for a détente with the modern perspective. But Scruton remains convinced that only the sacred can establish the horizon for human life, without which limit our over-running freedom will despair of satisfaction. For the emancipation of the modern individual to avoid the ‘monstrous’ consequences depicted in The Meaning of Conservatism, it would appear that liberals must become conservative-liberals, attuned to the need for social institutions and mindful of their fragility. Conservatives, for their part, ought to accept the justice of modern individualism even as they combat its worst tendencies, arguing for a conservative politics of liberty that respects the loyalties that are first for us.

Notes   1 Scruton, PP, p. 85.   2 Scruton, MP, pp. 121, 128.   3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in ed. Christopher Kelly and Roger Masters, Collected Writings of Rousseau, (Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, 1993), Vol. 3, 13.   4 Scruton, MP, pp. 245–6.   5 See Dooley, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach, p. 5.   6 Scruton, SW, p. 14. Cf. Scruton, MC, p. 5, identifying ‘the principal enemy of conservatism’ as ‘the philosophy of liberalism, with all its attendant trappings of individual autonomy and the natural rights of man’. For the purposes of this essay I will bracket distinctions among Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and refer synonymously to ‘modern political philosophy’, ‘liberal political theory’, and ‘social contract theory’.   7 Scruton, GR, p. 42.   8 Scruton, ‘Man’s Second Disobedience: A Vindication of Edmund Burke’, in The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).   9 Scruton, PMD, p. 523. 10 Scruton, PP, p. 90 (emphasis added); cf. pp. 86–7. 11 Scruton, PP, p. 90. 12 Scruton, SW, p. 80–1. Cf. Scruton, KI, pp. 18–19; 83–4.

214

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

13 Scruton, PP, p. 96. 14 Scruton, SW, p. 93. 15 On the complications of establishing a social theory on asocial assumptions, see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 65–83. 16 Scruton, MC, pp. 42 and 63. In this regard the liberal constitution is analogous to the God of the philosophers rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Cf. Scruton, SW, p. 12. 17 The term ‘negative anthropology’ is Manent’s. See Pierre Manent and Philip J. Costopoulos, ‘On Modern Individualism’, Journal of Democracy 7 (1) (1996): 4. Cf. Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 81 and Cours Familier de Philosophie Politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), Chapter 2, passim. 18 Manent, ‘On Modern Individualism’, p. 5. 19 Scruton, PP, p. 87. 20 Scruton, MC, pp. 42 and 63. 21 Ibid., 27. 22 Ibid., 28. 23 Scruton, UP, pp. 42–61. 24 Scruton, ‘Rousseau and the Origins of Liberalis’, in Dooley, The Roger Scruton Reader, pp. 44–5. 25 Ibid., 53. 26 This characterization of the Burkean argument relies heavily on Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 297–310. 27 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Select Works of Edmund Burke, ed. Francis Canavan and Edward John Payne (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), Vol. 2, p. 105. 28 Scruton, CC, xi, pp. 69–85. 29 Scruton, GR, pp. 33–44. 30 See, for example, Scruton, MC, pp. 47–8. 31 Scruton, UP, p. 46. 32 Ibid., p. 49. 33 Scruton, WR, p. 13; PDB, pp. 17–24. 34 Scruton, APP, p. 9. 35 Scruton, UP, pp. 42–61. 36 Scruton, APP, p. 13. 37 Ibid., p. 14; see also 8; Social Contract II.7.9 (Citations to the Social Contract are to book, chapter and paragraph.) 38 Scruton, UP, p. 230; Cf. Scruton, APP, p. 13. 39 See Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Marc LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 16.



The Loss of the Sacred and the Challenge of Modern Conservatism

215

40 See Manent, Cours Familier, pp. 23–37. The much-discussed ‘liberalcommunitarian debate’ centres on whether liberal theory is the cause or consequence of this separation. See Charles Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal Communitarian Debate’, in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 41 See Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, p. 85. 42 See Peter J. Stanlis, ‘The Basis of Burke’s Political Conservatism’, Modern Age, 5 (3) (Summer 1961). Cf. Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 28. 43 Scruton, WR, p. 15. 44 For a profound treatment of the way ‘human rights’ takes the place of ‘human nature’ in the modern consciousness, see Manent, The City of Man, pp. 148–9. 45 Scruton, WR, pp. 15–25. 46 Ibid., p. 39. 47 Scruton, UP, pp. 208–9. 48 Scruton, SW, p. 13. 49 Cf. Scruton, KI, p. 130. Cf. Charles Taylor’s suggestion that the social contract is ‘made’ neither in ordinary time nor in sacred time. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 110. 50 Michael Zuckert, Launching Liberalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), p. 255. 51 Scruton, WR, p. 53. 52 Zuckert, Launching Liberalism, pp. 257–8. 53 See Scruton, APP, p. 35. 54 Scruton, GR, p. 42. 55 Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., ‘Burke’s Theory of Political Practice’, in Selected Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 4–5. 56 Ibid., pp. 12 and 22. For a provocative discussion of the momentous consequences of this demurral on Burke’s part, see Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 313–15. 57 See Pierre Manent, Les Métamorphoses de la Cité: Essai sur la dynamique de l’Occident (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), p. 7. 58 See Leo Strauss, ‘On the Intention of Rousseau’, in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (Garden City, NY: Anchor books, 1972), pp. 284–5. Scruton’s multifarious reflections on culture might seem to confirm Strauss’s hypothesis; but as noticed above, Scruton’s complex account of subjectivity cannot be reduced to a process of cultural absorption of the individual. 59 The subtitle of Rousseau’s Social Contract.

216

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

60 I expound this argument in Freedom in Rousseau’s Political Philosophy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). Scruton connects Rousseau’s paradoxes to his a priorism in ‘Rousseau’, RSR. 61 ‘Puisque aucun homme n’a une autorité naturelle sur son semblable, et puisque la force ne produit aucun droit, restent donc les conventions pour base de toute autorité légitime parmi les homes.’ Social Contract, I.4.1, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume III, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–). 62 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 3, and Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, p. 9. 63 Locke, Second Treatise, II.4. 64 See Peter Augustine Lawler, ‘Liberal Conservatism, Not Conservative Liberalism’, The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 2003/Spring 2004): 58–62. Lawler accepts the proposition that an unmodified conservatism is no longer an option, and that the modification is necessitated by the fact that we are fated to be individuals in Manent’s sense. The correction offered by modern conservatism has to do with becoming an effective individual. Ibid., p. 60. 65 See Social Contract, II.7 passim; II.12.5. 66 Manent, On Modern Individualism, pp. 3–4. See EE, for one example of Scruton’s many treatments of this theme. See also Manent, Cours Familier, p. 51. 67 George Parkin Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1974 and 1985), p. 37. 68 Scruton, SW, p. 94. 69 Scruton, MC 2002, pp. 111–12. 70 Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing A Forgotten Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 117. 71 Scruton, PP, p. 135. 72 Ibid., p. 96. 73 Scruton, UP, p. 204.

19

Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture Charles Taliaferro

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? Henry David Thoreau In Green Philosophy, Roger Scruton offers a critique of what today would likely be considered the liberal, environmental movement, which will not surprise many readers familiar with Scruton’s work, but it also includes a robust case for caring for the environment that will surprise many self-described ‘conservatives’ in the United States. In the United States, ‘conservatives’ tend to be highly reluctant both to believe that environmental conditions demand serious changes by private persons and even more reluctant to impose restrictions on, say, major corporations that are contributing what most scientists believe are dangerous levels of carbon emissions. In Scruton’s conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke, there is no love for unfettered capitalism (a free market that is not influenced by the deeply humane and enduring values of community and tradition). Scruton shares with American conservatives a preference for a relatively small role for the state – relative, that is, in comparison to American contemporary ‘liberals’. Scruton believes we should ‘prevent the state from undertaking tasks that can be better performed by citizens’.1 But he believes – and seems to believe passionately – that we as individuals in our homes, in our work, in our families, communities and traditions need to make well-informed changes to halt and perhaps reverse the environmental degradation we are causing. Scruton favours an ethos and practice socially and culturally that will inspire us to responsible environmental practices based on the traditions of stewardship and care that we find in communities where persons naturally collaborate in the care of the places they call home. Scruton tackles the big issues (addressing the macroeconomics and global ecological problems of pollution) and rightly identifies ways in which some

218

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

government policies (for example, its providing incentives for the greater production of plastic products for the sake of food safety) have led to disastrous environmental consequences. There is something compelling about Scruton’s more domestic (regional) approach to environmental ethics as distinct from the approach of what Scruton sees as global environmental movements that seek to bring about mass change through social engineering, sometimes through legislation that works from the top-down (e.g. the imposition of ecological standards as set by the state). Scruton’s proposal for how we should care for the planet is a bottom-up, ‘grass roots’ strategy: our goal should be ‘to achieve a managed environment, in which good results arise spontaneously from what ordinary people do’.2 By describing Scruton’s approach as ‘regional’, I mean that it is regional in its inception and driving force; Scruton is not advocating a regionalism that ignores our relationships with others that can encompass the whole planet. Scruton introduces the term oikophilia, from the Greek for ‘love of home’ to name his conservative ethic, and there is much to praise here. I believe that Scruton is correct that there is something of an evident love of the home that runs through much of human culture and history. To be sure, it is a chequered history that is often wedged in by strident tribal, provincial, economic, ethnic or narrow religious loyalties that can be sources of profound suffering (not forgetting the fact that throughout history there have been homes that would not exist except for the practice of slavery, gender inequality, etc.), but we can see something that can meaningfully be called oikophilia in the work of Homer and Virgil, in the Hebrew, Christian and Islamic understanding of hospitality, the love of neighbour and the Golden Rule, in the home as envisioned by Confucius and in-grained in much Chinese culture. There are, of course, strong currents in the history of ideas that set up values that oppose particular loyalties (think of Moism or Plato’s ambivalence about family) and, yes, the idea of a love of home is broad and vague, but it is no worse and perhaps better (in my view) than, say, the term biophilia (coined by Eric Fromm)3 or natural piety (as used by Aldo Leopold) or reverence for life (as used by the good and noble Dr. Albert Schweitzer). Notwithstanding my defence of the concept of oikophilia, I suggest that the terms philosophia oiko might be better suited, because, by invoking philosophy (from philo for love and sophia for wisdom), the term philosophia oiko puts the love of home more solidly in the sapiential or wisdom tradition (so philosophia oiko may be interpreted as the wise loving of home). There are three sections that follow: the first situates Scruton’s project in cultural and economic terms. While I find Scruton’s strategy for saving the



Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture

219

planet admirable, I suggest it should be tempered by more government and international (‘top-down’) control. A second section seeks to provide reasons for thinking that a government that is founded on, and reflects, what may be called a philosophical culture is more promising than philosophia oiko taken alone. There is a very brief section at the end that suggests how theology and religious ethics may enhance the contribution to environmental responsibility of a philosophia oiko in the context of the greater love for a philosophical culture. Fortunately for us, Roger Scruton has done important work in his philosophical reflections on faith, Christian tradition and its resources for helping us live with not just an ethic, but a spirituality that will enhance any love we have for our home planet.

Philosophia Oiko in culture and economics As suggested above, Scruton’s conservatism is reflected in his distrust of international, global movements that focus mainly on large-scale problems and large-scale, radical action, and puts his trust, instead, in ordinary individual persons who are brought up (or who live with) a commonsense love of home or habitation, collaborating with others in ways that take responsibility for the environment in which we live. Scruton’s ideal conservative is not a misanthrope but someone who thinks of the larger places in which we live in public, shared terms. The conservative thinks of many places as ‘not just mine and yours, but ours’. This is the ‘ours’ that is compatible with a free-market economy in a just society and not the ‘ours’ in the socialist sense which would radically redistribute property holdings on a massive scale in the main economies of the world. In the tradition of Edmund Burke, Scruton’s ideal conservative thinks of society in terms of its past and future, ‘an association of the dead, the living, and the unborn’. Scruton rightly understands how, historically, the eighteenthcentury conservatism (of Burke and others) did not lead to a nationalist promotion of one’s homeland over others; witness, for example, Burke’s protests against British incursions (both economically and militarily) into India and Burke’s support of American independence. Scruton’s conservative is a lover; he values past traditions and practices of stewardship that can prepare homes for future generations ‘not from nostalgia, but from a desire to love as an enduring consciousness among things that endure’. Our local, individual concerns may begin with ‘our need for nurture and safety’ and yet it then ‘spreads out across our surroundings in more mysterious and less self-serving ways’. If Scruton is

220

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

right, then, ideally, if all people were empowered, educated, and motivated to change our ecologically grievous action or inaction using as a model the care a wise person lovingly takes in one’s shared spaces, then global problems might be solved by responsible, local, sovereign communities in which friendships and good neighbourliness triumph. At first glance, Scruton’s conservative environmental ethics may seem Panglossian, but I find his vision inspiring, refreshing and not without support. Scruton identifies what should and should not be in place for his conservatism to work. In cultural and economic terms, the ethos of a consumerist culture, where individual acquisitiveness is valued over sustainability, must be overturned or at least curtailed. Scruton rightly underscores that the battle against consumerism should unite the left and right. He offers concrete examples of small-scale action, quite independent of state planning, that has led to significant results, like the ubiquity of farmer markets, growth in community agriculture (such as Community Supported Agriculture), and the initiatives by ordinary citizens to establish the Women’s Institute and the British National Trust. Scruton also envisages taking steps to ensure that corporations and markets take responsibility for their damaging ‘externalities’. Some of this can be done through government, though Scruton seems more focused on motivating consumers to realize the true costs of our transactions: ‘[w]e must find motives that cause people to internalize their costs and the institutions through which those motives can be exercised to the common good’. Scruton’s analysis and proposal are fantastic in both senses of the word. They are profoundly attractive and I cannot help hoping that persons can be so motivated from local affections to responsible action. Who would not want a world in which ‘local affections are made central to policy and in which homeostasis and resilience rather than social reordering and central control are the primary outcomes’, unless of course those ‘local affections’ are myopic, xenophobic and narrowly tribal?4 But assuming we are in a world in which there is a sturdy reservoir of local affections that dispose us towards good neighbourliness, and ever-increasing expanding circles of affection, one has to have enormous faith that we humans will act on these affections when such action is not in our immediate self-interest.5 The moral issues and arguments on such matters (in the words of a hymn) ‘far out pass the power of human telling’, and so I will not be able to establish my less optimistic view of our readiness to voluntarily make the changes necessary to save the planet. The popular phrase ‘Home is where the heart is’ is almost always used to refer to the sentiment that our place of habitation can be a focus of our identity and loyalty, but homes can



Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture

221

also be places where there is also a great deal of lying, deceit and cruelty. Scruton is well aware of this. Our disagreement could (in principle) be settled empirically. While not offering such an empirical argument, I will offer some support of my more guarded position from United States history. Scruton seems to think of the United States as an imperfect but reasonably just society. I suggest that American history gives us some reason to question the adequacy of Scruton’s conservatism. It seems to support the idea that a conservative communitarianism (such as we find in the British colonies in the late seventeenth century on up until the Revolution) had to give way to Federalism in order for the United States to form a reasonable government that could keep the peace; maintain a national law; a stable economy; a body of rights; and a government structured to make tyranny unlikely. Consider the following contrast that Scruton draws between small-scale associations and mass movements. In the formation of the Republic of the United States it became apparent that a middle ground was essential: we could not live as a confederation of clubs, nor could we expect our citizens to be patriots if we lived our lives as part of an ‘agenda-driven movement’. Scruton writes: When people join together in a partnership or a club, they establish a form of collective liability, and the law has devised procedures whereby to recognize this liability in the courts. People who make decisions on behalf of the partnership or the club become accountable to the other members, and the club shapes its rules accordingly. Agenda-driven movements, however, are not like this. They involve a flow of collective sentiment, which might peak here and there in the shape of leaders and spokesmen, but which rushes ever onwards like an invading army, seldom pausing to restore the moral order that lies fragmented in its wake. The result is the erosion of accountability – both to the followers and to those whose interests they damage.6

This is stirring language that is not entirely out of tune with the anti-Federalist literature and the warning against a Federal Government: and the creation, not of a militia, but of a standing army. Scruton’s conservatism need not be linked with the more radical, anti-Federalist position that would make a large population in a large land ungovernable. But we have good reason to believe that, to take a specific example, farmers along the Mississippi can be shown evidence that the run-off of fertilizer from their farms winds up creating the massive ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico, and they show no sign of voluntarily correcting their practices. I think Scruton would (or does) endorse farmers being held accountable for the unreasonable

222

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

waste and contribution to the death of so much life in the Gulf. I suggest, however, that there are so many cases like this that we do need massive, ‘agenda-driven movements’ such as those endorsed by Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. Following the lead of some of the Federalists in America’s early history – persons of no less significance than George Washington – we need to have loyalty (that is affective as well as behavioural) or love for a constitutional, democratic republic that can enact environmental policies that compel us to be responsible. Whether we should adopt Scruton’s conservatism will depend on what we think the likelihood is that ordinary persons can find solutions to our common environmental problems and then work, on the basis of virtues learned in the care for home, to halt the increasing erosion of the environment. Let us consider how we might achieve Scruton’s goals but with a less than conservative approach to governance.

The wise love of a philosophical culture While I deeply admire Scruton’s ideal of a proper and wise love of home, I suggest that in current, complex and diverse societies, there is a great need for what may be called a philosophical culture. In building up the concept of a philosophical culture, let us take a highly selective look at Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, focusing on his thesis about the cultural importance of philosophy as a practice of independent, critical reflection not bound by the tyranny of either government or group, or, as Popper himself frequently referenced, tribal identity. Popper draws a sharp contrast between closed and open societies. Closed societies are those that are marked by tribal or collective identity and the adherence to traditions and practices that do not allow for the development and flourishing of individual thinking and personal responsibility. A closed society is anti-democratic in so far as governance is not based on individuals entertaining and developing arguments to bring about non-violent change in political power and policies. In a closed society, when the authority of the state is questioned, opposition parties are likely to be brutally silenced. In Popper’s view, many of the enemies of an open, democratic society are pessimistic about average human capacities for self-governance and accountability; they take the cynical view that ordinary persons require the leadership of an elite class or group that can act paternalistically for the good of the whole. Popper’s stance



Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture

223

may seem unexceptional and a matter of common sense, but at the time of his writing many of us were (and still are) not widely acquainted with his claim that tribalism and an anti-democratic collectivism (along with a distrust in the average person) were strongly advocated by some of the greatest philosophers in the West. While Popper is highly critical of anti-democratic philosophers, beginning with Heraclitus, and aggressively condemns any hint of authoritarianism in Plato’s writings, he construes the central activity of philosophy, as found in Socrates’ practice of engaging his fellow Athenians in dialogue, as inherently democratic. Socrates is hailed as ‘the champion of the open society, and a friend of democracy’, because he extolled and practised individual, critical reflection and dialogue on matters of value.7 Popper interprets Socrates’ focus on the care of the soul (as noted in Plato’s Apology) as something more than caring for one’s corporeal wellbeing. Rather than admonishing the Athenians to renounce their concern with their corporeal bodies, for Popper, Socrates rightly urges the Athenians to care about the love of truth and goodness through reason: [Socrates] demanded that individualism should not be merely the dissolution of tribalism, but that the individual should prove worthy of his liberation. This is why he insisted that man is not merely a piece of flesh – a body. There is more in man, a divine spark, reason, and a love of truth, of kindness, humaneness, a love of beauty and of goodness. It is those that make a man’s life worthwhile … It is your reason that makes you human; that enables you to be more than a mere bundle of desires and wishes; that makes you a self-sufficient individual and entitles you to claim that you are an end in yourself.8

I believe that the above description gives us a portrait of what Popper would recognize as essential to the practice of philosophy or (literally) the love of wisdom. From this Popper–Socrates perspective, a philosopher is an individual who loves wisdom, and this consists in such things as loving the truth about significant matters, a love that rejects falsehood. Because a lover of wisdom’s first priority is loving goodness, beauty, humaneness, reason and the like, secondary loves need to be subordinated. In cases of conflict, the love of goodness should trump the desire for fame, allegiance to tribe or the desire to have power over others. It is interesting that Popper sees Socrates specifically in terms of kindness. Presumably kindness is incompatible with simply imposing one’s viewpoints on others. The love of beauty and goodness would appear to lead a lover of wisdom into dialogue with others, to look for reasons why some ways

224

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

of living are more good and beautiful than others. As he does himself, Popper treats Socrates as a fallibilist, and so, given that the lover of wisdom is not in possession of infallible, incorrigible knowledge of matters of beautiful and good government and ways of life, there is great value in respectful dialogue between lovers of wisdom. Popper goes on to propose that the kind of culture that includes and encourages the Socratic practice of loving wisdom will rightly include critical reflection on the challenges facing democracy: ‘What [Socrates] criticized in democracy and democratic statesmen was their inadequate realization of [matters of importance]. He criticized them rightly for their lack of intellectual honesty, and for their obsession with power-politics.’9 The key, as noted above, is only to resort to power when this truly seems to be the wisest course of action after sustained, shared reflection that is honest, impartial and unaffected by tribal desires or threats. There is no room here to fill out and defend all the above terms and ideals, but here is a brief defence of the main points in the form of a rhetorical question: if we were to have the time and space to reason further about the adequacy of the above portrait of loving wisdom, would it not be a good way to fill out a fuller account by engaging in shared and honest reflection in which each participant loved the truth more than his or her tribal identity? Would it not be good to proceed non-violently, allowing ourselves to be persuaded (in principle) by the reasons and arguments of others, doing our best to share our love of goodness and beauty, taking seriously the way others love goodness and beauty? A philosophical culture, conceived along the lines of Popper’s portrait of Socrates, would require (or inspire) those parties engaged in philosophical exchange to regard each other with respect and as worthy of attention, exercising a principle of charity when interpreting the other’s claims. It may be that there are occasions when a just society built on the love of wisdom needs to treat some rights with unquestioned sanctity, such as the right of free speech and the right of assembly by minority populations, notwithstanding the disapproval of the majority. Such boundaries are part of constitutional democracies that expect their citizens to act with moral responsibility. What I hope is becoming apparent is that a philosophical culture supports a constitutional, as opposed to merely procedural, democracy. In a narrow, procedural sense, a democracy would include any society in which its population plays a significant role in governance by voting on policies or electing leaders or representatives. Two questions arise when further identifying a democracy: what if the ‘majority’ is composed of only a minority of those people living in the state? For example, what if a necessary condition of voting is being male?



Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture

225

Or a landowner? Or an adult? What if certain ethnic groups are not permitted to vote? A second matter concerns what was referenced above: the need to safeguard minorities from a majority violating their fundamental rights. Our concept of ‘democracy’ today is linked to a respect for individuals that does not allow for an unchecked implementation of majority rule. Jeremy Waldron describes a constitutional democracy that would be supported by what we are calling a philosophical culture.10 In a philosophical dialogue we need to assume, unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, that all parties are competent to reflect together about the nature of justice and that each of us has a right to be part of the great debates about values, especially as this bears on matters of governance: The identification of someone as a right-bearer expresses a measure of confidence in that person’s moral capacities – in particular his capacity to think responsibly about the moral relation between his interests and the interests of others. The possession of this capacity – a sense of justice, if you like! – is the primary basis of democratic competence. Our conviction, that ordinary men and women have what it takes to participate responsibly in the government of their society is, in fact, the same conviction as that on which the attribution of rights is based.11

It is clear that this conception of democracy is not merely procedural in nature. It is the kind of society that has confidence in the morality and maturity of its citizens, and thus does not allow for the blanket denigration of the minority that, in its exercise of morality and maturity, voted against some policy favoured by the majority.12 Waldron amplifies this morality-based approach to democracy with his insistence that persons in a democracy have a responsibility to engage in debate in the course of resolving disagreements.13 His concept of a constitutional democracy seems to provide an extensive political framework that would be supported by the practices of a philosophical culture as conceived of in the Socratic-Popperian tradition. While I am presenting this culture and arena for deliberation and action in contrast to Scruton’s philosophia oikos, the two are not incompatible. Moreover, in another of his books, Scruton has given us a wonderful portrait of what it would be like to engage one another in a philosophical culture: When I am interested in someone as a person, then his own conceptions, his reasons for action and his declarations of resolve are of paramount importance to me. In seeking to change his conduct, I seek first of all to change these, and I accept that he may have reason on his side. If I am not interested in him as a

226

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

person, however, if, for me, he is a mere human object who, for good or ill, lies in my path, then I shall give no special consideration to his reasons and resolves. If I seek to change his behaviour, I shall (if I am rational) take the most efficient course. For example, if a drug is more effective than the tiresome process of persuasion, I shall use a drug. Everything depends upon the available basis for prediction. To put it in the language made famous by Kant: I now treat him as a means, and not an end. For his ends, his reasons, are no longer sovereign in dictating the ways in which I act upon him. I am alienated from him as a rational agent, and do not particularly mind if he is alienated from me.14

This portrait of a philosophical culture may be extended by taking into account some of Scruton’s other writings. But I hope enough has been presented to place the love of home in a broader, complementary philosophical culture. Just as there are no guarantees that focusing on the home will always lead to environmental responsibility, one may readily envision how a philosophical culture might be disastrous. Imagine a philosophical culture that reaches a Schopenhauer-like conclusion about the vanity of life. I conclude with some brief remarks on another element that might enhance the chances that a wise love of home and a wise love for philosophical culture may benefit our environment. It will also provide an opportunity to fill out a vital element in what I take to be a healthy philosophical culture, one that has a genuine promise of leading us to think well and better than we usually do about what we think ultimately worthwhile.

The love of home in a philosophical culture and the love of God Scruton has written with great care about the reasonability of religious faith in our time. In light of this work and its reception, I offer only two suggestions. First, Scruton’s positive case for the love of home might be strengthened if he had examined the rich resources in Christianity (and in some other religious traditions) for a deep and effective environmental ethic. This is especially important given the distorted view of Christianity one finds in much environmental ethics.15 As Holmes Rolston, Gary Comstock, Wendell Berry and others have argued, there is a strong stewardship tradition in Christianity that can ground a responsible environmental ethics in the context of the love of God.16 While this may not move secularists, I submit that a Christian environmental ethic can be persuasive to even the more hostile critics of religious belief.



Loving One’s Home in a Philosophical Culture

227

A second point: Scruton’s contributions on the integrity and reasonability of religious faith are a refreshing and important contribution to how religion and values may be assessed in a philosophical culture. Consider Simon Blackburn’s monumentally hostile approach to religious faith in Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love. There Blackburn makes the belief in God in the Abrahamic tradition the equivalent to the belief in a very special teapot. The analogy comes from Bertrand Russell, but I fear that this was not one of his great contributions. I will not cite Blackburn’s unbearable thought experiment in which God is compared to a very powerful and wise teapot. Instead, I will cite Blackburn in two contexts. First, after his teapot thought experiment, he offers this recommendation for those who feel they should challenge people in the grip of theism: Instead of waving theistic or atheistic banners, we should pick up Hume’s Natural History of Religion, or its successors in the works of Kant, Marx, or Durkheim. And if we want to wean people away from their myths, or the particular coloration their myths have taken at particular times and places, then we must do what Nietzsche did at the end of the nineteenth century, which was to recognize moral corruption when we find it, and then to rail, preach, inveigh, fulminate, or thunder against it.17

Blackburn counsels us to look to Hume’s work, and others who engaged in philosophical argument. However, putting to one side speculation about whether Hume himself retained a thin version of theism; Kant’s practical reasons for a moral faith in theism; and Marx’s and Durkheim’s positive views on religion; Blackburn’s recommendation about the desirability of railing, fulminating, thundering and preaching, seems profoundly unlike the portrait of interpersonal, respectful dialogue Scruton’s work cited above. All may not be lost. I quote Blackburn’s comments on Scruton’s The Soul of the World: Its passion, imagination, and sensitivity to all aspects of our world mean that this is a book that can be enjoyed by humanists as much as by those who identify themselves as religious. Scruton’s God is embedded in the human world, including our art, architecture, music, and literature to which he is such a fascinating guide, which is the right place for gods to be.18

Is this the same Blackburn who compared belief in theism to believing in a magical teapot? Assuming it is, this is some evidence that someone of Scruton’s calibre as a philosopher may bring even some of the most hostile among us to see that Christian values could be considered vital for us to engage. My hope is

228

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

that through such an engagement, Scruton’s case for a serious conservative and mature approach to environmental ethics will gain momentum.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5

Scruton, GP, p. 377. Ibid., pp. 391–2. E. Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (London: Cape, 1974). Scruton, GP, p. 325. For example, see James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).   6 Scruton, GP, p. 89.   7 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1st edn, 1945), p. 204.   8 Ibid., p. 203.   9 Ibid., p. 204. 10 Jeremy Waldron, ‘The Constitutional Conception of Democracy’, in Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 11 Ibid., p. 282. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 283. 14 Witness the caustic claims by Paul Taylor in his Respect for Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and J. B. Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: SUNY, 1989). 15 Scruton, SD, p. 53. 16 Rolston Holmes, Environmental Ethics: duties to and values in the natural world (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); G. Comstock, ed. Life Science Ethics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010); W. Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt, 1972). 17 Simon Blackburn, Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 141–2. 18 This quotation is taken from the book jacket of Scruton’s SW.

20

Thinking Is Something Daunting1 Chantal Delsol

1 Man is defined as a being endowed with an individual consciousness: he can think for himself. This faculty is as essential as it is daunting. To use it is to expose oneself to a thousand perils. All cultures bear witness to the greatness of individual thinking and the dangers that it involves. I will only mention two ancient examples. First, one most familiar to us: Antigone and Socrates: both put to death for thinking differently. The fact that Antigone was a young, fragile – and probably anorexic – girl is all the more indicative of the human capacity, even among the frailest, to think for oneself and against all. The second example is further from us and therefore illustrates the universality of this idea. Liezi, a Chinese man of letters of the sixteenth century, dared to gather and analyse in a personal way, historical texts without permission from the authorities. He wrote two books, titled A Book to Burn and A Book to Hide. These works were, of course, banned, and their author ended up committing suicide in jail, after writing in a text titled An Emotional Look at my Life: ‘I have suffered so many affronts and been bullied so often that were the entire earth to turn into black ink, it would not suffice to write the tale of my woes.’2 Such is the courage to think, and it is not limited to the West. In Judaeo–Christian culture, individual thinking is not only a fact of nature, but also a moral necessity. In order to illustrate this, we might refer to the beautiful passages of Paul on the inner man. To be, each of us, endowed with an inner man – a being capable of thinking for oneself and in secret – allows us to grow at the same time as it causes us to suffer by severing us from human community. The inner man is not the person who loiters and dabbles with

230

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

concepts. His freedom to think should not be understood in the sense that everything is possible, such that it would be possible for him to think anything. This means that ‘thinking’ is not to be identified with ‘imagining’. One cannot think about the world the same way one writes fiction, as held within nihilist currents, from Diogenes to Michel Foucault through Sade, for example. In the life of action, freedom is nothing other than the choice of responsibility. In the life of the spirit, freedom implies the demanding quest for truth. The free spirit is the spirit available for truth. This requires courage. Augustine in his Confessions wrote that ‘men love truth when it enlightens them, they hate it when it rebukes them’.3 This shows how dangerous truth can be: one wishes it did not illuminate everything, but this light cannot be mastered (although many try). What use is an intellectual if not seeking the truth? The quest for truth makes us free, because it liberates us from all the certainties imposed by authorities, habits and prejudices. We are beggars for truth, and that is the best destiny we can have, since we thereby avoid all arbitrariness and parochialisms. Being an autonomous subject requires that one withdraws so as to really be able to think. A free spirit maintains this capacity for withdrawal, for setting himself at a distance, which allows ‘free inquiry’. Thus dictatorships and all forms of moral order seek to contain as many individuals as possible in crowds and masses so as to prevent this kind of withdrawal. This is why democracy, when properly understood, involves free spirits, whose solitude is symbolised by the polling booth. Leaving one’s community is a necessary condition for thought. With respect to the act of thinking itself, each spirit is the intimate guardian of the search for truth, which is universal. Since the search for truth generally requires abandoning other desirable goods (for instance, reputation), it is not at the centre of power, in the midst of might and glory, that the search for truth can be undertaken. Kant rightly remarked that participating in power necessarily restricts the freedom of judgement. Thinking is a sacrifice. Living at the margins is a weakness within political societies; a burden or point of pride for the artist; and a failure for the consumer. But for one who thinks, it represents dignity of the human spirit, which deploys its full potential by keeping its distance.

2 In our society, individual thinking is an established, even an exalted, right, for it belongs within the frame of a religion of the word (not a religion of the



Thinking Is Something Daunting

231

Book), of the logos, of dialogue: human beings are hermeneuts, interpreters of creation. Truth is always uncertain: one must therefore take the risk of uncertainty – thinking involves that which is fragile and subject to doubt. Wherefore audacity. Wherefore danger. Salto mortale, to use Jacobi’s phrase. This salto mortale makes possible the emergence of democracy. If the truth regarding the common good is something fixed, then there would be no use for debates: a good autocracy, or technocracy, would suffice for governing societies. This salto mortale makes possible the development of science by leaving behind readymade thinking – the comfort of prejudices and habits of thought observed by Bachelard. In The Sleepwalkers, Koestler narrates how the first scientists were despised and mocked. He describes Copernicus’ writing as the book no one has read. Similar examples are legion. It might be recalled that Mendel, the genius inventor of genetics, gave conferences to a yawning audience that forgot him soon afterward. Common opinion is not fond of novelty. Challenging inevitabilities and certainties requires constantly letting go of the self. ‘A truly free man’, Valery claimed, ‘never holds on to his opinions’: he can easily let go of them for the sake of truth, in the same way one might abandon prejudices. Wherefore the quasi-congenital disquietude, and the permanent discomfort, that distinguish him. The anthropology of the inner Man will help the development of the Enlightenment. To think for oneself is to escape holism. This is something of which only a few people in holistic societies are capable (e.g. Socrates). But Judaeo-Christianity introduces an anthropology by which all should be capable of thinking for themselves. In his treatise ‘What is the Enlightenment?’, Kant describes the Enlightenment as a process through which the human spirit leaves its marginal condition to make use of its own understanding. Thus Kant cites Horace: Sapere Aude! Dare to think for yourself! He defends the common view of his time that the process of the Enlightenment represents the fulfilment of the vocation of the human spirit, one that has heretofore remained buried and in a virtual state: ‘each one has a calling to think for oneself ’. In other words, the human spirit is called to see the truth for itself, in solitude, and not in the shadow of intellectual elites. If man does not want to use his reason in a passive manner, he ought to distance himself from the pre-established discourses and ready-made models of thinking of clerics, from which no society is exempt. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant provides further explanation in the form of maxims.4 Beside his ability to ‘think for himself ’, the free spirit is able to ‘think by putting himself in others’ place’, in short, he can assume all viewpoints so as to better seek the truth, whereas the prevalent way of thinking utters

232

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

ready-made judgements regardless of context. Only by keeping his distance is his temporary ubiquity possible. Finally, he ‘thinks consistently’, that is, he strives to live the way he thinks, which is impossible when judgement is heteronomous, because life has its own requirements. ‘Unbiased thinking’ (thinking for oneself) liberates us from centres of power where others think for us. ‘Broad thinking’ (putting ourselves in thought in everyone else’s place) allows one to assume all viewpoints, not just the central one. ‘Consequent thinking’ (thinking consistently) is its own centre of coordinated thought and action. The Enlightenment thus corresponds to the progressive emergence of a thinking subject, a being capable of thinking outside common ways of thinking. While this human type has always existed, albeit rather exceptionally, modernity enshrines it as adult humanity’s natural calling. Already in the seventeenth century, Vives and Comenius wrote that all people must come to think for themselves, because all have the calling and capacity to become not only dignified persons, but also autonomous subjects. Yet leaving the sealed and warm cocoon of the common world involves great difficulties. To think for oneself is daunting. One can advance only by going backwards. There is a secret desire to go back to the land of ready-made thinking.

3 There is no reason to think that the Enlightenment has freed individual thinking from the threats that hung over it. At present, when autocratic regimes are fading and democracies are spreading, majority opinion will, as it were, take the autocrat’s place by imposing a way of thinking on the individual. We are therefore living in a paradox: at a time when no one is required to adopt the certainties of his father, Church or State, people are more sheep-like than ever. While perhaps for the first time in history it is possible to think anything, one can see that almost everyone is singing the same tune. De Tocqueville described that phenomenon in advance, at the emergence of modern democracy in America: in democratic States, he writes, ‘the authority of the majority is so absolute and irresistible that a man must give up his rights as a citizen, and almost abjure his quality as a human being, if he intends to stray from the track which it lays down’.5 What has happened? It seems that the individual encounters a real difficulty, not so much in thinking for himself, but in taking responsibility for his thought, accepting that eventually he will be alone with his opinion. This is



Thinking Is Something Daunting

233

why he most often prefers abandoning his opinion and joining the group. The solitude of thinking is without doubt the most uncomfortable of solitudes. It is commonly rejected by every means and under every pretext. In her attempt to understand how some people are able to obey terrible orders, Simone Weil finds an explanation in man’s intimate desire to remain in unison with the group.6 Our thoughts are easily led. This gregariousness, although not admitted, secretly reassures people. Fashion trends are a laughable inevitability alongside intellectual trends, which, in the present, are not discernible, but in which later periods find and recognise themselves. Most people hate incomprehension. Just as we sometimes are willing to buy peace at any – even the most shameful – cost, we buy the consent of intelligence by making concessions to the prevalent way of thinking. In this sense, intellectual terrorism weighs heavier than any political terrorism, because it does not recognise itself and spreads without violence. Many people adhere to the alleged evidence of consensus, without reflection, and even with a sort of gratitude. Despite individualism, perhaps even because of it, people continue to aspire to the community of thought. They achieve it through intimidation, since they have banished physical terror and violence. Kravchenko was not compelled to drink the hemlock as Socrates did, but he was persecuted and condemned by the intellectual and moral authorities. This is a worse form of ostracism, for Socrates saved his honour in exchange for his life, but Kravchenko lost his honour when he appeared as a proven liar in the eyes of all the intelligentsia, even though he was right. Whatever one might say, the holistic society of the prevailing consciousness secretly collects our votes. The rejection of inquisitors is accompanied by an even darker inquisition that acts in undetectable disguises. The most remarkable consequence of this situation is that the solitude of thinking has become more difficult and rare than ever before, since we are now only opposed to explicit constraint, while modern consensus remains vague and puts on the fascinating hue of freedom of opinion. What are we to make of this? One might ask with La Boétie: why do they not free themselves? Especially given that conformist thinking claims no source, gives no pedigree, and has no ground. Even worse, it hides behind its contrary, namely freedom of thought. It is as if conventionally proper thinking, publicised by the media, has become the only remaining link between isolated individuals. Uniformity of spirit expresses the significance of that link. To stand out here would be to further isolate oneself.

234

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

4 Kolakowski’s buffoon is he who exercises ‘vigilance against every absolute’. His goal is to ‘debunk as impaired everything that pretends to be intangible’ and to ‘see whether opposite ideas may be right’. He seeks the truth among his opponents. Buffoonery is the spirit of derision. It is essential to the intellectual, since he criticises the world before criticising his own critique. This does not mean that it is enough to be opposed to the commonplace to really begin to think. It would be too simple to believe that the official centre is always wrong, and that contradiction equals truth. In principle, anti-conformism is still a conformism, and one who always says ‘no’ is a prisoner of his own refusal, which precisely prevents him from thinking. If the buffoon becomes the priest of his buffoonery, then he ought to be denounced as an impostor. In ‘Intellectuals against Intellect’, Kolakowski explains how many intellectuals let themselves be seduced by the sirens of totalitarianism.7 It is indeed troubling to note how often intellectuals (who precisely ought to act as bulwarks) put themselves at the service of tyrannies ahead of everyone else. This historical fact constitutes, in my view, the main argument in favour of democracy. Indeed, since Plato, opponents of democracy have argued that the popular classes, which have little education and little experience in world affairs, would not make the right decisions. But when we look at critical moments in history, we find that, for instance, Heidegger and Carl Schmitt enlisted in the Nazi party on the same day, and that in a country like France, for example, until 1989, about ninety-five per cent of intellectuals were Marxists, Marxist-leaning or -affiliated, while the rest of history shows that elites on either side of the political spectrum were gravely mistaken (in France, at the same time, the popular classes never massively voted for the Marxists). This shows that having a great diploma is not necessarily indicative of sound political judgement. After 1989, the countries of central Europe emerged from an annihilated society, while we, in the West, emerged from an annihilated philosophy. We still had a world (because the system had not been put to the test among us), but one deprived of legitimacy. There, Marxism played the role of a social atomic bomb, whereas here, that of an intellectual atomic bomb. In 1990, a Czech cartoon showed a distraught man in a phone booth: ‘Police! I’ve just been robbed of forty years of my life!’ We have been robbed of forty years of thought. All our values have been confiscated to give way to the ubiquitous commonplace. Many ideas on which our world rests have been banished, ridiculed and lumped



Thinking Is Something Daunting

235

together with those of diabolical adversaries. All currents of thought that could have guided us out of ideologies, such as personalism or ordo-liberalism, have been destroyed to make room for the dominant current and its diabolical enemies that serve it as a foil. For a long time, one could only be either Marxist or fascist – today one can only be either socialist or ultra-liberal. Thinking outside the commonplace is something daunting. We have the right – and even the duty – to denigrate past tyrannies, which the authorities brand for public condemnation. Yet attacking current intellectual oppressions is frowned upon. About the courage to think, Chesterton wrote: We often read nowadays of the valour or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true freethinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as much as from the past.8

Intellectuals who, for decades, have proclaimed and spread lies across all continents, must be held accountable for the dumbing-down of several generations. This enterprise has been driven solely by the hatred of partisans disguised as intellectuals – in other words, by one of the worst deceptions: that of chained spirits who sought to be recognised as free spirits, and thus gained the naïve confidence of their co-citizens. I would like to end with Kolakowski’s affirmation that ideas must be taken seriously. What does this mean? Ideas are alive. The courage to think is also to accept the courageous action it requires. Bernanos said, ‘Ideas generate wind, and wind drives the world.’ Ideas are not decoration, embellishment or noise. Thinking carries weight. Ideas must not be viewed as innocent, nor be taken as soap bubbles in the air. Lying kills. Thoughts and words have a proper life of their own. When they unfold in the atmosphere, they contribute to the fashioning of the future. One might finally say that thinking is something daunting because we are responsible for the worlds that thinking arouses, nourishes and unfolds.

236

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

Notes 1 This essay has been translated by Hadi Fakhoury. 2 J. F. Billeter, Contre François Jullien (Paris: Allia, 2007), p. 119. 3 Augustine, Confessions X, XXIII. 4 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40. 5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, II, 7 [1835]. 6 Simone Weil, ‘Letter to Georges Bernanos’, in Seventy Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 7 L. Kolakowski, ‘Intellectuals against Intellect’, Daedalus (June 1972): 1–16. 8 G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (London: Cassell, 1910), pp. 32–3.

Part Five

The Sacred and the Secular: Charles Taylor and Roger Scruton in Conversation

Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

The following is an edited version of a public conversation that took place between Canadian philosopher and Templeton Prize Winner Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University, and Roger Scruton at the McGill Faculty of Religious Studies in the Birks Chapel on 13 April 2014. The conversation was moderated by Professor Douglas Farrow and both Taylor and Scruton responded to questions from those in attendance at the event. Moderator: Can civil society, or the state that regulates it, be without religion? How can it or should it respond to religion? What place does religion have in public life? Taylor: There has been a really big change in the place of religion and the spiritual in Western societies. With the exception of the United States, for the most part you start off with confessional societies. North America was not, in general, like Europe – although Quebec was. Belonging to a confession and belonging to a society was so interwoven that you couldn’t separate the two. We’ve moved in a direction, parallel to the United States, towards a situation of tremendous multiplicity or ‘pluralism’. The other place that the religious or spiritual has acquired in our society is something that looks like a continuation of the earlier form. But now a confession is taken as a political marker of a society, which may go along either with a devout commitment to that faith or with a sense that its connection to it is purely historical and no longer a matter of conviction. So we have the end of Christendom that, I would say, was in some ways a very positive thing: it opened our world to a new kind of pluralism. But it also

240

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

has brought with it a negative inheritance. In the Charte de Laïcité in Quebec, for example, you had both of these together. You had a very narrow, very hostile laïcité, directed against religion, but also an attempt to maintain le patrimoine. The affair of the crucifix in the National Assembly was all about that. It has been a really poisonous combination of all the worst things you can have. This means that when we talk of laïcité, or in English of ‘secularism’, there are two great concepts that are put forward. One takes the pluralism of the present age seriously and requires the neutrality of the state towards both religion and non-religion, and it also requires the non-identification of the state with any religion and that the state guarantee the maximum amount of freedom for people to practise their religion or their non-religious views. The other is a secularism in the nineteenth-century mode: laïcité fermée which is above all concerned with keeping religion in its place. These two versions of secularism are fighting it out in our world and only one really fits the world we now live in. Scruton: In the history of France, since the French Revolution, laïcité has had a very important political significance that we haven’t followed in Britain. But, in America, there has been something similar in the First Amendment of the Constitution, which forbids the establishment of religion – a religion. In other words, there should not be an established church, something to which we all must belong, in order to enjoy the privileges of citizenship. I think that assumption is something that we in the West generally share. Being a citizen defines a set of obligations and a set of relations to each other that can be entered into regardless of faith. But I also think we should look at the history of this. This has not happened everywhere. In fact, it has only happened in those parts of the world where the Christian religion was once prevalent and perhaps still is in some way. Our systems of law grew out of a shared Christian culture, and have been embodied in a position which Christ himself made explicit in the Gospels in the famous parable of the tribute money – in which he said ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s’ – implying that, in some way, the jurisdiction of the community could be maintained and should be maintained without recourse to some shared or at least compelled religious devotion. Of course, there have been huge conflicts, like the Reformation, and many people have died for this or that interpretation of this kind of secularism. But by the time things had calmed down at the end of the seventeenth century, it was assumed – at least in the British part of the world – that political obedience and religious obedience are two separate conditions. It is the result of a previous Christian obedience and this is embodied in our law.



Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

241

Until recently, laws of marriage and the family were indelibly marked by the Christian vision: you were allowed one wife, one husband, and to have more than one was not only a mistake or an embarrassment, but a crime. We now have immigrant communities who want to be governed by the Sharia, which allows you four wives – at least on one interpretation. What do we do about this? Do we hold on to our existing law that, although secular, is marked by a particular religious inheritance? Or do we just open everything up and say there shall be no legal imposition of any particular cultural inheritance – let everything happen? I don’t want to let everything happen. I think the secular law is a beautiful and valuable thing, but I also think it doesn’t make much sense without the Christian inheritance that created it. Taylor: If I could take issue with some of that. You are basically right that the very word secular only exists because it is part of Christian self-understanding going way back. But take India, Indonesia or Senegal. India has come to this kind of open secularism – albeit contested by the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] – from a history of extreme pluralism. So they didn’t come our route from mono-religious societies, but they did end up, more or less, in the same place. There is an important parallel in the example of Indonesia. There you have the predominance of a certain kind of Islam which, through other Muslim-identified parties, prevents them from simply imposing [their version] of Islam. Senegal, to take another example, is ninety-five per cent Muslim. They have this phrase: laïcité bien compris. Scruton: Earlier we were talking about Lebanon. The Lebanese constitution made a distinction between laïcité and laïcisme. We are laïciste, i.e. we recognize the existence of all these different religious communities but we don’t go for the laïcité of imposing a secular order that cancels or flattens all the distinctions between the communities. Of course, that is something that, in the end, was inherited from the Ottoman Empire, where it had to be the case, because there were so many communities in a shared place who would otherwise end up killing each other. They did end up killing each other, but they did it with more of a smile as a result of this rule, because at least they knew whom they belonged to, and what they were dying for. We’re lucky we haven’t had to go through that, thanks to our, albeit very difficult, evolution in Europe. Most importantly, each European nation has had a territorial law, operating over a single territory with a single set of provisions applying to every citizen. That was already established in the Middle Ages and we’ve held on to that conception of legal order and steadily refined it. I fear

242

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

that if we try to accommodate religious communities as having some kind of separate legal identity within the state, we might lose that inheritance, which is fundamental to our freedom. Taylor: Absolutely. There’s no question of recognizing totally different ways of life and building them into the state. Our democracies are closely connected to Charters of Rights, a set of rights available to everyone. We depart from that very much at our peril. Now, there may be other situations where, for historical reasons, you might do this differently: but in our case, I think it is absolutely out of the question. But what we have to ensure, however, is that this single law isn’t interpreted in a very biased way so as to make it impossible, for people who are perfectly willing to collaborate in this kind of enterprise, to live their religious lives. Scruton: It does rather depend on what their religious lives require of them. Taylor: No one is required to have four wives. I can show you [how wrong] these interpretations are. Scruton: We have had cases in Europe of people who think they are required to kill their daughter because she has consorted with somebody from a different community. Honour killing is by no means rare. They may be wrong – of course they’re wrong – in thinking that’s required by their faith, but one of the problems of faith is that most people are wrong about what it requires. And most people fail to distinguish between their faith and a civil doctrine. Taylor: That’s why we should be careful with these examples like honour killing. They’re not Islamic in the sense that well-recognized Imams support them. You’re right in the sense that they can be part of a local custom, and sometimes this happens in various Christian parts of the Mediterranean. For people that live in these very tight communities, they don’t make a distinction between custom and religion, so they may see it as something religious. But there we can work with the major leaders in Islam to fight against this kind of error. Scruton: This help doesn’t seem to be very forthcoming, I must say. Taylor: It is, but we aren’t using it, because there is such a stupid wave of Islamophobia running through the Western world that these people aren’t actually called upon.



Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

243

Scruton: What you’re saying has an element of truth in it. But I think one has to respond by saying: look, when somebody commits these foul murders and then, when criticized, accuses you of Islamophobia, that rather discredits the concept, doesn’t it? Taylor: Well, no. Let me turn this around. If you want to fight the kind of thing that happened on 9/11, if you start off blaming this on Islam as such, you cut off your potential alliance with over a billion people. If we don’t fight this, our chances of fighting the larger battle to get a world we want to live in are very much reduced. This is what I call Islamophobia – not people objecting to the destruction of the twin towers. Scruton: There’s truth in what you say, but reactionary people like me respond, on the whole, in a different way. They say: of course, you must be careful about criticizing someone’s religion, but you have to take seriously the fact that people claim to be doing certain things on behalf of their religion. And when the things that they claim to do [on behalf of their religion] seem to be uniformly so savage, there is a real question: how do you respond? The characteristic left-wing response to the atrocities is to say the perpetrators are reacting to your Islamophobia. In my view, that gets the causality the wrong way around. Islamophobia, so called, is itself a reaction to things like 9/11 and the Boston bombing. Of course, you’re right: most decent Muslims are appalled by those crimes, but most decent Muslims also recognize that there is a cost in saying so. Taylor: That depends where they live. If they live in Pakistan, yes. Scruton: There is a cost in Britain and in France especially. And you’ve got to be very careful. Their thought is: let’s keep our heads down. It would be wonderful if they had spokesmen who said: ‘we represent the true Islam that is committed to citizenship in just the way that you are’. We’ve been looking for these people in Britain for an awful long time. Taylor: I don’t think there is a big difference between us. You see, I think that it is not true that Islamophobia caused this reaction, nor is it true simply that this reaction causes Islamophobia. But it is true that this reaction is a very Islamophobic reaction, a very imprudent reaction, to the aggressions that have been committed. It ups the ante. It makes it easier for those people to recruit Muslims. So just out of sheer concern for the world our grandchildren live in,

244

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

we ought to criticize this very severely. If we don’t recognize the damage this Islamophobia causes, then it is going to be harder to live in a peaceful, civilized society. So for the sake of the survival of the civilization we both very strongly believe in, we cannot afford it. Moderator: In the example you gave of Indonesia, Professor Taylor, there is an assumption that the political order assumes a reference that includes God. Whereas here [in Quebec] there is a very strong insistence that the political order as such must have no reference that could be construed as theological. I would like to hear you both on that. Scruton: I think this is a very important question. And it’s still disputed whether the no-establishment clause actually excludes religion from politics or simply says that it shouldn’t be enforced in a particular way. But, nevertheless, many people in America think religion has its place in politics, although it has to have a very specific kind of place if it is to be allowed to express itself publicly. And this has led to huge disputes recently. I gather it has happened in Quebec too, judging from what [Taylor] said about the crucifixes [in the National Assembly]. Many people in America say religion has to be excluded from the public sphere. You can’t have prayers in school; you can’t have the Ten Commandments on the wall of the court; and, if you go a bit further, you can’t wear crucifixes around your neck; there is the question of whether people can wear the Burqa etc. But I would say that this reflects a deeper problem: which is that we don’t really know what it would be to exclude the religious life completely from the public sphere, given that, even among atheists, the religious instinct is part of the human condition. If Durkheim is to be believed, or the evolutionary psychologists, religion is ineliminable, and, if forbidden in one form, will emerge in another – maybe a superstitious or ritualistic form or simply reflected in social life, in attitudes to marriage and to children. The life of the reproductive family reflects something deeper than the mere secular rule of law, and the attempt to forbid the religious instinct from expressing itself might actually end up reducing the liberty of the citizen, rather than enhancing it. I feel that we’re getting to that stage, especially in Europe where Christians are beginning to be persecuted for wearing a cross, or for teaching their children the values they feel they have to pass on to them. In iconic issues – like the homosexuality issue – Christians are increasingly marginalized, even criminalized for preaching what they believe. Is that a gain in liberty or a loss? And, anyway, is liberty the only thing that the law is there to sustain? I feel that



Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

245

we’re at a turning point. We have come to recognize that humans are not these abstract things that can be governed by law alone, but have a legacy of social emotions that have to be respected, and those emotions belong in the religious sphere as much as in the legal. Taylor: I basically agree with that. The idea of excluding religion in a democracy: how do you do that? Do you tell to [a religious person] to shut up, or to translate his remarks into more acceptable or reputable language before we allow [him] to speak on the radio or give a speech in Parliament? That’s tyrannical. It would be reproducing another, as it were, atheistic established church. Let’s take another case: the Canadian case. The Canadian Charter starts off with a clause about recognizing that we’re under the sovereignty of God. I think that was a terrible mistake. In a democracy, people ought to be allowed to speak and propose things out of their real convictions, bearing in mind that the state in which they do is composed of members who do not necessarily share their convictions. That’s what it means to live in a radically pluralistic society and to try to do justice to it. So we have to have some kind of common and accepted ethic that is there in things like Charters. This is a democratic society, a society founded on human rights, that has to be something everyone signs on to, which, in almost every case, people can from their own background. But the deeper reasons they can sign on are never agreed by everyone. Moderator: The preamble to the Charter expresses a belief in the sovereignty of God and the rule of law. So the question goes to both of you: is there no connection between those two beliefs? Scruton: I was brought up in the Anglican Church, which is distinguished by the fact that it pays lip service both to God and to the secular law as inextricable parts of a single institution. It doesn’t ask you to pay any other kind of service. It says: acknowledge this. And you know that in acknowledging God in this formalized way you’re recognizing, with due humility, that you are not the author of your existence; you are not here to make laws for yourself; there are higher powers; and you are invited to go along with the tradition that uses the word ‘God’ to acknowledge those higher powers. Doing that constantly reminds you of your unity with other members of a community and of your shared submission to higher things. When the word ‘God’ is on people’s lips – as in Austrian society when people greet each other by saying ‘Grüß Gott’ – it is, to me, beautiful to see God so

246

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

acknowledged. You are not saying ‘I believe in God’, the Christian God, and you too have got to sign on the dotted line. You are saying ‘I am no more than this humble human being like you, and I am beginning our encounter by acknowledging this’. Same thing if a Muslim says ‘Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim’ [In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate]. You know that he is immediately acknowledging his own humility, and asking you to do likewise. There is something beautiful in that, and it is a beauty that can never be replicated in a purely secular idiom. That’s what I would say. And I want to keep such customs. I don’t see what harm they do. And I do see the harm that’s threatened by the attempt to remove them. Taylor: No, that’s quite true. If I had been Pierre Trudeau, I would not have accepted that preamble – although maybe he had to politically. But let’s forget it. Lawyers all tell me that it has absolutely no legal consequences – absolutely none. So I agree: we shouldn’t make a huge fuss about it. But it’s another question altogether if you’re writing a constitution now. Question 1 from the floor: How can the state be neutral between faiths? For example, if as a Muslim I regard the Danish cartoons as offensive and expect the state to forbid the publication of such offensive images, causing difficulty for free speech. Taylor: It’s a mistake to think any system of principles you adopt is going to free you from dilemmas. On the one hand, there ought to be freedom of speech, and it’s difficult in our kind of regime to start legislating against certain kinds of publication. We in Canada have a law against hate speech. I don’t know if that particular cartoon would have fallen under that law. However, it’s clear that that cartoon was absolutely unconscionable and unjustifiable – an absolutely revolting act. One of the weakest minorities in that particular society in Denmark was being pilloried by these people, who had no understanding of what their identity was. Any kind of possible democratic society has to have certain informal understandings of the limits of discourse. It wouldn’t be possible to have that kind of caricature of women, because people would object to that. But it was possible in Denmark to have this disdain for Islam, a very small minority there. This sort of thing we should strongly condemn. They should really be shamed into stopping this. But once you start making laws in this kind of area, where do you stop?



Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

247

Scruton: The problem is anybody can declare himself to be offended by something. Readiness to be offended is itself an offence. We live in a society where one of the things we learn is not to be immediately offended by things we disagree with. I take a different view about the Danish cartoons. In response to this, Muslims all across the world invented a so-called principle of the Sharia that you don’t represent the prophet. And that’s just not true. There’s a whole history of Islamic portraits of the Prophet. This interpretation was invented for the moment. Moreover, the cartoon was saying something quite reasonable. It was saying: look, are you actually representing the founder of your religion as somebody who legitimizes the planting of bombs? It was a question posed to Muslims. Of course it was crude and in bad taste and people were offended. But was the fault in the one who gave offence, or the one who took it? We should remember that Christians have to face this sort of thing all the time. We don’t go around, as a result, killing the people who have offended us. Yes, we have to use social pressure to prevent people from giving unnecessary offence. But we also need some kind of consensus that social pressure only operates after a certain level of offence, which is widely agreed to be an offence. Otherwise you entitle any group to declare themselves offended, so scoring a ready victory over their opponents. Question 2 from the floor: What is the purpose of religious education in schools? Is it used to create this sense of pluralism, or lip service to religious communities, or unity between disparate religious communities? Taylor: There are two kinds [of religious education]. One is confessional education where you bring the child up within it. The other is what we have with the Quebec course on different religions and ethical views. The aim of that is to begin to make inroads into the appalling ignorance. No one is to be blamed for this – we lived for centuries without close contact with Buddhists, for example. But it is something that obviously has to be altered, otherwise people are capable of believing all kinds of horrible stereotypes. Scruton: The issue of religious education has been very important in Europe too, responding to two pressures: the first comes from the minorities who have recently arrived; and the second comes from the atheistic culture, which is growing at the intellectual level and permeating the rest of society. The atheist culture insinuates that maybe we’d be happier if we were free of religion entirely.

248

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

We could then just do what we want. The result of these two pressures has been that in schools, what was a compulsory twenty minutes in the morning of religious worship – essentially a few moral maxims, a reading from the Bible, and hymn – has now gone, although religious studies is on the national curriculum [in Britain]. It takes the form of what you, Chuck, were just describing: essentially introducing people to the various religions of the world that are thought reasonable for them to know about. I have to say that when I was young we were introduced to the religions of the world in any case. We read Virgil and Homer, which gave us a natural interest in anthropology. The Empire still existed. Kipling was there to teach us about the religions of the East. We read the Arabian Nights. We knew about these things, though not, of course, in any erudite way. It was obvious to us that the world contained many cultures, many ways of life and many beliefs. It is partly a testimony to the impoverishment – the cultural impoverishment – that has succeeded those times that this now has to be taught. I also regret the loss of that twenty minutes of castigation, when we spotty youths, who were thinking only about sex, were told that there were other things out there [audience laughter], which were horribly more important, and now we’re going to sing a hymn to them [more laughter]. And I thought we were all improved by this [more laughter still]. Question 3 from the floor: Who should judge the values of the different religions when they come into conflict, knowing that religions carry with them a vision of the human person? Marriage versus Polygamy, for example. Who decides what takes precedence and on what basis? [Speaker makes reference to views on the human person and faith and reason in the Roman Catholic tradition]. Taylor: I have to mention [Pope Benedict XVI] who put his foot in it when he said in Islam they don’t have an understanding of the relation between faith and reason, and Christendom does, which was a great oversimplification. But in our kind of society, there is a set of common principles, to which everyone has putatively agreed, in Charters and this is how we resolve these issues in the end. There can be cases where the background reasons will inflect your application of a given set of rights and principles. There is no other way in our kind of society but to have lawyers and judges who are sensitive to these differences and who can make some kind of decision. But this has to be on the basis of the



Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

249

Charter of Rights. Let’s push it farther: we’re taking it as a priori that, when, for instance, we admit people to our society as immigrants or in whatever way, the Charter is basic. Now, you can move through certain procedures to change these Charters, and it should be much harder than changing, say, the rate of income tax, but until they’re changed, they are the ultimate arbiters. Scruton: I think the question touched on another issue. You said that Christians believe that certain matters are made available to them by faith, but could also be discovered by reason. This conjures the spirit of the Enlightenment: that there are certain things that are contained within the Christian religion, which have been inherited, but which could still be held on to as the results of genuinely rational enquiry into human nature. And those are the things that should be guiding us; the state should be evaluated on the basis of Reason, rather than on Revelation. You mentioned one specific issue: the equality between men and women. It is clearly not a recognition of the equality of men and women to allow men to have four wives, but for women not to have four husbands. We recognize here at least some disparity between our inherited view and existing rivals to it. Sexual equality is recognized in Christianity, or became recognized, and we think that it is recognized by Reason itself. We want to believe that we don’t need religion in order to persuade us that men and women are equally persons with equal rights. If Reason persuades us of this, then we would have an arbitrator. In any conflict between religions, we could appeal to the higher court of Reason, which would judge between them. I think that’s what Kant would have said in response to your worry, and maybe quite a lot of other people. I suppose, in his way, Rawls would say that too [Taylor agrees]. But maybe that’s too simple. Maybe Reason doesn’t give us an answer to all the things we need an answer to [Taylor voices agreement], and it is precisely about those other things that people get so hot under the collar over and start killing each other. What, then, are we to do? Taylor: That Reason is a myth. That ‘Reason alone’ of Kant – bloße Vernunft – is a very dangerous and damaging myth, but it would take us a long time to work this out. Moderator: In Canada, a Supreme Court Justice recently asked the question whether the State has a role to play in promoting a diversity of truths. Is the need to frame a question like that a sign that we’ve gone too far in abandoning our

250

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton

confidence in Reason, to the point that we can even hold there is such a thing as truth or touchstone by which we can have a society where there is a rule of law and freedom to worship peacefully? Taylor: Diversity of truth sounds to me like a contradiction in terms. Something is true or it isn’t true. You can talk about a diversity of views, theories or approaches to truth. But diversity of truths? It’s so confused you have trouble understanding what [the Justice] might have had in mind. And promoting it? What could that possibly mean? Scruton: I assume [the Justice] means ‘diversity of Revelations’. I think the Justice is talking about revealed truth. All religions recognize the distinction between truths of doctrine and truths that are revealed. There are conflicting revelations obviously. We’re talking about two of them. There is no known procedure for deciding between the two – except prayer. And that only works if every now and then the one who’s got it wrong is struck down by a thunderbolt. [Audience laughter] So I feel there are bound to be these absolute blockages in the human dialogue, and that underlies the Enlightenment view. When there are these non-negotiable conflicts, you have to rise above them and find some other court of appeal in which they can be discussed. I think we all secretly in this room, however religious we may be in our private life, long for that court of appeal, would probably adhere to it, and would take our case there in any real conflict. So when you see your neighbour’s widow throwing herself on to her husband’s funeral pyre, however much you disliked her, you would try and stop this, and you would appeal to that higher court. Indeed, since the British Empire doesn’t exist anymore [laughter], there’s only that higher court. And you’d expect the widow to finally understand, as you explain the judgement to her, that she’s not doing something reasonable. Taylor: One footnote to that. Over a long period of time, we do learn from each other. Just think of how our great philosophical syntheses in the Middle Ages were affected by Aristotle being channelled through Arabic sources, and also the way in which originally Western derived human rights doctrine has had an impact in [other cultures] like the engaged Buddhists in Thailand. Or think of Gandhi and civil disobedience picked up by Martin Luther King. There are some very interesting cases where we’re not always simply faced off with each other in total disagreement.



Roger Scruton and Charles Taylor on the Sacred and the Secular

251

Question 4 from the floor: To Professor Scruton: why do we need a religious framework to make sense of our lives? To Professor Taylor: why call Reason a myth? Scruton: I want there to be an acknowledgement of a higher order, as part of the daily humility with which we confront each other. This is what I think of as the religious element needed in the public sphere. But I also want a higher court of appeal in any conflict, which is Reason. And these are different. I’m happy when people greet each other with the words ‘Grüß Gott’, but if they said ‘Grüß Vernunft’, I think I’d be a bit worried. [Audience laughter] Taylor: When I said Reason alone was a myth, I meant Kant’s idea of bloße Vernunft. In other words: nothing but the reasoning process. The reasoning process never gets you anywhere without certain very deep assumptions. Now, you can argue between them, but that’s a long and basically hermeneutic process. There are no knock-down blows in [this process]. When Kant is talking about Reason, or when Habermas is talking about Reason, it’s a system of absolutely knock-down [arguments], arriving at absolutely firm conclusions without drawing on any of these deeper assumptions. That was the point of Kant’s Religion within the bounds of Reason Alone. That ‘Reason alone’ is a terrible, erroneous, pernicious, obscuring myth, I think.

Epilogue

No Through Road Roger Scruton

The writers in this volume have done me a great honour in taking seriously some of the more speculative aspects of my work. It is impossible to answer all the many questions that they raise, so I shall concentrate on what seem to me to be the most important of them – important because they challenge me to say exactly what it is that I believe, about the world, about human destiny, and about the role of art, morality and religion in giving sense to our lives. Many of the writers have addressed the arguments of my two recent books on theological topics – The Face of God, and The Soul of the World. Those books emerged respectively from Lectures endowed by Lord Gifford at the University of St Andrews, and by Dr Stanton at the University of Cambridge – two religious people who sought to promote the knowledge and the love of God. These days, when public intellectuals deliver such lectures, they are none too respectful towards the intentions of their dead benefactors, being out of sympathy with the old religious beliefs, and more interested in making a splash in the prevailing culture than in shoring up a culture that is being swept away. As a card-carrying anachronism it made more sense for me to dig for the truth in those old religious beliefs, and that is what I did. I had neither the hope nor the aim of offering a proof of God’s existence or a vindication of the Christian faith. But I wanted to show the inescapable way in which religious ideas – innocence, purity and pollution; the numinous, the sacred and the transcendental; the real presence and the fall – enter into human consciousness, so as to change the face of our world. This meant that my argument was primarily phenomenological, dealing with the way we human beings think, and the way that we must think if we are to relate to each other as persons. In both books I describe aspects of our shared Lebenswelt, while also arguing, in The Soul of the World, for a kind of cognitive dualism that

254

No Through Road

will rescue the Lebenswelt from those scientistically minded people who wish to explain it away. Brian Hebblethwaite complains that I have turned my back on metaphysics, and lost sight of the ideas – the existence of God, the goodness of creation, the afterlife and the hope of salvation – which I need if my defence of the sacred is to be something more than a façon de parler. Anthony O’Hear wonders whether I have not stayed within the bounds of the ‘intransitive religion’ that Erich Heller attributes to Rilke; Robert Grant suspects that God is more hidden behind the veil of my invocations than overtly revealed in them. In similar vein, John Cottingham thinks that the religion that I invoke in my two books is in danger of being over-aestheticized, a charge made also by Hebblethwaite. For Cottingham, moreover, my religion is too much focused on beauty, and not properly attached to the real roots of religious experience in the moral life. All those are serious charges, and my first response to them is to say that I was trying, in those two books, to be honest, and not to speculate beyond what I believe to be provable. If I am right in the claims that I make for the ‘transcendental’ concepts of religion, then I must show that these concepts have a place in the life of the atheist, the agnostic and the polytheist as much as in the life of a Christian believer. The belief in a creator and redeemer God is a matter of local and historical faith. The distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted, the consecrated and the desecrated are, by contrast, human universals, and that is the view of them that I strive to justify. But I should add that I do not turn my back on metaphysics, and that there is, indeed, at the heart of my view of things, a firm metaphysical commitment. The position to which I return is that which Kant defended as ‘transcendental idealism’. This is the view that our cognitive powers do not reach beyond the empirical world, since they are constrained by the forms of space and time, and by the a priori categories of the understanding. Space, time and causality establish the boundaries of our world, and science reveals the laws that organize all that happens within the spatio-temporal continuum. Metaphysics, on this view, sets the limits beyond which knowledge is unavailable to us. Even if reason conjures, from the abyss of thought, the idea of beings outside space and time, of a moment of creation or a somewhere beyond the edge of space, of the infinite God who intervenes to rectify and to punish, and of the immortal soul that is released by death into the noumenal ether – even if those metaphysical ideas have an inescapable grip on the human imagination, I agree with Kant that they do not admit of ‘positive employment’, by which he meant employment in decidable judgements. The ‘ideas of reason’ point beyond the edge of our world, towards a place at which they can never arrive.



No Through Road

255

But does this imply that any reasonable religion must be, in O’Hear’s sense, intransitive? My answer is no, and here is how I arrive at it. In one of the most profound chapters of the first Critique – the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ – Kant rejects the Cartesian view that the soul is an individual substance, of which I have knowledge through my first-person awareness. Self-knowledge, Kant argues, presents me with the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ – the unity of the ‘I’, assumed in all my first-person judgements. But this unity is purely ‘formal’, a matter of my immediate and criterionless awareness that these mental states are the states of a single thing. From this premise, I cannot advance to a ‘substantial’ unity. I cannot conclude that there is a substance called ‘I’ – nor, indeed, that ‘I’ is the name of anything. The ‘self ’ eludes all attempts to identify it as an object within the space-time continuum, and all my knowledge stops at the threshold of this thing that to me is a nothing, and to you nothing observable. In many different ways that thought has been fundamental to modern philosophy, taking a metaphysical form in the idealism of Fichte and Hegel and in the existentialism of Sartre. Our interpersonal emotions are directed always beyond the edge of the empirical world, to the unknowable perspective of the other. There issues, from the person whose spatio-temporal embodiment stands before me, the direct expression in words, reasons, looks, gestures and glances, of the ‘I’ that my outward-going emotions can never reach. I stand at the very boundary of your being, not able to proceed further, but aware that, in just the same way, you stand at the boundary of me. The metaphysical hunger of the reasoning being is, in this case, satisfied, not by reaching the place that cannot be reached, but by being addressed from a place beyond the impassable threshold, from the place that is nowhere. Such was my theme in The Face of God. The religious spirit that I invoke in that book is not the ‘intransitive’ frame of mind described by Erich Heller. It is the spirit of a free and accountable person, who is addressed by the voice of ‘I am’. Such a person faces the world and is aware of its face. He lives at the edge of a one-sided boundary, knowing that, in a deep sense, he belongs on the other side. This liminal form of life is the life of the religious being, and it is enshrined for us in the culture, art and moral consciousness that make us accountable to each other and to the whole of things. We don’t have to see the world in that way. We can ‘fall’ into the purely objective and instrumental way of viewing things. I have my own way of describing this fall. But its presence is felt all around us, in the faceless architecture of the modern city, in the ambient music of public places, in the scenes of destruction, violence and brutality that are the stock in

256

No Through Road

trade of popular culture, and in the annihilating stream of pornography that makes human beings faceless in the very moment when they are or should be face to face. To understand the extent to which we deface the world is to take the first step towards understanding our deep need for the sacred, which is a need to be rescued from the fall. It is part of Kant’s greatness that he recognized the metaphysical necessity of one-sided boundaries, and modern science has followed him in this. Some philosophers just cannot get their minds around this phenomenon that nothing can get around. Hegel is one of them, arguing that if we come to a boundary, then we can know it to be so only if we can get to the other side, which we do through the dialectic of reason. In my view, that is nonsense. Despite what Michael Pakaluk says in his interesting article, I am not a necessitarian, nor do I deny the possibility of ‘agent causation’. The necessitarian picture of the universe was refuted by quantum mechanics, and agent causality means only that when I hold you to account, it is I who attribute some happening to you. The universe, as I conceive it, is wrapped in a one-sided boundary, and science tells us that we and all our observations are contained within that boundary, including the observations that reveal or release (depending on how you understand the quantum equations) the indeterminacy of their subject matter. I want to stay this side of the boundary, while acknowledging the direction in which the self-conscious being is pointed, as his thoughts and emotions crowd to the edge. Giving ‘further and better particulars’ is not, at that point, the task of philosophy. But it is, or can be, one of the tasks of art. It is also the prerogative of religion. Alexandra Slaby reflects on my description of myself as (in part) a French intellectual. In English-speaking countries philosophy has not, for the most part, been seen as a branch of literature. Locke described it as the handmaiden of the sciences, and Hume regarded his own contribution as a kind of science of the human mind. For John Stuart Mill ethics too had become a science, a branch of ‘political economy’, applying utilitarian reasoning to the general wellbeing of mankind. And modern analytical philosophy grew from the study of logic and mathematics, with hardly a mention of art, music or poetry. Nothing like that has been true in France, where philosophy has been seen as continuous with the rest of literature. In the days that preceded and followed the Revolution of 1789, France contained many writers for whom abstract philosophical argument and the artistic presentation of the thisness of the world went hand in hand. I think of Rousseau, known now for his contentious political essays and the remarkable book of Confessions but far more important as the poetic



No Through Road

257

author of La Nouvelle Héloise and even deserving a footnote in musical history as the composer of Le Devin du village. I think of Diderot, the philosopher whose Jacques le fataliste and La religieuse are two of the most original novels of the eighteenth century. I think of Montesquieu, philosophical author of the beautiful Lettres persanes, and of Voltaire, the philosopher who poured out his distinctive worldview in plays, poems, novels and stories as well as in reasoned arguments. Later, in the period of reaction, the story is repeated: writers like Chateaubriand and Maistre wrote philosophy that was also literature, and they showed that you could understand the presence of the social world without feeling the old revolutionary urge to destroy it. None of those great writers had much to do with academic life; all of them were fully part of the current of contemporary events, and between them they set the standard for an independent literature that would also be a mirror to the social world. Yet they were all philosophers in the true sense of the word. Whether Christian like Chateaubriand, deist like Voltaire or atheist like Diderot, they stood in that liminal region, observing and embellishing the face of things. Even Sartre, their greatest successor and the Mephistopheles of modern philosophy, made his own attempt to give a face to the ‘bourgeois’ reality, before throwing his rotten eggs at it. Slaby says many interesting things about my journey beyond Dover Beach, a journey that both shaped my political vision, and strengthened my attachment to the arts. I unashamedly confess that I have always regarded philosophy as incomplete if it could not be distilled into the ‘felt life’ that is the central concern of literature in all its forms. (It is a legacy of my Leavisite schooldays to believe that.) My early attempts at novel writing are of no great significance, but with the novella ‘A Dove Descending’ (in A Dove Descending and Other Stories, 1991) things began to come together in my imagination. I understood that you show ‘what it is like’ by exploring what it is like for the other, not what it is like for yourself. When, looking back after a quarter of a century at my perceptions of Czechoslovakia during the final years of communism, I attempted to capture the ‘thisness’ of that world, it was through imaginary young people whose experience was entirely unlike my own. Notes from Underground is not a work of philosophy if you mean, by philosophy, the elaboration of abstract arguments from a priori premises towards a view of ultimate reality. But it is a work of philosophy if you take philosophy to include the attempt to plot the role of truth in personal relations, and to explore the way in which the sacred hides its face in a faceless world, so as to shine forth suddenly in the darkest corners. Hence I have no qualms in saying that the philosophy of sex, the basic features of which I laid out in Sexual Desire, 1986, has become gradually clearer

258

No Through Road

for me as I have moved the topic away from the abstract theory of intentionality towards more concrete representations of our interpersonal being. First, in ‘Phryne’s Symposium’, contained in Xanthippic Dialogues, 1992, I embodied the various contenders for the truth about desire in distinct personalities, as Plato had done in the Symposium. This book, ranging from the all but obscene poem addressed to Archeanassa to the serenely nuptial reflections of Xanthippe, was my first real attempt to incorporate the ewig weibliche into my philosophy. I moved on to Death-Devoted Heart, 2004, taking Wagner’s Tristan as my theme and showing how it provides both chastity and sexual ecstasy with a deep vindication – though one whose power depends entirely on the ‘this, here, now’ of the music. Finally, in my forthcoming novel, The Disappeared, I have tried to find the concrete situation that might redeem the great traumas that our society is going through, now that the pure, the innocent and the sacred have been expelled from the sexual encounter, and invested in a fairy-tale world that has no clear relation to the torrential lust that is engulfing us. In all those works, I have been conscious of the ‘obscure object of desire’ to which Fiona Ellis refers in her challenging paper. In Sexual Desire, I was concerned to explore the way in which you, as the intentional object of my desire, are both identical with and revealed in your body. There is another metaphysical conundrum here, which takes us back to Kant’s argument in the Paralogisms. In the I-You sexual encounter it is you whom I desire. I don’t just desire to do something with you. But this purely transitive desire again comes up against a one-sided boundary, is turned back on itself, leading to all the possibilities of shame, humiliation and domination with which we are familiar. You are both the object of my desire and the boundary that impedes it, and from this stems all the mysterious dissatisfactions that have caused human beings to surround desire with prohibitions, and to set it in a place apart. Ellis is no doubt right to argue that the problematic nature of desire, as I describe it, could be better accommodated within a more theological vision of our incarnation. The Christian view sees God as both identical with his incarnation in Christ and also wholly Other in his stance towards the world. This offers a model that could, perhaps, be adapted to the case of sexual union. It could be that the possession at which we aim in desire is one that can be achieved only if we forcibly retain our conception of the absolute otherness of the thing that we want. Proust wrote of sexual love that it ‘is born, it lives, only for so long as there is something left to conquer. We love only that which we do not wholly possess.’ And he revealed in that sentence that the love he has in mind is one that is never transcended into childbearing and domestic serenity. It is a



No Through Road

259

non-nuptial love, of the kind that Xanthippe criticizes in ‘Phryne’s Symposium’. And my ultimate answer to Ellis’s conundrum is Xanthippe’s: sexual desire does not provide its own consummation. Only through institutions and commitments do we overcome the trouble of desire. When we extract desire from the institutions that fulfil it, we can still retain its sacred character. But then we see it as endless, in both senses of the term, destined for the eternal night where Tristan and Isolde finally melt into each other and into the nothingness that they then become. (See Death-Devoted Heart, 2004.) This returns me to the charge made by O’Hear, Cottingham and Hebblethwaite, that my philosophy is over-aestheticized. I would respond by saying that this is not so. It is rather that I see aesthetic representations, and the work of the imagination generally, as fundamental to the task of putting philosophy to the test. Douglas Hedley gives me credit for this, in his own way, though I would hesitate to accept that I am really thinking along the same lines as Plotinus, a philosopher with whom I profoundly disagree, especially when it comes to the topic of sex. (See my spoof of Melanie Klein in ‘Perictione’s Parmenides’.) Nevertheless, I have tried to give artistic form to some of the ideas about sexual union that I defend in Sexual Desire, and thereby to understand more completely what they mean in the life of the individual. In Violet I explore the cost – personal, artistic and social – of a sexuality that puts aesthetic above moral values. And in the course of pursuing this theme I strive to dramatize the idea of England, and what was lost when our country plunged headfirst into the trenches of the First World War. I am truly grateful to Vanessa Rogers for her painstaking account of Violet, and her sympathetic analysis of its leading character and her narcissistic way of life. I was in part aware of the charges subsequently laid by O’Hear and Cottingham. I wanted to show just what it is to invest your life in the pursuit of aesthetic value, and to make of yourself, in doing so, an object to be contemplated, rather than a subject to be loved. And by implication I pinned the suicide of my country on the same obsession with the aesthetic perspective. During the late nineteenth century the art and culture of England lapsed into an ‘idyllization’ of its inheritance, replacing the England of Reformation, global trade, industry and common law justice, with a picture-post-card memory, whose fields stretch away forever from the enchanted precincts of the landed squires. That was the world on which Violet alighted like a poisonous butterfly, instilling all around her a sexuality that was divorced from childbearing and from the faith that childbearing requires. She did not have a child because she was one, and turned the men around her into children too. But she also expressed a

260

No Through Road

vision of beauty. She belonged to that last attempt to hold on to chastity and restraint, not as negations of sexual emotion, but as ways of expressing it in the language of enchantment. That was why I tell her story in the past tense, through her diaries and the reflections of her great-niece Jessica, as she struggles to free herself from the charm of a vanished idyll. Violet is about sex and about England. It is also about music, Violet’s embracing of the Early Music movement being part of her refusal to live in the present tense. Throughout the opera present passion confronts sterile nostalgia, as piano and harpsichord contend for the upper hand. Violet therefore raises the question of how music is understood, and how the soul speaks through it. Férdia Stone-Davis addresses this question in a powerful piece that needs a far lengthier reply than I can give to it here. She is of course right to emphasize the nature of music as an action, and the importance of the performer as a bodily presence. And this raises the question of how far the ‘acousmatic’ experience of music, which I make a point of emphasizing, is any more than a passing eccentricity of the concert-hall culture. I believe that this experience is in fact central to music as an art, and it is worth saying why, since this will illustrate the role that I assign to imagination in the understanding of the world as a whole. The real objection to the aestheticization of religion is that not everybody is equipped, emotionally or intellectually, to understand the messages of high art. That is why Kant proposed nature as the primary object of aesthetic interest: nature is something that we can all appreciate, and in the appreciation of which there is an ‘interest of Reason’. Hence, aesthetic judgement is a universal, and a proper object of philosophical, as opposed to scientific, study. However, specific arts appeal to expertise, initiation, and the peculiarities that distinguish us from each other. A religious work of art like the St Matthew Passion cannot therefore be the sole or primary vehicle for the religious thought: if it were then the mass of mankind would be cast out into darkness. Religious art must be the transformation into art of something else – something that exists in a less fraught and more everyday form in the hearts and minds of ordinary believers. One function of the imagination is to create worlds in which human matter is re-organized as spiritual form. In a work of fiction, order is elicited from and imposed upon ordinary actions and aims, so as to endow human situations with a completeness and a unity that they do not, in ordinary life, display. Although the imagination deals in non-actual worlds, it does not deal in unrealities: it is subject to the demands of sincerity and truthfulness, and it is for this reason, as Douglas Hedley notes, that I have placed great weight in my aesthetics on the distinction between imagination and fantasy. Imagination creates a distance



No Through Road

261

between us and ordinary life, not in order to falsify that life, but in order to show us what it means and how our hopes and fears reside in it. But while this seems like a reasonable account of representational art forms, such as literature and painting, it leaves the philosophy of music without a clear foundation. Music is not a conceptual idiom. All attempts to assimilate the organization of music to the organization that we know from language are, I argue, doomed. (See The Aesthetics of Music, 1997.) Nevertheless, I hold that there is as direct and central a role played by the imagination in understanding music as in understanding the other arts, and that this explains both the value of music and the pleasure we take in listening to it. It is for that reason that I want to argue that we hear music acousmatically. By this, I mean that, when we hear music we connect the notes in our imagination in a way that the corresponding sounds are not connected in fact. What we hear is not a succession of sounds but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that lies in the musical line. This musical line inhabits a one-dimensional space that has no relation to the geometry of physical events, and in which nothing exists except music and its meaning. In hearing music we ‘abstract away’ from ordinary causality, and enter the purely imaginary realm of musical movement. This does not mean that the facts about performance and bodily involvement to which Stone-Davis draws attention are irrelevant. These too must be noticed, if the status of music as an action is to be properly appreciated. On the other hand, it both is and isn’t an action of the performer – in the way that the action on stage both is and isn’t an action of the player. The performer does not exist in the space where the tones are, nor do they exist in the space of the one who produces them. And if you study the structure of acousmatical hearing, I argue, it turns out to share all the formal features of imagination in its other instances. Like imaging, aspect perception, and telling a story acousmatical hearing is dependent on attention, responsive to reasoning, more or less vivid, and subject to the will. (See here the argument of Art and Imagination, 1974.) But that is not the end of the matter, as Stone-Davis points out. I want to go some way, indeed as far as I can, along the route followed by the German Romantics, towards assigning a transcendental meaning to music. I want to argue that the virtual causality that we hear in music is a revelation of agency, and that, in certain supreme instances, the music is not merely placed before me to be heard but is addressed to me, from the space that I cannot enter. This experience is an icon of the ‘real presence’ that forms the target of prayer and the source of revelation. There is, in the meditative masterpieces of our tradition,

262

No Through Road

a ‘you’ in music, which summons the ‘I’ in me. Stone-Davis rightly points out that it is one thing to say that the meaning of music is ineffable, quite another to assign a transcendental meaning to it. I am trying to have it both ways, and maybe it would be better to remember Wittgenstein’s remark: that whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence. Music takes us to the edge, to the one-sided boundary beyond which nothing can venture. But how can it address us from the other side, urging us to hearken to the sound of nowhere? The question of aesthetic meaning arises in other contexts besides music, and Mark Wynn considers one of them, the ‘atmospheric’ meaning of certain buildings, as I describe this in The Aesthetics of Architecture. Wynn’s concern is more with the monastic way of life than with the nature of architecture, and I don’t really disagree with what he says. However, it is worth considering the case of architecture in more detail, since it raises the question of the role of aesthetic judgement in everyday life. If people think of aesthetic judgement as somehow rarefied, confined to moments of awe and wonder, and therefore incapable of tying us to the world as we are tied by religion or morality, this is in part because the topic of everyday aesthetics has been so widely neglected. I wrote The Aesthetics of Architecture in response to the thought – expressed in a famous essay of Heidegger’s – that building and dwelling are inseparable. We humans understand the world by making it, and we make it through settling down and imbuing our surroundings with the image of what we are and what we aspire to be. The important aesthetic judgement is not that which speaks of beauty, nor that which studies the meaning, the content or the emotional power of the individual work. It is that which speaks to us of right and wrong, of the detail that fits, of the correct way of assembling a building, a chair or a suit of clothes from its parts. Aesthetic judgement is therefore an essential part of the oikophilia that I identify, as the true motive on which environmental protection depends. Charles Taliaferro, who applauds my argument in How to Think Seriously about the Planet, nevertheless takes me to task for ignoring the rich resources in Christianity and other religious traditions, when developing an environmental ethic. Again, the implicit charge is that my vision of the world is over-aestheticized, too much concerned with appearances, and not enough with the deep commitments from which appearances flow. Others, however – Robert Grant for example, and Mark Dooley in a chapter that leaves me with very little to disagree with – recognize that, for me, the thesis of the ‘priority of appearance’ has a very special sense. I do not advance this thesis by way of contrasting appearance and reality, or by way of pointing



No Through Road

263

to some deep and underlying structure that provides the unknown and perhaps unknowable basis for our being in the world. I advance it because, in a very real sense, appearances are all that we have. That is what transcendental idealism means, and it is further supported by the cognitive dualism that I advance in recent works. As I argue the point, there is a right and a wrong way to conceptualize appearances, and the right way is that which allows the personal to shine through. The error in scientism is not in believing that science gives us the truth about things. It lies in believing that scientific concepts can capture the way things really appear, to someone who approaches the world as a free and accountable person. There is another way of organizing appearances than the way of explanation. And this other way is what aesthetic judgement is, or ought to be, about. Aesthetic judgement seeks the ‘real presence’ that addresses us from sacred moments, but seeks it in the ordinary and the everyday, and in the furniture with which we settle the world. Ever since The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) I have seen this task as fundamental to our lives as social beings, and I accept what both Dooley and Taliaferro say concerning my view of culture. Through culture, we supply ourselves, our fellows and our surroundings with a face. And if we do it right, we will see the face of our maker in the face that we make. But this brings me to the crux. Peter Bryson does me a great service in showing the way in which my account of political order reflects an understanding, not only of our English-speaking inheritance, but of the modes of common law reasoning. The common law of England is, in fact, paradigmatic of the kind of reasoning that belongs to the cognitive dualism that I espouse in The Soul of the World. It emerges from the general attempt to hold people to account for their actions, to judge free transactions in terms of the I-You encounter that is expressed in them, and to replace relations of power and domination with interpersonal agreements. That is the way in which we create and maintain the face of the world. The goal of the common law is not social engineering but justice in the proper sense of the term, namely the punishment or rectification of unjust actions. The judge rightly thinks of himself as discovering the law, for the reason that there would be no case to judge, had the existence of the relevant law not been implicitly assumed by the parties. Bryson is therefore entirely right to point to the catastrophic distortions introduced in recent times by top-down legislation and the fabrication of imaginary ‘human rights’ – rights that are not discovered in the judicial process, but imposed by ideologists who wish to revise society rather than to resolve its conflicts. You cannot use the common law

264

No Through Road

procedures to change the nature of society, to redistribute property that is justly held, to violate ordinary understandings or to upset long-standing expectations and natural relations of trust. For the common law is the working out of the rules already implicit in those things. It is a network woven by an invisible hand. A conservative (at least a conservative of my persuasion) would urge that the common law is, in contrast to the civilian system, essentially concrete. Its ultimate authorities are embedded in the history and experience of a human community, and although it aims to universalize its judgements, and so to achieve the abstract form of law, it is inseparable from a given content, which derives from conflicts within a shared historical experience. Hence, as Bryson rightly recognizes, the English law has always been an independent domain, which appointed the sovereign and stood over him in judgement. Legislation has been regarded as law only if it derives from and harmonizes with the thing rightly so called, which is the body of precedents discovered in the courts. To put the point in another way, the common law condenses into itself the fruits of a long history of human experience: it provides knowledge that can be neither contained in a formula nor confined to a single human head, but which is dispersed across time, in the historical experience of an evolving community. Hayek rightly sees a parallel here, between common law justice and the epistemological benefits of a market. Just as prices in a market condense into themselves information that is otherwise dispersed throughout contemporary society, so do laws condense information that is dispersed over a society’s past. From this thought it is a small step to reconstructing Burke’s celebrated defence of custom, tradition and ‘prejudice’, against the ‘rationalism’ of the French Revolutionaries. To put Burke’s point in a modern idiom somewhat removed from his own majestic periods: the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it. This brings me to Dan Cullen’s invocation of Rousseau. Whatever we make of Rousseau’s standing as a political thinker, it is surely undeniable that he had quite a different view of law from the one that I have just expressed. He saw law as the product of the legislator – usually an assembly of people tasked with the business of government. It was in part thanks to Rousseau that France took the course that has led to its situation today, in which law is as much the source of conflict as its cure. And thanks to the European Union, the Rousseauist view of



No Through Road

265

legal order is being imposed in my country too, with a vast burden of legislation imposed on the people without discussion, and without respect for common law justice. I therefore remain sceptical towards Cullen’s contention that I ought to treat Rousseau with more respect. Treating people with less respect than they demand is my metier; and Rousseau is a prime candidate (though see above for my praise of La Nouvelle Héloise). Cullen also argues that I need to integrate my conservative politics with the religious worldview. As he seems to imply, conservatism does not stand up on its own, in the way that liberalism and socialism stand up, since it is neither an ideology nor a fully developed philosophy of man. Conservatives have beliefs, of course. They believe that it is easier to destroy good things than to create them; they believe in institutions and legal order; they esteem this or that part of a specific historical inheritance. And they believe, if they are like me, in the ‘priority of appearance’. But it is part of that last belief to acknowledge that solutions to the human predicament are not produced by a formula, and not dictated from above. Real solutions are imbued through and through with a particular historical experience and a particular conception of who owes what to whom. There is therefore no abstract or universal conservatism, as there are abstract and universal liberalisms and socialisms. But should we depend on religion to supply what is lacking? Cullen gives good arguments for this. But I remain unpersuaded. I want to include, in my hesitant army of recruits to the cause of gentleness, a great number of atheist and agnostic friends. Like me, they believe that things are pretty awful; but like me, they fear things could get worse. Like me, they have suffered from the censorship exerted by the left establishment, which has made our lives more interesting and more difficult than they might have been. Chantal Delsol rightly identifies our situation today, when she refers to ‘the hatred of partisans disguised as intellectuals – in other words … chained spirits who sought recognition as free spirits, and thus gained the naïve confidence of their co-citizens’. In Thinkers of the New Left, 1987, I discussed some of those chained spirits, and was rewarded with a quantity of hatred that surpassed anything that I had hitherto encountered. And while it has, in the last quarter of a century, become possible to say what I then said about the New Left without encountering quite such a barrage of abuse, this is only because the left-wing causes of today are no longer those of the nineteen-eighties. Diverge from the new orthodoxies in any matter that has been captured by the feminists, the gay activists, or the multiculturalists and you can say goodbye to an easy career, or maybe any career at all, in the public sector. The deepening

266

No Through Road

darkness of the surrounding culture demands that we stand together in what light we can create, whatever our religious belief or lack of it. And that means accepting something like the position I have been advocating in my writings, in which a humane conception of the Lebenswelt is made available to all serious thinkers, regardless of their metaphysical commitments. That seems to me to have been a worthwhile enterprise, and one worth being hated for.

Index abjection 95 Abrahamic religions 116–17, 227; see also Judaeo-Christian tradition acousmatic view of music 170–3, 260–1 Act of Supremacy (1534) 194 Adam and Eve 105–6 aesthetic education 155–62 aesthetic judgement 263 aesthetics 5, 7, 24–5, 121–4, 136–7, 148–9, 165, 259 musical 182 theological 148 agape 116–17 Alcibiades 113 animal consciousness 104 animal individuality 82–4 animal part of human nature 112 animals 8–9, 25 as distinct from human beings 80, 82, 84, 123 Anscombe, G.E.M. 92 anthropic principle 68 anthropology 10 Antigone 229 apartness, experience of 29 Aquinas, St Thomas 38, 70, 93, 100–3 architecture 11–12, 29, 147, 153–4, 262 Aristophanes 114 Aristotle 93, 250 Armstrong, A.H. 126 Arnold, Matthew 5–6, 133 Aron, Raymond 137, 140–1 art 11, 24–5, 123, 130 and morality 180 religious 260 as a substitute for religion 179, 184–5 atheism 13, 48, 61, 68, 99; see also ‘new atheism’ Auden, W.H. 161–2 Aufhebung and aufheben 158–9 Augustine, St 85, 115, 125, 230 Auschwitz 62

Bach, J.S. 25, 182, 185, 260 Chaconne 171 Bachelard, Gaston 137, 231 Bacon, Francis 4 Baelz, Peter 72 Barrington, Bill 180–5 Barth, Karl 48, 70 Bataille, Georges 137 Baudelaire, Charles 124 beauty 9–13, 25, 35, 99, 112, 123–4, 127, 157–61 of holiness 129 Beauvoir, Simone de 137 Beethoven, Ludwig van 49 Benedict XVI, Pope 9, 248 Berkeley, George 69 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 117 Berry, Wendell 226 Besançon, Alain 141 ‘Big Bang’ 103 Blackburn, Simon 227 Blake, William 36, 58 Bohlman, Philip 170 Book of Common Prayer 194 Bork, Robert 200 ‘born free’ fallacy 206, 208 Botticelli, Sandro 118 Bourdieu, Pierre 136 bourgeoisie, the 138 Brady, Ian 59 Bryson James xiii; editor and author of Chapter 10 Bryson, Peter xiii, 263–4; author of Chapter 17 Buddhism 68, 247 buffoonery 234 Burke, Edmund 196–9, 204–12, 217, 219, 264 Busoni, Ferrucio Benvenuto 171 Canada 244–9 cannibalism 197

268 Index capitalism 217 Capra, Fritjof 151–3 Caravaggio 117–18 ‘Cartesian ego’ (McDowell) 78–9 Castro, Ariel 62 Catholicism 89–91, 134, 248 causality per se and per accidens 100–1 primary and secondary 102–3 Chancellor’s jurisdiction 195–6 charity 156 Chateaubriand, Vicomte de 257 Chesterton, G.K. 235 chiaroscuro 161 Chinese culture 218 Christian standard of aesthetic value 148 Christianity 9, 43, 55, 70–1, 74, 83, 85, 183, 200, 205, 218, 226–7, 239–41, 244, 248–9, 258, 262 Church of England 71, 141–2 civic decline 199 cloisters 149–53 closed societies 222 cognitive dualism 17, 20, 49–51, 55, 128, 165–8, 253–4, 263 Coke, Sir Edward 195–6 Coleridge, Lord 197–8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 5, 129, 155–7 Comenius, John Amos 232 common law 191, 195–6, 263–5 communism, opposition to 140–1 communitarianism 221 Comstock, Gary 226 conceptual analysis 5 concert-hall listening 169, 172–3 Confucius 218 consciousness 8, 40, 81; see also animal consciousness; self-consciousness consecration 94 conservatism 206–13, 219–22, 227–8, 264–5 constitutional crises 191–3 consumerism 220 contract theory 205–7 conversion experiences 152–3 Copernicus, Nicolaus 231 corpses 94–5 Cottingham, John xiii–xiv, 254, 259; author of Chapter 3

creation, theology of 67 Cullen, Daniel xiv, 264–5; author of Chapter 18 culture origin of 105 sacred view of 134 Scruton’s view of 5, 12 task of 133 see also philosophical culture Curran, Thomas xiv; author of Chapter 14 Czechoslovakia 257 dancers 172 Dante Alighieri 73–4, 159–61, 194 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 184 Darwall, Stephen 21 Darwin, Charles 7 Dawkins, Richard 36–7 Dawson, Christopher 133 Deely, John 101 Deleuze, Gilles 139 Delsol, Chantal xiv, 265; author of Chapter 20 democracy 224–5, 230–4 Denmark 246–7 Denning, Lord 191–2 Derrida, Jacques 4, 133 Descartes, René 4, 24, 85, 122 design arguments for the existence of God 129 desire, problem of 116 diabolic, the 58–60 Dickson, Emily 130 Diderot, Denis 257 Dillon, John 127 Diogenes 230 Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite 117–18 Diotima 113 disenchantment 50–1, 60–1 Dolmetsch, Arnold 180 Don Giovanni 179, 184–5 Dooley, Mark xiv, 134, 138–9, 262–3; author of Chapter 1 Douglas, Mary 59 Dudley and Stephens case 197–8 Durkheim, Émile 10, 27, 40, 70, 128, 135–6, 141, 204, 227, 244 duty, sense of 156, 198 Dworkin, Ronald 198

Index Eagleton, Terry 139 aesthetic education 155–62 Edwards, Jonathan 152–3 Eliot, T.S. 55, 104, 115, 118, 121, 133, 139, 183 Ellis, Fiona xiv–xv, 37, 258–9; author of Chapter 7 embodiment 9, 84, 115–16; phenomenology of 89, 91, 94 empiricism 18 energetic buildings and ways of life 150–1 ‘enfaced’ world 138 Enlightenment thinking 231–2, 249–50 environmental ethics 226–8, 262 environmental movement 217–18 environmental policies 219–22 Eriugena, John Scot 125–6, 129 eros, theory of 111–18, 183 erotic desire 111–12, 115, 183 eschatology 90 ethical demands 42; see also environmental ethics Eucharist 10, 173 European thinking 3–4 European Union 264–5 evolutionary psychology 18–20, 244 explanation for making sense of experience 18 externalities 220 faces, human 90–1, 137–8, 263 fantasy 124, 260–1 Farrer, Austin 74 Farrow, Douglas 239–51 Fauré, Gabriel 30 Ferguson, Niall 198–9 Feser, Edward 100–1 feudalism 193–4 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 19–23, 27–31, 53 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 255 Ficino, Marsilio 129 Finkielkraut, Alain 141 Flaubert, Gustave 123–4 Foucault, Michel 4, 133, 138, 230 freedom, human 6–7, 230; see also natural freedom Frege, Gottlob 122 French intellectual life 133–42, 234, 256–7

269

Freud, Sigmund 59 Fromm, Eric 218 Garden of Eden 105–6 German-language philosophy 158, 160 gestalts, perceptual 147–52 Ghandi, Mohandas 250 gift, existence regarded as 41–2, 93 Girard, René 52, 99–100, 103–8, 135–8, 141 Glencoe 62 God 7–13, 19, 41–2, 50–5, 57, 60–1, 67–71, 83–4, 91–3, 100–5, 125–9, 134, 149, 203, 245–6 absence of 48, 54–5 search for 57, 63, 209 ‘God of the gaps’ 91–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 60, 129 Grant, Robert xv, 254, 262; author of Chapter 5 Greek tragedy 155 Habermas, Jürgen 251 Hagel, Thomas 39 Hand, Learned 200 Harris, Sam 35–7 Havranek, Pavel 47 Hayek, Friedrich 264 heavenly city, the, images of 147–51 Hebblethwaite, Brian xv, 254, 259; author of Chapter 6 Hedley, Douglas xv, 259–60; author of Chapter 11 Hegel, G.W.F. 4–5, 19, 23, 25, 137–8, 158–61, 255–6 Heidegger, Martin 60, 125, 234, 262 Heller, Erich 33, 254–5 Henry VIII 194 Heraclitus 223 Herbert, George 48–9, 55, 114, 118 hierophany 129–30 Hildebrand, Alice von 91 Hitchens, Christopher 35 holiness 129, 134 Holy Communion 10, 73 home longing for 3–4 love of 218–19, 222, 226 Homer 127, 218, 248

270 Index honour killings 242 Hooker, Richard 73 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 43, 61–2 Horace 231 Howells, Christina 124 hubris 63 human rights 199, 250, 263 humanism 125 Hume, David 18, 23, 29, 37, 47–8, 52, 74, 122, 227, 256 Husserl, Edmund 4, 6, 18, 122, 137, 208 Huxley, Aldous 28 icons and idols 127–8 Idealism absolute and personal 69 transcendental 263 imagination contrasted with fantasy 124, 260–1 definition of 129 general theory and special theory of 122–3, 129 Incarnation of God in Christ 72–3, 83, 85, 90, 258 India 241 individualism and individuality 205–7, 212–13, 233 Indonesia 241, 244 infinite regress 100–1 ‘intellectual terrorism’ 233 intention 94 ‘intentional understanding’ 6 intentionality, musical and human 167 interpersonal conceptual scheme 20–1 introspection 79 Islam 71, 218, 241–8 Islamophobia 242–4 Jackson, Thomas 114 James, William 152 James I 195 Jesus Christ 10, 42–3, 55, 70–3, 83, 240 face of 90 John Paul II, Pope 90 Judaeo-Christian tradition 42, 58, 229, 231 juries 193–4 justification for making sense of experience 18

Kant, Immanuel (and Kantianism) 4–5, 7, 20, 23–5, 28–30, 38–41, 49–50, 58, 67, 72–4, 78–9, 89–95, 100, 122, 137, 156, 161, 170, 226, 230–1, 249, 251, 254–60 Keats, John 121 Kenny, Anthony 70 Kierkegaard, Søren 4, 125 King, Martin Luther 250 Kinsey reports 26 Kipling, Rudyard 248 Klein, Melanie 259 Koestler, Arthur 231 Kojève, Alexandre 137–8 Kolakowski, L. 234–5 La Boétie, Étienne de 233 Labouchère, Max 181, 184 Lacan, Jacques 133, 137 law, English 191–3, 264 Leavis, F.R. 5, 133, 139 Lebanon 241 Lebenswelt xxi, 6, 10–12, 18, 21–4, 29, 49, 57, 63, 141, 157, 203, 208–9, 253–4, 266 Lees-Milne, James 72 Leibniz, Gottfried 4 Leopold, Aldo 218 Leopold, Freudenthal 69 Levinas, Emmanuel 137–8, 141 Liezi 229 liturgy 9, 72–3 Locke, John 4, 197–200, 211, 256 Loeb, Richard 69 Løgstrup, Knud 41–2 love 93, 111–15; see also home, love of McDowell, John 37–8, 78–82 Macmurray, John 69 Magna Carta 192–4 Maistre, Joseph D. 257 Manent, Pierre 205 Maoism 218 Marcel, Gabriel Honoré 137 Marx, Karl 6, 19, 227 Marxism 19, 234–5 Mass 11, 134 Mendel, Gregor 231 Menninghaus, Winfried 95

Index Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 137, 141 metaphysics 68–71, 74, 79–84, 89–92, 118, 134, 254–6 Michelangelo 118 Mill, John Stuart 256 Milton, John 36–7, 61 mind 68–9 miracles 92–3 modernism 12, 60 Montesquieu, Baron 257 morality 156, 180 Morrissey, Christopher S. xvi; author of Chapter 9 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 179, 182, 184 music 35, 165–74, 260–2; as a character-forming force 180 assigning transcendental meaning to 261–2 connection to religion and the sacred 167–8 instrumentation 172–3 listening to 169–73 in relation to sound 165–6 understanding of 261 see also Violet mysticism 117–18 myth 105–6 need for 114, 116 structure of 99 ‘myth of origins’ 100, 105 Naaman 93 Nagel, Thomas 8, 41, 68, 71, 89, 91, 94 natural freedom 209, 211 natural rights 208–9 natural theology 68 nature appreciation of 260 use of the term 37–8 necessitarianism 91–5, 256 Neoplatonism 114–18, 125–6 ‘new atheism’ 35–6, 89, 92 Nicene Creed 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 6, 53–4, 59, 77, 227 nihilism 5, 13 Nine Lessons and Carols 72–3 Novo Millennio Ineunte 90 Nygren, Bishop 116

271

obscenity 9 O’Hear, Anthony xvi, 254–5, 259; author of Chapter 4 oikophilia 218, 262 ontological dualism 77, 86 open societies 222 opera see Violet original sin 52, 54, 105–6 Pakaluk, Michael xvi, 256; author of Chapter 8 Pakistan 243 Palkova, Alzbeta 47 Parfit, Derek 21, 68 Paris riots (1968) 136–7 Pascal, Blaise 47–52, 55, 125 Paul, St 42, 117–18, 229 Perictione 99, 112–13 phenomenology 10, 49, 57, 253 of embodiment 89, 91, 94 of the sacred 92–3 philosophical culture 222–6 philosophy analytical 256 Anglophone tradition of 3–4 cultural importance of 222 link with literature and religion 4 restoring the human subject 6 Scruton’s approach to 4 task of 5, 7, 17, 160, 212 see also religion, philosophy of Pieper, Josef 104 piety 93–4, 99, 204 Plato 27, 92, 99, 111–15, 218, 223, 234, 258 Platonism 55, 118, 121, 126–30 Plotinus 114–16, 126–8, 259 poetry 155–6, 161–2 political theory 208 Popper, Karl 222–5 popular sovereignty 208, 211 pornography 11, 26, 28, 255–6 postmodern culture 51, 54–5, 139 Proclus 161 profane, the 58, 100–1, 104–5, 135–6, 139 Protestantism extreme forms of 61 modern 205 Proust, Marcel 60, 258 Psalm 26 89–90

272 Index quantum mechanics 256 Quebec 244, 247 rape 26, 28 Raphael 118 Rashdall, Hastings 69 Rawls, John 249 redemption 183 re-enacting the human world 5 Reich, William 26 religion 4–5, 12–13, 20, 29, 48, 52–5, 61, 70–1, 200, 212, 265 and aesthetic values 148–50 and experience of the sensory world 148 philosophy of 5, 19, 71, 89 place in public life 239–51 social functions of 135 religious education 247–8 rights 198, 205, 209, 224, 242; see also human rights; natural rights Rilke, Rainer Maria 53–4, 62–3, 254 The Ring 19, 53, 130, 181 rites of passage 107, 139 Rogers, Vanessa xvi, 259; author of Chapter 16 Rolston, Holmes 226 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 52, 206, 210–12, 256–7, 264–5 Ruskin, John 5 Russell, Bertrand 92, 227 sacredness and the sacred 6–13, 31, 35–43, 48, 89, 92–3, 100–1, 128–9, 133–9, 153, 204–5, 213 foundations of 37–9 location of 57–64 and the primacy of the moral 41–3 and the primordial ‘I’ 39–41 Sade, Marquis de 230 Said, Suzanne 127–8 Sartre, Jean-Paul 59, 133, 137, 140–1, 122–6, 129–30, 255, 257 ‘scapegoating’ scenario (Girard) 100–7, 135 Schiller, Friedrich 4, 60, 139, 155–62 Schmidt, Carl 234 Schopenhauer, Arthur 226 Schweitzer, Albert 218

science 5–6, 10, 18–19, 22, 36, 39–40, 57, 60–1, 67–8, 91–2, 165–6 scientism 80–1, 86, 121, 263 Scotus, Johannes see Eriugena, John Scot Scruton, Roger answers to questions posed by contributors to the present volume 253–66 approach to philosophy 4 Cambridge years 134 in conversation with Charles Taylor 239–51 engagement with French intellectuals 133–42, 256 life 3 as a novelist 257–8 as an opera composer 179–80, 259–60 religious beliefs 3, 72, 77, 141–2 writing career 3, 140–1 author of Chapter 2 Sebeok, Thomas A. 105 secularism 240–1 Self and Other 137–8 self-awareness 78–9 self-consciousness 22–3, 28, 52 Sellars, Wilfrid 18–19 Senegal 241 Septuagint, the 93 sexuality and sexual relations 11, 25–8, 77, 81–5, 112, 183, 257–60 Shakespeare, William 28 Sharp, Cecil 182 Sidney, Sir Philip 121 sightseeing 36 Slaby, Alexandra xvii, 256–7; author of Chapter 12 Smyth, Ethel 182–4 social contract theory 197, 204–11 ‘social effervescence’ (Durkheim) 135 Socrates 112–17, 223–5, 229, 231, 233 Sophocles 55 Soskice, Janet Martin 173–4 soul, human 7, 77–81, 84 species-being 19–20 Spenser, Edmund 73–4 Spinoza, Baruch 4, 41 Stalin, Joseph 62–3 state, the, role of 217 ‘state of nature’ 205–9

Index Steiner, Rudolf 139 Stern, Robert 41 Stone-Davis, Férdia xvii, 260–2; author of Chapter 15 subjectivity 7–8, 12, 40, 138–9 supernatural realm 21–5, 78 Swinburne, Richard 70 Taliaferro, Charles xvii, 262–3; author of Chapter 19 Taylor, Charles 212, 239–51 Temple, William 68–9 Thailand 250 theism and theistic thought 40–2, 70, 81–6, 227 theology of the body 90–1 of creation 67 see also natural theology theophany 125, 129 thinking for oneself 231–2, 235 Thoreau, Henry David 217 Titian 118 Tocqueville, Alexis de 199, 232 Tollemache, Denis 181, 184–5 Traherne, Thomas 58 transcendence 6–7, 11–13, 20, 54–5, 62, 67–70, 137–8, 168–9, 204 ‘transcendental argument for the transcendental’ 17–31, 153 ‘transcendental categories’ 17–18, 23, 27 ‘transcendental deduction’ (Kant) 22, 28 ‘transcendental idealism’ (Kant) 254 transcendental ideality of space and time 74 transcendental illusion 81 tribalism and tribal identity 222–4 Trudeau, Pierre 246 trusts 196–8 truths of doctrine and truths that are revealed 250 Tudor state in England 194–6

273

Uexküll, Jakob von 104 United States 221 Constitution 240 Supreme Court 200 Verdi, Giuseppe 59 Violet (opera by Scruton) 179–85, 259–60 Virgil 218, 248 Voltaire 257 Wagner, Richard 10, 19, 43, 53, 60, 63, 99, 181–4, 258–9 Waldron, Jeremy 225 Warnock, Mary 122 Washington, George 222 Waugh, Evelyn 71 Weber, Max 60 Weil, Simone 48, 54–5, 102, 233 Wesley, Charles 72 West, Christopher 90–1 West, Fred 62 Wilde, Oscar 153 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 51, 67, 122, 129, 262 Wojtyła, Karol 90 Woodhouse, Gordon 181, 184 Woodhouse, Violet 180–5 Wordsworth, William 25, 30, 35, 43, 130 worship 9–10, 53, 203, 248 Wynn, Mark xvii, 262; author of Chapter 13 Xanadu 129 Xanthippic Dialogues 99, 112–13, 258–9 Zeno’s Paradox 159 zombies 59 Zurbarán, Francisco 61