An Anglican gratitude for Roger Scruton (i)
Gratitude for Sir Roger Scruton has marked many of the tributes offered since the news of his death yesterday. I want to suggest that there can be a particular Anglican gratitude for his writings, a recognition of a sense in which he both articulated an Anglican sensibility and contributed to a restatement of a classical Anglican vision. Today and tomorrow I will seek to outline what might be considered as grounds for such an Anglican gratitude for Scruton, hopefully in a fashion which resonates not only with those of us Anglicans who identify with a traditional Tory/conservative sensibility.
A religious animal
Scruton's 2010 Gifford Lectures and 2011 Stanton Lectures gave (if I may be forgiven for using the term) fresh expression to the noble tradition of natural theology. Both series of lectures were subsequently published as, respectively, The Face of God (2012) and The Soul of the World (2014). In many ways, they provide a rebuttal of the culturally significant New Atheist allegation that 'Religion is a Bad Thing', setting forth a vision of the sacred and the transcendent as the basis for rich experience of meaning, beauty, and love. As Scruton stated in the conclusion of The Face of God:
Our disenchanted life is, to use the Socratic idiom, 'not a life for a human being'. By remaking human beings and their habitat as objects to consume rather than subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both. Postmodern people will deny that their disquiet at these things has a religious meaning. But I hope that my argument has gone some way to showing that they are wrong.
Similarly, in The Soul of the World, Scruton contrasted "obligations of love" rooted in a transcendent order, with Rousseau's insistence on "free choice and self-made obligations":
But it turns out ... that those vows were far more deeply woven into the fabric of our experience than enlightened people tend to think, and that the world without transcendent bonds is not a variant of the world that had not yet been cleansed of them, but a completely different world, and one in which we human are not truly at home ... If true, it tells us something extremely important about religious experience, and about the transformation of the world that comes about when we cease to relate it meaning to a transcendental source.
Scruton sets before us religion as a key means of human flourishing, protecting the 'ordinary' experience of the sacred in persons, beauty, and place against the profanation and desecration of what John Keble termed "an age of light, Light without love". Here Scruton offers a compelling contemporary restatement of another Anglican defence of the meaningful and the real, Burke's insistence "that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort ... Man is by his constitution a religious animal", and recognition of the disorder which entails when this truth is denied, when "uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition" displaces it. We might note that quite recently Scruton refuted one such degrading superstition: "We have too much prosperity ... And we shouldn't be wanting always to be more prosperous and wanting to grow".
Place and Beauty
If you ask why concepts like community, place and belonging have suddenly come to occupy a central place in our politics, then you will quickly light on the fact that those aspects of the human condition are all under threat. And the threat comes from a single source: globalisation - 'Architects turned us all into Citizens of Nowhere', The Times, 20th September 2019.
... everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives - Beauty (2009).
Rather than being a defender of a passing liberal market settlement (the politics, economy, and culture of Davos) - in which place and beauty are disregarded and desecrated, in which liquid modernity homogenises, atomises, and then entertains homo economicus with banalities - Anglicanism should be recognising how many of the concerns of its classical social teaching find an echo in the vision of the common life sought by contemporary communitarian and postliberal thought. As a Blue Labour commentator has noted, these movements owe much to Scruton for his "conservatism is a philosophy of attachment":
He describes it as a love of home, by which he means the common life and inheritance that belongs to “us”, the people, and which grows out of everyday life. This “us” is not made by contract and nor is it ethnic in its origins. It is membership which is made in the ordinary life of friendship, family, community and love of place.
Scruton's account of place, alongside his defence of beauty, in the absence of which "my home is not a subject but an object - a place without a face" (The Face of God), point to defining characteristics of the Anglican experience. John Milbank describes the "hidden coherence" of Anglicanism as revealed in being "sturdily incarnated in land, parish and work, yet sublimely aspiring in its verbal, musical and visual performances": place and beauty. We might then see that in his work on our profound need of place and beauty, Scruton offers an Anglican apologetic and, perhaps, an apologetic for Anglicanism.
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