An Anglican gratitude for Roger Scruton (ii)

Regaining religion

The decline of Christianity, I maintain, involves, for many people, not the freedom from religious need, but the loss of concepts that would enable them to assuage it and, by assuaging it, to open their knowledge and their will to the human reality. For them the loss of religion is an epistemological loss - a loss of knowledge. Losing that knowledge is not a liberation but a fall -  Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2006).

In Gentle Regrets, Scruton offered both a personal narrative and a broader cultural analysis to provide an alternative to casual, commonplace assumptions about the inevitability of secularism.  Interpreting the process of secularisation as loss (contrary to to some influential liberal and evangelical Anglican accounts, united by their hostility to the memory of popular Anglican practice and conformity), Scruton insisted "that the loss need not occur".  The significance of this narrative is emphasised when it is placed beside Sam Brewitt-Taylor's superb analysis in Christian Radicalism in the Church of England & the invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970 (2019).  Brewitt-Taylor points to radical theologians within the Church of England, such as John Robinson, legitimising the idea of the secular society - an idea which until then had been on the margins of the culture, and viewed with considerable social scepticism - and making "prophecies of permanent 'secularization' ... importantly self-fulfilling".

Against this background, Scruton offers the Church a renewed confidence in narrating the secular society as a loss resulting "in a great religious deficit in our society".  We seek to fill this deficit with "gods of a kind, flitting beneath the surface of our passions", but have lost "those aspects of religion that provide genuine guidance in a time of spiritual need".  We have, in other words, settled for the banal and the hollow.  Which means the Church should have confidence in setting forth the meaningful and the real, as Scruton discovered in his local parish church and its Prayer Book worship:

Perhaps there is no more direct challenge to secular ways of thinking than the famous Hundredth Psalm, the Jubilate Deo, as translated in the Book of Common Prayer. It was by reflecting on this psalm that I came to see how its pure and unsullied idiom contains the answer to the lamentations of Michael Stipe. The psalmist enjoins us to be joyful in the Lord, to serve the Lord with gladness and to come before his presence with a song. It is a notable fact of our modern civilization, in which duties to God are ignored or forgotten, that there is very little gladness and still less singing. 'Losing my Religion' is a moan, not a song, and the idiom of heavy metal expressly forbids its followers to 'join in' when the music starts ...

Having put our trust in science we can expect only disappointment. And seeing, in the mirror raised by science, our own aggrieved and sullen faces, we are turned to disaffection with our kind. That is why the singing stops. 

The psalmist goes on to remind us of the remedy: 'Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.' This sentence contains all of theology. It is reminding us first that our knowledge of God is a kind of personal acquaintance, summarized in a statement of identity. We know God by knowing that God is the Lord and the Lord is God. Christians believe that they have three ways of knowing God: as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. But they also believe that our knowledge of God is a matter of personal acquaintance, which cannot be conveyed in the language of science.

This personal narrative of "regained religion" is a story of how the meaningful and the real can be encountered in the ordinary life and common prayer of the parish church.  It is a reminder that it is this which had been lost, that, as theologian Alison Milbank has said, "secularism in this country is a loss of habits".  It is a call to a renewed confidence in, and invitation to, the ordinary life and common prayer parish which should stand at the heart of the Church's vision of the culture "regaining religion".  In the words of Rowan Williams:

A religious life is a material life. Forget for a moment the arguments we might have about the definition of the 'spiritual'; living religiously is a way of conducting a bodily life. It has to do with gesture, place, sound, habit.

Anglican piety

It is noteworthy that in the above extract Scruton finds "all of theology" contained in a text from that quintessentially Anglican liturgy, Prayer Book Mattins.  This is in itself, of course, might suggest why Anglican clergy and theologians reviewing his Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2013) found it to be, in the words of one such reviewer, "deeply irritating and unsatisfactory".  Prayer Book Mattins, after all, is similarly "deeply irritating and unsatisfactory" for many of those whose theological and liturgical outlook was shaped by the Sixties.

The culture of repudiation which has influenced much official Anglicanism since the Sixties - in particular, repudiation of Anglicanism's historic presence in nation, culture and civic society, and a not unrelated repudiation of doctrinal commitments (cf. The Myth of God Incarnate) and classical liturgy - could not but be offended by an account of Anglican piety which rejoiced in the richness of a patrimony too often disowned and rejected.  In Our Church, Scruton unfolds the (to use a term from John Milbank) "hidden coherence" of the piety embodied in and given expression by the Prayer Book, a coherence which calls us into a rhythms of living more meaningful than those offered either by secularism or contemporary Anglican liturgical expressions.

For example, Scruton points to whose service is perfect freedom, from the Second Collect for Peace at Mattins, and expounds the significance of this deeply resonant phrase for our common life:

The phrase ... is a rebuke directed to those who think that freedom and authority are in conflict, and who therefore feel entitled to disturb the civil order for the sake of their spiritual liberation.  And the whole implies that faith in the 'author of peace and lover of concord' is never an act of aggression, but at most a defence against it.

This phrase, heard by generations of Anglicans at Sunday Mattins, sets forth an understanding of the peace of the civitas which is at the heart of the common good, a more effective means of transmitting social teaching than countless episcopal pronouncements or committee publications.

Similarly, the phrase from the Communion Office, Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's Church Militant here in earth, he describes as "the clearest and most moving of all Anglican invocations", drawing us into a prayer which embodies what John Hughes termed "Anglicanism as Integral Humanism", in which our common life in Church and polity, and all states of life, are ordered to "unity and godly love ... thy religion, and virtue".

As for the Prayer Book's occasional offices, combining homeliness (Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed) with recognition of the reality of the human condition (Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery), they "collaborate in the work of re-enchantment", a particular characteristic of traditional Anglican piety.

What Scruton here identified was one of the most compelling strengths of the Prayer Book, the manner in which it draws us into a godly and quietly shared life, shaped by love of God and neighbour.  It is rare indeed for contemporary liturgies to do so, for they are profoundly weakened by the absence of any meaningful vision of the shared life, weakened by that same casual acceptance of the inevitability of the secular society which has afflicted too much of Anglicanism's public witness over the last generation.

In his rather dismissive Church Times review of Our Church, Richard Harries, a former bishop of Oxford, asked a "critical question" of Scruton's reliance on the Book of Common Prayer, a question to which, one would assume, the bishop thought the answer was self-evident:

Does he really think that even a significant minority of the English can now be won back to that language? 

The answer, much to the surprise of that generation of clergy, liturgists, and theologians who repudiated the Prayer Book in previous decades, is - as Scruton intimated - 'yes'.  The growing popularity of Choral Evensong in cathedrals testifies to this.  This is also the case in Oxbridge chapels. As one 2016 report stated:

College chaplains have seen a steady but noticeable increase in attendances at the early evening services which combine contemplative music with the 16th Century language of the Book of Common Prayer ... Chaplains say the mix of music, silence and centuries-old language appears to have taken on a new appeal for a generation more used to instant and constant communications, often conducted in 140 characters rather than the phrases of Cranmer.

Trends would suggest that it was Scruton, rather than the generation of clergy who so enthusiastically supported repudiating the Prayer Book, who correctly identified the cornerstone of Anglicanism's character, appeal, and resonance.

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There are indeed grounds for a particularly Anglican gratitude for Roger Scruton and his writings.  More so than many pronouncements emanating from official Anglicanism, he compellingly articulated both the attraction of Anglican piety and a classically Anglican vision of our common life, not least in a restatement of the cultural importance of religion to human flourishing.  Both of these, so often under-valued in contemporary Anglican understandings of mission, are vital means of drawing a secular society to regain religion, for in "discovering this truth, we encounter what is permanent".

Where there is no gratitude there is no love. Conversely, a world in which there is love is a world in which the good things of life are seen as privileges, not rights. It is a world where you are aware of the good will of others, and where you respond to that good will with a reciprocal bounty, giving what is in your power to give, even if it is only praise - Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life.