Alasdair MacIntyre and John Charmley: a tribute

The recent deaths of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and historian John Charmley have led me to consider how I came to discover their works and how both, in different ways, have influenced my thought.

I was introduced to After Virtue during my theological formation for ordination in the late 1990s. Like very many others, it became for me a foundational text, with ramifications considerably beyond moral philosophy. In the words of James Orr on Unherd:

By any measure, the impact of After Virtue (MacIntyre 1981) on Anglophone moral philosophy was electrifying. A scathing critique of modern moral philosophy, which he had come to view as a post-apocalyptic shadow of the richer and more coherent moral traditions that had preceded the dawn of liberalism, the book remains an extraordinary demonstration of the degree to which the thought of the past can catalyse thought in the present. After MacIntyre, no one can deny that the most convincing expressions of post-liberalism will always be those that draw on pre-liberal traditions.

It is noteworthy that MacIntyre's critique of liberalism has influenced a significant diversity of political perspectives, as indicated by Christopher Akers in his tribute on Engelsberg Ideas:

There is a prophetic element to his arguments which link into current post-liberal thinking and signs of growing interest in traditional religion, amid widespread moral confusion and a teetering liberal consensus. Echoes of his intellectual influence can be found in the work of American critics of liberalism such as Charles Taylor, Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen, and British philosophers and theologians such as John Gray, John Milbank, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. They are all writing in MacIntyre’s shadow.

Such diversity (contrast, for example, the politics of Rod Dreher and of Rowan Williams) is a sign of a healthy legacy, giving rise to contrasting and competing accounts of what post-liberalism should be, because philosophers authentically pursuing the Good do not give rise to a banally monolithic, dully predictable political movement.

I heard MacIntyre lecture once, in Dublin, in - if my memory serves me right - the early 2000s. Looking back on the event now, over two decades later, I can still recall the modest, patient, careful articulation of his thought. Some in the audience were clearly expecting a culture war call to arms. They didn't get it, not least because such a call to arms would not serve forms of community "within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us". When one of those in the audience seeking such a call to arms asked a rather rambling question of MacIntyre, I was impatiently shaking my head, muttering to a friend about the questioner entirely missing the point of the lecture. MacIntyre, by contrast, responded with quiet, thoughtful grace and gentle encouragement to engage with the culture in a different manner, no less rooted in the life of faith.

I also have half a memory of being told, by someone close to those organising the event, that MacIntyre excused himself from a pre-lecture social event, in order to prayer Evening Prayer from his volume of the Liturgy of the Hours with a Roman Catholic priest friend.

The concluding words of After Virtue have, of course, appeared in many of the tributes to MacIntyre published since his death. No less compelling, in fact, I might suggest, perhaps even more compelling are some words from his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), in which he described part of what he termed the "synthesis of the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions":

because my life is to be understood as a teleologically ordered unity, a whole the nature of which and the good of which I have to learn how to discover, my life has the continuity and unity of a quest, a quest whose object is to discover that truth about my life a whole which is an indispensable part of the good of that life. So on this view my life has the unity of a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, beginning with birth and ending, so far as concerns the final judgement to be passed on it - in respect of the achievement of my good - with death.

Perhaps it is because I write this on the 2nd day of the month, with Psalm 1 fresh in my mind from Morning Prayer yesterday, that MacIntyre's words strike me as something of an exposition of the opening of the Psalter. This is appropriate when considering both scholars to whom I seek to pay some small tribute: "And he shall be like a tree planted by the water-side".

I was introduced to the work of John Charmley about a decade before encountering the thought of MacIntyre. At some point in the early 1990s, I came across Chamberlain and The Lost Peace (1989), a reinterpretation and defence of the policy of appeasement. In fact, I have just checked my copy of the book: in my handwriting on the inside cover are the words "Christmas 1991". I recall finding Charmley's account of Chamberlain's foreign policy convincing. That said, I was, admittedly, the sort of conservative undergrad who found too much enjoyment in provoking left-wing fellow-students with conservative revisionism. 

In the introduction to the book, Charmley voiced a traditionally Tory - though often unheard - view of the outcome of the Second World War:

The world was handed over to a Manichean struggle between America and Russia; was this whither a thousand years of British history were tending?

While, with the passage of the years (and in light of a dark strain of Churchill revisionism, entirely different to Charmley's scholarly work), I have come to a rather more standard Churchillian view, it remains the case that when the issue of Chamberlain and appeasement is raised in conversation, I do drift back to Chamberlain and The Lost Peace. I do so not least because a traditional conservatism should be rightly cautious about war and deeply hesitant about inevitably destructive Manichean struggles.

In more recent years, I came to know John Charmley on Twitter/X. In our interactions I always found him gracious and encouraging, something I particularly valued from a former Anglican who had crossed the Tiber. It does not take much time on ecclesiastical X to discover that some former Anglicans who cross the Tiber can have a foaming-at-the-mouth view of Anglicanism and Anglicans. Such certainly was not the case with John Charmley, who gave encouragement to those of us seeking the renewal of Anglicanism. Such an ecumenical presence on ecclesiastical X was a gift to be recalled with thanksgiving.

Many evenings he posted on X a prayer many Anglicans will know from Compline: 

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the silent hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, may repose upon thy eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Pleasingly, it was always in traditional form - appropriate for someone who happily re-posted Prayer Book Society posts on X. Mindful of how ecclesiastical X can, at times, be a very depressing display of sectarianism and prejudices, John Charmley, almost every evening, gently called us to pray as the day drew to a close. His online witness will be missed.

Reflecting in recent days on the deaths of these two scholars, I have re-read C.S. Lewis' 1939 sermon, 'Learning in Wartime'. I think both Alasdair MacIntyre and John Charmley would have robustly agreed with Lewis' opening words:

A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. 

It is, however, to the closing words of the sermon that I am drawn, as I give thanks for both recently departed scholars:

If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.

Let me conclude with a most Anglican prayer, as I recollect how many of us have been enriched by "the life of learning, humbly offered to God" by Alasdair MacIntyre and John Charmley:

And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom: Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ's sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.