First Session: What Is the Sacred?

First Session: What is the Sacred?

What is the sacred?

John Cottingham

The concept of the sacred plays an important role in Roger Scruton’s strategy for defending a religious outlook against the onslaught of modern secularism. Rather like the idea of spirituality, the notion of the sacred has considerable appeal to those like Scruton who are broadly supportive of religious sensibility, but have reservations about the doctrinal and metaphysical components typically associated with religious faith. This paper will examine the idea of the sacred as it appears in Scruton’s recent work, particularly in the context of our human response to moral and aesthetic value, and will ask whether the idea can coherently be deployed without explicit reference tothe theistic presuppositions with which it has traditionally been associated.

Cognitive or Ontological Dualism?

Anthony O’Hear

In a number of recent writings, including his Gifford and Stanton lectures, Roger Scruton has developed an account of religion, showing in detail how religious attitudes grow out of human activity and give that activity meaning and direction. However, in line with a broadly Kantian approach to the relationships between the world as conceived in modern science and that in which we live (the Lebenswelt), it is not altogether clear whether the human and religious meanings Scruton so subtly extracts and expounds require a different level of reality, as opposed to a different level of description, from that delivered in the laws and explanations of physics. In this paper I will explore what Scruton refers to as a ‘cognitive’ dualism, arguing that it does indeed require both a teleology and an ontological dualism, transcending anything deliverable by physics.

The Metaphysical and Doctrinal Implications of Roger Scruton’s Philosophy of Religion

Brian Hebblethwaite

In the first part of this paper I examine Roger Scruton’s Gifford Lectures, The Face of God, and attempt to tease out the metaphysical implications of his powerful refutation of materialist reductionism. His defence of free will and the person, and of objective moral and aesthetic values, is surely suggestive of a philosophy of personal idealism such as may be found in earlier writers like Hastings Rashdall, C.C.J.Webb and John Macmurray. Scruton’s diffidence about pursuing such a path is perhaps due to an over-reliance on Kant’s philosophy of the limits of human understanding. In the second part I examine Scruton’s book, Our Church. A Personal History of the Church of England, and attempt to tease out the doctrinal implications of his very positive views on religion, faith, sacrifice and sacrament. I conclude that a greater sympathy for natural theology might well incline us to take revelation-claims more seriously as they have come to expression in the classic formularies of the Christian faith, including those of the Church of England.

Scruton on the First-Person Perspective: The problem of locating the human subject in a world of objects

Richard Greydanus

Roger Scruton’sThe Face of God(2012) is characterized by two contrary arguments: the first distinguishing between the human subject and a world of objects, and the second locating the human subject in a world of objects. I will suggest that the two arguments assume two overlapping accounts of the relation between a human subject and its objects. The first is of Kantian provenance: an actual subject and a possible empirical object. The second has a metaphysical pedigree: a possible subject (or, perhaps more appropriately, a soul, which is potentially all things) and an actual sensible object. The two accounts exist in a productive tension. Due attention paid to the differences between them, I will argue, is revelatory of the character of Scruton’s thought on religion.

By regarding the location of human subjectivity in a world of objects as analogous to the problem of God’s presence, Scruton helpfully moves discussion about religious belief away from debunking quasi-scientific assertions about the natural world, and towards the nature of membership in community.Some suggestions will be ventured about the relationship Scruton sees between religion and conservatism; namely, what it is in human life that religion seem especially suited to conserve.

A Glance at the Face of God

Michael Pakaluk

I wish to explore Scruton’s account of the “face of God” by discussing three interrelated tensions in that account. The tensions may be stated as questions. First, is a metaphysical account of God necessary to underwrite talk of the “face of God” or not? Scruton seems to say both “yes,” in his first Gifford lecture, where he criticizes rational theology, and “no,” in his last lecture, where the metaphysical contingency of the world in relation to God seems important for our interpreting existence as a “gift.” Second, do we confront the “face of God,” each of us, alone and individually in the first instance, or always with others? Scruton seems to hold the latter in his first and last lectures, where he stresses that we must look for the face of God within a community, and yet elsewhere (as indeed is reflected in the idiom, “face to face”) Scruton seems to construe any encounter with a face as originally solus cum solo (in Newman’s words, from the Apologia). Third, is the encounter with the “face of God” more or less fundamental than our encounter with “the face of the person” and “the face of the earth”? The latter two look more fundamental, at least insofar as we seem to encounter them first, yet Scruton refers to those encounters as “openings onto the transcendental,” which we presumably could not interpret them as being, unless we had some prior encounter with something transcendent, to which we could take these to be leading.

Finding Beauty and Truth in René Girard: On Roger Scruton’s Philosophical Theology

Chris Morrissey

In a literary tour de force, his Xanthippic Dialogues, Roger Scruton explores the extent to which philosophy has limits and how mythological experience must pick up where philosophy ends. As Scruton sees it, atheism and impiety, despite a pretense of rationality, are in fact irrational, because piety and the belief in God is rational, although not amenable to reason. 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”. Perictione explains how rational beings spontaneously attach themselves to myths and expect an eschatological reward for their sufferings because they want to return totheir original state. The sufferings of the hero are shown 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 possess such a common structure. René Girard’s own theory about the origins of myth’s common structure has been a constant fascination with Scruton since he first encountered it. In dialogue with Scruton’s reflections on Girard’s theory, this paper develops a critical response to Scruton’s philosophical evaluation that, despite whatever beauty and truth may be found in it, Girard ultimately tells only of a “myth of origins” because his theory must assume what it sets out to prove.

Scruton on the Sacred

Robert Grant

Roger Scruton’s recent adventures in divinity are extensions of his previous ‘humanistic’ phenomenology. His fundamental premise is 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 nonscientific 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.’ This is true, literally, but also quite a leap. Of course, when it comes to explanation, personality is a mystery, but in (and with) practice it is something that we inhabit, encounter and understand reasonably unproblematically. It does not follow, however, and pace Scruton, that God must somehow exist in the same way, or at all. 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.

Our experience of the sacred, like that of personality, may also appear to ‘point to’ a divine source. (We also regard persons and their embodiments as ‘sacred’, and their violation as a kind of sacrilege.) But if such a source positively existed, it would explain the sacred, and the sacred, though immediate like the person, is less clearly apprehensible, and thus equally or more elusive of explanation. If we suspect that the source is after all a mare’s nest, maybe (as before) we should just settle for what we have, namely our manifest sense of the sacred. Certainly, to recognize the sacred as objectively existent invites the question as to its source. But even if God exists, the sacred might still be the only mode in which we can apprehend him (i.e. obliquely).

Longing for the Sacred: Desire and Beauty

The Problem with Plato: Roger Scruton on Eros

James Bryson

Roger Scruton argues that the relationship between God and man is fundamentally one between subjects, an I-Thou dynamic expressed and sustained by love. Accepting the classical distinction made between Christianagapeand Platoniceros, Scruton states his preference for the downward movement of God to men in charity to the upward thrust of men to God by desire. While Scruton wants to incorporate eros into agape, he rejects the mystical solution of the Neoplatonic tradition because it dissolves or enslaves the subject in its relationship to God. I would like to suggest that Scruton revisit the Neoplatonic metaphysics of Christian mysticism where there is no distinction made between ‘selfish’ desire and ‘selfless’ giving to the other. Instead the cosmos itself consists in an erotic interchange between God and his creatures which is at once and on both sides a giving and a receiving. A reconsideration of this metaphysical tradition would complement Scruton’s project to reestablish the loving relationship between God and man in the face of what he calls the ‘loveless’ culture of postmodernity we presently inhabit.

That Obscure Object of Desire

Fiona Ellis

In his The Conception of Immortality Josiah Royce tells us that the problem of the worthy object of love is philosophically identical with the logical problem as to what constitutes an individual being. His position involves a contentious metaphysics of individuality which is bound up with his theism. Roger Scruton addresses these problems in his Sexual Desire in the context of a discussion of the so-called paradox of desire. His position presupposes a similar metaphysics of individuality to that of Royce, but he argues that the metaphysics must be rejected. So there is a tension in his position and a question of how, if at all, it is to be resolved. I shall argue that it can be resolved, but that the framework within which he is operating requires amendment. This will return us to Royce’s account of the relevant matters, and I shall consider a reconciliatory compromise which makes explicit the theistic implications of Scruton’s position.

Roger Scruton and the Neoplatonic Theory of Beauty

Douglas Hedley

Roger Scruton dismisses outright the Neoplatonic theory of beauty 'as a feature of Being itself'. I argue in my paper that he could buttress his own philosophical objectives by reconsidering the relevance and power of the Neoplatonic theory. My starting point is the great Treatise of Plotinus on Beauty Ennead V, 8 and the Renaissance interpretation of that theory. I conclude by considering the pertinence of such a theory in the contemporary context.

Sensing the Sacred: Religion and Aesthetics

Religious thought and the sensory world

Mark Wynn

In his book The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton UP, 1979), Roger Scruton notes how religious thoughts can structure the appearance of buildings. He considers for example how the thought of the heavenly Jerusalem can enter into the appearance of a Gothic church (pp. 74-5), with the result that the content of the thought comes to be embodied in the appearance of the building. These reflections are immensely suggestive theologically, as they allow us to suppose that religious thoughts can be entertained, and reckoned with, not only in relatively abstract terms, but also as embodied in the sensory appearance of things. In this paper, I consider how this idea might be developed, in dialogue with Scruton's treatment of these themes in his book.

Roger Scruton’s Aesthetic Education of Mankind

Thomas H. Curran

In Roger Scruton’s Beauty (2009, 2011), the reader is informed that “the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world, to ‘a kingdom of ends’ in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered.” Two of Scruton’s constant correspondents on aesthetic questions are Friedrich Schiller (for his Aesthetic Education of Mankind) and T.S. Eliot for his journey from The Waste Land to the Four Quartets. Following Schiller, Scruton asserts: “aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.” With Eliot, Scruton’s writings make their way “from the ennui of modern life” to “a point outside the flow of temporal things” – famously summarized in Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” as “the point of intersection of the timeless with time”. Therefore, aesthetic education is not a refusal to engage with a world, but the necessary condition for Immanuel Kant’s “kingdom of ends”: which is to say that aesthetic education imparts the knowledge of how to live in freedom, while also encouraging the freedom of all others.

Entering the Unknown: Music, Self, and God

Férdia Stone-Davis

Music stands at the heart of Roger Scruton’s philosophical and religious thought. This paper will focus and comment upon his most recent treatment of music, found in the Stanton lectures which were delivered in 2011 at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. Revisiting themes found in previous seminal work on the aesthetics of music, Scruton extends them, situating them within a theological frame. Within the ‘I/you’ encounter there is an ‘over-reaching intentionality’ that enables the unfathomable ‘other’ (the presence of ‘you’) to be glimpsed. This ‘over-reaching intentionality’ is extended within music, which ushers the listener into a ‘sacred space’ wherein a nameless intentionality is made present. This intentionality, embedded within the musical line, prefigures the intentionality of religious feeling, which is directed towards a transcendental subject revealed in, but also hidden by, the sacred object or event.

Art as Religion?: Exploring Roger Scruton’s Violet

Vanessa Rogers

At the close of Act II in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (the celebrated Commendatore scene) the statue attempts to give the Don one last chance to choose a virtuous life, singing ‘He who dines on Heavenly food / has no need for the food of mortals!’ Intriguingly, this excerpt is quoted in the Act I finale of Roger Scruton’s most recent opera, Violet (2005). What might Scruton mean by having his characters quote these famous lines? Is it merely a musical reference – or is he perhaps pointing us towards his idea of how we might live a virtuous life? Incorporating material from a recent interview with Scruton, I will address several questions in this paper: Does this opera serve a moral function? Are there other extra-aesthetic significances of a symbolic, religious, or expressive kind? In what way does the opera Violet serve as an example of Scruton’s high aesthetic and moral ideals? How does it explicate to listeners the place of music / culture in our modern world? And finally, how should we listen to Violet, and what does she have to say?‘Conserving the Sacred’: Religion, Political Philosophy, and Culture

The Lebanese Exception:A Reading of Scruton’sA Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West(1987)

HadiFakhoury

Published in 1987, at the height of the Lebanese civil war, and never reprinted, Scruton’sA Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the Westalmost passes for a bibliographical curiosity today. In part a commentary on the political and religious culture of Lebanon, in part a polemical attack on Anglophone reporting on the Lebanese civil war, the book deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Beyond the historical contingencies which may have occasioned its writing, Scruton’s work indeed offers unique insights his thinking on the relation between politics and religion, the sacred and the secular, Islam and Christianity, the Arab and Western worlds. This paper revisits Scruton’s discussion of Lebanon, with an eye to showing its relevance in the debate concerning his religious and political thought.

Beyond Dover Beach

Alexandra Slaby

Alexandra Slaby sets out to reveal the extent to which Roger Scruton’s thinking of the sacred has been informed by his experience ‘beyond Dover Beach’ and his cultivation of French intellectual life. She also endeavors to show how intimately intertwined are the development of his thought about the sacred and his own development as an intellectual. To do so, she explores the defining influence on Roger Scruton of French theorists of the sacred, and of French philosophers who developed a tradition of thinking about the human subject which interrogates its sacredness. She shows then that Scruton’s conception of culture and in turn his profile as an intellectual have developed in reaction to but also in affinity with those French intellectual connections.