Scruton on the Religion of England

I am reading Roger Scruton's England: An Elegy. It is, as its title suggests, a book lamenting the passing of an English character that once was and now no longer is.

Put very briefly, the Church was domesticated in England, defined, like everything elses, by a place rather than a doctrine or a chain of command. It adapted to the core religous experience of the English, which was of the consecrated nature of their island. Its ceremonies and liturgies sanctified the English language, the English landscape, the English law and institutions and the English Crown - the mysterious corporation sole which is also the supreme fiction in this fairytale. p. 18

The Anglican religion in other words has helped formed the English social imaginery- to define its dreaming. The trouble is, if you shatter the myth, you lose the dreaming. And there is little you can find that will replace it...

Still, this is an explicitly religious view of Anglicanism, and one which shows how deeply unChristian Anglicanism can be ...

Eliot the conservative, and religion

Scrutonian conservatism is not dissimilar to TS Eliot's conservatism. Eliot, in his 'The Idea of a Christian Society' described the necessity for society to have religious institutions for its benefit and even for its survival. Christianity, in the form of an established church, meshes well with the traditions of Englishness. It implies a life in conformity with nature, he says - not in a pagan sense, but in that it aids and abets family and social and national life as they spring, as it were, from the soil. He is not silly enough to suggest that this means that every is a Christian if they are English: but rather, that a Christian society might provide fertile ground for the discovery of Christ by the individuals within it. So he says: 'We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so that it may be overcome by religious hope'.

Strangely, in Murder in the Cathedral it seems that Eliot is also aware of what a great temptation this is for the church! Society may want what the churches have to offer: but the churches may not be able to give it in the way that society wants...

The values debate in Australia replicates this tension. Society clearly wants a version of Christian values of the kind that liberalism is unable to provide. And it will pay for it. We just may be tempted to accept the offer...

Roger Scruton on establishment

As a real live intelligent conservative, Roger Scruton supports the establishment of the church. That is, from a social and political point of view he sees great benefit in church-establishment for the country as a cohesive and visionary institution. The existence of a prominent established religion helps to maintain the social bond, he argues.

This only functions well insofaras the Church 'attends to the consoling myths which have drawn people to it'. As the church falls prey to secular causes - as he puts it, becoming 'a sanctimonious addendum to Gay Power' - then its authority is lost. That is: it must be true to its own mission and identity - alien though it may seem - if it is to maintain its position at the heart of the nations political authority. Society needs the church, he argues, in order to bring order and sense to the great passing moments of birth, marriage and death. Secularisation brings only confusion, 'a thousand irrelevant creeds'. Established religion also serves to protect the nation from the violence of fanaticism, and from the 'Manichean idiocy' so prevalent in California.

Scruton offers a great temptation to the church then, from the point of view of society. Society needs the church to perform a function that society is unable to do on its own. Will the church perform this role? The great danger would be for the church to imagine itself as the chaplain of social cohesion, just as it is a great danger for the church to imagine itself as persistently taking a revolutionary attitude to society and the state.

The Meaning of Conservatism - Roger Scruton

Prague Castle, seat of Wenceslas andmore latterly, Vaclav Havel.

Roger Scruton's major early book was his The Meaning of Conservatism: a pre-Thatcher era defence of the intellectual grounds for a conservative approach to political, social, national and family life.

He targets especially the social contractarian liberals for their sheer voluntarism. The family itself is a naturally occuring unit in which authority is to be found without it needing to be imposed from outside. Likewise, the society is not a voluntary association of free individuals who may withdraw at any time: it is 'naturally' occuring, having its origins beyond human choosing. And authority appears within it, of course. Why should we have to provide a theoretical justification for it, as liberals try to do? Such a justification always appears artificial. Power is always already there in these 'natural' affiliations, by means of a 'transcendent bond' which exists outside the realm of individual choices.

As with all political philosophers, he wants to say something about the self (even if, like Rorty, you want to say 'there is no self!' you still want to say it):
There is, to put it bluntly, something deeply self-deceived in the idea of a fulfilled human being whose style of life is entirely of his own devising; The cult of 'authenticity' - emphasizing the truth that the individual self is in some sense an artifact - espouses the self-contradictory position that it is by himself that he is made. This myth of self as causa sui is one to which few people now subscribe....I shall argue that, once we have rejected the cult of 'authenticity' we shall be forced to abandon the attempt to erode whatever is 'established', whatever has a versted power to overcome opposition, which is the first principle of liberal as of socialist thought... p. 38

Some holiday reading

Sacha gazes out over Prague.

Prague Castle with St Vitus' Cathedral from the Charles Bridge.

OK - we are are back. Czech Republic was great. Sadly, the churches seems to be emptied out shells, and I could see no evidence of Protestantism at all. The land of Jan Hus is no longer a place of the kind of preaching he was known for, even though his statue is in the Old Town Square.

I read while I was away:

Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost. I went through an Ondaatje phase back in the mid 90s - I read all his poetry and novels. Loved his poetic style and his depictions of love and pain. He is a writer who really knows about the human body. Then I never got around to this novel which he sets in his native Sri Lanka. It is brilliantly written - three or four terrific, wounded characters. And more suffering of an appalling kind mixed in with illicit and licit love. The narrative has a kind of CSI flavour which is becoming a bit tired now after all those TV shows (the main character is a forensic anthropologist).

Franz Kafka - The Trial. OK, I tried here and failed again. I have tried several times to enjoy this book and where better then in Kafka's home town? But frankly, it is a dull book. Perhaps it is badly translated...

Will Self - The Book of Dave. I enjoyed this immensely. I am a self-confessed Self fan (??). He is a real surrealist. This is a kind of dystopian fantasy of what England would like if the mad, racist and misogynist ranting of a London cabbie of today were written on metal plates and found in a post-apocalyptic future and then treated as a divine revelation. It is a non-too-subtle satire of revealed religion and its capacity to wreak havoc. But Self also endears us to Dave, who by the end of the novel has been redeemed sufficiently to have written a second, more humane book... Wonderful passages written entirely in Cockney.

Sam Wells - God's Companions. I have to review this book - as I said before, I think it is frustratingly cheesy. I won't put it like that in my review...the best thing is that Wells has discovered the local church as the site of theo-praxis. Evangelicals I think have know that the local church is where the action is for years. The emphasis on symbolic practices is curious to me: Wells wants us to practice foot-washing, for example. It is funny that ritualists read scripture literally at this point, and non-ritualists read it metaphorically...

Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imagineries. Interesting take on the way in which revolutions come about and why or why not they are successful. There needs to be a vision of what a society could be under a new regime - merely opposing the current ruler will produce chaos unless there is a deeply felt sense of an alternative national/social/political identity. Why did the Velvet revolution succeed in 1989 without bloodshed? Because it was obvious to the Czechs that there was another and better way of being Czech, without communism. Maybe Taylor is only saying what is obvious in different words... also, he clearly feels he has earned the right to make sweeping historical statements without footnotes or evidence. It is hard to challenge him when he is writing like this.

Roger Scruton - Modern Culture. Scruton is a fabulous English conservative. The real thing. And thoroughly Kantian. His thesis in this book is that without religion 'high' culture will die. He mounts a sterling defence of high culture against the dominance of 'cultural' 'studies' in our schools and universities. I have to say he has my sympathies: good writing just is good writing I am afraid. You can't make pop culture better by clever criticism of it I am afraid. One of his best points is that the canon of Western culture is already a tolerant and diverse and self-critical canon - and is so because of Christianity. To present as a single monolithic ideology is simply false. Scruton is an unabashed Kantian, and I feel this is his great weakness - because he presents Kant's view of religion rather than the really Christian one. Christianity for Scruton seeps out of the English soil and is the natural accompaniment to Englishness. Only an Anglican of a certain blinkered and rural kind could think that.