Scrutinizing the Sacred

When Roger Scruton sent me a proof of what would be his last book, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption (Penguin, 2021), I considered it in the same vein as I had all his previous writings. It was, I believed, yet another astonishing attempt to show a disbelieving world how to find redemption from its fallenness. It is true that he opens the book by observing that Parsifal is Wagner’s answer to “a question that concerns us all: the question of how to live in right relation to others, even if there is no God to help us.” But does this imply that Scruton was, like Wagner, committed to the belief that there is no God? Anyone even partially acquainted with his writings will know that despite “serving a full apprenticeship in atheism,” Scruton devoted his life to proving that “freedom, love and duty come to us as a vision of eternity, and to know them is to know God.”

It is true that Scruton deeply admired Wagner. I remember staying at his Wiltshire farm when he was writing The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of Nibelung (2017), his masterpiece on Wagner’s Ring cycle. Each night before retiring, he would sit at his piano and play something from that opera. It was as though, in those quiet nocturnal moments, he was communing with the very spirit of the man he sought to understand. However, Scruton was not Wagner. Indeed, he intentionally distanced himself from Feuerbach’s and Wagner’s treatment of “the gods as projections of our human passions, through which we mortals try to fathom the vast impulses that govern us.” In that same context, Scruton synthesized his entire outlook in terms of his particular conception of the sacred:

My argument aims to show that all persons, in other words all who can relate to others by situating them in a shared Lebenswelt [“lived world”], have to bring their experience under transcendental concepts, and therefore see the world as a revelation of an ineffable beyond. They do not have to theorize this revelation in terms of any specific religion or metaphysic, any more than they have to spell out the scientific image in terms of some particular physical theory. The revelation lies incipient in their interpersonal dealings, and governs their conduct and decision-making in ways that profoundly affect what they are for each other and themselves.

This does not mean that Scruton’s conception of the sacred was beyond critique, as I shall attempt to show below. However, it does undermine what many have often suggested—especially when analyzing his relationship to Wagner—that, notwithstanding everything he wrote to the contrary, Roger was, as one commentator remarked, “an avowed atheist.” Forget the fact that he concluded his 2005 memoir Gentle Regrets with a chapter entitled “Regaining My Religion,” in which he says that “by pondering my loss of faith I have steadily regained it.” Forget that, as early as 1990, he wrote that in the Holocaust and the Gulag we find the “proof of original sin, and the evidence that man is after all not sufficient for his own redemption, failing most dismally in emancipating himself precisely when he seeks to free himself from God.” Even if we have no knowledge of any of this, we still ought to ask why a purported atheist would, as Scruton often did, publicly take sides against “fellow-atheists”?

Why, in other words, would Scruton—the “avowed atheist”—openly critique, as he often did, the high priests of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Hawking? The answer is simple: he was not an atheist, but someone who spent his life defending “the human form divine” from the corrosive critiques of reductionism, scientism, naturalism, and later, neuroscience. I would go so far as to say that the principal theme of his work can be summed up in this one observation: “The hubris which leads us to believe that science has the answer to all our questions, that we are nothing but dying animals and that the meaning of life is merely self-affirmation, or at best the pursuit of some collective, all-embracing and all too-human goal—this reckless superstition contains already the punishment of those who succumb to it.”

There are some who will respond by arguing that despite all this Scruton was someone who, while not an atheist, upheld the external forms of religion without actually believing in them. Thus, playing the organ in his local church was more an aesthetic pastime to support the local community than anything that committed him to doctrine or creed. To this I want to say that while it is true that his faith was complicated, the fact that he was a believer cannot be doubted by anyone who gives his life and work serious attention. He was certainly not what he once dubbed “the aesthetically-minded tourist, who stands in the wings of the ceremony in a state of contemplative pleasure.” More than once, I witnessed him as he reverently knelt to receive Holy Communion at his local chapel—a moving spectacle that fully convinced me, more than anything else, of his deeply-held Christian convictions.

All of this notwithstanding, there is, I believe, a significant problem to be confronted in Scruton’s theory of the sacred and the primacy that he gives to the aesthetic as a revelation of the infinite. As he writes, art “suddenly leapt into prominence at the Enlightenment, with the eclipse of sacred things.” It is why it became a “redeeming enterprise,” and why the artist “stepped into the place vacated by the prophet and the priest.” When properly understood, therefore, art “is a kind of prayer: it is an attempt to call the timeless and the transcendental to the scene of some human incident.” This means that, in our “cynical age,” it is possible “for those blessed by a high culture . . . to retain the consoling vision which religion grants to all its supplicants.” 

Put simply, religion is not an exclusive source of sanctifying grace. By ennobling what Scruton called ‘“the human spirit,” art “presents us with a justifying vision of ourselves, as something higher than nature and apart from it.” It does this “not as religion does, by demanding belief and worship”; rather it “engages our sympathies without compelling any doctrine.” Hence, art is religion for those who don’t do doctrine.

I don’t for a second believe that Scruton’s faith was compromised by holding any of this. He was acutely aware that, in a society that has largely lost its religion, art can give people a sense of the timeless and transcendental. That is why he spent his life defending genuine art from those who would “do dirt on life.” However, it is also true that art can never provide the redemption that is promised by religion. The reason for this is that while art may offer us “intimations” of the sacred, only religion can reconcile us to it. 

Intimations of the Infinite

In Scruton’s view, the point of high culture is “to recuperate by imaginative means the old experience of home.” What I want to say, in contrast, is that far from recuperating such a vital experience, art ultimately leaves us homeless. It is not that art cannot be a doorway to the transcendental, but it is a doorway that we can never walk through. The self is left, as it were, “fragmented, painfully suspended between opposing extremes.” Or, as Hegel so perceptively put it: “What is present is only this going out on my part, this aiming to reach what is remote; I remain on this side, and have a yearning after a beyond.” I “stay immovably impaled upon the stake of absolute opposition,” thereby remaining alienated from my true source.  

For Hegel, art and religion are vital phases of consciousness through which the self must pass to surmount alienation and realize true identity. However, if religion supersedes art in the dialectic, it is because it enables us to identify with those ultimate things from which we would otherwise remain estranged. Whereas culture reconciles us to “‘the best that has been thought and said,”’ it cannot adequately satisfy our deep hunger for reconciliation with what exceeds the world and the senses. There will always be something with which we cannot identify and from which we will remain perpetually separated.  Art and culture may bring us to the threshold, but it is there that we must linger while “‘yearning after a beyond’.” That deep sense of alienation can never be truly conquered so long as we remain divided from the divine. Or, as American theologian Mark C. Taylor states, we are “‘left to wander in a foreign land’,” laboring under the infinite sorrow “‘of separation and loss and can only yearn for the everlasting peace of reconciliation.”’

Without art and culture, we shall never complete our journey to selfhood. However, that journey requires us to move beyond culture to religion where “‘the divine being is known as spirit,”’ and where “‘the divine substance and human subject are reconciled.”’ The satisfactions of culture are both beautiful and consoling, but they are temporary satisfactions without that sense of true belonging achieved only in the “‘reunion of divinity and humanity.”’ At best, they give us what Scruton called “‘intimations of the transcendental.”’ That, however, is not the homecoming for which we ultimately long, nor to which Roger Scruton dedicated his life’s work. Neither is it something that can assuage our restless yearning for true communion with what philosophers call the “‘wholly Other.”’

Homelessness of the Mind 

Ultimately, this boils down to the distinction between Kant and Hegel.  Scruton wrote that “‘Hegel was probably the greatest of all conservative philosophers, and all the greater for the fact that his political thinking had deep metaphysical roots’.” Moreover, Scruton was thoroughly Hegelian in the way he lived, and his conservative outlook was shaped more by Hegel than by any other thinker.  Despite this, as I mentioned earlier, he owed his greatest intellectual debt to Kant.  As he told me in our book Conversations with Roger Scruton, he read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “‘around ten times,”’ and he wrote his book Kant: A Very Short Introduction (still his bestselling work) in just four days. We often argued over this tension between Kant and Hegel in his work, and it was the one subject where we could never find agreement. That is because I don’t believe you can be both a Kantian and a Hegelian—Hegel being the great philosopher of reconciliation, while Kant’s entire theory was based on what is ultimately irreconcilable with human experience. You cannot, in other words, subscribe to Hegel’s preference for home and history, while holding to Kant’s empty, abstract universalism and transcendentalism. That, however, is precisely what Roger Scruton sought to do, and it is why, for him, there could only ever be “intimations of infinity” rather than a full revelation of the sacred or the divine. 

In simple terms, Kant believed in an “unknowable” thing-in-itself—a “sheer beyond” that is inaccessible to human comprehension. Hegel, on the other hand, believed that the very notion of the “unknowable” was an absurdity. To say that something is “unknowable” or “wholly Other” is already to conceptualize it, and thus to have knowledge of it.  As Hegel scholar W. T. Stace writes: “To say that an unknowable exists is to apply a concept to the unknowable. But to apply a concept to it is to have knowledge of it. Therefore, the theory that an unknowable exists involves the contradiction that we have knowledge of the unknowable.” Or, as he elsewhere clarifies: “If anything is unknowable, this means that it is absolutely unknowable. And if we have any knowledge of it, however slight, it is not unknowable.” Consequently, while there may be things that are unknown, there is nothing that is unknowable in that Kantian sense of the term.

For Kant and Scruton, however, we acquire “intimations” of the transcendental through our encounters with the human subject and the “subjectivity of the world.” We acquire them through seeing personality in things that don’t naturally possess it, such as beautiful architecture, wine, and music. Relying on Kant’s vision of the human predicament, he argues that “while there is no place for the free being in the world described by science, our own self-awareness, without which no description of the world makes sense to us, forces upon us the idea that we are free.” Freedom, he tells us, is “the mysterious lining of the human organism, the subjective reality which gives sense and meaning to our lives.” Hence, to see a face where the scientist sees only flesh, muscle, and bone is “to recognise that this, at least, is sacred, that this small piece of earthly matter is not to be treated as a means to our purposes, but as an end in itself.” It is, in sum, Kant’s theory of freedom, his ideas of the transcendental subject and aesthetic judgement, that suggest “how we might understand the sacred and the miraculous.” 

In the end, however, such intimations of the sacred and the transcendental that we acquire through our encounters with the human subject and the “subjectivity of the world,” remain just that: intimations. Since, for Kant, the transcendental ultimately remains unknowable, we are condemned to what Hegel defines as a “restless searching.” That is why he concludes that Kant’s transcendentalism is, in the phrase of Dieter Henrich, a “homelessness of the mind.” 

Hegel understood that art brings us to the threshold of the transcendental. It is, as he said, Spirit (Geist) shining through the veil of sense-experience. However, so long as we are condemned to this homelessness of the mind, we can never be fully at home in the world.  As he wrote: “I am [only] at home in the world when I know it.” Art and culture are necessary stages to selfhood, in so far as they enable us to identify with what Hegel called the “social substance.” Through them, we transcend material alienation and are reconciled to the legacy of emotional and moral knowledge. It is also true, as Scruton writes, that human beauty “places the transcendental subject before our eyes and within our grasp.” 

For Hegel, however, this transcendental subject “remains an Other, which cannot be determined by me.” Again, what is present “is only this going out on my part, this aiming to reach what is remote.” But Hegel cannot rest once alienation, estrangement, or separation persists, which is why his dialectic moves beyond art and culture to religion. To repeat, the very idea of “an Other, which cannot be determined by me,” is, he believes, logically incoherent. That is because the Other has already been determined by me through my conceptualization of it. Its identity is no longer that of a “wholly Other” but has now been shaped by me and I by it, forming what he called an “identity amid difference.” What once appeared remote and a “sheer beyond” is now recognizable and identifiable. 

Homecoming

Religion surmounts the homelessness of the mind because through it we achieve what Hegel describes as “absolute reconciliation.” Our original estrangement is overcome through the divine union between God and man which takes place on the Cross of Calvary. The division wrought by sin and alienation is cancelled on Golgotha, thus realizing the “humanization of the divine” and the “divinization of the human.” Or, as St. Paul stunningly declares: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” 

Scruton himself writes that Hegel “gave the deepest available exposition of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and showed that if one is to believe in God, one must believe in the Incarnation too.” Without the Incarnation, we are perpetually condemned to what Hegel identified as “the standpoint of the opposition of the infinite on one side, and on the other side a fixed finitude.” Without God becoming man, the opposition between God and self remains absolute. But now, with the Incarnation, we can recognize ourselves as part of the divine drama. We can identify with Christ, and thus the separation between man and God, the self and Other, is overcome. Mark Taylor puts it nicely when he writes: “From Hegel’s point of view, sojourners can feel at home only in a world in which the divine itself is at home. Heaven descends to earth and earth ascends to heaven, bringing the kingdom of God.”

The consolations of art and culture are real and essential to human flourishing. They may even bring you to that exalted state that Scruton describes when he writes: “Sometimes, listening to a Bach fugue, a late quartet of Beethoven, or one of those infinitely spacious themes of Bruckner, I have the thought that this very movement which I hear might have been made known to me in a single instant.” Such moments are, he says, “precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.” And yet, in so many ways, Roger lived, not only as if he had caught sight of that other and brighter world, but as though he had indeed entered and made it his own, if not his home.

Despite this, however, he persists in saying things such as: “Like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. There are many who, like Feuerbach, dismiss it as an illusion. But there is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to such people. Moreover, this aspect is of the first importance. Our loves and hopes in some hinge on it. We love each other as angels love, reaching for the unknowable ‘I.’ . . . Putting the point that way I have already said too much. For my words make it look as though the world beyond the window is actually here, like a picture on the stairs. But it is not here; it is there, beyond the window that can never be opened, and before which we cannot linger, for we are prisoners of time and our steps always trudge onwards and upwards.” 

While such thoughts should put paid to any lingering notion that Scruton was either an atheist or an aesthetically-minded tourist of the holy, they nevertheless prove again that he was immovably impaled on the stake of infinite opposition that Hegel sought to synthesize or reconcile. The “unknowable ‘I’” is Kant’s transcendental subject; the world “beyond the window that can never be opened” is a variation of Kierkegaard’s “wholly Other.” All presuppose an unknowable world-in-itself, a noumenal realm that is inaccessible to phenomenal consciousness. 

Hegel’s response to this was to push beyond Kant’s dualism to surmount the alienation to which it inevitably gives rise. He sought to reconcile us fully to the world, the other, and to our divine source; first, by demonstrating the incoherence of the very idea of an unknowable or a wholly other—even when they supposedly offer glimpses of themselves through “intimations” or “moments of revelation”; and, second, to show that, as a consequence, “dialectical reason enables one to penetrate actuality and comprehend reality.” Hence, Hegel’s is a “revelation of the reconciliation of the divine and the human,” thus making explicit “the eternal validity of time and the infinite value of the finite self.” Put simply, Hegel shows that the ultimate conclusion of the Kantian enterprise is fragmentation and the very form of alienation that Scruton seeks to surmount in his philosophy of home. 

In an essay from 1984, Scruton wrote that “no philosopher is more pertinent to our times, or to the intellectual task faced by modern conservatism, than is Hegel.”  That “important task” is, he says, one of “providing to the spiritually homeless, a promise of their proper home.” Hegel does that, according to Scruton, by pointing the way “to a recovery of faith: faith in what is concrete, complete, and knowable.” In the same essay, he describes the Kantian subject in the following negative terms: “The self becomes, for the liberal, the ‘transcendental subject’ of Kant, a noumenal creature, divorced from ‘empirical conditions,’ whose principium individuationis can never be defined.” Both descriptions of these philosophers’ central ideas are perfectly accurate. Why then did Scruton, as that great philosopher of home, ultimately opt for the “noumenal creature” of Kant over Hegel’s faith in what is concrete, complete, and knowable? Why, if Hegel leads us home, did Scruton defend a transcendentalism that makes us strangers “to the soil and to men alike”? 

I often argued with Roger about this, but the answer never became clear. However, the conservative vision that he proposed requires “faith in what is concrete, complete, and knowable.” It requires that we provide for the spiritually homeless a promise of their proper home—something that he sought to do in his writings on hunting, wine, music, religion, and architecture. But that promise fails if we cannot fully recognize ourselves in the world, in each other, and in God. It fails if it trades a world that is knowable, complete, and concrete for one to which we seemingly belong but cannot enter. Scruton understood this, which is why he wrote: 

Modern man is severed from history, from custom, from religious usage, and at the same time burdened with a conscious yearning for those things—a yearning from which he vainly attempts to rid himself by turning upon his inheritance the fires of a self-made animosity. If this spiritual condition is so often ignored or mis-described by conservative theory, it is at least in part because the lesson of Hegel has not been learned.

The essence of that lesson is that “I am at home in the world when I know it.” Otherwise, we are condemned to a “restless searching” in which we remain “prisoners of time”—our steps trudging always onwards and up to who knows where.

Image by sbuwert and licensed via Adobe Stock.