Roger Scruton: Philosophical Christian and Scourge of Nihilism Par Excellence 

Carl R. Trueman has written yet another lucid and penetrating book that gets to the heart of our present cultural and spiritual discontent. Published earlier this year to critical acclaim, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity persuasively argues that the death of man is a necessary byproduct of the rejection of God, and that no decent or morally serious society can long survive the absence of Christian faith and theistic affirmation. Divorced from the truth that human beings are created “in the image and likeness of God,” human dignity cannot be credibly upheld. So far, so good.  

Trueman, however, goes further. He is convinced that anything less than a robust recognition of the imago dei is nihilistic, a rejection of man that flows from a “refusal of God-given obligations, the transgression of God-given limits, and the rejection of God-given ends.” We must therefore choose between the truth of Christ’s Gospel and nihilism tout court—there is, Trueman insists, no “middle path” available to us. This leads him to define nihilism in such a broad and capacious  way that many who self-consciously fight against, and indeed reject, the nihilist temptation nonetheless are, or would be, relegated to the camp of Nietzsche’s “Madman” (who thunderously declared that “God is dead,” modern man having killed him).   

There is something unjust and peremptory about Trueman’s all-or-nothing approach. For example, despite his own obvious indebtedness to the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton (drawing freely as he does on Scruton’s accounts of desecration and pornography as “moral pollution” and his Goethe-inspired identification of Satanic evil with “the spirit that forever negates”), Trueman ultimately consigns his intellectual “hero,” as he once called him, to the camp of nihilism. Too many reviewers, moreover, have uncritically followed Trueman in this judgment. Here, I hope to set the record straight.   

For Trueman, Scruton’s evident sympathy for the Christian religion is reduced to an “instrumental” appreciation of it “as a profound source of cultural good.” Trueman thus reduces Scruton’s remarkably rich reflections on religion and the “sacred” to the rather crude view that neither of them is true, but they “are good things for the organization of society.” Even here one has to note: tertium non datur. That is, there are more options than these binaries. Indeed, one has to say that Trueman presents a caricature of the late English philosopher and man of letters as a defender of the “spiritual residue” of Christianity rather than the Christian faith itself. Because, in Trueman’s view, Scruton is insufficiently dogmatic (which one can acknowledge), he turns out to be a mere aesthete, a defender of “exalted and beautiful thoughts about truth, goodness, and beauty.” By pigeonholing Scruton as nothing but a Kantian philosopher, Trueman makes him appear nothing more than “a cultural Christian” who appeals to “the language of truth … to justify taste.”  

However, Scruton’s intellectual debts went well beyond the German philosopher of the noumenal and phenomenal distinction and were remarkably wide ranging. He drew on Plato’s as well as Jan Patočka’s rich conception of the “care of the soul”; Aristotle’s articulation of the cardinal virtues; Burke’s eloquent defense of tradition, prudence, and ordered liberty against ideological fanaticism; and Hegel’s account of the necessarily “situated” character of ethical community. To these, he added careful attention to the moral witness of those who struggled in the east of Europe against the totalitarian lie in the second half of the twentieth century, and, not least, the New Testament’s affirmation and highlighting of forgiveness and neighbor love in lives lived well, lives truly open to the manifold intimations of “eternity” in time. Moreover, one could argue that Scruton was more indebted to Kant’s refusal to reduce human persons to impersonal objects bereft of souls and lacking in moral responsibility or “mutual accountability.” None of this is remotely the thought of a nihilist. 

To the contrary, Scruton believed that we human beings are beings “with language, self-consciousness, practical reason, and moral judgment” who can look out at the world in an “alert and disinterested way.” He articulates all of this with grace and lucidity in his 2009 book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Nonetheless, while acknowledging that “Scruton’s arguments have a strong, appreciative connection to Christianity, albeit refracted though a Kantian lens” (I would add: through much more than a Kantian lens), and that he “was critical of nihilism and offered his philosophical project as a counter to it,” Trueman suggests that Scruton merely “repackaged” nihilism because he was insufficiently “creedal” and insensitive to the essential dogmatic claims of Christianity. Trueman then goes on to place Scruton and Richard Dawkins in the same “cultural Christian” camp and hence in the same nihilistic camp. On their face, these judgments are unjust, and the equivalences are patently false. 

Even worse, Trueman shows little or no awareness regarding the place of religion and religious truth in Scruton’s own philosophical and political itinerary. In the concluding chapter (“Regaining My Religion”) of his elegant 2005 autobiographical reflection Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, Scruton recounts his return to the Christian religion in a way that is indispensable to any effort to understand his philosophical and religious thought. As he tells us, he had long left behind the (albeit conservative) “atheist apprenticeship” of his early books such as 1979’s The Meaning of Conservatism, where his account of religious belonging was indeed more instrumental, sociological, and Durkheimian, even if genuinely respectful. Subsequently, in the writings of Rilke and T. S. Eliot he discovered an account of the “sacred” that took the interiority of the soul seriously and aimed to give expression to those intimations of “eternity” that are available to us in time.  

Scruton had long taken non-arbitrary or non-subjective “moral knowledge” very seriously. Confronted by totalitarian secular religions that aim to negate the life of the soul, the moral law, and the dim if shining light of eternity available on “the edge of things” and the Lebenswelt of ordinary experience, he came to perceive the profound truth at the heart of Psalm 100: “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God … it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” This sentence, Scruton insists, “contains all of theology.” We know this God through “personal acquittance” more than through philosophical argumentation. By this time Scruton had returned to the Church of England, playing the organ at his local rural church on Sundays. He had joined in a community of faith, of persons who freely acknowledged that God has made us “and not we ourselves.” He would remain a Christian communicant until his death on January 12, 2020. Forgiveness, repentance, and mutual accountability found strength, sustenance, and personal confirmation in a community of Christian worship that bowed down before the living God.  

What Trueman ultimately fails to do is to recognize the intimate connection between Scruton’s final philosophical position, rooted in a sympathetic articulation of the goods that come to light in the Lebenswelt (and a critique of every form of scientific materialism), and his later Christian affirmation. Even in earlier books such as Sexual Desire (1986) and Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), the English writer vigorously defended the proposition that human beings are embodied souls: freely acting, thinking, and judging persons. He was by then the most forceful and eloquent philosophical critic of what the English philosopher Mary Midgley called “nothing buttery,” the pseudo-philosophical conceit that “the ‘self’ is an illusion, and that the human person is ‘nothing but’ the human animal, just as law is ‘nothing but’ relations of social power, sexual love ‘nothing but’ the procreative urge and the Mona Lisa ‘nothing but’ a spread of pigments on a canvas.”  

In a 2014 piece for The Spectator entitled “Humans Hunger for the Sacred: Why Can’t the New Atheists Understand That?,” from which I have just quoted, Scruton goes so far as to say that “getting rid” of such “nothing buttery” is “the true goal of philosophy.” And he clearly believed that philosophy so understood would pave the way for renewed religious affirmation and an uninhibited recognition of the powers of the soul. By exposing scientistic dogmatism for the fiction that it is, the Scrutonian model of philosophizing could provide “the first step towards understanding why and how we live in a world of sacred things.”  

In his remarkable 2012 book, The Face of God, based on his Gifford Lectures, Scruton shows how a non-reductive appreciation of the human face as the seat of personhood, moral agency, and mutual accountability can point to the ultimate I-Thou relationship, the relationship between the Creator God and those ensouled persons he endowed with moral freedom and personal responsibility. Where is the nihilism here? I also suggest that interested readers examine Scruton’s 2006 essay “Dawkins is Wrong About God.” There is nothing “utilitarian” in Scruton’s approach to God and Christianity in these and other pieces that I have highlighted. And when Trueman takes Scruton to task for defending human mortality as a necessary precondition of a morally serious life (as Leon Kass has also done), he fails to distinguish between immortality in this world and the “promises of God” about eternal life.  

Roger Scruton knew that philosophy could only go so far in defending the truths of religion. As he suggested in a posthumously published 2020 essay, it could do something by clearing away false obstacles to faith and the life of the soul, which is hardly nothing, as he quickly added. As for his own personal journey, in an interview published in the May 2020 issue of the Hungarian Review, Scruton explained why he returned to the Anglican Church in the final decades of his life. He found there, he said, joy and solace in its hymns and Bible stories, “and the experience of Holy Communion force(d) me to be humble and to recognize my faults.”  

Rather than consign him to the camp of the nihilists, I would think it is a more Christian thing (and altogether just) to be grateful for his efforts to liberate and defend the soul and to fight so courageously against the ubiquitous “culture of repudiation.” 

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