Laudatio of Roger Scruton

Intro

If philosophy had disappeared during Saint Thomas Aquinas’s lifetime, it was said that he could have singlehandedly reconstructed it. In Thomas’s spirit, let us offer words suited to the substance: if philosophy were to disappear whilst we sat here Roger Scruton could also revive it for us. Should the automobile disappear, do not worry how you will get home, for he could revive horsemanship, too.

Now, it is a rare thing, indeed, to have some great part of the world mapped in one’s mind, so that one could give back as much as one had taken from the world. Most of us are takers and not givers in this respect. But giving and gifts are essential to a life well lived, a life twinned to gratitude, possessed by forgiveness—a life absent of the resentment that might just be the default position of social animals.

Roger Scruton, as of yesterday by the Queen’s decree, Sir Roger, has given us more than forty books, hundreds of articles, both popular and academic, two operas (and perhaps another on the way?), countless lectures, on topics ranging from architecture to wine to dancing properly to not saying too much (or at least leaving the unsayable unsaid, which I, too, shall attempt to do).

 He has also given himself as father and farmer, husband and husbandman, teacher and mentor, friend and charitable foe, patriot of England and compatriot particularly of Poles and Czechs, gadfly of paranoid communists everywhere and bane of social liberals, market capitalists, and progressives—all the while a stalwart cultural icon of resigned English excellence.

He has described himself variously as a ‘French intellectual’, a ‘Virginian farmer’, and an English hunter. These are all true, or true enough. In self-description he neither deceives nor fakes anything. But he is not above embellishing or taking artistic license, the way a novelist misremembers the past in order to shake the truth out of it. No matter which genre he treats, the philosopher is never far. For, he is a ‘lover of wisdom in the original sense of philo–sophia. In presenting a liveable philosophy he has the courage not to lie, even when lies would be prettier; and the intellectual honesty to end things at the right time, not to speculate too much, not to attempt to see beyond the one-sided boundary. For these reasons, his work can be trusted and received as the gift it intended to be. It is credible.

I shall not merely tell you of Roger Scruton’s virtues and accomplishments, which I know would embarrass him most of all. I shall instead offer some of his thoughts in my own idiom. All errors in understanding or misrepresentations are naturally mine. I want to reflect on two related themes of Roger Scruton’s work, person and the sacred. What they have meant to me? What they could mean for you?

‘Roger and me’

After losing my way in the modern university, Roger invited me to Oxford, where I soon joined his ‘Refugees’. This was a club of young scholars in some way estranged from contemporary academic fields and fads. We got together a few times a term to contemplate a paper over wine. It became an education in spite of the university, and it still is. Prof Scruton always had a very English way of telling one to try harder next time. He once said: ‘One thing has been made abundantly clear by your work: this is a difficult topic’. And: ‘You do refer to interesting arguments’. Like a child pointing at shimmering things beyond his reach, I referred to things I did not understand. That put me two steps away from where I had thought I almost was: Neither did I understand nor did I make interesting arguments. I did not even know where to begin.

Then, just before losing hope, Prof Scruton said to me, ‘It is important you discover where you stand on these things, your philosophy’. In one sentence he had explained the problem: like the sportscaster calling a match, I had been placing myself in the role of intellectual spectator. I engaged in taxonomy, lining up philosophers like so many toy dolls to admire their differences, to ponder their similarities. ‘You must place yourself amongst them’. But how could I move from spectator to participant?   

‘You only know when you write’, he said, a phrase rife with meaning. Ignorance is a dark fog that we push into attempting to let light in. There are less and more courageous attempts. Little else exposes oneself to oneself more unflatteringly than self-knowledge through writing. One then sees everything better. Many of us recoil at the first glimpse of ourselves, imagining we see rightly the first time we lay eyes on our own form. But writing, like seeing, requires training. The self is not fixed. Knowing changes the self, allows for improvement and acceptance. It also situates the self amongst other selves in a world of incarnate rational animals, that is, a world of persons, living, dead and yet to be born. It allows for a perpetual, self-conscious gift of self as no other known medium does. ‘We write to know that we are not alone’, C. S. Lewis says. We soon learn that we are not. It can be a form of communion.

Another sense of the phrase ‘You only know when you write’ relates to testing the mettle of one’s ideas. It is said that every one of my educated countrymen has a novel inside him. Luckily, most of them stay inside. But, honestly, almost no one has a novel inside of him. One has an idea for a novel that can never be much more until he goes through the self-revelation of attempting to bring it out. Self-revelation is a type of personal experience, but one that is best engaged in with others. One cannot write a novel by committee, no matter what the communists tried. Yet, as soon as one has passable chapters, he circulates them, edits and corrects. He has now brought others into the discovery of writing. We are individually generally poor judges in our own cause, but we can become pretty good judges if our values are fit to the field of judgment at hand, and practiced together.

Yet, the habit of judgment has a great enemy in authenticity. Having to ‘be original’ estranges us to our own contentment. The poet famous for a song about himself once said, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’  Walt Whitman wanted to seem great. But any large spirit would rather say something like: ‘Tell me your story.’ For, it is the world that contains multitudes, faces asking to be answered, I-to-I. In concert with the judgment of others we find acceptance and belonging. This is not immediate, but formed as we suitably adjust to shared standards of beauty, truth, and goodness and the like.

Here one begins approaching something that touches the sacred. In fleeing ignorance, we each find the person, who was seeking to be found. Courage brought us both here, from ignorance to truth. But love—agape—keeps us here. This love of neighbour is also proper love of self: knowing one another face-to-face. We have it on great authority that the twin laws of love are restatements of one divine law, so that love of God is never far from agape.

What began as Roger Scruton’s invitation to philosophize was revealed to be an offer of love through truth, which was in turn an invitation to philosophize again for the first time: It became understanding seeking faith seeking understanding.

‘Roger and you’

Enough about me: What can Roger Scruton’s ideas of person and the sacred mean for Poland?

The Polish national anthem alludes to the uncertain historical place of Poland. ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła’ [ˈjɛʂt͡ʂɛ ˈpɔlska ɲɛ zɡʲiˈnɛwa]): ‘Poland has not yet perished’. Or ‘Poland is not yet lost’. Not to be lost is a good thing. But it is different than being found, or well-founded, to extend the metaphor. One who is not lost can wander, can lose one’s way, can get lost. One who has not perished might still be in danger of perishing.

Poland shares with other nations in the region a tragic self-understanding, in which direction is found in suffering. If the goal is shared by the nation, this suffering may be willingly taken on by its members. Taking the suffering of others onto the self is noble, but a nation cannot be founded on the fact of suffering. However, a nation may be continuously formed by giving suffering meaning. The nation answers the ‘Why’ of suffering with a ‘We’ of settlement; with a ‘Here’ of place; with a ‘Then and Yet Still’ of shared history.

‘My name is million, For I love and I suffer for millions,’ is Konrad’s exclamation in Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady. But solidarity is not merely for millions of unknown or in principle unknowable individuals. Solidarity requires pre-existing relations between persons. A thin solidarity could rely on the principle of ‘humanity’. But solidarity that rallies higher virtues of self-sacrifice requires pre-existing relations of friendship, family, nation, tribe, confession, civilization, or culture.

This is one of the problems with inviting more than one million non-wine drinkers into Europe, and relying on ‘solidarity’ to make it work. Poland, with a real tradition of solidarity, was right to ask for migrants with whom you share something more than mere ‘humanity’, such as the Christian religion. This is part of what Roger Scruton means when he says that ‘culture counts’. Culture involves the ways in which we are European, and the ways you are Polish. Ordinary culture is about membership and belonging, as well as judgments about morals and mores; high culture is about judgment based in shared values. A society built on a common heritage of Christianity, seasoned by a large contribution from Judaism, can welcome strangers. But strangers cannot be welcomed to live in ‘humanity-land’ of rights-bearing agents. For, no persons actually live there. There is no such place.

But these strangers are persons that you would want to look in the face in order to form friendship and perhaps families with. They are persons that you would want to share judgments about right and wrong, beautiful and wretched, fitting or inappropriate. Veils can be seen through, but their presence in the public sphere is meant to preclude a shared space, a public space that the West has secured, sadly often through war. But it has been secured. And Poland, as part of the West, stands against the rest, in a tradition of ordered liberty provided to individual persons. We can have some solidarity with those who share at least that conviction.

Nothing is more indicative of that liberty than the beauty that has been produced by individual Western artists—art that is forbidden or at least considered shameful in many of the migrants’ lands. Think of the various self-portraits of Rembrandt: then young, now middle aged, now playful, now a serene old man. Where is the beauty in these secular icons, especially after the fire of Rembrandt’s youth has dried his body? It is not in the wrinkled cheek, nor the tested hand on the cane, nor even in his solace in loss. It is in what has persisted, and in a way still persists in our mind’s eye: the person visible in his face—and indeed in her face, in Rembrandt’s sympathetic portraits of women. Christianity has taught us to look for the Creator in the Creation. The Incarnation and Sacraments are doctrines teaching just that; and Judaism also had ‘God with us’, Emanuel, in the temple. Even so, the whole world is God’s creation. And God too is a person. Person, as Thomas taught, implies dignity. It also implies relation.  

But we are in danger of losing sight of the sacred, dignity of the person. It survived communism and fascism, but now everything from transhumanism to transnationalism, and even resurgent Catholic fideism, threatens its dignity. On all sides the old demon says: ‘Ich bin der Geist der stats verneint’(‘I am the spirit who always denies, who reduces Something to Nothing, who undoes the work of creation’.) The response must be to look to the faces with whom we are in solidarity, and to the face of the nation and the land that is its birthright, to see and re-present these beauties to others as art. These are manifestations of a sacred wish for humanity, first proclaimed by the Israelites: to dwell in peace in the land of your fathers.

Please join me in thanking Roger Scruton for his work for Poland and for the life of the mind, for his courage on behalf of our civilization.