Two Virtues of Western Culture
Roger Scruton
Irony, Sacrifice, and the Transmission of Culture
My theme is culture, its place in education, and the place of education in our lives. And, because I know it is a concern of those assembled here, I will try to connect my theme with the subject of the Christian religion, and its enduring place in our society.
Autobiography of a class traitor
I should like to begin from a couple of vignettes from my own education. I was born into a typical lower middle class family in suburban England. My father was a teacher in a primary school, who resented the fact that, coming from the working class, he had been unable to obtain a proper education for himself and been unable therefore to rise in his profession. In consequence he was deeply opposed to education in general, and my education in particular. He fortified his opposition to the practice from which he made his scant living by the vague but passionate advocacy of social justice.
Education, he argued, introduced the evil idea of distinction into human affairs. By grading, judging, examining and testing; by passing and failing; by issuing certificates and diplomas, we amplify and perpetuate those old distinctions of class and influence which were the bane of England. He himself was proud that he possessed no certificates or diplomas; and if he had had his way, certificates and diplomas would have been all called in by the officials of a benign socialist state and ceremonially burned in Parliament Square.
He particularly singled out for condemnation the grammar schools—ancient establishments founded in order to teach Latin and the Trivium to poor scholars which, because of their antiquity, had become, during the late nineteenth century, both an integral part of the state education system, and also self-conscious rivals to the private schools that we, in our English love of inexplicable mysteries, call public. To get into grammar school you had to sit an exam, aged 10 or 11, and, if you passed that exam, you were separated forever from your less gifted or more indolent contemporaries and installed in an exalted place to which they could never aspire, with one foot on the ladder which led to the star-studded firmament of the old upper class. It was self-evident to my father, as it was to all members of the Labour Party of which he was an ardent supporter, that grammar schools should be abolished and all children confined together, in state-protected barns where nothing pernicious could ever be done to them—and certainly nothing as pernicious as education.
It was a considerable setback for my father when I passed the examination that he wished to abolish (and which has indeed since been abolished) and entered the grammar school. I had embarked, aged 10, on my career as a class traitor. And it was a career that filled me with excitement. Our school—the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe—was well supplied with excellent masters: men of the officer class who, returning from the colonies, mission accomplished, and hoping to teach at Eton or Winchester, had settled for second best in the suburbs. Most of my teachers were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, and although I was studying natural sciences, what I principally gained from the school, apart from a scholarship to Cambridge, was an awareness of, love for, and eventual immersion in culture.
It was in our school that the greatest of American poets, T. S. Eliot, had spent his first year in England, struggling to survive as assistant English master, and no doubt suffering from the Prufrock-like embarrassments that we English love to inflict upon Americans. Eliot’s ghost still inhabited the school, and the senior English master, Mr Broadbridge, made a point of inculcating severe Eliotian attitudes in his pupils, which they made a point of imposing in turn upon their friends. Although I never knew Mr Broadbridge I was, by the time I left the school, intimately acquainted with the merits of Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and John Bunyan; with the errors and transgressions of Tennyson and Walter de la Mare; with the absolute necessity for us of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, and with the need to work out an objective canon of good taste in all the areas of artistic expression.
Religion, resentment, rebellion
Where was religion in all this? I should say that religion was, for me, an arena of the contest that had invaded every other part of my adolescent life, and to which Marx and Engels had given the name “class struggle.” My father had only one settled religious opinion, which was that the Anglican Church is another branch of the upper class, and as such part of the conspiracy that rules over England. He had no clear response to my mother’s desire that her children should receive the rudiments of Christian instruction, other than to insist that, wherever we were to be sent for that particular form of punishment, it should not be to the Anglican Church. He spent some weeks visiting various gloomy precincts that still welcomed new adherents in the non-conformist backstreets of our town. Eventually he settled on the Baptist chapel as being sufficiently melancholy to hold out some promise of improving us. He himself, having arrived at this judgement, never set foot there again.
You will not be surprised to learn that this experience planted in my mind an immovable image of the beauty and spirituality of the Anglican church. Leaving our home each Sunday en route for the Baptist chapel, I would double back down the little alley behind the vicarage, and settle myself down in the back of the Anglican church of St Mary—in Marlow, to which place we had moved. My father never discovered this further aspect of my betrayal of the old working class. Nor did he discover that I attended confirmation classes and even had myself confirmed, aged 15, on account of the girl in the white mackintosh who sat in the class beside me and whose name I never knew.
Soon afterwards the sixties began, along with all the things that Philip Larkin mentions, including sexual intercourse and the Beatles’ first LP. I drifted away from the Anglican revelation, which was, by then, continuous in my thinking with the vision of England presented in Four Quartets, and with the music of Benjamin Britten. I did not have that fortifying experience which has been given to so many Americans, of being raised on the works of G. K. Chesterton, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis—Christian thinkers able to paper over the great chasm between childhood and adolescence, and to provide the reasons and the feelings that make innocence endure.
My Anglicanism was something that I had rescued from the debris of my surroundings, a forbidden object that I had come across in the ruins, and which I had picked up and hidden, along with all my other treasures, in the little store of my spiritual possessions, outside the reach of the ever vigilant, ever resentful, thought police of socialist England. It was as fragile as that implies, and by the time I went to Cambridge—after a year bumming around Europe—I was a fairly normal, sceptical, disorderly member of my generation, marked out only by my resentment of resentment in all its forms. This attitude was to stand me in good stead, I believe. For it lies at the root of my distinctive posture towards the world, a posture which I acquired later in the sixties, in the streets of Paris, when I became a rebel against rebellion.
Dr Laurence Picken
I want to skip now to another reminiscence, this time of my tutor in Cambridge, Laurence Picken, since he too had enormous input into my vision of culture, though without, I think, being aware of it.
It has to be said that my time in Cambridge began rather badly. Coming from our local grammar to a college dominated by self-confident boys from Eton and Harrow, bearing a scholarship in a subject that I abhorred, and finding myself in a suite of chill bare Victorian rooms at the start of the coldest winter on record, my first instinct was to run away. It was an instinct that I could not act upon since there was nowhere to run to, I having already run away from home nine months before in one of those definitive adolescent gestures which I was planning at some stage to revoke—though in fact I never got round to it. There was nothing for it but to go to this old geezer who had been appointed in loco parentis and to tell him that I was not going to read natural sciences, that the thought of crystallography, biochemistry, and microbiology filled me with disgust, that there must surely be some other subject—Chinese, for instance—that would answer to my bohemian yearnings without damaging my brain, and that in any case if he didn’t come up with something better I was leaving the college that night, so there.
My agitated knock was greeted with silence. Listening carefully I discerned a faint, mouse-like scraping somewhere behind the door. After a while I realised that the sound was music—though music played so softly that it was like music remembered, rather than music heard. I knocked again and, after a short pause, was greeted with a quiet “come in.” Bursting through the door like the proverbial bull I found myself in a china shop, surrounded by precious vases, delicate musical instruments and a hundred polished and fragile things, among which none appeared more fragile or more polished than the loco himself—a large porcelain head which turned faint blue eyes in my direction from behind a clavichord, on the keys of which his beautiful ivory hands were resting.
“You are my tutor,” I blurted out, overcome with confusion.
He looked at me anxiously.
“I feared as much,” he said at last.
“I need to talk to you.”
He got up from the clavichord and quietly closed the lid. With slow studied gestures, like a bomb-disposal expert, he turned and tip-toed to his desk, from where he gestured me towards an armchair. I stood by it, not sitting, and delivered my prepared speech. He winced every now and then at some particularly coarse turn of phrase, but otherwise remained seated, motionless behind a neat array of pens, papers, and green jade dragons. When I had finished and after a moment’s silence during which he studied me apprehensively, he quietly addressed the problem, as though speaking to himself and in a voice so soft that I had to strain to overhear him.
“I cannot recommend Chinese,” he said. “It is a language I happen to know, collection of languages I should say, and requires an immense amount of work and dedication. We can rule out English since obviously you will read those books in any case, and that really leaves no choice save history or moral sciences. Not that I approve of either.”
“What,” I asked, “are moral sciences?”
“Well may you ask. It is the traditional Cambridge name for philosophy.”
“Moral sciences, then,” I instantly decided.
Dr Picken sighed reproachfully.
“We admit you young men to read the natural sciences, which are, you know, the greatest legacy of this university, and you can never stay the course.”
“Would you?” I asked, looking around at the books and instruments, the scrolls and vases, and assuming myself to be in the presence of a distinguished orientalist.
“I did,” he replied.
“You mean you are a scientist?” I asked incredulously. He nodded.
“I branched out a bit,” he added. “But I stayed the course.”
I eagerly accepted the glass of sherry which he poured from a decanter. He told me about his work in cytology, concerning which he had written a large book. I asked to see it, and turning over the pages I saw that the last chapter was entitled “Envoi,” a word that I knew from Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti translations. I looked across at Dr Picken with renewed interest. This old geezer was clearly not loco at all; nor was he so very old. I asked him what he thought of Ezra Pound. He responded with a shy but authoritative lecture on the Confucian Odes. Pound’s inaccuracies in the translation, he told me, were off-set by some real felicities in the feeling. He went on to talk about the Noh plays, indicating without stating it that he knew Japanese as well. And when at last I was convinced that this man was quite the most learned person I had ever met and that I ought to take his advice, he got up slowly, and said,
“Moral sciences it is then. I will send you to Dr Ewing.”
His manner was somehow precarious, and it became clear to me that I was intruding, that I had been intruding all along, that only a carefully nurtured veneer of politeness had enabled him to carry on a conversation with me, and that his interrupted session at the clavichord had probably been going on in his mind throughout our talk. I left with a note for Dr Ewing, and so began my career as a philosopher.
Dr Picken, I discovered, was a conscientious tutor, who refused quite categorically to make favourites of his pupils, and who invited us all to dinner, five at a time, once a year. I know that I was a trouble to him, often visiting him at unauthorized hours for an emergency exeat, which he would grant while looking at me from distant and fearful eyes, as though not sure whether I was tricking him into complicity in some crime about which he would rather not know. He retreated from emotion, and would not allow me to express it. And sometimes, passing his room in the evenings, and seeing him seated at the clavichord, or at the lovely old chamber organ on which he played the chorale preludes of Bach, I would have the sense of a creature so fragile that merely to touch him would cause him to fall in fragments to the floor. And yet, when I was reported to him as a candidate for rustication—a collection of woman’s clothes having been discovered in my wardrobe, along with empty gin bottles and other signs of dissipation which, in those days, were sufficient to jeopardise an undergraduate’s career—he entered quietly and doggedly into my defence, upheld, with the faintest of smiles, my story that I had transvestite leanings, and successfully protected me from punishment.
We became friends, and sometimes we would play together on the two grand pianos in the College music room, working through the Mozart piano concerti, one of us as soloist the other as orchestra. He said very little, but played with a kind of vulnerability that suggested depths of feeling, depths of suffering too, that he could admit to in no other way. Once I put in some Mozartian ornaments, and he spoke out approvingly across the room. Seldom has praise been so precious to me.
If Dr Picken spoke about any topic, it was because he knew everything about it. Yet he spoke always with exemplary respect towards his listener, and with a complete modesty of demeanour. His learning astonished me. He seemed to know every European language, the Slavonic tongues included, and was an ethno-musicologist of the first rank, who had gone over the ground first opened up by Bartok, Kodaly and Janacek. Although you could be forgiven for thinking that he had never left his college rooms, he had in fact pursued his scientific career all over the world, beginning before the war with four years’ work on freshwater Ciliata in the Balkans, where he had learned Serbo-Croat and written down the folk songs, moving thereafter to the École de Chimie in Geneva, and so beginning adventures that took him back and forth across Europe, picking up languages and melodies wherever he went.
He had researched not only folk music but also the instruments that accompanied it, most of which he could play. He was—and no doubt still is—the world expert on Turkish folk instruments, which he collected and catalogued at a time when they were fast disappearing from popular use. He was fluent in Turkish and of course could read it in the Arabic script that the Turks themselves have now forgotten. Oriental languages were another love, along with the literature and music that had traditionally accompanied them, and he was an expert on Japanese Gagaku, as well as the old folk orchestras of China and the gamalan of Bali. He had researched Bach deeply, and I was told that he had even discovered a previously unknown Bach cantata.
Dr Picken was also quietly knowledgeable about wine, and I can still remember the conversation with which he launched me on another of my professional careers. He had cheered me up with some Burgundy left over from one of his dinners and we were standing in his little kitchen, as neat and clean as every other part of his museum-like rooms, as he carefully washed up—it being intolerable to him to see a dirty glass polluting the chair-side table.
“I should tell you,” he said, “that the Burgundy you have just drunk was not very good. In fact commercialisation has more or less destroyed the region, and people of your generation will probably never know Burgundy as we knew it. With one exception. There is a small Domaine in Vosne-Romanée called Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. If you ever come across it you should give it a try. It has the perfect balance of stalk and fruit, and the soil speaks through it too. Nobody else now knows how to make wine like that.”
That advice was given to me in 1964. Shortly afterwards Romanée-Conti was discovered by the trade, and today it is probably the most expensive wine you could buy. But I remembered Dr Picken’s little speech, and was able to repeat it at all kinds of gatherings where knowledge about good wine was rewarded with a glass of it.
The purpose of the student
Dr Picken was, for me, the very image of the bachelor don, who had retreated from life in order to immerse himself in learning. He typified the osmotic process whereby a cultural and intellectual inheritance was transmitted within college walls. You could pick up from him any amount of knowledge on any number of subjects—from the wave structure of the benzene ring to the translation of Dante, from Frazer’s theory of magic to the chronology of the Upanishads—and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding. He justified, in my eyes, the rigorous monasticism that had been nurtured by the Cambridge colleges, living as he did in permanent retreat from ephemera.
His attitude to learning was the very opposite of that which has come to dominate the schools and universities today. He did not believe that the purpose of knowledge was to help the student. On the contrary. For Dr Picken, the purpose of the student was to help knowledge. He was throughout his life the willing and self-sacrificing trustee of an intellectual inheritance. Young people mattered to him because they had the brains into which his reservoir of learning could be poured. He looked at us students sceptically, but always with that underlying hope that, in this or that undisciplined young face, there was yet the outward sign of a brain large enough and dispassionate enough to capture some of the accumulated knowledge of mankind, and which could carry that knowledge through life without spilling it, until finding another brain into which it might be discharged.
That philosophy was the educational philosophy of Cambridge in my day. It had also been the philosophy—unacknowledged, but adhered to tenaciously all the same—of the Royal Grammar School. The RGS had not been infected by the modern heresy, which tells us that knowledge must be adapted to the interests of the child. On the contrary; our “beaks” believed that the interests of the child should be adapted to knowledge. The purpose of the school was not to flatter the pupils but to rescue the curriculum, by pouring it into heads that might pass it on.
Of course, you can impart knowledge only to those who are willing to receive it. But that means making a radical distinction—the distinction which the egalitarians refuse to make—between those who can be taught and those who can’t. Even the most rebellious among my contemporaries at school and university shared the assumption on which our education was based, which is that there are real distinctions between knowledge and opinion, culture and philistinism, wit and stupidity, art and kitsch. We were consciously aiming to better ourselves, and even if some of us entertained eccentric views as to what self-improvement might consist in (I being particularly disgraceful in this respect), the real goal of education was constantly before our eyes and endorsed by all of us.
Dr Picken, through his life and his example, made me realize that scholarship is part of culture, that science too is continuous with it, and that there really is a purpose to education—namely, to be educated. The world of the educated person is different from that of the uneducated. And the presence of educated people among us, even when they hide in cupboards, behind an accumulation of fragile china, learning languages that nobody within earshot can speak, embarking on no adventure more exciting than to open a bottle of the Grands Echézaux 1955, changes the lives of the rest of us. They instil the world with judgement, they separate good from bad, knowledge from ignorance, refinement from vulgarity—in short they are the friends of distinction in all its forms, and the secret enemies of the egalitarian state. No wonder the state has tried to abolish them.
Entering the cathedral of culture
That, I think, is what I principally took away from my school and college: the thought of culture as the heart of education, and of both as founded in the pursuit of distinction. My school taught me that a discipline is available, which permits us to absorb the works of our culture, to discriminate between them, and to venture safely into hitherto uncharted areas. This discipline is criticism, and criticism is necessary if culture is to be protected from decay.
I never thereafter lost the sense that, if you want to know the meaning of life—of your own life as well as of the lives around you—you should explore your cultural inheritance with a critical eye, so as to repossess the meaning that has been distilled in it. Cambridge taught us that the temptation was not other cultures, whatever they might be, but corruption within the culture that is ours—in particular the ubiquitous diseases of sentimentality and kitsch. My aesthetic ideal remained the book that I had read at school, a later work of one of our masters there, Four Quartets, a work imbued through and through with a religious melancholy, and which also achieved a purity of utterance that set it apart from all the ordinary pleasures of high art.
This attitude belonged to the air we breathed at Cambridge. Nor did we think of it as a political attitude, a way of taking sides in the trivial conflicts (as we saw them) that occupied Members of Parliament. Although our suspicion of kitsch came to us from the arch-conservative T. S. Eliot, we found it endorsed by the quasi-socialist F. R. Leavis, by the liberal Thomas Mann, and, in due course, by the Marxists Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The effort to “purify the dialect of the tribe” was one that could, and did, unite people of all political persuasions, and the study of culture was something higher and more meaningful than the adoption of any political creed. Culture, we believed, is a form of knowledge, while politics is mere opinion.
Hence, during those Cambridge years I was, although socially estranged like virtually every grammar-school boy, spiritually at home. The spiritual home in which I existed was what I and my friends called culture, and culture rose around us and above us like a great cathedral, defining a place of judgement, discrimination, and allusion, a place where everything connected and where everything was imbued with a significance that made its study worthwhile. It still seems to me that the best form of education in the humanities would be one in which students enter that cathedral, and enter it as we did, with a critical as well as a wondering eye.
But it is no accident that the image of a cathedral presents itself to me. This culture into which we were inducted was not just a by-product of Christianity. Although it rejoiced in its universal vision, its central manifestations derived from the Christian faith. Even the pagan writings of D. H. Lawrence depend for their penetration on a language rooted in the Book of Common Prayer and in the imagery of the Psalms and the Gospels. Four Quartets owed its immense power over people of my generation to its ability to summon the ghost of a Christian belief that had all but died in us, but which was seeking to breathe again.
We were, I think, aware of this intimate dependence of our culture on the Christian faith, and our heroes—Eliot, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Matisse—were Christians. But we were also convinced that our culture could be studied, enjoyed and internalised by unbelievers—could become, for them as much as for the committed Christian, a source of meaning, truth, and value. Moreover it never seemed to us that our critical studies were merely subjective, that our tastes were arbitrary or ideologically motivated, still less that—in pursuing them—we were falling victim to some hidden political agenda. The methods of interpretation and evaluation that we applied, when assessing the sincerity, depth, finesse, or emotional truth of a particular poem or painting, seemed to us to deliver clear and absolute answers—or at any rate answers as clear and as nearly absolute as the subject allowed.
Indeed, we did not fully endorse the suggestion that there was some “method” that we applied in order to establish the superiority of Mozart over Vivaldi, of Milton over Carew, of Titian over Veronese or, for that matter, of Paul McCartney over Johnny Rotten. For that would have implied that someone else could choose some other “method” and arrive at some other result. It would have implied that the method was something added, chosen by us, in order to decipher a cultural artefact that was otherwise mysterious. The works of our culture were not mysterious to us, but merely deep, in the way that the face of a mother is deep to the eyes of her child.
Religion and knowledge
But this brings me, in conclusion, to the place of religion in the kind of culture, and the kind of education, that I have been invoking in this talk. If you look at the debates over education in America today, you will encounter three salient features. First, the defence, on all sides, of a kind of relativism, according to which the humanities must be approached from a “multicultural” perspective, since no culture has any claim to special authority and nobody is in a position to judge between them. Second, the suspicion of religion in general, and of the Christian religion in particular, as the voice of some kind of oppressive authority, which is attempting to reclaim us for a world view and a way of life that has lost all credibility. Third, the sense that those two things are connected: that, if there is to be some fixed point, some standard of objectivity, from which one culture can be chosen from the heap and endorsed as the one with real validity, that fixed point will be conceived in religious terms. Only if God exists and is knowable, can our culture be rescued as an authoritative source of knowledge. Without that belief there is no “transcendental signified,” to use the jargon—no perspective from outside, from which to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the fake, the good from the bad among cultural artefacts. To attempt, like Harold Bloom, to hold on to the Western Canon, without also holding on to the Western God, is—according to the followers of the late Richard Rorty—to be launched on an impossible task, like building a skyscraper out of water.
Now I do not doubt that the position of my contemporaries, who defended the high culture of Western civilization as a repository of real knowledge, is an unstable one. But in my book Culture Counts I have tried to defend it nevertheless, by arguing that culture is not just a matter of tastes and preferences, but—far more importantly—a source of knowledge. The knowledge in question is emotional knowledge: the kind of knowledge in which I was lamentably deficient when I burst, that day, into Dr Picken’s study, but which he had in sufficient measure that, for all his immense fragility, he could face down an oaf like me.
As for the role of religion, however, it seems to me that the matter is far more complex than the relativists would have us believe. It is nonsense to think, as Rorty did, that somehow all objectivity vanishes from the world with the loss of religious belief—that all truth is now up for negotiation. The gods of Greece vanished from the world two millennia ago: but their buildings, their sculptures, their poems and tragedies are still with us, speaking as freshly and persuasively today as they did when the gods were still believed in. Nor do we have to believe in their gods in order to make judgements of their culture, or to learn from it what it has to teach us (the immense amount that it has to teach us) about human possibilities.
It seems to me that Christian culture likewise communicates its message as vividly today, even to those who do not or cannot believe, with the very same force with which it impacted on us at Cambridge. I would add, however, that this force is not independent of the deep deposit of Christian belief, or of the vision of man and his destiny that is contained in the gospel stories. Western culture has been the expansive, knowledge-filled, and emancipating thing that I absorbed at school and college only because it has inherited the metaphysical vision of the Christian faith. The vision is of course familiar to you. But two important aspects of it deserve emphasis: the aspect of sacrifice, and that of irony.
Unlike the prophet Muhammad, Christ proved himself not through war and political authority, but through offering himself as a sacrifice. This mysterious fact has resounded down the centuries of our culture, and it is part of what gives that culture it authority: the great works of art and literature which embellish the Western canon are concerned with one thing above all, which is the sacrificial gift. They are lessons in the difficult art of giving yourself, and giving yourself completely. That is the message of Shakespeare in his tragedies, of George Eliot in Middlemarch, of the Magic Flute and the Beethoven Quartets. These works would be unintelligible without the Christian tradition of moral thinking, of which they are among the high points.
The virtue of irony
But our culture has inherited another of its virtues from the Christian vision, and that is irony. There is already a developing streak of irony in the Hebrew Bible, one that is amplified by the Talmud. But a new kind of irony dominates Christ’s judgements and parables, which look on the spectacle of human folly and wrily show us how to live with it. A telling example of this is Christ’s verdict in the case of the woman taken in adultery: “let he who is without fault cast the first stone”—in other words: “come off it; haven’t you wanted to do what she did, and already done it in your hearts?”. It has been suggested that this story is a later insertion—one of the many culled by the early Christians from the store of inherited wisdom attributed after his death to the Redeemer. Even if that is true, however, it merely confirms the view that the Christian religion has made irony central to its message. And it was a troubled, post-Enlightenment Christian, Søren Kierkegaard, who pointed to irony as the virtue that united Socrates and Christ.
If I were to venture a definition of this virtue, I would describe it thus: a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself. However convinced you are of the rightness of your actions and the truth of your views, look on them as the actions and the views of someone else, and rephrase them accordingly. So defined, irony is quite distinct from sarcasm: it is a mode of acceptance, rather than a mode of rejection. And it points both ways: through irony I learn to accept both the other on whom I turn my gaze, and also myself, the one who is gazing.
Irony, in that sense, has been integral to Western culture, and it is one cause of the ability of that culture to venture around the globe, accepting, endorsing, assimilating the achievements of other people, and inculcating in its adherents the toleration that has been so lamentably absent in our times from the culture of Islam.
In teaching Western culture to our students we do indeed teach, as the egalitarians fear, distinction. We teach to discriminate; we teach that not every thought, deed, or person is equally estimable; we teach the grandeur and superiority of a vision that has come to us from our Christian heritage; and we teach that this vision extols the highest to which human beings can aspire, which is sacrifice.
But we teach all that in a spirit of irony, deliberately inculcating the point of view of the other, and seeing ourselves always from outside. This is ours, we say, so let us treasure it. But in the same voice we say, this is theirs—it belongs to those others who we are. This stepping outside oneself is a great virtue, an instrument of peace and forgiveness, as Christ showed in his judgement of the woman taken in adultery. And it moderates and softens judgement, turning distinction from a threat to a virtue.
Looking back on it I see it as the thing that I was most fortunate to acquire, through my education and through the Anglican church. I see it also as the thing which, had he acquired it, would have led my father to endorse the many practices that he resented, with a cheerful and self-deprecating smile. In resenting resentment, and in rebelling against rebellion, I was being consciously ironical. But it is only of late that I have come to understand that I was also, in my own way, finding a path back to the Christian faith.
Roger Scruton, a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, is, among other things, a philosopher and composer. Among his books are Culture Counts (2007) and an autobiography, Gentle Regrets (2005). This article is adapted from a speech he gave to the Board of Trustees of The Trinity Forum in Washington, DC in September 2007.
3 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Arts and Culture, Faiths and Worldviews, Global Culture, Society, Mon 03 Dec 2007
