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Piety, Love, and the Permanent Things

In the closing sentence of his article for the 2019 Christmas issue of The Spectator, Sir Roger Scruton wrote, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” He wrote these words as a dying man who believed he was on the road to recovery from cancer. Alas, it was not to be. As Daniel J. Mahoney writes, in his lead essay, “Sir Roger Scruton died just shy of his 76th birthday on January 12, 2020, after a short but valiant struggle with cancer.” Reading this last sentence of Sir Roger’s, two things leapt into my mind. One was an essay by G. K. Chesterton, and the second was a book titled The Politics of Gratitude by Mark T. Mitchell. I thought of Chesterton’s observation that “the way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost,” and Mitchell’s argument that we must root politics and culture in gratitude. I remember talking to Roger about Mitchell’s book in 2017, five years after it was published—I see Scruton’s conservativism as an embodiment of that rootedness.

Mahoney writes that as the “fifth anniversary of his death approaches, it is fitting to pay renewed attention to Scruton’s elevated (and elevating) conservatism.” Russell Kirk, in a 1988 letter to Charles Heatherly, wrote of Scruton, “I find him the brightest of all English conservatives.” Indeed, Roger was the brightest of all English conservatives, and five years after his death, English conservatism still has an enormous Scruton-shaped hole at its intellectual heart. His philosophy and his conservatism did elevate and was elevating because he articulated his themes, be it the law, culture, or politics with such beautiful prose, and his philosophy articulated truths about the human person and about the world we find ourselves in. Yet, it goes beyond this. Ferenc Hörcher, in his book called Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, notes that for Scruton “philosophy is not simply about epistemic claims” about “certain truths concerning the natural world and the human realm.” Scruton’s philosophy “is also about character formation, and the efforts to live a meaningful and whole life.” James Bryson, editor of The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton, suggests that Scruton’s work “combines a commitment to rigorous philosophical argument and the piety of a philosophical way of life.”

The loss of Scruton the person is permanent, but we can recapture his thinking, because his work is an enduring source of wisdom.

Piety, gratitude, and love are all important aspects of Scruton’s thought. Roger once said to me that it was because of John Casey, a literary historian at the University of Cambridge and a mentor to Roger, that he had taken unchosen and unsought obligations—piety—seriously in both morality and political philosophy. Casey persuaded Scruton of the importance of unchosen obligations within a moral and full life. Moreover, Casey impressed upon Scruton the fundamentality of piety to conservative thought. Other conservative thinkers have thought so too. For instance, Joseph de Maistre argued that we ought to have piety towards established things, and place divinely ordained traditions above the urges of self-interest. Indeed, Richard M. Weaver called piety a “crowning concept,” and in The Southern Tradition he wrote that “piety” is an important feature “of the conservative temper.” Weaver defined piety as “a discipline of the will through respect” and he added that “it admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.” John R. E. Bliese argued that piety should be “the overarching attitude which should govern our attitudes toward everything else in the world.” Scruton’s work shows the importance of piety for both a moral and conservative life and its centrality to a conservative politics. 

As a mentor to me, Roger was particularly interested in assisting me on this topic. Scruton believed that the “main task of political conservatism” is “to put obligations of piety back where they belong, at the centre of the picture.” Indeed, in On Human Nature, Scruton gets to the nub of the matter: “The obligations of piety, unlike obligations of contract, do not arise from the consent to be bound.” Scruton further remarks that these obligations of piety “arise from the ontological predicament of the individual.” In The Face of God, he argues that “piety connects us to the sacred and the sacramental.” He then expanded upon this by observing that the “pious sentiments gather round moments of sacrifice, in which people devote themselves, undertaking obligations that are too vast or indeterminate to be contained within a contract.” What are these “moments” according to Scruton? They are moments “connected with birth, initiation, sexual union and death” amongst other things. Or, to use a phrase deployed by T. S. Eliot and popularised by Russell Kirk, they are the “Permanent Things.” 

As Scruton put it, the Permanent Things are “features of the human condition that cannot be changed.” They are also “the accumulated wisdom which nevertheless enables us to deal with them.” In The Philosopher on Dover Beach, Scruton penned:

The naturalistic explanations which threaten our sense of the sacred, threaten also the impulse of piety upon which community and morality are founded. This is what Matthew Arnold foresaw on the “darkling plain”: the loss of piety, the loss of respect for what is holy and untouchable, and in place of them a presumptuous ignorance, fortified by science. 

Another core task for conservatives, according to Scruton, is to connect the human person back to the Permanent Things. How should we do this? We need to do this “in a way that overcomes our fear of them” and in a way “which brings us both gentleness and peace.” Scruton believed that love is one of those Permanent Things. Scruton conceptualised love as a union that creates a first-person plural; that is, a “we.” Scruton points out that people make sacrifices for the things that they love, and ask, “When do these sacrifices benefit the unborn?” His answer was, “When they are made for the dead.” In Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, he argued that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome.” It is interesting here to look at Scruton’s Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as he writes:

Like Burke, therefore, I made the passage from aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of intellectual incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost experience of home. And I suppose that, underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recaptured—not necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression. That belief is the romantic core of conservatism, as you find it—very differently expressed—in Burke and Hegel, in Coleridge, Ruskin, Dostoevsky and T. S. Eliot.

In his work, Scruton expressed this “romantic core of conservatism” and the “search of a lost experience of home” in the three most powerful words in the English language: love—of—home. Scruton called it “oikophilia.” He explained, “Oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours.” Scruton believed “that human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by the attitude that I call oikophilia: the love of the oikos.” According to Scruton, in Where We Are: State of Britain Now, “It is the stage-set for the first-person plural of politics, the locus, both real and imagined, where it all ‘takes place.’” Therefore, Scruton’s conceptualisation of oikophilia goes beyond “the home” and it also includes “the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with its personality.” A Scrutonian conservatism understands the importance of the architecture, music, and storytelling that provides our countries and homes with its personality. Adapting Edmund Burke’s phrase, “to make us love our country” we must conserve its personality.

It has been five years since Roger slipped from our grasp. Scruton’s body of work will still inspire conservatives who wish to live meaningful and purposeful lives, lives that are sustained by strong families and that are situated within an ethical apprehension of ordered liberty. The loss of Scruton the person is permanent, but we can recapture his thinking, because his work is an enduring source of wisdom. From his first book on Art and Imagination (1974) to his last on Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption (2020), Roger shows us that we have much for which to be grateful.