Repentance & Scruton the Reader & Philosopher
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Mary Magdalene, the Myrrh-bearer & Equal to the Apostles
Anno Domini 2020, July 22
1. Essays et al: “Sir Roger Scruton & Philosophy as Vigilant Presence in Culture” by Erin Doom
I’m currently on a Scruton kick since the inaugural issue of The Christian News-Letter
(CNL) is offered in his memory (to be released to Eighth Day Members
this weekend). It’s precisely the sort of times in which we are currently living that his strong public voice is so deeply missed. But he did leave us a huge body of work that speaks powerfully to our chaotic age. Before reading him on his discovery of books below, and before the release of CNL, I thought I would reach into the archives for an issue of the Director’s Desk which I wrote for members back in November about my trip last summer to Scruton's summer school.
This piece primarily introduces Scruton as a true philosopher, i.e., as one who loves wisdom and as one who was always committed to applying philosophy to culture. Here’s how he explains philosophy:
“Philosophy” means the love of wisdom. The philosophy taught in British and American universities pays great attention to the analysis of concepts and the structure of logical argument, but seldom issues in anything that looks like wisdom. There are many reasons for this. During the hundred or so years of its existence analytical philosophy has focused on logic, metaphysics and epistemology, with occasional forays into ethics and politics, and has tended to neglect the broader cultural landscape. Topics relevant to the meaning of life—religion, art, music—are often treated dismissively, and the fact that philosophy is literature, to be judged and appreciated as much for its beauty as its truth, has been largely ignored.
As I remarked then,
Scruton’s interest in philosophy then, is motivated by a love for wisdom that applies to all areas of life, including friendship and wine. And for Scruton, philosophy needs to once again become a “vigilant presence in culture”; it should help us think “clearly about what matters” so that we can more effectively address “the wider concerns of civilization.”
But Scruton doesn’t just say that he believes philosophy should help us answer the question, “How should I live?” He doesn’t merely argue that it should help us make sense of the modern condition. Philosophy is no abstract intellectual exercise for Scruton. Instead, it’s something to put into action, which is exactly what Scruton does. He practices what he preaches. And he’s been doing it for a long time.
The rest of the essay goes on to explain one particular way he put philosophy into practice through his opposition to communism in the 1980s, not unrelated to the forthcoming CNL theme of “oikophilia” (a term coined by Scruton that simply means “love of home”).
2. Books & Culture: “How I Discovered Books” by Roger Scruton
Scruton’s memoir, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, is one of several of Scruton’s books that I think are great introductory gateways into his work. The opening chapter provides a moving account of his discovery of the book, which he describes “as a hidden door in the scheme of things that opens into another world.” He continues:
My first inkling of this experience came from Bunyan. The year was 1957. I was 13, a day boy at our next-door grammar school, where I learned to distinguish books into two kinds: on the syllabus; and off it. Pilgrim’s Progress must surely have been off the syllabus; nothing else can account for the astonishment with which I turned its pages. I was convalescing from flu, sitting in the garden on a fine spring day. A few yards to my left was our house—a plain whitewashed Edwardian box, part of a ribbon development that stretched along the main road from High Wycombe halfway to Amersham. To the right stood the neo-Georgian Grammar School with its frontage of lawn. Opposite was the ugly new housing estate that spoiled our view. I sat in a nondescript corner of post-war England; nothing could conceivably happen in such surroundings, except the things that happen anywhere: a bus passing, a dog barking, football on the wireless, shepherd’s pie for tea.
And then suddenly I was in a visionary landscape, where even the most ordinary things come dressed in astonishment. In Bunyan’s world words are not barriers or defenses, as they are in suburban England, but messages sent to the heart. They jump into you from the page, as though in answer to a summons. This, surely, is the sign of a great writer, that he speaks to you in your voice, by making his voice your own.
I did not put the book down until I had finished it. And for months afterwards I strode through our suburb side by side with Christian, my inner eye fixed on the Celestial City.
You can read most of that introductory chapter here. Read it and then purchase the book from Eighth Day Books. You will have no regrets!
3. Bible & Fathers: "My Repentance Has Not Even Made a Good Beginning as Yet" by St Ephraim the Syrian
This Patristic Word comes from my all-time favorite “devotional” book (I think I can call it that!), a collection of passages by St Ephraim the Syrian organized into a psalter format by St Theophan the Recluse. Here’s a sample from today’s penitential Patristic Word:
The fact that I am bound by my own desires should provoke weeping and lamentation, shame and disgrace. And yet more terrible is the fact that I bind myself with the shackles that the enemy places upon me, and I slay myself with the passions that give him pleasure. Although I know how dreadful these shackles are, I hide them behind a noble appearance from all who might see. I appear to be robed in the beautiful clothes of reverence, but my soul is entangled with shameful thoughts. Before all who might see, I am reverent, but inside I am filled with all manner of indecency. My conscience accuses me of all this, and I act as if I wish to be freed of my shackles. Every day I worry and sigh over this, yet I ever remain bound by the same snares. How pitiful I am; and how pitiful is my daily repentance, for it has no firm foundation.
Read the whole passage here. And once again, get a copy of The Spiritual Psalter
from Eighth Day Books.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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