Series:
Essay #15:
Synopsis:
It and Thou
Faith 3- Embodied
With an abundance of gratitude, I open to God and thank Him for His sacred gifts freely given, like the gift of marriage
Here’s a summary of this essay and the last two. Faith is real when it’s in a real person whom I love and whom I may not abandon. If I jump the abyss in a leap of faith, it’s because I jump to an embodied person on the other side. Like the dream, I fall then fly! Some of us find our faith in marriage and children; others look to Christ. But the latter isn’t so easy for those of us who grew up in secularism and don’t feel at home on the religious side. Coming to faith is a process, which in my case began after decades of family life, a life so wonderful that I needed someone to thank for all these gifts freely given to me. I think this happened to that great philosopher, Roger Scruton.
Roger Scruton’s life-project was to recover the sacred from secular desolation. Mr. Scruton stood in the doorway to God with one foot on either side. By nature, he held a moral key that unlocked a door to right and wrong and to the sacred, but he grew up secular in a secular world. He was that would-be believer living in an atheist milieu, for whom the words, “I believe in Christ” kept getting caught in the throat. So he believed in women.
Roger Scruton’s first wife was a French Roman Catholic, and after living together awhile, they married in a Catholic church. In preparation for marriage, Scruton, a committed believer in belief, attended religious lessons. Scruton assented to all
“the tenets of the Catholic faith… not one of them created the slightest intellectual difficulty, save the major premise of God's existence. But this too could be held in place, I surmised, by the structure that had been built upon it, and whose angles and junctures I knew from Saint Thomas Aquinas. … The structure stands unshakably, even though built upon nothing. Seen in this way, religion is a work of art, and its values are aesthetic values: beauty, wholeness, symmetry, harmony. Clearly, my attitude to the Church whose rituals I was prepared to borrow was not ultimately the attitude of a believer.” From the essay, Becoming a Family.
Out into the cool of the evening, strolls the Pretender. The priest said marriage is an unbreakable tie and Scruton moved his mouth in assent. They divorced, and for the next 20 years, a lonely Scruton kept on talking to his ex-wife in his inner voice. Scruton’s crime was pretending to believe. At the end of his essay, Stealing from Churches, Scruton said, “The apostolic church is a church of the heart. When you steal from it you steal the heart. Hence the theft is easy; and amends are long and hard.” Betrayers of faith get the lowest ring in Dante’s hell.
Later, Scruton met Basia, who was a Catholic dissident in Communist Poland. Basia lived in faith, almost like a saint, but they shared an intense sexual attraction… that never consummated. Invitation given not accepted, because for Scruton, it would’ve been stealing. Sex is sacred, not for the act itself, but for the two hearts involved: “sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory between…” (Stealing from Churches).
Basia wanted to save Scruton -- he was her Christian mission -- and maybe the load was too much for Scruton to bear. He imagined secular, dismissive ways of seeing Basia, for example, she practiced a Freudian aggression or a cunning calculation. As always, though, our dismissive reductions mostly reflect ourselves, the voice of a tiny ego protecting a tiny self. If Basia really wanted Scruton, she could’ve reached out and taken him as women have been doing since the beginning of time. Yes, Basia wanted Scruton, but she wanted Christ more. I can almost feel Scruton’s relief that Basia didn’t take him.
Scruton didn’t want a savior; he wanted a wife. Scruton wanted the sacred marital vow that each spouse gives to the other, to love and cherish till death do us part. To take a sacred vow is to say: this is bigger than me, it binds me, and I want to be bound by it. I don’t want to just run around doing what I want anymore. In the essay, Becoming a Family, Scruton speaks of “the real liberation that comes through accepting a moral law. In my first marriage, I had lost my freedom by wanting to hold on to it. In my second, I regained it at the moment when I freely gave it away.”
Scruton had faith in his second wife, Sophie. Sophie herself was the child of divorced parents, and by that loss she understood what the vows mean. Marriage is most sacred in the eyes of the children who see it broken. Scruton and Sophie made a home and family together until Scruton’s death in 2020.
Scruton thanked Sophie for her sacred gifts freely given, and he thanked God for His sacred gift of Sophie freely given. In marriage, I accept that my wife knows me entirely, therefore, I become entirely me and not a pretender. It’s a wonder how wonderful it is. I want to thank someone, and who else but God? I say to my wife (and to my children and friends), “I’m glad you’re here.” And God says to us, “I’m glad you’re here.” An abundance of gratitude spills over to God. Glory be to God for dappled things, and in Scruton’s case, also for Bach’s Mass in B Minor which was his favorite, as I recall.
Basia said that “truth must be incarnate in a person, and that person is Christ, who calls us to obedience through love.” Roger Scruton found truth incarnate in his wife, and then he returned to church and gave thanks, no longer as thief or pretender. This is man curved outward.
Dappled Things
It’s the end of this series, It and Thou, and here’s my final thought. I guess I don’t really know if there’s a God or if He cares about me personally, or if my wife really loves me, but this much I do know: I must have faith in them for it to come true. When I see Thou and call to Thou, Thou calls back.
Essays in this Series, It and Thou: