“Our Church” by Roger Scruton

From its beginnings, the Church of England was first something of a political creation rather than a religious one. It was carved out of the Roman Catholic Church, once Henry VIII decided to make the break when the pope refused to grant a divorce or annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Spain. Its early years were marked by the tumult of the Tudor era – Henry and the dissolution of the monasteries and Mary’s attempt to restore Catholicism (including burning Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the stake in Oxford). Life was comparatively quiet for almost a century, until Cromwell took power.

The church weathered all that and more. But it has always had an official position within England’s (and Britain’s) governance structure, influence that helped to shape the Americans to decide upon on established church once the new country was born.

As Roger Scruton points out in Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England, the church has also been something more, even for those who don’t attend. It is a cultural presence in thousands of English towns, villages, and cities. C of E churches are a familiar sight, anchoring a locality in history, tradition, and community. This doesn’t mean that the church is a thriving organization in 21^st century Britain; far from it. It represents tradition in a country that is knitted of traditions.

Our Church, first published in 2012, is not a history of the Anglican church. Instead, it is a personal reflection and meditation of how Scruton understands the church; why he, raised a Baptist, converted to Anglicanism when he was 15; what the church’s sacraments mean; and how being a member of the church unites him to believers like C.S. Lewis and R.S. Thomas, doubters like Philip Larkin and Benjamin Britten, and to atheists and agnostics like Robert Vaughn Williams and Paul Nash.

Scruton doesn’t tell a history but rather roams the history, art, and architecture of the church, writing with both affection and insight. He fully understands the problems the church but this is about what’s wrong and how to fix it. If anything, he has doubts about whether the serious problems the church faces can be fixed.

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is an English writer and philosopher who has published more than 30 books on philosophy, aesthetics, beauty, environmental conservatism, conservative politics, human nature, and other subjects. He’s also written several novels. He teaches part-time at Boston University and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, and founded Claridge Press.

From my own experience, I can say that during the many times we have visited England, we have always included churches large and small on our itineraries – Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral, the cathedrals at Canterbury and Salisbury, St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, Westminster Chapel, Westminster Cathedral, the chapels at Merton’s College and Christ College in Oxford, and the churches of St. Mary-le-Bow, All Hallows by the Tower, and many others. The churches speak to England’s history and tradition, and they speak to England’s soul.

Our Church is a meditative, often moving account of one of the country’s most important institutions.

Related:

My review of Roger Scruton’s Notes from Underground.

Top photograph: Interior of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, London.

“Notes from Underground” by Roger Scruton

Prague, 1985. A young man named Jan Reichl works as a street cleaner, because it is the only work he’s allowed to do. His father was arrested , tried and imprisoned for anti-state activities; as a result, Jan is not allowed to go to university. His mother spends most of her free time typing samizdat manuscripts – how works by dissident Czech authors and others were circulated during the communist area (samizdat was not limited to what was then Czechoslovakia; it existed is virtually all European countries in the soviet orbit and in Russia itself).

Jan, through his imagination, lives in what he calls “the underground,” a kind of alternative existence, even if only in his mind. When he rides the Metro, he imagines lives for the people he sees on the train. He fashions these imaginings into stories, one of which, entitled Rumors, has slipped into samizdat circulation under a pseudonym.

One day on the Metro, he sees a girl, a girl so vivid she breaks through his imaginings. He’s so overwhelmed that he leaves a typewritten copy of Rumors on the train. It ends up in her hands. And they meet, Jan and this young woman named Alzbeta Palkova, or simply Betka. And Jan soon finds himself increasingly enmeshed in another kind of underground, a real one, one comprised of dissidents and intellectuals.

Notes from Underground by Roger Scruton is the novel that tells the story of Jan and Betka, but it does so almost indirectly. It is a novel about a specific place and time – Prague in the waning does of communist domination before the end of the Berlin Wall. It is a novel about a love affair. It is a novel about a search for truth, both collective and individual. It is a novel about history, and how history is not something that happened years before but almost a living thing that continues to shape and direct the reality of today. It is a novel written as a memoir, with the writer describing events of 30 years previously.

Roger Scruton

Scruton, a native Briton and currently a Fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center in Washington, D.C.  has written both novels and short stories over his long career as a writer and philosopher, but he is better known for his non-fiction works, such as Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2012); Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2009); The Uses of Pessimism (2010), and Green Philosophy (2012; published in the United States as How to Think Seriously About the Planet). He is also a well-known lecturer (he recently spoke at the Ethic and Policy Center on “The Future of European Civilization: Lessons for America”).

He is also that relatively rare species of conservative philosopher, and a novel like Notes from Underground (with a title borrowed from Dostoevsky) might have fared poorly in less experienced hands, becoming too much of a political discussion. What is different about this work is its heart of the love story of Jan and Betka, a story of a love that the reader understands early is likely doomed but only gradually coming to understand why.

And it is in that unfolding of the “why” that the story of an era is told, and told well.

Photograph by the Prague Castle at sunset by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.