Roger Scruton’s The Face of God
The Face of God. Roger Scruton. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.
The Face of God, the most recent book by the prolific English philosopher Roger Scruton, is a measured, clear, and impressive philosophical critique of what Scruton describes as “the atheist culture that is growing around us” (p.1 ). He notes at the start of this brief (180-page) work that he will be diagnosing contemporary “atheist culture” as both an intellectual and a moral phenomenon, and as his argument proceeds, it becomes obvious that these two dimensions of the issue can only superficially be separated from each other. This is because, in Scruton’s analysis, contemporary intellectual ideas and systems that deny the apprehension of God, or the “real presences” of spiritual reality as manifest in human subjects, nature, or art, are always in part motivated by a “desire to escape from the eye of judgement” (2).
This is indeed a moral issue, and one that Scruton accurately places at the center of contemporary culture’s frequent and ubiquitous manifestations of an eagerness to disenchant, deface, and desecrate all that smacks of the sacramental and the transcendent. While atheist culture derives from many origins, in other words, Scruton wishes to emphasize that one of its central motives is flight from accountability to the truths and difficulties of being a subject involved with and encountering other subjects–flight, that is, from being an “I” who continually addresses, and is addressed by, a “You,” whether this “You” is God, another person, a landscape, a natural object, an artwork, or even a building.
The essence of all “I-You” relationships is accountability; and the desacralization and disenchantment of atheist culture, Scruton argues, is permeated by the desire to avoid genuine accountability–to self, to other people, to nature, to our humanly-built environments, and ultimately–in and through all these contexts–to God. As his use of the language of “I and You” indicates, Scruton’s book is deeply indebted to Martin Buber’s account of human existence in his masterwork I and Thou. Indeed, my first thought when finishing his book was that Scruton had perhaps re-read I and Thou, had rediscovered its profound and wide-ranging wisdom, and–disliking and rebelling against the obscurity of Buber’s highly difficult and “poetic” language in that work–had decided to render its wealth of insights into the language of “philosophy as we know it in the English speaking world” (78), that is, to render it accessible to a broader intellectual public.
Scruton actually uses the phrase quoted above with regard not to his frustration with the language of Buber but with that of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose notion and analysis of “the face” Scruton wholeheartedly affirms and applies to his puproses, and from which in fact he derives the title of his book. While I find a bit off-putting Scruton’s condescension toward the extraordinarily rich linguistic usages of Buber, Levinas, and others (Hegel, Heidegger), and while his “rendering” key insights of these thinkers into more accessible terms inevitably robs their analyses of some of their more delicate and important nuances, overall I find Scruton’s project with this book enormously valuable and successful.
His argument throughout is true to the essentials of Buber’s understanding that all encounters of an “I” with a “You” entail an awareness and embrace of mutual accountability; an experience of community as the basis of genuine human (and human-divine) living; and the fact of a “presence” that inexplicably transcends the realm of space-time causality and scientific explanation. And the final three of his six chapters–“The Face of the Person,” “The Face of the Earth,” and “The Face of God”–remain true to, and explicate important implications of, Levinas’s profound insight concerning how we encounter transcendence, as freedom, as spirit, and as God, through “the face.”
Scruton’s first three chapters–“The View from Nowhere,” “The View from Somewhere,” and “Where Am I?”–find him working up to his central topic by, first of all, explaining why the search for a full account of the human being and the world on the basis of “science” alone is a doomed and shallow enterprise. With clarity and precision, he explains how the “why?” of science, seeking causal explanations in the world of space-time, is quite distinct from the “why?” of reason as it asks such questions as why there is a world to begin with, or why the world is as it is. The “why?” of reason, he points out, is not at all meaningless; and by its very character, of course, it cannot be answered by answering the “whys?” of scientific explanation.
Scruton’s account of why science and “causal analysis” can’t arrive at, or prove, the “transcendent,” may seem elementary to a student of Voegelin, but it is presented carefully, clearly and succinctly, and thus has distinct value as a pedagogical tool. On this basis, Scruton goes on to explain why “our understanding of the human world cannot be captured by the science of objects” (68) [emphasis added]. This is because the human world, the world of human subjects, is constituted by freedom, choice, and accountability, and this freedom has “no basis” (44).
That is to say, freedom is freedom because it is not causally determined, and thus the encounter with freedom (which always occurs between subjects, or in experiences imbued with subjectivity) is always “beyond” the realm of objects and causal explanation. It is a gap in the world of “things.” It is, in fact, an “opening onto the transcendental” (178); and this opening always brings us into “the sphere of accountability.”
One of the central attractions of a reductionist science like evolutionary biology (Scruton’s principal example of scientific over-reaching) is that it approaches the idea of human being, human interaction, and historical development without having to address the radical uniqueness of the human, a uniqueness in which the ineffable and transcendently sacred, the obligations of mutual accountability between humans, and the accountability of humans toward the world and its Creator, are all made vivid to us in a humbling and inescapable way.
Scruton’s final three chapters are all in the end, as he observes, forms of investigation and elaboration on what is meant by “the face of God” (73)–a comment in harmony with Buber’s observation in I and Thou that all the “lines of encounter” between the I and a human (or natural or human-made) You “intersect in the eternal You.”
In his fourth chapter, “The Face of the Person,” Scruton presents a phenomenology of the human face (nicely enhanced by the reproduction of artworks by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Goya, and others) that is superbly clear and convincing, addressing among other topics the unique power and meaning of human eyes, lips, mouth, and the act of blushing.
His fifth chapter, “The Face of the Earth,” focuses both on natural and human-made landscapes as places where the sacred can manifest itself; and Scruton is insistent, here, both that there is a “religious meaning” at the heart of environmental protection movements, and that much of modern architecture and city-planning, beginning in extremis with the embrace of the International Style of Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier, has involved an intentional desecrating or desacralizing of buildings and public spaces by making them void of humanly relatable, spiritual “presence.”
Scruton’s final chapter, “The Face of God,” is more a summing up of the significance of the analyses of earlier chapters than anything else–he is not interested in doing “theology.” It does, however, unite the book’s prior themes in a brief phenomenology of “the gift”–the fact that our openness to the “real presence” of God as manifested in humans, nature, artworks, and buildings is predicated on our ability to recognize the world, ourselves, and all things as gifts from a divine and mysterious source. (This discussion rehearses in a few pages, intentionally or not, key elements of Lewis Hyde’s superb book, The Gift [1983]). And Scruton explains here, as earlier in the book, that the essence of gift-receiving and gift-giving is love–the love which does not count costs, and which is able to embrace suffering and sacrifice, confident in the ultimate meaningfulness of our human and natural world.
To summarize: what blocks our recognition of the world and ourselves as gifts of a transcendent God is, above all, our fear of being accountable: for ourselves, for others, for the earth, and to God. And this shows itself in all the desecrations and degradations that we visit upon each other and the environment, as well as in our relentless turning of persons, sex, natural objects, food, etc., into mere objects for consumption.
There is a great deal to admire in Scruton’s book and little to criticize. Its principal shortcoming is Scruton’s self-admitted “reliance on Kantian metaphysics” (162-63), a methodological limitation that keeps him from fully entering the explanatory metaphysical viewpoint on the human that is provided, for example, by Voegelin’s notion of “the metaxy.” When Scruton repeatedly describes the human situation, in its worldly involvements where nevertheless it finds itself continually encountering transcendence, as a “living on the edge of things,” one finds oneself wishing that he might have recognized the need for some linguistic inventiveness–like Buber’s, Levinas’s, or Voegelin’s–that would convey a post-Kantian phenomenology of consciousness.
Also, Scruton’s well-known conservatism with regard to art and architecture does not serve him well when he summarily describes all postmodernist buildings as “gadget architecture” (150)–although his very Kantian idea that an artwork might happily be recognized as an “intrinsic value” in the sense of Kant’s account of humans as “intrinsic values” and “ends in themselves” is a thoughtful and enticing notion.
This is a book I would unhesitatingly recommend to colleagues, friends, and students–and indeed I might use it someday in an undergraduate course–most of all for its lucid and persuasive reformulating and application of elementary insights of Buber and Levinas into what it truly means to be a human subject.