This is going to be an odd and rather speculative piece. It will represent no party that I am aware of in Holyrood, and no political force that has any likelihood of power in Scotland within the foreseeable future. It does not even reflect my own views where, politically, I would only regard myself as bound by the principles of Catholic morality and social teaching, with very little sense of how that might be put into effect beyond Dante’s culminating observation in Paradiso:

But my desire and will were moved already,

like a wheel revolving uniformly, by

the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

That said, it represents something that might emerge from a perspective on politics whipped up from Alexander Dugin, Alain de Benoist and Steve Bannon. Behind that lies an influence they all explicitly share: that of René Guénon and Traditionalism. None of these are influences much discussed publicly even in right-wing circles within the UK where the main explicit preoccupations are with immigration and the economy. But even assuming the leaders of such UK movements don’t secretly share these intellectual preoccupations, others in the world do, which at least raises the question as to why we don’t. Beyond that, it is a viewpoint that has sufficient echoes in Catholic teaching that it might provoke a fruitful conversation.

So I’m going to cut the Gordian Knot of definitions here and create an imaginary Scottish Radical Right. My immediate sources for this invention are Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina’s A Theory of Europe, Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier’s Manifesto for a European Renaissance and Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Popular Right. But I’m happy to admit that this is all going to be a bit imaginative and even playful.

All that said, what’s going to be in our manifesto? Here’s a few suggestions.

Metapolitics:

UK politics and Scottish politics in particular are terribly shortsighted. In part, this is due to democracy: most people are immersed in the material world, and any attempt to appeal to them will inevitably appeal to their material desires. But politics is not just about the day to day or even the five-year election cycle. It also consists in addressing longer term issues about the workings of society of the sort discussed by classical political philosophers such as Plato. In current Scottish society, these issues are meaningless to the electorate and ignored by a governing class which is itself increasingly unable to appreciate anything beyond the world of business and economics. To the extent that anything like such a metapolitical concern does exist in Scotland, it is dominated by progressive thinkers rather than those animated by a respect for Tradition.

Of all our manifesto, this is probably the most important aspect. The absence of an intellectual right wing cultural sphere in Scotland is damaging, both to the development of a practical Radical Right politics in the future, but also to the wider cultural and political space in the country: unless a dominant progressivism is constantly challenged, it will become complacent and fantastical.

The Sacred and Kingship:

No other Scottish manifesto is going to contain these elements, certainly viewed as positives. We, on the other hand, as inheritors of Tradition, think that the Sacred should be at the heart of our society. Much of the decline of Scotland results from an abandonment of the Sacred and a concentration on the material. Given the practicalities of any foreseeable future in a formerly Protestant, largely secularised Scotland, we look for a coalition of various religious communities and the spiritual but not religious, gathered under the umbrella of the Good, Beautiful and True.

The King is the most potent political symbol of the centrality of the Sacred in national life. We can grumble about the actual members of the Royal Family, their constitutional Protestantism, the lack of a clearly Scottish King, but these are quibbles given the republican alternative. Far too many countries have thrown away their inheritance in this area. We should not follow them.

Scotland, nation and geopolitics:

The past certainties of nations and political alliances are dissolving. Whatever the future of Scotland as an independent state (and we welcome all cultural nationalists whether supporters of independence or of the Union) the Scottish Parliament in the current devolution settlement lacks responsibility for foreign affairs and defence. But that doesn’t mean that Scots thinking about metapolitics and national identity can afford to ignore these existential issues. Much of the Continental New Right is hostile to America and, more broadly, to the Anglo-Saxon, pinning the responsibility for the problems of globalisation and deracination on its mercantile culture. Given Trump’s hostile attitude towards Europe, a hostility that is likely to be increasingly reciprocated, Europe and the Anglo-Saxons are drifting apart.

Where does all this leave Scotland? An independent Scotland might sit more happily with the Continent. But a Scotland which, for the foreseeable future, is part of Britain, is liable to find it difficult to maintain such links and yet we will be uneasy allies for an Anglo-Saxon, but isolationist America.

This is an area where it is difficult to see a way out. Certainly, for the immediate future, it seems essential to ensure that Scotland -and that on any reasonable scenario involves the UK- is better prepared for military defence. But beyond that, Britain is in danger of finding itself suspended between great power blocs such as Continental Europe and the USA, with Scotland in the position of being powerless to negotiate its own place both within the UK and the wider world.

Immigration and popular unrest:

If radical right-wing politics are starting to achieve a greater prominence within the UK, it is in large part due to immigration. Quite apart from the genuine social harms caused by large scale immigration, it is also a convenient means to generate popular unrest for political purposes. Racism as fear and hatred of the other is a powerful psychological force, and the pretence that it is easily removed or is confined only to a few pathological characters is an easy lie.

Discussion of immigration control goes on, and no party seems able to handle the practicalities satisfactorily. But two elements of traditional thought seem underplayed. First, there should be a genuine horror at civil unrest. Public demonstrations and riots embody disorder in the State and reflect disorder in the psychology of those engaged in that public disorder. Disagreements about politics need individuals to exercise iron self-control, and if they cannot control themselves, the State must control them. Second, from a Christian perspective, all of us bear the image of God, and racism’s denial of that reality is blasphemous. This means that there are moral limits on what decisions are available and how they can be implemented. Tradition favours self-control and wisdom, modernity favours self-expression and lack of emotional restraint.

Solidarity:

If immigration is one of the main drivers of right-wing politics, the other is a sense that we are governed by globalised elites whose loyalty is to themselves. In traditional Western societies, elites felt themselves answerable to God and responsible for those in their charge. In the absence of this sacred hierarchy, self interest becomes culturally unchallenged, and other people merely things to be used. It is entirely possible that Scotland faces a grim economic and political future: civilisations flourish and wane, and there is no reason to suppose that we are immune to this pattern. But all of us have value and a place in society. The modern demand for equality is a pale shadow of the truth of solidarity: each of us, in different ways and according to our different abilities, has a role to play and no one should be abandoned.

Conclusion

Well, there’s some of the headings. More to be said and particularly short on practical solutions of course, but essentially that’s the point. Unless Scotland can wean itself off the drug of believing only a certain sort of progressive analysis of society has value, and unless we can start thinking about the permanent things of living in a community with deep traditions, we will drift and ultimately capsize. As MacDiarmid put it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle:

I wad ha’e Scotland to my eye

Until I saw a timeless flame

Tak’ Auchtermuchty for a name,

And kent that Ecclefechan stood

As pairt o’ an eternal mood.

By Dr Stephen Watt

Stephen is a permanent writer and co-member of the editorial team. He teaches Philosophy at Edinburgh University and the Open University and is also involved in the Albertus Institute in Edinburgh.

This book provides a helpful and highly readable road map to some key areas where, in particular, modern science may provide evidence for the existence of God. Due to the complex nature of many of the fields explored, it can’t do more than point to possibilities which, at best, better support the existence of God than a purely materialist perspective. It’s unlikely to convince hardline atheists but it does offer the prospect of starting interesting conversations with those who are more open-minded. Overall, it suggests at least the reasonableness of a theistic approach given current knowledge.

The work is essentially divided into two parts. The first, longer part deals with evidence within science; and the second (which I thought less satisfactory) deals with evidence from outside science, touching on traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, as well as, amongst other things, the reliability of the Bible, the apparent chosenness of the Jewish people and the miracle of Fátima. Its main strength is not in the detailed treatment of the various issues, but as an overview. The proper response to such a work is therefore less a triumphant waving of a completed investigation in the way that some atheists treated Dawkins’ The God Delusion as the final word on religion, but rather as an introduction to some of the questions and an invitation to consider them further. The failure to approach it in this way can have at least two unfortunate consequences. For those inclined to atheism, the inadequate detail of some of the arguments gives them an excuse to reject the book out of hand. But for those inclined or fully committed to a theistic viewpoint, there is also the danger of a sort of cultish quickness which leaps from the current acceptance of, say, the Big Bang as the absolute beginning of space and time to an assertion that science has demonstrated the existence of God. Catholicism ought not to be too enamoured of God as logos or reason to allow that sort of cheap discussion. We may know that our Redeemer liveth, but we ought to be honest, particularly with ourselves, about difficulties in reconciling that with our other reasonable but non-religious beliefs. The authors are sometimes explicit about the limitations of their work, but the general breeziness of the tone does rather obscure those acknowledgments.

Much of the publicity surrounding the work focuses on its drawing on new findings of modern science which are claimed to support the existence of God: ‘Science is now God’s ally’ as the cover blurb puts it. As the book goes on to argue:

Today, three implications of the claim that God does not exist are challenged by science: the idea that the universe had no beginning, that the fine tuning of the universe is nothing more than chance, and that the emergence of life from inert matter is a natural, comprehensible, and replicable phenomenon. But science has contested all three of these ideas. Therefore the thesis they flow from no longer seems tenable.

Now there is probably an appropriateness if, given a theistic view of the world, we should then discover that science gives evidence for at least three direct interventions in the universe: at its beginning with a Big Bang; in ensuring that the Big Bang occurs in such a way that, some ten billion years afterwards, life could develop; and, finally, in the actual development of life from non-living materials. Such obvious interventions would fit in nicely with our theism. But none of them appear absolutely essential to theistic belief in general or even specifically to Catholicism. The scientific discoveries that the universe did not come into existence in 4004 BC, and that the genus Homo to which modern human beings belong evolved around 2.8–2.5 million years ago in Africa have not fundamentally undermined Catholicism, even if it might have been neater had a more literal Biblical narrative been demonstrated. The essential theological point is that human beings and indeed the universe as a whole are completely dependent on God for their existence; and the metaphysical proofs of the existence of God most famously summarised in Aquinas’ Five Ways express aspects of that necessary connection, even if the precise ways in which that fundamental dependence is manifested require patient scientific investigation.

In passing, note the precise wording of that quote: ‘But science has contested all three of these ideas. Therefore the thesis they flow from no longer seems tenable.’ It is a logical error to assert that the conclusion that God does not exist, even if it did depend on these three ideas, would be overturned simply by their being contested: the ideas would have to be disproved, for the thesis that God does not exist to be no longer ‘tenable’. This kind of excitable inexactness is not unique in the book and is not helpful to its overall case.

Lying behind a lot of discussion between science and religion is what I’m tempted to call an existential choice between two attitudes. I take a truly Catholic approach to be one which welcomes any scientific investigation of how God created the world: knowledge is based in wonder, and the details of, say, human evolution or the development of the universe are indeed fascinating and wonderful. Part of that wonder rests on the exploratory and tentative nature of rational exploration: scientific conjectures come and go under the tests of refutation and confirmation and that is part of the excitement of discovery. There is good historical reason to believe that it was only Christianity which allowed the full development of modern natural science: for example, only if you believe that the universe is created by a rational mind does it become credible that human rationality can successfully explore it. But that exploration is only possible if one doesn’t reach too quickly for the simple explanation that God did it. You cannot explore and wonder at the contents of God’s mind if you are satisfied simply to credit God’s action without any further attempted exploration as to how he did it. So the Catholic attitude of mind is: ‘I know God created everything and that’s wonderful! Let’s patiently explore this wonder in the spirit of gratitude and respect!’

That’s pretty much how science was conducted until recently. But an alternative approach, more characteristic of modern materialism is along the lines of: ‘I don’t think God exists. Let’s see how far I can get in exploring the world without mentioning him.’ Both approaches will, at some points, have to say: ‘I don’t know why this happened. I will keep trying to come up with a scientific solution but it’s possible (due to weakness of human wit) that I may not be able to do so.’ That, I’m sure, is precisely what most atheistically inclined readers of this book will quickly conclude and find no reason in this failure to believe in God. Theists may say the same thing. But for the sort of Catholic reasons that are not really covered in this work (e.g. confidence in the essential rationality of creation; a trust in the sacredness of the human mind and reason; a view of human nature which prioritises the sort of epistemic virtues such as humility and trustworthiness which allow co-operative scientific endeavour) they will confidently push on to see what else may emerge in the task of rejoicing in the wonder of creation. At the very least, Catholicism might be thought to provide a stronger motivation for this sort of fundamental theoretical research than atheistic materialism.

Catholicism, unlike many other forms of theism, tries to do justice to both reason and revelation by patient exploration of both. It has survived many paradigm shifts in what is taken to be scientific truth and it will doubtless survive many more. As a thought experiment, it’s worth asking yourself how much of the science in this book will be likely to survive, say, one thousand years into the future. It is much more plausible I suggest that Catholicism will still be around and recognisable than that the science put forward here as supportive of it will be fundamentally unchanged. So, while we should welcome this work as suggestive of the current relationship between science and theism, particularly Catholicism, we should also be careful not to place undue reliance on a popular account of what inevitably will look very different in that future.

By Stephen Watt

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In the Coracle this week: Stephen Watt on Sebastian Morello’s book which has stirred a lot of online debate. The upcoming Saints for this month include one of the most important in the northern British Isles - St Ninian. Not to mention, and arguably as important as Ninian - St Adomnan. We also have St Mirrin of Paisley. Please click here to find out more.

Book Review: Re-enchanting the world? Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality. (Os Justi Press, 2024, pp.204. Paperback £14.95. ISBN‏: ‎ 978-1965303047.)

Sebastian Morello’s book on re-enchanting the world has provoked a flurry of online comment and reviews, mainly centring on whether Morello is advocating the reception of occult practices into Catholicism. While I think the critical comment in its extreme forms is unfair, there are areas in his writing that need to be developed more carefully. Nonetheless, overall, it’s a book worth engaging with and which addresses the subject of the disenchanted modern universe that is at the heart of much modern debate about Catholicism and religion more generally. [1]

Morello has recently been appointed as Wolfgang Smith Chair in Philosophy at St Mary's University, London and, as well as by his Catholicism, has clearly been heavily influenced by Roger Scruton. The central aim of his book is to recommend

…a set of practices and disciplines of mind, will, and imagination that habituate the practitioner to a vision of the world that acknowledges it as God’s icon. [2]

Although there might be something to be said even against this starting point, I’ll accept it as a reasonable aim. Where Morello starts to become more controversial is in his use of the term ‘Hermeticism’ for these practices. Hermeticism in its ancient sense is a spiritual movement combining Egyptian and Greek elements and involving a mix of Platonic philosophy, alchemy and magic. It can be seen as part of the general intellectual background in the Mediterranean world of roughly of the period between 200 BC and 300 AD. This material has been used in subsequent centuries in the West and as part of the nineteenth century occult revival, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which has been a major influence on modern Anglophone occultism and ritual magic.

Whatever Morello’s specific account of the failings of modernity, his work falls into a recognisable and common pattern in contemporary religious discussion of claiming that there is something uniquely wrong with modernity and that we need to repair that fault and recover an older way of looking at things. But as he notes himself, the ‘Hermetic’ practices he recommends to cure modernity might in principle range from innocuous efforts of concentration to Aleister Crowley’s sex magic, so it should be particularly important to be clear here what is meant. And I don’t think that clarity is achieved, particularly in what is ruled out. In fairness to Morello, it’s worth stressing that the book is primarily a collection of essays previously published as separate pieces in the online magazine The European Conservative and it consequently reads as slightly ad hoc and bitty. So, it’s probably unfair to expect a coherent and systematic account of these practices here. But some of the ones that he mentions include meditating on an image of Hildegard von Bingen’s red angel called ‘The Theophany of Divine Love’ [3]; ‘rock climbing, practising martial arts, dancing, training with a steel mace’ [4]; and ‘booze, hunting and education (treasured in that order)’ [5]. There is nothing particularly objectionable here in a commonsense sort of way and the resolute heartiness of most of these practices should allay some suspicions. That said, it is understandable that some have read into his book claims that go dangerously near dabbling in the occult or even crossing that boundary. Using terms such as ‘Hermeticism’ and ‘magic’ favourably throughout the work; bringing in authors such as Guénon and Valentin Tomberg both of whom did originally dabble in occult circles and arguably remain tainted by them -all this feels like a deliberate edginess.

A particular problem here is that, since both Guénon and Hermeticism explicitly emphasise the importance of esoteric, secret teachings given only to the few, it is not surprising that, in the absence of complete clarity about what is intended, suspicions might arise that undisclosed teachings lie behind what Morello explicitly states. Paradoxically, given this suspicion of hidden teachings and practices, one of the main problems with Morello’s approach -and indeed with much Catholic writing in modernity- is that it overlooks the need to address different audiences differently. Morello as a Catholic academic might have a right, even a duty, to explore intellectual and spiritual areas that may be dangerous. And the broad suggestion that Hermeticism and magic might have something to contribute to Christian thought is no more surprising in principle than the suggestion that an academic study of other non-Christian religions or philosophies might have a positive contribution to make. But that is very different from suggesting that all ordinary Catholics, particularly those who may have fled contact with modern occultism, might benefit from delving themselves into those areas. A traditional, enchanted Catholic view of the universe would amongst other things certainly emphasise the real and dangerous existence of demons: getting things wrong with the occult is not just a cognitive failure, but involves the very real possibility of letting the wrong entities in. One of the services that ordinary Catholics might look to their academics to provide is that of a careful sifting in any field of study of what is and isn’t valuable to non-academics. There is too little of that here.

Finally, there is perhaps a hint here of a diagnosis of a failing in modern Catholicism that might explain some of Morello’s more worrying tendencies. He is often quite rude in his criticism of the modern institutional Church. He suggests that there is a crisis of authority in the Church which is the result of the use of naked power to exact immediate obedience rather than a genuine spiritual and reasonable authority: as he puts it, a ‘servile’ rather than a ‘filial’ obedience [6]. Now there may be something in this. Authority structures in modernity sometimes depend on an unthinking obedience that is different from the personal obedience of pre-modernity: modern armies and symphony orchestras require a different sort of discipline from the ancient Germanic war band. But if one confines one’s gaze to the 1960s and later, it’s hard to argue against the view that one of the characteristics of this period has been a general unwillingness to respect and obey any sort of authority.

This general suspicion of institutions is particularly worth noting here because a resistance to institutional discipline has been posited elsewhere as a virtue of ancient Hermeticism and an overemphasis on obedience as a particular failing of the post-Constantinian Church.

The monastic way of life came, it is true, to be called the Christian ‘philosophy’, but monks were not encouraged to be independent minds in the manner of Origen and Arius, who were much closer to the traditional ideal of the philosopher. Both these teachers were to be condemned by a Church that valued conformity to conciliar decisions, episcopally and even imperially enforced, above the personal authority of the sage [7].

There may be something of this sort going on in Morello’s mind, but if so, it needs to be developed more fully to avoid itself becoming part of modernity’s drive towards anarchy.

By Stephen Watt

References and further reading:

[1] The best starting point for the debate around the book is the (highly critical) article ‘Hermetic Tradition or Catholic Tradition? A Critique of Sebastian Morello’ by Matthew Minerd, Matthew Scarince and Thomas Mirus (Catholic Culture, available at https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/hermetic-tradition-or-catholic-tradition-critique-sebastian-morello/; accessed 9 September 2025) which provides a summary of and links to earlier critical comment. Morello provided a reply to his critics at OnePeterFive, https://onepeterfive.com/to-achieve-clarity-to-avoid-scandal-some-statements-on-christian-re-enchantment/ ; accessed 9 September 2025).

[2] ‘Ch. 5: The Magi return’ (p.93/213). (I am working from an EPUB edition of the work, so I have given chapter headings. Pagination is approximate and given as a proportion of a total of 213 pages.)

[3] ‘Appendix 2: A response to Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder’ (p.194/213).

[4] ‘Chapter 8: Christendom is Benedictine’ (p.124/213).

[5] ‘To Achieve Clarity, to Avoid Scandal: Some Statements on Christian Re-Enchantment’. (OnePeterFive, https://onepeterfive.com/to-achieve-clarity-to-avoid-scandal-some-statements-on-christian-re-enchantment/ ; accessed 9 September 2025).

[6] ‘Chapter 3: Acknowledging the Crisis and Breaking the Spell’ (p.69/213). See also pp.8-9 of Minerd, Scarince and Mirus (2025).

[7] p.xiv in Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, Princeton, Princeton University Press (paperback edition, 1993). I’d strongly recommend this work for an exploration of the ancient tradition of Hermeticism.

[8] The image is Hildegard-Von-Bingen’s ‘Red Angel’.

There has recently been some public discussion of the concept of self-destructive empathy and its unfortunate effects particularly in the political arena, prompted in part by Elon Musk’s deriding of ‘suicidal empathy’ and his claim that, ‘The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy’. In essence, the claim is that understanding and sympathising with another person's suffering reduces the capacity to take necessary action, due to an overemphasis on that action’s harmful effects. Behind this criticism is a simple observation: any institutional decision will often cause some discomfort to some people. If this discomfort is given undue weight, then just and wise decisions may be prevented by an ill-judged sensitivity. If anything like such a criticism is correct, then an emphasis on empathy and related qualities such as mercy, sympathy and caring would be less of a resistance to the cruelty of modernity but rather a further expression of modernity and its vices. So, which is correct: is empathy a virtue lacking and needed in the modern world or in a distorted form is it part of the modern world’s failings?

Although there is undoubtedly some useful philosophical work to be done in carefully analysing and distinguishing between the related concepts involved here, I’m going to ignore all that and concentrate broadly on the concept of mercy. (Again, there is probably some useful work to be done in exploring the differences between the Latin ‘misericordia’ and ‘misereri’ and the English ‘mercy’, but that’s not something I’m going to attempt here.) One important reason for this is that such an emphasis on mercy was characteristic of Pope Francis’s pontificate, and now that some of the distracting noise surrounding his teaching has died down, it would seem opportune to re-assess some of its main principles.

Aquinas talks about mercy thus: ‘mercy is heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succour him if we can’ (S.Th. IIa IIae, q.30 a.1 resp.). A virtue in general in Thomist and Aristotelian philosophy is roughly the mean between two extremes: the extreme of too much (which is presumably where self-destructive empathy lies) and too little (which is where the vice of callousness will be found). Therefore, if Pope Francis is correct, the modern world is likely to be dominated by the vice of callousness and insensitivity while, if the proponents of an attack on self-destructive empathy are correct, the main modern vice will be that of too much sensitivity and mercy. (It is of course entirely possible that, in different circumstances, we lurch from too much to too little mercy.)

It is tempting to regard the case for the dangers of self-destructive empathy as being more prominent in our current situation due to an obvious emphasis on oppression and minority rights and, more generally, on feelings in many western institutions and cultures. Certainly, the language of oppression and of paying attention to feelings is a common currency in much public discourse in the West in a way that it was not for previous generations. That said, there are strong reasons to believe that mercy as in Pope Francis’s approach should indeed be more of a presence in modern western society. In essence, mercy is an acknowledgement of the humanity of those around us. Suffering in its many forms is one of the deepest aspects of our lives and, to the extent that we ignore that most human aspect of life in other people, we fail to treat them as fully human. A modern society which emphasises competition, economic success and iron self-discipline in the achievement of goals is likely be one which underestimates the importance of mercy towards failure in these areas.

It's beyond the scope of this essay to decide finally whether Pope Francis’ emphasis on mercy and sometimes explicit condemnation of the rigidity of institutions or personalities is at least a very important criticism of modernity and perhaps even the most important. However to the extent that modern western society holds a view of life in which human beings are assessed only by their effectiveness as means to a material end, or one where our society is dominated by the Great Men and Women who are achievers and doers while the rest of us flounder around in a sea of uselessness, the benefits of an increased emphasis on mercy at least look plausible. It would be a pity, now that Pope Francis has died and the attention of both Catholics and the rest of the world moves on to other things, if his characteristic call for greater mercy in modernity is overlooked, even if its precise implementation remains, as with all the virtues, a difficult matter requiring both God's grace and the virtue of practical wisdom.

By Stephen Watt

Alasdair MacIntyre who died on 21 May 2025 was Scotland’s leading philosopher and a practising Catholic convert. Born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, he was educated and worked in English universities until emigrating to America in 1970. He taught in a variety of US institutions, until his retirement in 2010 from his position as Senior Research Professor in the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. He remained philosophically active even in retirement. Quite apart from his geographical wanderings, his intellectual and personal life also display considerable movement. He was married three times, divorced twice, and moved back and forth between varieties of Christianity, atheism and Marxism until finally converting to Catholicism in 1983.

MacIntyre was perhaps popularly best known for his gripping picture of a modern world in cultural ruins, still using the language of morality but without the conceptual schemes that gave that language significance. Moreover, his prescription for surviving this catastrophe -the founding of communities which could embody a coherent intellectual and moral life analogous to the founding by St Benedict of monasteries- took on a life of its own as the Benedict Option. [1] However, such a focus doesn’t do justice to the depths of his thought. Although his restlessness makes it difficult to summarise neatly his philosophy, several themes recur, particularly in that period of work defined by the publication of After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). [2] Throughout his career, the critique of political liberalism as an avoidance of harms rather than the pursuit of the good is central, with an attempt to analyse what sort of society would facilitate that pursuit, rather than abandoning that quest to isolated individuals dependent solely on their own resources.

Key elements in that analysis are the concepts of a practice and of a tradition. A practice is a way of life that allows its members to develop the virtues that will give their lives access to the goods of human flourishing: prime examples of this would include the professions and farming. Turning to the other key concept of ‘tradition’, MacIntyre introduces it as follows:

What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover, is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational inquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition. [3]

Taking a step back from the details of MacIntyre’s texts, the overall picture is something like this. Human beings learn to flourish through a form of life which is social not individual. Such forms of life develop a more or less conscious awareness of themselves and can use that awareness to improve and defend themselves. This analysis contrasts with an Enlightenment understanding of rationality which resists the community aspect of rationality and reflection in favour of that of individuals. Moreover, such an Enlightenment understanding ignores and even actively resists the inheritance of the past in tradition, instead preferring a version of reason that ignores the peculiarities of local circumstances and histories in favour a universal understanding of what it is to be rational. As noted above, that Enlightenment understanding becomes, in liberalism, a focus on the avoidance of harms, with individuals being left to decide what goods to pursue purely based on whatever desires or needs they happen to identify themselves as having.

Although the details of this central analysis do develop -and it is hard to deny that much of MacIntyre’s argument is impressionistic rather than detailed- the main lines of what made MacIntyre such a well-known figure in philosophy are relatively clear. There is an attack on modernity particularly in its liberal and progressive forms for failing to articulate or support the flourishing human life. There is a diagnosis of that failure in modernity’s Enlightenment heritage which emphasises the universality of human reason across times and cultures and its dismissal of rationality as rooted in particular times, places and traditions. Moreover, there is increasingly in his work an emphasis on Aristotelianism and in particular the version of Aristotelianism developed by St Thomas Aquinas as being the intellectual tradition which is best placed to cure this failure and provide the basis for social forms which support human flourishing. This positive aspect of MacIntyre’s work is perhaps most clearly addressed in what is my personal favourite of all his books, Dependent Rational Animals (1999). [4]

Although MacIntyre’s adult years were spent mostly outside Scotland, the importance of the country to the self-narration of his life remained extremely important:

My ancestors lived in small communities in Northern Ireland and in the West of Scotland - my father, was one of the first generation of his family not to learn English as a second language. In other words, I come from the fringes of modern Western culture and have tried to give a clear voice to some of those people who do not belong to the dominant mainstream and cannot identify with it. [5]

As well as being a reservoir of pre-modernity in ‘small, ideal fishing communities’ [6], Scotland is also the arena for the creation of modernity in MacIntyre’s account of the creation and disintegration of one of the three main traditions covered in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. Covering approximately four chapters and some 120 pages of that volume, MacIntyre surveys the development and decline of one of the chief sources of modern liberalism: a Scottish philosophy of Common Sense based on the vision of a society where

[a]ll plain persons of sound mind assent to one and the same set of fundamental truths as underived first principles, the truth of common sense, as soon as these truths are elicited from the mind by experience. [7]

As MacIntyre goes on to note, such a conception not only requires no specific social setting -the assent to truths depends only on sound minds- but soon finds itself undermined in the twentieth century when confronting ‘social contexts of fundamental disagreement and conflict’.

MacIntyre’s work while lauded in American and English circles seems to have had little direct impact on public life in Scotland. We are probably above all that, having moved into a progressive, secularised utopia where we all agree and where a concentration on the Central Belt removes anything that might reek of fishing communities, idealised or not. We do not like deep thinkers especially of a conservative hue. We prefer politics as the calculation of campaigners rather than as the basis for practical wisdom. Catholicism of course is simply too embarrassing to mention except as adding sectarian spice to football. But it is rather a pity, to say the least, that a philosopher who is an ‘eminent case’, embodying ‘a long and complex intellectual trajectory’ [8] and throwing light on so many issues afflicting the modern world is so little thought about in his native land.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

And may we, particularly in Scotland, learn from him.

By Stephen Watt

References and further reading:

[1] Presented especially in Macintyre, Alasdair, 1985 (2^nd ed.). After Virtue, London, Duckworth. Rod Dreher publicised a simplified version of this in his 2017 book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Society, New York, Sentinel.

[2] The central works referred to here are:

Macintyre, Alasdair, 1985 (2^nd ed.). After Virtue, London, Duckworth.

Macintyre, Alasdair, 1988, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London, Duckworth.

Macintyre, Alasdair, 1990. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, London, Duckworth.

Apart from these and other works below, I would recommend the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on MacIntyre https://iep.utm.edu/mac-over/ .

[3] Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p.7.

[4] Macintyre, Alasdair, 1999. Dependent Rational Animals, London, Duckworth.

[5] MacIntyre quoted in Perraeau-Saussine (trans. N.J. Pinkoski), 2022, Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, p.46.

[6] Perraeau-Saussine , 2022, p.46. The author rather uncharitably goes on to describe MacIntyre in this vein as ‘parfois un peu “poseur”’.

[7] Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p.p.324-325.

[8] Pierre Manent in his introduction to Perraeau-Saussine (2022), p.xi.

Alister McGrath (2025) Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times. Oneworld Publications. £16.70. 272pp. (ISBN-13978-0861549214)

Alister McGrath’s latest book joins (according to Wikipedia) his more than fifty previous books on Christianity. So what does Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times add to this impressive back catalogue? More generally, what does it add to a market already overflowing with reflections on Christian apologetics, spirituality and on the (religious or non-religious) state that we’re in?

My blunt assessment of this is probably that it adds little. In terms of substantive content, it says little that hasn’t been said elsewhere. Where it might help is in its clarity and straightforwardness. If you are attracted by a ‘science has the answer to everything and religious people are idiots’ sort of viewpoint, then you might find something in here at least to prod you into some unease about your position.

McGrath focuses on the sort of New Atheist position advocated by the Four Horsemen (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris). This is not a book which tackles the details of their arguments directly but instead focuses on their general view that we should only believe what is evidenced by the standards of empirical science. McGrath argues convincingly that restricting belief to such an evidential standard makes it unliveable and that any worthwhile life instead depends on other elements which go beyond scientific evidence. In essence, we are all believers, and the only question is whether our belief systems are life enhancing or not.

I think that, so far as this part of his case goes, he’s correct. A life lived by scientific evidence alone would be unliveable. Where I’m less certain is that he is attacking here a position that is held by anyone other than a few spluttering internet warriors. I’m not at all certain that New Atheism (if it ever really dug that deeply into most people’s psyches) is still around that much. To the extent therefore that some variety of New Atheism is the book’s target, it is now probably as past its usefulness as the movement itself. Where the main current of religious disbelief now exists (and probably to some extent always did) is in the ‘Nones’, essentially those who answer ‘none’ to questions in censuses and surveys which ask: ‘To what religion do you belong?’ And it is precisely because the Nones form an increasing element in a post-Christian Scotland and elsewhere that this book is inadequate as a response.

The last Scottish census in 2022 showed 51.1% of respondents claiming ‘no religion’ as opposed to 36.7% in 2011 [1]. As such, we are considerably ‘ahead’ of the figures that McGrath quotes for the UK as a whole (2021: 37% 2011: 25%) and the US (2017-2022 an average of 20-21%) [2]. While McGrath seems cautiously hopeful that these figures may represent a plateau, and despite there being some evidence for some growth in UK Church attendance particularly among males aged between 18-24 [3], it seems unlikely given previous trends that there is going to be a dramatic shift in the prevalence of Scottish Nones soon. If that’s right, then the biggest competitor to Christianity is not so much hardline New Atheism, but rather the more varied rejection of institutional religion by the Nones.

The Theos 2022 report, The Nones: Who are they and what do they believe? breaks the Nones down into roughly three equally numerous groups: Spiritual Nones, Campaigning Nones and Tolerant Nones [4]. Of these only the Campaigning Nones broadly fit the New Atheist paradigm:

· spiritually closed (only 20% hold any form of spiritual belief)

· individuals who believe science is the only reliable way to describe, explain and understand reality

· strongly atheistic (80% are atheists)

· extremely hostile to religion (78% believe it is comparable to smallpox, vs 29% of Nones overall)

· a group of individuals who see no value in religion or its place in society

Of the remaining 2/3 or so of the Nones, both Tolerant and Spiritual Nones have some openness to religion. The Spiritual are:

· individuals who see value in religion and its place in the modern world

· individuals who believe that science is only able to describe and explain part of reality

The Tolerant:

· believe that science cannot tell you how to live your life

· are more tolerant and accepting of religion than Campaigning Nones

· believe religion has some helpful things to say about ethics

So McGrath’s arguments are directed mainly at (assuming the Theos proportions apply to the Scottish census figures) the Campaigning Nones who possibly represent some 17% of the Scottish population. The remaining 34% of Tolerant and Spiritual Nones already agree on McGrath’s central argument which is that science is an inadequate guide to living well and that Christianity (and other traditional religions) have some value in teaching us how to flourish.

Now, of course, having something directly to say to 17% of the Scottish population is not a negligible achievement. But there is little in McGrath’s current book to explain to the more open Nones why they should move beyond a vague sympathy for religion in general to a particular interest in Christianity and, more importantly, a possible institutional commitment to it.

Indeed, McGrath’s ambitions seem to undermine seeing Christianity as an Institution, instead pitching it as an exploratory wisdom tradition:

By using a series of different maps, each grounded in a different intellectual discipline, Midgley argues that we can gain a deeper understanding of ‘what the outside world is actually telling us. We need to avoid an imperialist map, which tries to colonise other disciplines, and instead find a way of bringing together the insights offered by multiple maps [5]

Regretfully putting aside any ecumenical spirit, it needs to be pointed out that McGrath (quite understandably for an admirer of C.S. Lewis) seems to be thinking throughout of ‘the basic idea of a consensual Christianity -what Lewis termed “mere Christianity”- which was denominationally open-ended’ [6]. Whatever else might be said, this approach does not easily apply to the Catholic Church which, while it is a wisdom tradition (and one rather deeper than most other versions of Christianity), is also the visible Body of Christ, subject to the divinely appointed teaching authority of Pope and Bishops. If McGrath is right that the Nones ‘have a problem with religious institutions’ [7], while it makes sense particularly for a Low Church Anglican to de-emphasise the institutional aspect of Christianity, from a Catholic perspective it only leaves a greater absence in this book.

To sum up, McGrath’s work does probably add something to the literature which might encourage someone to explore Christianity, just as it might also encourage someone to explore any of the other major world spiritualities such as Islam or Buddhism or Taoism and so on. It does little to prepare explorers for the exclusive truth and institutional claims that Catholicism will present them with and indeed may well make it harder for these explorers to treat such claims with anything other than suspicion. What it lacks in particular is much of a hint about why Christianity is more likely to be worth the explorer’s investment of time than other possibilities, and why remaining as an open minded and open hearted None is not going to be a more inviting prospect than taking a leap of faith into an apparently patriarchal, colonialist and closed minded cult such as Christianity in general and, a fortiori, the Catholic Church [8].

By Stephen Watt

References and notes:

[1] National Records of Scotland https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/latest-news/religion-and-ethnic-group-results-published/ (accessed 21 May 2025)

[2] McGrath, 2025, ch.6. (I am working from an unpaginated eBook edition, hence the reliance on chapter numbers.)

[3] ‘The Quiet Revival: Gen Z leads rise in church attendance’, https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/research/quiet-revival (accessed 21 May 2025)

[4] Hannah Waite, 2022. The Nones: Who are they and what do they believe? https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/research/2022/10/31/the-nones-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-believe (accessed 21 May 2025) Most of the quotes are taken from the executive summary on pp.11-24.

[5] McGrath, 2025, ch.5

[6] McGrath, 2025, ch.5

[7] McGrath, 2025. ch.6

[8] Whilst I don’t have the space here to provide a reasoned response to such a challenge, let me at least testify. I have never found the Catholic Church to be anything other than a uniquely rich space within which to explore the sort of wisdom that McGrath is advocating. And to live one’s life wisely means, at some point, committing oneself to an institutional discipline rather than living with total openness.

In the Coracle this week

Beyond Happiness: New writer, Benjamin Woods, believes that we should embrace responsibilities in ways that bring joy and fulfilment.

A picnic with St Phillip Neri: We encounter the Apostle of Rome on his upcoming feast day.

Two of Scotland’s most important Saints have their feast days in June - St Columba and St Moluag.

Other things that might interest you

Eucharistic Revival Week: Fr James Cadman from the Borders joined St Mary’s Cathedral in Aberdeen and gave a number of talks. Go to their youtube page here.

Carfin National Pilgrimage: Pilgrims of Prayer in the jubilee year of 2025 on Sunday September 1st at 3pm. All welcome.

Referring to St John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Pope Benedict XVI asked, ‘[C]an…a work written by a hermit monk who lived 1,400 years ago, say something to us today? Can the existential journey of a man who lived his entire life on Mount Sinai in such a distant time be relevant to us?’[1]

John Climacus lived approximately from AD 579 to 649, dying as Abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai in Syria. He lived as a monastic for much of his life, and The Ladder of Divine Ascent, sets out the path of spiritual progress for a monk. What follows is my personal take on having read through the Ladder twice fairly recently, these readings accompanied by listening to a very helpful series of podcasts by a Byzantine Catholic priest, Father Charbel Abernethy [2]. Whatever the spiritual worth of the work, I found it a rather engaging read: it’s often surprisingly witty, deep in its psychological insight, and refreshingly free of cloying piety.

I came away with three aspects of the work particularly in mind. First, there is the stage of subduing the passions. Second, there is what Jungians might refer to as ‘individuation’, integrating the various parts of one’s personality into a virtuous whole, primarily through accepting the discipline of a spiritual director. Third, there is moving that personality towards God so that, finally, it (almost) becomes God in the process of divinisation. Although there sometimes is a sense of a sequence to these steps, more strongly there is a sense of the continuing struggle in all three aspects: one never gets the feeling of ever being quite safe with Climacus as the passions and the demons which control them find ever more subtle ways of tricking the monk.

One way of exploring these three aspects is by analysing why they can be so difficult to the modern non-monkish mind. Let’s start with subduing the passions. It’s very difficult for a modern layperson to conceive of why it would be a good thing to subdue the passions in quite the harsh way that Climacus recommends. One of the most striking episodes in the Ladder is his visit to a monastery prison for penitent monks in Step Five:

Some chastised themselves in the scorching sun, others tormented themselves in the cold. Some, having tasted a little water so as not to die of thirst, stopped drinking; others having nibbled a little bread, flung the rest of it away….They did not even know that such a thing as anger existed among men, because in themselves grief had finally eradicated anger.

Fasting and extreme mortification of the flesh are prominent methods of breaking the control of the body over the nous (the intellect not in the sense of discursive reasoning, but that part of the person which can know God by means of direct spiritual perception). But such an extreme physical regime seems cruel to the modern mind. Father Charbel’s recommendations here struck me as particularly wise: this was one of those elements of the Ladder that will be and should be felt as most challenging to our modern condition, and that, rather than trying to solve this puzzle, we should live with it for a while and see what insights emerge from that tension. Having lived with it myself for a few months now, I suppose my main insights are that I am much further away from any sort of holiness than I would like to admit, and that my gratitude for the lifeline flung out by the Church and its sacraments is so much the greater.

The closely related second aspect of handing over oneself to a spiritual director is part of the destruction of the passions but is also part of developing the nous. Although the nous might be described as our True Self, it is a True Self that is at odds with what we normally take to be our Self: the flitting everyday empirical consciousness that is filled with whatever happens to stick in our brains for a while. Only by handing over that false Self to someone who has already that intuitive apprehension of God can we ourselves develop the nous. But again, to the modern mind, such a complete abandonment of Self seems unhealthy. The Self (as many philosophers will tell you) is simply the basket of whatever mental contents happen to be there at a time, not some strange metaphysical entity behind all that and (perish the thought) very, very close to God. And even were one to entertain such a possibility, the brutal reality of Climacus’ practical advice here looks like an invitation to spiritual abuse. For example, in Step Four:

Once the great elder, for the edification of the others, pretended to get angry with [a monk]…Knowing that he was innocent…I began to plead [his] cause…. But the wise director said: ‘And I too know, Father, that he is not guilty…the director of souls does harm both to himself and to the ascetic if he does not give him frequent opportunities to obtain crowns such as the superior considers he merits at every hour by bearing insults, dishonour, contempt or mockery.

Again, following the advice to live with this tension for a while, the best I can come up with is a sense of the distance between Climacus’ world and its perspectives, and the world I inhabit: that generally seems to result in a modern sense of how much better we all are, but only leads me to reflect on how much we may also have lost. More straightforwardly, there is the awareness that what we and the world take to be our Self is not our Self.

Finally, the aspect of divinisation. Having fully developed the intellect, the monk is divinised. From Step 29:

He who has been granted such a state, while still in the flesh, always has God dwelling within him as his Guide in all his words, deeds and thoughts. Therefore, through illumination he apprehends the Lord’s will as a sort of inner voice. He is above all human instruction and says: When shall I come and appear before the face of God?…The dispassionate man no longer lives himself, but Christ lives in him….

Although the Ladder can appear at times almost Pelagian in the efforts a monk has to make to achieve divinisation, the lasting impression it gives is of the desperate need for grace. Whenever we do something, there is always a demon waiting to congratulate us on our efforts and thus to nullify any efforts made. Only by allowing oneself to dwell with God by simply making Him the focus of one’s life is that final closeness achieved, less by one’s own efforts than by the overwhelming mercy of God Himself.

As we reach the final stages of Lent, how has the Ladder left me? I pray more, particularly the Jesus prayer: after being constantly battered by the cunning of your passions and the demons around us, what else is there other than to call on the only certainty which is God? I remain distrustful of spiritual direction in the form suggested by Climacus but am less willing to assert my everyday wants and desires against that teacher which is the world and its buffeting. (Step 28: ‘Have all courage, and you will have God for your teacher in prayer.’) Finally, I distrust more than I already did the sort of public displays of anger and pride that are all too common in our society and even in the Church. I do not know the precise way to deal with all the evils we face, but I suspect that God does not want us to react like that.

By Stephen Watt

Further reading:

All quotes from the text of The Ladder of Divine Ascent taken from http://www.orthodoxriver.org/books/ladder-of-divine-ascent/ (accessed 10 April 2025)

Wikipedia article John Climacus John Climacus - Wikipedia (accessed 10 April 2025)

Wikipedia article The Ladder of Divine Ascent The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Wikipedia (accessed 10 April 2025)

References:

[1] Benedict XVI, General audience 11 February 2009 (available online at https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20090211.html ; accessed 10 April 2025)

[2] Podcast on The Ladder of Divine Ascent PODCAST SERIES | PhilokaliaMinistries (Father Charbel has two series on the Ladder. I only listened to the earlier series Season 2 | Philokalia Ministries which I found excellent. The sound quality on some of the audience questions and discussion is of variable quality, but it’s worth trying to follow them as they often contain insightful points.)

Writing You Might have Missed in the Coracle

The Benefits of Fasting: Archbishop Charles Eyre, of the Western District of Scotland in 1871 writes about the benefit and reasons for fasting. An excerpt.

Miracle at Birnie: How a synthesis of local Catholics, the Ordinariate and Presbyterians are saving one of the oldest places of worship in Scotland.

A Lenten Journey of Hope: How has your Lent been?

Included in this month is the upcoming feast of St Magnus, St Donan and St Maelrubha. We also have summary of the life of St Egbert of Iona from OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE.

Other Things that Might Interest You

The Quiet Revival: A recent survey by the Bible Society in England and Wales has picked up on what it is calling a ‘quiet revival’. The remarkable feature of this is that it is Gen-Z who is driving it. There are no figures for Scotland but is anyone picking up on any anecdotal evidence?

Being Catholic TV: Set up by Scotland’s Bishop’s over lockdown the channel, based out of St Augustine’s in Coatbridge is steadily growing its offering and becoming a home for Catholics in Scotland to tune in to.

In his Ten Thousand Saints, the Irish writer Hubert Butler wrote:

It is 17 March and I am contemplating a picture of our national saint on the front page of a national daily. A bearded and mitred figure of great dignity, he seems to be about to deliver some message to our sad generation…He is telling us that woollen blankets and undergarments manufactured by the Snowflake Fleece Company are staunch and absolutely reliable. Folds of snowy cloth hang from the arm, which holds the crozier, and it is plain that he too in his time knew that worth will tell and was the enemy of all that is mean and shoddy.

Although saints’ lives always gather fable, it is hard to think of many other saints who have gathered quite so much as St Patrick. So what do we know of the real Patrick? The commonly held academic position is summarised by Suzanne Forbes thus:

On the basis of [the Confessio], we can say that Patrick really existed, that he was born somewhere in Britain, and that he was taken to Ireland as a slave. He subsequently escaped and travelled back to Britain, but once he became a priest he felt compelled to return to Ireland as a missionary. Although many stories and beliefs about Patrick's life emerged in the centuries that followed (such as the idea that he drove all the snakes from the island), the Confessio and Epistola are the only primary sources that researchers have been able to attribute with confidence to Saint Patrick himself and the period of time he was in Ireland. As a result, they are the only sources to provide us with reliable information about the ‘real’ or ‘historic’ Patrick.

The Confessio and Epistola are two documents written in Latin, allegedly by Patrick, a claim which is widely held by scholars to be plausible given the content and style of the documents. Based on a variety of supporting evidence primarily from the Confessio and the account it gives of the surrounding social circumstances, he was active during the fifth century AD, with possible dates of birth being in the late fourth century, and dates of death based on later documents being c.460 and c.493.

The Confessio says that he was born in Bannavem Taburniae (a place of which no record exists) along with the oddly worded claim that going to Britain (or more exactly ‘in Brittanniis’ -among the Britons) is going ‘quasi ad patriam et parentes’ (as though to my homeland and relatives). These scant facts have led to a number of speculations, but point to a Brittonic speaking area within easy reach of the Irish pirates who abducted him at the age of sixteen. (Purely on the grounds of national prejudice, we at St Moluag’s support the Catholic Encyclopedia’s claim that he was born in Old Kilpatrick in West Dunbartonshire.) He was the son of a deacon and likely to have been of reasonable economic means and social status.

So much for his origins. But before going to examine the rest of his career, it’s worth emphasising that even the bare outlines given so far may be doubted. The sceptical Hubert Butler comments on the Confessio and Epistola:

As for [them], the most we can say about them is that a fifth century missionary might well have written them and that, if a later ecclesiastic invented them and attributed them to Patrick, he did it with skill and plausibility. The real force of the item for believing in their authenticity is that most people in Ireland want to believe, and that anyone who opposed this strong current of opinion would be heading for trouble.

This is probably going too far. Scholars of early mediaeval Europe struggle to make sense of a hodge-podge of sparse primary sources, embellished later sources and archaeological findings. Any account of persons or events in this time is going to be based on more or less plausible leaps of imagination and interpretation: less a matter of wanting to believe and much more a matter of having to make some educated guesses, failing which there would simply be silence.

Many of the familiar stories about Patrick’s later career (such as the magical contest of between the druids and Patrick at the Hill of Tara or the banishing of snakes from Ireland) seem implausible when judged by the sceptical tests of academic scholarship. No academic historian is likely to trust (publicly in any case) stories featuring magic or miraculous intervention. (Whether a Catholic should trust the story of any saint which doesn’t feature such miracles is a further question.) Herpetology provides a difficulty in noting that snakes have not lived in Ireland since the land link to Britain was cut off about 8,500 years ago after the end of the last ice age. Other stories may plausibly have been invented to further ecclesiastical politics, particularly the desire to promote Armagh’s claim for ecclesiastical supremacy in Ireland. The evidence of Patrick’s personality and circumstances in the Confessio and Epistola seems at odds with the later stories. As Ian Bradley puts it:

Patrick’s posthumous fame was achieved the cost of grossly distorting his actual character and achievements in life. The self-doubting wandering missionary of the Confessio became the confident miracle-worker at the power-evangelist of the [later lives].

When sifted through those tests, we may be left with little more than one Brittonic speaking missionary among many other missionaries, spreading Christianity in an extremely hostile pagan society, whose cult and legends have buried whatever the ‘real’ Patrick was, in Hubert Butler’s words, ‘under the religious prepossessions of the fifty generations that shaped his story’.

Well, even if that were all, that’s not nothing. One of the aims of St Moluag’s Coracle since its beginning has been to publicise some of the early Scottish saints, most of whose lives make Patrick’s seem positively over-documented. To remember and explore the long past of Christianity in these islands, to give at least some shape to those men and women who undoubtedly did spread the religion in an early mediaeval, pagan environment, to have a sense of what this must have been like -all that is not negligible even if it is often uncertain and subject to competing detailed interpretations. And Butler’s ‘religious prepossessions of the fifty generations’ since Patrick are also part of that long story: another reminder of how deep and enmeshed Christianity is with the general history of Ireland and Great Britain. Moreover, the legends, even the most improbable, usually carry a spiritual meaning beyond whatever historical reality lies behind them. One common aspect of this is the relocation of patterns of Biblical stories into our landscape: when Patrick fights the magic of the druids at Tara, the scene reflects the struggle between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel. When Patrick expels the snakes from Ireland, he reflects Christ in his ministry of exorcism. In a modernity where there is increasing talk of the need to re-enchant the world, how previous generations have accomplished this becomes an important resource for us, particularly where these stories, as with Patrick in Ireland, retain a popular currency beyond committed Catholics.

But beyond all this, Patrick as a saint is alive in heaven and able to help us. Whatever the earthly Patrick was like, why wouldn’t he care for Ireland, care for the message of Christ, still be concerned to spread that message in the face of a hostile world? That, whatever, the historical realities, is the living reality of the communion of saints in Catholicism. Let’s not ignore that.

St Patrick, pray for us!

References and further reading:

Perhaps the best sources for further initial exploration are:

Wikipedia article on St Patrick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick

Kelly, David (2011) ‘St Patrick’s Writings: Confessio and Epistola’ in Royal Irish Academy, St Patrick’s Confessio [online at https://www.confessio.ie/more/article_kelly#; accessed 10 March 2025] Full texts and translations of the Confessio and Epistola can be found from the main site

https://www.confessio.ie/#

Other works mentioned:

Bradley, Ian (1999) Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Butler, Hubert (2011) Ten Thousand Saints: a Study in Irish and European Origins. Dublin: Lilliput Press.

Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) St Patrick, [online at https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11554a.htm ; accessed 10 March 2025.]

Forbes, Suzanne, (2019) ‘Remembering and forgetting in Ireland’ in Jessica Hughes (ed.) Traditions. The Open University: Milton Keynes, pp.247-299.

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Governmental rule has traditionally been identified in some sense as sacred. But Western democracies have generally abandoned such an identification. Is this a result of a growing realism about the uses and abuses of power, or is it a deep failing in a secularised approach to politics which is rendering Western societies increasingly ungovernable? Given Donald Trump’s recent presidential victory, what should we make of Trump’s Catholic, former éminence grise, Steve Bannon, whose his views have described thus:

His ideal society is not one where certain human types lord over others, but where considerations for spirituality and cultural essence guide social and political life. [1]

Such thoughts have been prompted by my having just completed approximately 330 hours of watching the Turkish TV epic, Diriliş: Ertuğrul [2]. The series is set in 13^th century Anatolia and covers the various struggles which would ultimately result in the foundation of the Ottoman Empire by Ertuğrul’s son, Osman. It’s probably worth saying immediately that, on a straightforward level, it’s just an enjoyable adventure story which has some of the virtues of older Hollywood films and TV programmes: lots of intrigue, goodies and baddies, sword fighting, love interest and riding up and down spectacular countryside on horseback. It’s also been incredibly popular in much of the Islamic world and thus has the added attraction of giving some sort of insight into another way of looking at the world from the modernised norms of secular, Western culture. Once you get your head around the fact that our traditional heroes like the Crusaders and Byzantine Empire are their traditional enemies, you can settle down to an almost endless stream of enjoyable warrior bonding and damsels in distress.

But it’s that another way of looking at the world that I want to focus on here. The main element throughout is the sense of Ertuğrul’s sacred mission to impose justice on a chaotic world, and the daily presence of religion as a source of strength in those struggles. This theme was probably reinforced for me by reading Julius Evola at the time of much of my viewing. Whether or not the series is directly influenced by Evola’s Traditionalism, or indirectly by a common source in Islam, there are some striking echoes between Diriliş: Ertuğrul and Evola’s work that are worth pondering. [3] Evola emphasises the role of the priest/king in imposing the sacred on society, and, more generally, imposing form on the people’s chaotic psychological material:

Beneficial spiritual influences used to radiate upon the world of mortal beings from the mere presence of such men, from their ‘pontifical’ mediation, from the power of the rites that were rendered efficacious by their power, and from the institutions of which they were the centre. These influences permeated people’s thoughts, intentions and actions, ordering every aspect of their lives and constituting a fit foundation for luminous, spiritual realizations. [4]

Ertuğrul spends much of the series fighting against internal enemies who undermine the struggle to maintain Islamic rule usually for the sake of personal advantage or from a failure to uphold the traditional laws and customs of the tribe due to a lack of self-restraint and uncontrolled anger. He imposes external order by following the traditions of the tribe combined with clear-sighted decision making, and encourages development of character by example and individual punishment. There is mercy in Ertuğrul, but is usually reserved only to those who have made a radical change in their lives and personalities, particularly by becoming Muslim: a regular refrain throughout the series is that, ‘Mercy to the cruel is cruelty to the weak.’ In general, the need to use power in imposing order on the chaos of hostile enemies and individual psychology is emphasised, and Ertuğrul’s prophetic judgment often set against the more pragmatic and fallible judgments even of the well intentioned.

It is very easy to see analogies to these views in older Western thought. Plato in books 8 and 9 of the Republic draws constant connections between the order of society and the order of the soul. Aquinas argues as follows:

[I]n the individual man, the soul rules the body; and among the parts of the soul, the irascible and the concupiscible parts are ruled by reason. Likewise, among the members of a body, one, such as the heart or the head, is the principal and moves all the others. Therefore in every multitude there must be some governing power.

[…]

The greatness of kingly virtue also appears in this, that he bears a special likeness to God, since he does in his kingdom what God does in the world; wherefore in Exodus (22:9) the judges of the people are called gods, and also among the Romans the emperors received the appellative Divus. [5]

Now it is very easy to imagine some common responses to all this. The sacred is a fiction. Talk of the near divinity of kings is a disguise for the imposition of power in support of material interests. Evola is a Fascist or even worse. Ertuğrul as a TV series, whatever its merits as entertainment, also brings with it a taint of Turkish Nationalism weaponised in the interests of President Erdoğan’s authoritarianism. Taken together, this is a poisonous soup of fascism from which no political lessons should be drawn except for what to avoid. In many ways, I don’t disagree with such analyses: Traditionalism in the sense I am using it here, and particularly that version of it espoused by Evola, I take to be more of an interesting but often hostile conversation partner for Catholicism rather than something that should be a direct inspiration. However, Evola has some plausibility in claiming that, ‘My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.’ And given that for most of those 1789 years preceding that revolution -and indeed, in many ways until long after- those principles were those of Catholic Christianity (and magisterial Protestantism), it is rather an odd position, for Catholics at least, to privilege what has emerged only in late modernity rather than the accumulated wisdom of the centuries. Until very recently in Scotland, respect for religion and the monarchy was widespread. The virtues of the military life were valued and had formed the characters of most men. In particular, a warrior’s need for emotional restraint and obedience to one’s leaders was inculcated in the young and supported by popular entertainment. These are the main principles of Evola, they were the main principles which used to be widespread in Scotland, and they are still the principles to be found in this immensely popular TV series which presumably says something about the current culture of Turkey and much of the Islamic world. So why are we now so certain that there is nothing of value in them, and that what we have replaced them with is so obviously better?

I write this without much of a sense of how such questions should be answered. But what we, as Catholics and Scots, lack is much widespread thought on the fundamentals of political structure, rather than a mere tinkering with existing arrangements. Instead, I would focus on two questions which arise from the above reflections: how should Scottish politics encourage a link to the sacred, and how should it encourage a character among Scots that, instead of encouraging lack of emotional restraint, instead encourages self-control under the influence of that rational self which lies closest to the divine? Catholics will have their own specific answers to this, but putting the questions in this form might well encourage the contribution of allied spiritualities to our efforts and, at the least, a growing questioning of some of the assumptions of secular modernity. 

By Stephen Watt

References and further reading:

[1] Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (2020) War for Eternity: the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right, Penguin, Ebook, p.79

[2] At the time of writing, the best way to view this series is via YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDoK5CcjJZA5l21jGd6PNUIpMtCUnKNeo&si=S2kNWXc51X4xwUQN English subtitles are available. The Wikipedia article on the series can be found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirili%C5%9F:_Ertu%C4%9Frul  

[3] On Evola, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola and on Traditionalism in general, my previous article in the Coracle https://stmoluagscoracle.substack.com/p/king-charles-iii-traditionalism-and

[4] Julius Evola (2018) Revolt against the Modern World. Inner Traditions. Ebook, p.62.

[5] De regno, chapter 1: https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/DeRegno.htm#1

With the Feast of our nations Patron coming up why not try a traditional novena and read a little bit more about St Andrew.

The conversion of Saint Paul, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Are there signs of a revival in Christianity and even in Catholicism in the West? A number of recent celebrity conversions as well as endorsements of the benefits of cultural Christianity might seem to suggest this. But do we really have reason to find hope in this phenomenon?

The latest outburst of hope in the post-Christian West seems to centre on a number of celebrity conversions to Christianity, and also on a few celebrity near misses: well-kent figures who, while unable to describe themselves as Christians, are willing to acknowledge the cultural benefits of Christian societies. Vanity Fair's recent article [1] gives some flavour of the figures and movements involved, while viewing the phenomenon rather suspiciously through the magazine's progressive perspective on American conservative politics and its entanglement with religion. Russell Brand, J.D. Vance and Jordan Peterson are among the more recognisable names mentioned in this article.

Let’s start by separating clearly the two categories already touched on: those celebrities who have actually become Christians from those who remain non-Christian or only culturally attached to Christianity. Both categories are addressed and indeed partially represented in an UnHerd discussion between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch-American writer and activist who has been primarily known as a critic of Islam and until recently, a militant atheist [2]. Dawkins in the discussion occasionally says some nice things about Christianity (and has elsewhere apparently called himself a ‘cultural Christian’ [3]) but is extremely clear that he thinks Christianity both false and dangerous, even if less dangerous than Islam. Hirsi Ali on the other hand seems to have had a genuine albeit still incomplete conversion to Christianity:

I find that Christianity is actually obsessed with love. That is in the figure of the teaching of Christ….The message of Christianity I get is that it’s a message of love. It’s a message of redemption. And it’s a story of renewal and rebirth. So, Jesus dying and rising again for me symbolises that story. In a small way I felt I had died and I was born. That story of redemption, and rebirth, I think makes Christianity actually a very, very powerful story for the human condition and human existence. The pain of suffering, but also our internal recognition of what you call sin.

Dawkins, despite suspicions that it is less a conversion and more of a development of her opposition to Islam, seems finally to recognise its genuineness:

I came here prepared to persuade you Ayaan that you’re not a Christian. But I think you are a Christian. And I think Christianity is nonsense. You appear to be a theist, you appear to believe in some kind of higher power.

Compared to the complete teaching of the Catholic Church, Hirsi Ali’s explanation of her beliefs is clearly an inadequate form of Christianity. I’m not sure precisely what brand of Christianity she has adopted, but she seems quite clear she is still exploring it:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali : I won’t survive death. I don’t think you will survive death. I said that when Bertrand Russell said, ‘When we die, we shall rot’, that is true. But then what happens to the soul consciousness, etc. That again I can’t say.

Richard Dawkins: You think there is a soul that survives death?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, there is something that I did feel a connection to and it wasn’t a bodily connection. It was a connection through consciousness and mind and whether that’s going to outlast me or not, I don’t know. I don’t know about that.

But that incompleteness is no indication of a lack of sincerity. All of us struggle to live a fully Christian life, both in terms of belief and in terms of action and motivations. That reality is sometimes obscured by a rather Evangelical Protestant emphasis on the simplicity of the conversion experience: you either accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour or you don’t. The Catholic analysis of conversion is more about a continuing process of improvement or divinisation: we are initiated into the body of Christ through the sacraments and, with our ‘yes’ to God’s grace, grow closer to him Ignoring the details of her denominational commitments, Hirsi Ali sounds like someone who would fit perfectly into an RCIA programme for exploring sacramental reception into the Church.

What then of the truly cultural Christians, who may well be sympathetic to the Church or like some of its political or aesthetic values, but remain clear that they are not Christian? A lot depends on the precise variety of cultural Christianity adopted. Dawkins -to the extent he is any sort of cultural Christian- seems limited to a liking for some Christian art and an acceptance that the Enlightenment grew out of (but away from) an historical Christian background. It is probably a symptom of how much cultural damage secularisation has done that such views are even worth noticing: that Christians did some good art and dominated intellectual life until very recently in the West should hardly be news. But others, who see genuine moral and political goods in Christianity even if they can’t accept the theological teachings behind them, seem to be a quite different position. If, for the sake of simplicity, we reduce the centre of Christianity to loving God and loving your neighbour, many cultural Christians seem to be in the position of rather liking the teachings about how to love your neighbour but being unable to accept the beliefs about God. As Niall Fergusson, Hirsi Ali’s husband and historian, declared:

[A]theism, particularly in its militant forms, is really a very dangerous metaphysical framework for a society. I know I can’t achieve religious faith…but I do think we should go to church….I’m a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, we’ve got a pretty good framework to work with. [3]

That’s not enough to get into the Church now, but it should be enough to begin an exploration which might eventually lead you into the Church.

Although there may be some reasons for hope in some aspects of this movement, any optimism needs to be tempered by the wider background of religious decline in the West. A predominantly American perspective is particularly misleading when applied to the Scottish religious landscape. In both in the US and Scotland, there has been a striking increase over recent years in those ‘having no religion’ (Scotland) or those who are ‘religiously unaffiliated’ (US) which shows no signs of tailing off in the knowable future. But even with this trend, the US still remains publicly religious in a way that has little similarity to Western Europe and, particularly, Scotland. For example, in the 2022 Scottish census, 51.1% of the population identified itself as having no religion, with only 38.8% identifying as some variety of Christian, including 13.3% as Catholic. Compare this with US figures from the 2023 PRRI Census of American Religion which showed 66% of Americans identifying as Christian, including 22% as Catholic, with only 27% as 'religiously unaffiliated' [4]. For ‘influencers’ primarily focused on the US market, religious branding is going to be part of a marketing mix. Few Scots, on the other hand, will grow rich by favouring traditional religion.

To sum up, I’m not at all sure that the phenomenon of celebrity conversion or celebrity interest in Christianity is going to have much effect on the process of secularisation particularly in Scotland. At best, it is possibly a symptom that the high tide of celebrity atheism has passed. It is, however, a reminder that ‘the inherited wisdom of a two-millenia old religion’ will always attract some people, perhaps especially intelligent, imaginative people. The Church needs to think both how it can present that wisdom so that more people can be interested in it, and then how to convert that interest into a genuine love of God and a willingness to embark on the process of drawing closer to God.

References:

1. Vanity Fair, 'Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex' (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/catholic-right-celebrity-conversion-industrial-complex archived here: https://archive.ph/RGry5 ) 

2. The God Debate https://unherd.com/watch-listen/the-god-debate/

3. Think. ‘The turning tide of intellectual atheism.’ https://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/the_turning_tide_of_intellectual_atheism

4. Scottish census figures https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czddp0j488qov PRRI figures https://www.prri.org/research/census-2023-american-religion/

The month of October draw nears us with important Saints such as St Rule of the town of St Andrews to celebrate along with some interesting female Saints, such as St Tridunna with a wide area of veneration that includes Orkney, Caithness, Edinburgh and Forfarshire. She also has potential connections with St Andrews on the Fife coast and with Hexham in Northern England. Most importantly, October is the month of our beautiful Lady’s rosary, which is an excellent time to reacquaint or start afresh with Mary and her prayer.

October Saints

The German Protestant theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, died on 3 June 2024 at the age of 98. Sometimes described as the most influential theologian of the last half of the twentieth century, he was prolific in his writings and the subject of many obituaries and tributes on his death.

In the recommended reading below, I’ve included suggestions for a number of such tributes, and there is little point in repeating their details here. Instead, I’ll focus on a more personal response to his work. I first came across Moltmann on the recommendation of a deacon in the Scottish Episcopal Church whom I greatly liked. That deacon came from an evangelical background but with a strong focus on social action, and that’s not a bad prism through which to start an approach to Moltmann. Moltmann like many twentieth century Germans lived out his life in the shadow of the Second World War and particularly of the Holocaust, and it was his attempt to reconcile that suffering with the hope of salvation that can be seen as informing much of his work.

Moltmann was held as a prisoner of war in a number of places including Kilmarnock, where he was employed in constructing and repairing roads. During these periods, he began to read the New Testament and described his treatment by his former enemies as both ‘incredibly kind and yet deeply shaming’. (This combination of suffering and yet also an offering of a new hope through that experience is characteristic.) Following Karl Barth, he rejected a Christianity that was closely identified with existing society, but unlike Barth he emphasised the possibility of nevertheless finding hope in history and experience.

When I was first presented with Moltmann primarily through his book, The Crucified God, I was excited by a theologian that promised both radical rejection of actual social norms but also the prospect of an experience of God that was not simply founded on blind faith but on observable features of the world, in particular the hopefulness of resurrection and eschatology. But I’m afraid I also found the book rather dull and I struggled to finish it at the time. In retrospect, I don’t think this was entirely fair to Moltmann, but it felt like the stereotypical atmosphere of justice and peace Christianity at its worst: a rather complacent emphasis on the power of everyday lives and action, and a compete dismissal of anything that might burst into that world with angels and fire and trumpets. I wanted an apocalypse of divine glory; and what I thought I got was Greenham Common and consciousness raising.

This sort of criticism of Moltmann is still common among more conservative theologians and is reflected in Carl Trueman’s assessment of his career:

For Moltmann, the categories of this immediate world context drove his theology. He had no sense of transcendence and no final sense that God’s Word breaks into this world from outside, rather than merely emerging as part of an immanent historical process. And those who marry their theology to immanence are oddly doomed to divorce their theology from relevance. That is why his contributions to Liberation Theology, Christology, social Trinitarianism, theodicy, eschatology, and political theology are all now museum pieces, fodder for courses in modern church history rather than systematics.

So why don’t I think this is entirely fair to Moltmann? The underlying charge from Trueman that Moltmann is too immersed in the values of the existing world to provide a truly Christian challenge: whether the therapeutic benevolence of Western Christian communities or the Marxism of Latin American guerillas, both are those of this world rather than the next. To respond to this underlying charge, I’d distinguish between (as Richard Bauckham puts it) Moltmann’s ‘openness to dialogue’ as a principle, and how he chooses to apply that principle. Moltmann is open in principle to recognising the signs of hope in the present, and will thus engage in dialogue with current values and movements in order to explore that hope. But as Bauckham also notes,

[Moltmann] resists the idea of creating a theological ‘system,’ as a finished achievement of one theologian, and stresses the provisionality of all theological work and the ability of one theologian only to contribute to the continuing discussion within an ecumenical community of theologians…

It is therefore possible to think that Moltmann’s principle of open dialogue to explore the signs of a truly Christian hope is a worthwhile one, while accepting that many of the ways he applies that principle are very much provisional and even (as Trueman puts it) ‘museum pieces’. An example of this might be his final two chapters in The Crucified God where the dialogue partners are Freudian psychology and Marxism. That strikes me as more of an obvious choice in 1973 than it would be now, but even then, Moltmann is explicit that his exploration of such specific dialogues is only representative of possibilities:

Of course, this dialogue is only an extract from the many-layered pattern of Christian anthropology today, open to the world as it must necessarily be. It can therefore lay no claim to completeness. But it did seem more important to present the consequences of the theology of the cross at one point than to keep to abstract generalizations.

In broad terms, I think it is entirely plausible to find in Moltmann a helpful emphasis on the importance of dialogue with this world and its values, so long as what is primarily sought are the traces of the gold dust of eschatological hope rather than a resignation to the dross of materialist values. (In 2024, for example, why not a dialogue with the Mark Fisher’s criticism of ‘capitalist realism’ or with Julius Evola’s idea of society as embodying a sacred hierarchy?) For individual Catholics, this may be less about engaging with ideas and more about meeting people which became an increasingly important part of Moltmann’s approach in his later theology. Although I don’t have the space to do this topic justice here, and despite the fact that I am not aware of any acknowledged direct influence from Moltmann, it is clear that much of Pope Francis’s emphasis on synodality and personal encounter might be illuminated by a more detailed comparison of his views and Moltmann’s. Certainly, the influence of Moltmann on Latin American Jesuits in general is well documented, not least by the discovery of a copy of The Crucified God next to the body of the martyred Father Juan Ramon Moreno.

Finally, however, I think it important to provide two warnings about Moltmann’s approach. First, Moltmann’s approach is extremely Protestant. For example, in The Crucified God, he talks of Christian theology primarily thinking ‘traditionally in terms of a dialectic of law and freedom’. While that's always going to be an important topic, I'm not sure it's so central to the rather richer universe of Catholic theology as it is to German Protestantism. And acknowledging this is to suggest that too strong a focus on liberation in Moltmann’s theology rather than, say, divinisation may itself be a misdirection. Linked to this is a second warning: as Nietzsche puts it, ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ Staring into the world can easily have you lost in the world unless you approach it with a strong formation in Catholicism: although there is a need to engage in an open dialogue with other non-Christian and non-Catholic approaches and people, there is a primary need to engage in the living body of Christ which is the Catholic Church, both intellectually and sacramentally: ‘You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’ Whether Moltmann always does this, even in his own Protestant terms, is perhaps open to doubt.

Stephen Watt

Recommended reading and references:

BBC Radio 4, ‘A suffering God’,  Beyond belief, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021qjc

Obituary by Zoran Grozdanov, BYU Law, available at https://talkabout.iclrs.org/2024/07/08/revolutionary-in-theology-in-memoriam-jurgen-moltmann/

Carl Trueman, ‘The night I met Jürgen Moltmann’, available at https://eppc.org/publication/the-night-i-met-jurgen-moltmann/

Church Times, 27 March 2020, ‘Listening for God’s eternal “Yes” ‘, archived edition available at https://archive.ph/MaOig

Bauckham, Richard (1997) ‘Jürgen Moltmann’ in David F. Ford (ed.) The Modern Theologians, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, pp.209-224.

Moltmann, Jürgen (1974), The Crucified God, London, SCM Press

We are in the middle of the ‘dog days of summer’ (yes that’s a thing!) with July gone and an uncertain August nearing its end. There are many local Scottish Saints for us to read into and devote sometime in prayer with. Go over to our ministry site: www.maryswell.net/augustsaints to learn more about some of them. They include St Walthen of Melrose, St Berchan of Renfrewshire and Argyll, St Blaan of Bute and the great St Aidan of Lindisfarne.

Interview between Stephen Watt and Fr Jean Gové.

Would you say a little about your background and how you came to be studying for a PhD in philosophy at St Andrews?

I’m a diocesan priest from the Archdiocese of Malta, ordained just over five years ago in 2019. As I was completing my theological studies in Malta, my Archbishop asked me to pursue further studies in analytic philosophy, and St Andrews was singled out as an ideal place to do this. I first began a postgraduate diploma, then followed on to the Masters programme, and finally the PhD which I successfully defended last April.

Your main research interests centre around the philosophy of mind, language and epistemology. How important do you think AI is in relation to this general field?

I suppose it would be better to ask the opposite question - how important are philosophy of mind, language and epistemology to AI? The answer there would undoubtedly be “A lot!”

Within these fields, we discuss a myriad of questions. How do we think, reason and understand? How do we know what we’re thinking? What is the relationship between our thoughts and words about objects, and those objects themselves? How do we become acquainted with new objects and grasp new concepts? What is it to be conscious, and in virtue of what are we conscious? The list goes on…

The more complex AI systems become, and the more ‘life-like’ they seem to be, the more people seem to be confused as to whether or how AI systems are different from us humans. The philosophical study of mind, language, and epistemology, as the small sample of questions just provided above show, thus offers us invaluable tools and concepts to help distinguish and differentiate between genuine thought and sentience, and mere computational processes. 

Although AI in some form has been around for a while now, the recent explosion in the use of LLM (large language models) for AI has resulted in it being a much more obvious part of everyday life for many people. What do you think the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity are likely to be from this expansion in technology? 

As you rightly pointed out, AI has been around for a while, but it’s only in the past few years that we have seen this marked expansion and, more importantly, a more diffuse usage of this technology - specifically with respect to what is called ‘Generative AI’ (GenAI). GenAI are AI systems, such as LLMs, which are able to create new material, be it text, image, or audio, based on existing data that a system has been trained on.

AI systems in general have the capacity to automate a good number of menial or time-consuming tasks that, up until now, could have only been carried out by a human agent. Doctors and educators, for example, can devote more time to actually being with their patients or students, instead of being taken up carrying out time-consuming administrative tasks that can now be offloaded onto AI systems. 

Furthermore, given AI systems’ great ability to predict and pick out patterns, it also has the potential to be used to solve more complex problems. A fantastic example of this is the AI system AlphaFold, developed by DeepMind. A great problem in the scientific community, commonly known as the ‘protein folding problem,’ was that of figuring out the structure of complex proteins. This knowledge is important for a number of reasons, such as the development of new medicines. AlphaFold, launched in 2018, essentially solved this problem.

So the opportunities for great benefit are definitely there. But there is equally a threat, or rather, a number of threats that AI poses to us. I’ll just focus on a couple. With the ability to create vast amounts of new content in a short span of time, a very real worry relates to disinformation campaigns. We’ve already heard this a number of times in the news where election interference is involved. The use of AI technology in creating deepfake media can cause great harm - whether it’s a fake phone call pretending to be President Biden dissuading voters from going to vote, or a fake video of President Zelensky ordering Ukrainian troops to surrender. Another, related point, concerns the issue of fairness. As time passes, AI systems become more embedded in our daily life. Major decisions with long lasting consequences - be they financial, medical, or civil - are slowly being taken by AI systems. This is, in part, due to an assumption that AI systems are necessarily always better than a human decision-maker (or, at the very least, cheaper!). However, this is not the case. While AI systems are better than human agents at examining vast amounts of data, it has been seen time and time again that AI systems replicate the same bias that is found in human agents (an excellent textbook example of this is of the COMPAS AI system employed in US law courts). 

There have been many long-standing concerns among philosophers and theologians about the general impact of technology and the machine age on modern life. Do you think the problems of AI are simply a continuation of these sorts of concerns or do you think it raises unique problems of its own?

In some sense, there is a continuation of certain issues. Technology is always framed in the perspective of ‘tools.’ Now we generally take certain rudimentary tools as being morally neutral. This means that the tools in themselves are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather it’s what a subject does with them (or by means of them) that would be morally good or bad. However, this argument becomes more complicated, and less clear once we begin to consider more complex tools – more complex technologies. In this sense, the discussion surrounding AI is just a continuation of the debate on the impact technology has on us.

But at the same time, as we have seen in the past with other technologies, novel tools tend to bring about novel challenges. A major novel challenge that AI is posing that we have not really been confronted with (at least not on this scale), is the possibility of AI replacing our interactions with other humans – especially when it comes to meaningful or important contexts relating to friendship, dating, therapy, and education, to mention a few. Are interactions with AI systems equivalent interactions with other human beings? And if not, how does this adversely affect us individually, and as a society?

I’d like to focus on two problems that might be raised by AI. The first is whether AI might raise issues regarding the creation of artificial persons, and the second is whether its use might damage the flourishing of existing human persons. Starting with the first problem, do you think there are any implications for our understanding of personhood that AI raises particularly for theology? For example, might we have to wrestle with whether artificial persons can be saved?

This is quite an important question – and one that, given my background, I tend to focus on greatly. And while this question might seem a bit far-fetched and theoretical at the moment, we can very easily imagine a not-too-distant future wherein the AI systems employed seem to be, for all intents and purposes, identical to the way we reason and feel. What do we do then? Should such AI systems be accorded the same rights we have? Affirming that such AI systems are indeed persons like you or me might also imply that, as you mentioned, they could or should also be saved.

Theologically speaking, we tie the concept of personhood, and the dignity that we enjoy, with the fact that we are created in the ‘image of God’. We have normally expressed this biblical phrase in terms of abilities that we can do (as in CCC §357) and which no other animal can. But what if an AI system were to be able to have these same abilities (assuming that such a system would not be simply imitating these abilities, but genuinely performing them)? The Incarnation might also have something to tell us here. Christ took on this particular form – this human, organic body. Does this mean that to be in the ‘image of God’, necessarily implies having an organic, flesh-and-blood body? This is not entirely clear to me.

Let me be clear, I am not implying that the AI systems we have today should be considered as persons (or are even conscious). Furthermore, I have significant reservations about whether or not this might be possible. However, what is sure is that these questions will be raised, and we need to have the theological and philosophical arguments to confront them.

Turning to the second problem, a worry that seems to be common is that AI might become too intelligent for our own good, with the takeover by Skynet in the Terminator films being a popular representation of this. Do you think that this is a real worry and is there anything that might be done to mitigate this threat? 

While I would not categorically exclude this possibility, I don’t think this should be a major cause for panic – at least not presently anyway. On the contrary, instead of worrying about rogue AI, I think we should be more concerned about AI being used for malevolent means by what are termed as ‘bad actors’ – individuals who make use of AI tools in order to advance a harmful agenda. We should also be worrying about the great power such a few companies yield in this area, and about the lack of legislation to safeguard against the abuse of such tools.  

As well as the ‘big issues’, two of which I’ve just mentioned, there are many smaller but still important issues raised by AI which are of perhaps more immediate concern. One example of a more immediate threat is the way that assumptions unconsciously or consciously built into algorithms controlling AI can result in issues of social justice, for example, in discrimination against minority groups. Moreover, because AI is being developed and applied by experts with little moral or political accountability, there is a danger of such control being exercised against the common good. Do you think this sort of injustice is a real problem and, if so, are there any possible insights that Catholic social teaching can bring as to how this problem might be mitigated?

As mentioned above, these are the more pressing issues that we should actually be worrying about and doing something about. The COMPAS case is an excellent example of a racial bias. Furthermore, while AI has its benefits, there is also a real risk that such tools may further exacerbate the already present inequalities present in our societies. Catholic social teaching has many points that can be helpful in these cases, from issues relating to labour, to the environment, to what Pope Francis is repeatedly referring to as the ‘technological paradigm.’ However, I’d just like to highlight one principle in particular – subsidiarity. The use of AI tools, if not done properly, has the possibility of further centralising power and decision-making, thus affecting the autonomy of individuals and of smaller community groups. We must be guard against this and ensure that AI remains a tool that does not enslave, but that liberates.

A further but more hopeful opportunity that AI seems to be presenting just now is the expansion of cheap educational tools. Do you think that the Catholic Church might find opportunities here particularly for catechesis? 

Yes! While of course not discarding the importance of human relationships and interactions, especially in the important activity of transmitting the faith, AI can serve a role in this area too. A particular project that I’m contributing on does precisely this – Magisterium AI. This is a LLM that is able to answer questions related to the faith by referencing a vast number of magisterial texts, along with writings from patristic authors, Doctors of the Church and other saints and theologians. It’s being constantly updated, and is a great tool, not only for individuals who would like to know more about the faith, but also for pastoral workers, and researchers alike.

Overall, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of AI?

As Catholics we are always invited to be hopeful. The Lord has endowed us with many gifts and talents to use, to look after the planet, to build God’s kingdom of love, and to ultimately be united with Him. Problems and challenges will always present themselves, but I believe that the desire for good and truth that is placed in the heart of every human being will ultimately prevail and lead us forward.

Could you recommend to our readers any sources for exploring AI and Catholicism further?

            In January, the Pope published two messages relating to AI that merit reading – the Message for the World Day of Peace, as well as the Message for the World Day of Social Communication. Furthermore, a number of Dicasteries within the Holy See are working tirelessly on this area. Most notably the AI Research Group within the Dicastery of Culture and Education. Their recent publication called ‘Encountering AI’ (which can be freely downloaded) is a great resource. This is apart from an ever-increasing number of Catholic academics who are also publishing writings on this issue.

*This was a written interview sent via email to Fr Gové.

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This upcoming month we are celebrating the Canterbury Tales. It may not be a subject that trips off the tongue when considering Catholicism in 21st Century Scotland, however the Tales are timeless and not only enjoyable, ask the same hard hitting and deeply affective questions we do today; as Catholics we can see in his work, as Dryden so famously said, ‘Gods plenty’. We will cover this subject into November as well but begin this week as the anniversary of Chaucers death was on the 25th October.

As part of our offering over the next month we have a Chaucer expert writing for us, Paul Strohm; Proffessor Emeritus of the Humanties at Columbia University and previously the J.R.R Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles on the man himself and his works.

Many people tried to spend the UK COVID lockdowns in positive ways. I made all sorts of resolutions, but the only one I really kept was to read The Canterbury Tales for the first time. You’ll see in detail what I made of it below, but I’d strongly recommend Scottish Catholics to try and engage with Chaucer as a way of getting to grips with what lived Catholicism was like in Britain before the Reformation: a complex mixture of different personalities, different vocations, sex and the sacred, and all wonderfully vibrant and human. And nothing like the modern caricature of a Christian society.

I’m not sure if this was the best method, but I ‘read’ The Canterbury Tales generally by listening to an audio version which, although it varied from reader to reader, tended to keep to the original Middle English text, but only lightly followed the original pronunciation. I followed the reading in the Middle English text and then re-read it in modern English, concentrating on those bits I didn’t really understand in the original text.

So, first of all, congratulate me! I feel it was a bit of an achievement, which is one of the worries I’m going to address in this piece: Why did I feel it was a bit of a chore, with a sense that I was constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting applause for that chore?

Chaucer has lain in the background of my life as a classic of English literature. (That’s part of what classics are: they lie around in the landscape, whether or not we actually visit them very much. The status of classic marks a cultural work as worthwhile, even if we yet aren’t quite ready to appreciate it.) But two things, besides the competitive, cultural target setting of the COVID period, drove me on finally to read him. First, having become a Catholic about twenty years ago, it’s hard to avoid the thought that the Middle Ages need to be treated seriously as the last time Britain had a coherent Catholic culture. Chaucer is one way into that thought, and, having read much of Chesterton including Chesterton on Chaucer a good few years ago, Chaucer also seemed likely to be a particularly Catholic form of that encounter. Second, having developed an interest in mediaeval theology and philosophy over the years, I constantly struggled to get inside the mediaeval head (if such a thing exists). I remember in particular one student asking me to recommend one book that would help her do this: I floundered, thought about suggesting the (as yet unread) Chaucer, but thought better of it. I would like to do better the next time I encounter a similar question.

So here I am: three years or so later and finally Chaucered. It went pretty well. I enjoyed quite a lot of it in a fairly uncomplicated way. I enjoyed that lurching from high thought to low humour. But it was an effort and now, afterwards, I keep wondering whether I did really enjoy it and whether I would really recommend this experience to someone else.

I’m going to try and answer those questions by starting with the question: Why read old books at all? Chaucer’s Middle English is certainly more of a barrier than Shakespeare’s Early Modern English, but manageable in a way that Beowulf’s Old English is not. But there is going to be some linguistic effort involved if we are to tackle Chaucer. Is it worth it? Let’s say that we read old books because of a complex blend of the familiar and the foreign: the oldness of a book in terms of its culture and its language forces us beyond what surrounds us and confronts us with possibilities of humanity that surprise or even shock us. We need that shock because otherwise we too easily sit within the fantasies of the modern entertainment world: we all think like this, and only monsters like them do not. But beyond this needful shock of the unfamiliar, there is the echo of familiarity, even that familiarity of half-forgotten and half-glimpsed beginnings which makes works like Chaucer’s necessary to us in a way that, say, Chinese literature of a millennium ago, however worthwhile, normally is not. During the Second World War, the high literature of Chaucer and Shakespeare was familiar enough to cinemagoers to allow the viewers of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale or Olivier’s Henry V to identify them at least as symbols of something that was essential to their lives and something worth fighting for. For a conservative mind that sees a culture as an organic growth, in Edmund Burke’s words, ‘a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born’, or in Chesterton’s, ‘the democracy of the dead’, to cut oneself off from a cultural root such as Chaucer is to cut oneself off from fully understanding even more recent generations such as that of the Second World War and, indeed, ourselves.

For Catholics, the case for effort in overcoming the strangeness of Chaucer is even more pressing. For us, Chaucer has sometimes been deliberately used to block our own self-understanding: to peel away those deceits about him and his times is to peel away barriers to our own selves. For the Protestant and then secularised interpretation of Chaucer is that Chaucer is immersed in the Middle Ages and thus in darkness. He lives in a theocracy and hence we can explain the longueurs of his ‘Parson’s Sermon’. (So why read him?) Or at best he represents the first stirrings of the rejection of repressive, celibate, priestly, Latin culture, and its replacement by Protestantism or, better still, our Enlightened freedom. (So why read the accounts of an old battle? It’s done.)  But here’s an alternative view. As Chesterton puts it:

It was of the very life of the ancient civilization, Pagan as well as Christian, from which medievalism drew its deep and strange type of strength, that it was rooted in very varied realities; that it had made a cosmos out of a chaos of experiences; that it knew what was positive and could yet allow for what was really relative; that its Christ was shared by God and Man; that its government was shared by God and Caesar: that its philosophers made a bridge between faith and reason, between freedom and fatalism; and that its moralists warned men alike against presumption and despair. Only by understanding all that ten times complicated sort of complication, can we see how Geoffrey Chaucer could find life so simple.

For Chesterton, the essence of mediaeval culture is that it finds a balance between apparently competing realities. Among our twenty-first century obsessions, we might note especially a balance between sex and religion, and between seriousness and humour. It would be rather bold to claim that Chaucer (or mediaeval Christendom in general) resolved these tensions, but it is clear even from a cursory reading of the texts that he lived with them in a way that is profoundly different from how we attempt to. And we often read literature to find a fresh landscape within which a different life and sensibility can be glimpsed rather than to find solutions.

Reading Chaucer isn’t always going to be easy and will require effort, as is proper with a classic, to live with it. But there is a desperate need to escape from the modern entertainment monoculture and that’s inevitably going to discomfort us. Indeed, isn’t it typically modern to expect entertainment (rather than studying) to be easy? Reading Chaucer is something I’d recommend as a lifetime’s adventure. I think it’s probably going to repay the effort and enough readers over the centuries have agreed with me to make that gambling of effort a plausible bet. If I were to attempt a perhaps overly neat ending, reading The Canterbury Tales is itself a sort of pilgrimage, as though:            

The holy blissful martyr for to seek

                That them hath holpen when that they were sick.

By Stephen Watt

Saints of the week:

Please go to www.maryswell.net/novembersaints for all our local Scottish saints.

Pope Benedict XVI said, “the parish is a beacon that radiates the light of the faith and thus responds to the deepest and truest desires of the human heart, giving meaning and hope to the lives of individuals and families”. 1 The Parish at it’s most basic is a territorial area within a Diocesan boundary under the authority of the Bishop, who, through that authority empowers Priests to administer the sacraments and provide pastoral care. For most of us it is the building, one dedicated Priest and the Catholics in that area. However, is the Parish system fit for purpose in the 21st Century? In different Dioceses throughout Scotland we have seen amalgamations and closures and commonly now we find a number of Parishes run by one Priest, and a Deacon if your lucky. However their is still no joined up discussion or consultation on how we as a Church handle all the constraints within God’s overall plan for our nation. Hopefully with the Synod we will have this discussion but for now, it is interesting to look at how certain denominations within Protestantism who are facing similar issues have dealt with it.

This week we move our focus to the Church of England and ask Alison Milbank, Vicar, lecturer, author and one of the key proponents of Save the Parish to write about what is happening there. We did ask someone from the other side of this debate in the C of E to comment but they declined to write. However if your interested look up CCX which has worked to come up with new expressions and ways of doing Church.

To contextualise this for us, frequent contributor Stephen Watt comments on Alison Milbank’s article and how we should begin asking how we might look at our own Parish system.

In this week’s Coracle I have asked Stephen Watt to review an article by Antonio Garcia Martinez who decided to convert to Judaism. What was interesting about this conversion was how he claimed the ‘secularized sequel to Christianity’ secular liberalism had driven him to it and also away from Catholicism. I felt that his points were genuine questions to reflect on and ponder for though you can see the idea’s of the victim and the apocalypse within liberalism (for him it is best seen in woke culture); only Catholicism can bring hope, and forgiveness, not the nihilism and desperation that underlines so much our societies thinking. Below is the link to Garcia’s original article, which Stephen predominantly reviewed.

The Pull Request

Why Judaism?

There is the first post in a two-part series on ‘Why Judaism?’ The second installation is here…

Read more

5 years ago · 90 likes · 25 comments · Antonio García Martínez

The article, ‘The Moses Option’, can be found here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/the-moses-option (All quotes are from this unless otherwise indicated.)  Earlier articles on the theme can be found on his website.

Antonio García Martínez is a victim of the modern sport of ‘cancellation’, having been sacked from Apple as a result of writing a book, Chaos Monkeys, which was held to have violated the firm’s claim to have ‘always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace’.

It’s perhaps hardly surprising that his justification for his recent religious conversion seems to be to flee the chaos that many feel underlies such cancellations:

Public life in the West these days is a feverish cycle of figuring out which divine victim to elevate, and which world-saving millenarian “current thing” to embrace this week. It’s the secularized sequel to Christianity with all of the grace, chastity, and virtue stripped out leaving only the faith in a victim-prophet and in an imminent apocalypse that will right all wrongs and initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth.

What perhaps is more surprising is that this conversion has taken the form of a conversion from some sort of Catholicism (‘raised as I was inside the Cuban Catholic world of Miami’) to Judaism. I’m going to concentrate on one of his published pieces (‘The Moses Option’) detailing this change, although he has published others which I will refer to at times.

Although García Martínez doesn’t go into much detail on this so far as I can find, I get the impression of a lightly held Hispanic cultural Catholicism, quickly abandoned in adulthood in favour of a secular liberalism. That’s probably the biographical story, but there’s also a story about ideas and their failure: a secular liberalism that fails to deliver a viable account of human flourishing; and a Christianity that fails in at least two ways as a real alternative: firstly, by Christianity’s always containing within itself the virus of ‘the faith in a victim-prophet and in an imminent apocalypse that will right all wrongs and initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth’ which has led to the current crisis of modernity; and finally, a sort of ‘hyper-agnosticism’ which he characterises thus:

I hate the term ‘agnostic,’ as it seems a kind of half-assed skepticism that doesn’t want to go all the way to nihilist atheism. My position is more of a I don’t think the question [‘Do you believe in God?’] is even answerable, so why bother asking? [From ‘Why Judaism -part II]

Most Catholics are probably not going to disagree with him on the vices of secular liberalism. But then it gets really interesting for me at least: why not Catholicism? At one point, he describes traditional Christianity and secular liberalism as being much of a muchness:

But the trad Christians and woke progressives don’t actually disagree on the dominant moral narrative for our lives, they simply disagree on who to cast in the starring role.

I take this as meaning that Christianity and liberalism put victimhood centre stage: either in the form of Christ and the martyrs (trad) or sexual or racial minorities (lib). And it’s this aspect of Christianity that does seem central to his avoidance of a return to Catholicism: that modernity simply reveals a fundamental problem within Christianity which is that of asserting victimhood and an excitable apocalypticism as the centre of a religious (or post Christian secularised) life. The other central reason for his avoidance of Christianity seems to be connected with naturalism: that the vibrantly supernatural and personal God of traditional Christianity simply isn’t tenable as a serious belief in modernity. Instead, Judaism as a religion which focuses on practice rather than belief provides a better alternative.

What then is a Catholic to make of these twin repulsive forces from Catholicism: firstly, a diagnosis that Christianity as a religion of ‘impossible moral demands’ which will always, ultimately, collapse itself (and is doing so in secular liberalism); and secondly, that it is a metaphysically false religion which is better replaced by a more epistemically modest emphasis on practice rather than dogmatic assertion? The first thing to say, I think, is that in modernity all religious belief looks a little improbable and all conversions a little arbitrary. I have written previously about the ‘buffered self’, Charles Taylor’s idea that the self of modernity is always peering out beyond its walls and trying to assess the beyond. In the context of morality and religion, we are always trying to find a personal finality on an understanding of the world that is essentially incomplete and veiled to our subjectivity: whatever we finally decide for ourselves, we know that such decisions could have gone otherwise and have done so for other people as wise or wiser than ourselves. Finally, I think there is a particular responsibility of being careful when dealing with relations between Judaism and Christianity. Vatican II has done much to heal the bloody history between Judaism and Catholicism, but the tensions remain and it’s important for Catholics to exercise particular care when dealing with them.

Bearing all that in mind, I’m glad that García Martínez is now worshipping our shared God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob rather than secular nothing. But I’m sorry he has rejected Catholicism because I think it’s a better choice and I hope he comes back to it. I find his attack on the centrality of the weak and the victim in Christianity ill-founded and hard to reconcile with the similar ethical drive of Judaism: isn’t it central to both Catholicism and Judaism to ‘[g]ive justice to the weak and the fatherless;/maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute’ (Psalm 81(82):3)? Many of our current problems are the result of the abandonment of forgiveness for past wrongs and a failure to see this world as a vale of tears. Secular liberalism may have emerged from Christianity, but because it is not Christianity it has abandoned those central Christian insights which allow wise use of such Christian principles that do remain. Moreover, if emphasis on victimhood gives Christianity a tendency to produce evil in the way of secular liberalism, an emphasis on power and vengeance produces obvious problems of its own. There is no quick route for escaping the power of demons: fresh ones are always waiting to move in.

Turning to what I have styled García Martínez’s ‘hyper-agnosticism’ about the existence of God (‘why bother asking?’) and emphasis on the practice of Judaism rather than belief, although this sort of claim about Judaism’s orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy is often made, it does seem to be one that’s particularly applicable to some forms of Judaism rather than others. My knowledge of Conservative Judaism (Masorti Judaism outwith North America) is admittedly heavily dependent on the Rabbi Small detective stories of Harry Kemelman, but this emphasis on practice rather than belief is a constant theme in them: it seems rather less characteristic of what you’ll find elsewhere in, say, Maimonides or Nachman of Breslov. Unless orthopraxis is backed up by some account as to why this or that burdensome practice is rooted in truth, it will fail to retain or attract. Perhaps as a result, even within Judaism, Conservative Judaism is a dwindling minority: the third largest denomination in the US and ‘[b]eyond North America, the movement has little presence’.

In short, García Martínez’s flight from secular liberalism is understandable and one with which many Catholics will sympathise. His adoption of Conservative Judaism rather than a return to Catholicism strikes me (what a surprise!) as less convincing. But in general, it’s hard to avoid that baffling opacity of religious conversions in modernity: at any conversion’s heart lies both an element of subjectivity and an element of grace that’s hard for an observer to do justice to.

Stephen Watt

Further reading and references:

García Martínez’s Wikipedia entry is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Garc%C3%ADa_Mart%C3%ADnez_(author)

The article, ‘The Moses Option’, can be found here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/the-moses-option (All quotes are from this unless otherwise indicated.)  Earlier articles on the theme can be found on his website:

and 

The Pull Request

Why Judaism?, part שני

There is the second post in a two-part series on ‘Why Judaism?’ The first installation is here…

Read more

5 years ago · 29 likes · 8 comments · Antonio García Martínez

I mention the Rabbi Small mysteries as an introduction to Conservative Judaism. I’d particularly recommend Conversations with Rabbi Small (1981) which, unlike the rest of the series, is intended more as a dialogue about the nature of Judaism rather than a novel. The quote and statistics about Conservative Judaism are from the Wikipedia article which can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Judaism .

Upcoming Scottish Saints Feast Days

30th August: St Aidan | d.615AD

1st September: St Murdoch | 8th or 9th Century?

1st September: St Giles | 8th or 9th Century

Please click on the links to find out more. You will be taken to www.maryswell.net that lists many of Scotland’s Saints by feast day throughout the year, you will also find Scottish prayer cards, a portion of the rosary in Scots, and other articles celebrating Catholicism in Scotland.

The reasons for a Catholic not to read the German philosopher Heidegger (1889-1976) are pretty obvious. Unless your life circumstances are such as to allow you a great deal of leisure, you will already have enough problems getting to grips with the depths of Catholicism to have much time or energy available to spend on a non (and even perhaps anti) Catholic philosopher. Moreover, Heidegger is extremely difficult to read and understand, and many have concluded that his obscurity conceals little of value. Finally, Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and elements of Nazism are claimed to be deeply embedded in his thought.  If you are going to invest time in intellectual exploration, why not pick a safer bet?

My answer to this rejection of Heidegger is going to be, roughly, that he helps you think more deeply. ‘What is thinking?’ is an excellent question and one that Heidegger asks explicitly in a course of lectures given in 1951-2. (One reason for reading Heidegger is that he raises excellent questions.) ‘Why should Catholics think and what should they think about?’ is also an excellent question even if Heidegger’s own life and thought suggests that he rejects Catholicism precisely on the grounds that it prevents thinking. Let’s start with this then. The common sense, secularised caricature of Catholicism is that it prevents thinking in at least two ways: first, by exercise of authority, it prioritises obedience and settled dogma especially for the laity over a lively and individual pursuit of truth; and second, to the extent it does offer tools for thinking, it has tended traditionally to offer ready-made systems such as Scholasticism which, while giving the illusion of thinking, instead get in the way of real thinking. (Both these criticisms have been internalised within the Church especially since Vatican II. Another reason for reading Heidegger: his direct influence -or at least what wider intellectual movements he reflects- have been at the root of many of the most important cultural changes in modernity.) This brings us to what I regard as the heart of Heidegger’s work: the attempt to recover reality (what he would call Being) from a covering up by systems of language and impoverished thought.  In his later work, Heidegger emphasises the restorative power of poetry and indeed generally seems in his often obscure language to be trying to create a philosophy which is poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his poem, God’s Grandeur, writes:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things

Hopkins’ concern that commerce and generations of human activity have obscured reality is one shared by Heidegger. In his essay, ‘The question concerning technology’ (1954), the way that modernity forces us to think about reality simply as a resource for production (as Heidegger terms it, a ‘standing-reserve’) and thus obscures that dearest freshness becomes an important theme. And yet Heidegger goes beyond a simple romantic rejection of technology and identifies it as one way we begin to get a deeper grasp of reality:

It is precisely in enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence – it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the essence of technology.

Thus the essential unfolding of technology harbours in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power.

I don’t claim to be able to explain every nuance of this, and one of my reasons in quoting this passage at length is to give a sense of what obscurity will meet you if you do decide to tackle Heidegger. But I hope bits do start to ‘come to light’ given what I have already said. There is a danger in technology that we just start to forget to see the world in the various ways we might engage with it (‘the danger of the surrender of his free essence’), replacing that with seeing it simply as a resource for profit. But without that temptation and the way that modernity has turned everything in our environment into pre-packaged answers (‘enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the ostensibly sole way of revealing’) we wouldn’t be presented with an opportunity to go deeper: only with the rise of an all-enveloping technology in modernity can we be forced to start to think properly about what precisely reality and our use of it is like (the ‘unfolding of technology harbours in itself…the possible rise of the saving power’). The obscurity of Heidegger’s language, like poetry, forces us beyond the clichés that make up what Heidegger calls the ‘chatter’ of modern life (another source of concealing reality). And yet, like poetry, there are resonant terms (‘the saving power’) which are striking and yet not quite understandable. Particularly resonant for theists no doubt, and particularly troubling for secularists to be reminded that, despite their enframing and chatter, the world still ‘will shine out like shining from shook foil’ (Hopkins again) even if we might struggle to put those resonant phrases into precise words.

If I had to summarise why I think Heidegger is worthwhile engaging with it would be in the way he identifies a danger (the concealment of reality) and offers paths in which that danger can be identified and fought. I gave three reasons for Catholics not reading Heidegger at the beginning of this article and have addressed the first two:  Heidegger is an extremely important thinker who offers help in addressing key problems in modernity. While some of his linguistic obscurity is avoidable, his overall strategy in reminding us of the importance of poetic language in exceeding what can be said transparently is, at the least, worth taking seriously. But what of the final point: that Heidegger’s thought is irredeemably tainted by his commitment to Nazism? That there was, at least for a time, a commitment to Nazism is undeniable. Other than complete rejection of Heidegger and his work, there have been various reactions to this. But one approach I’d emphasise is to note that Heidegger and his thought undoubtedly embodied many traits that were common to European and particularly German culture emerging from the nineteenth century, and that these were the precisely the traits that provided the soil and in part the content of Nazism: Nazism did not emerge from nowhere and did not disappear into nowhere.  For example, both Heidegger and Nazism clearly embody elements of Romanticism and folkist movements. Given that these were important elements in Nazism and that we know the results of Nazism in mass destruction and death, does this mean that Romanticism and folkism are necessarily entirely pernicious? Does that mean that anyone who remains influenced by such ideas is necessarily a Nazi? I can’t answer those questions, but simply raise them as points that really ought to be thought about more deeply. If there are worthwhile elements to Romanticism and folkism, then Heidegger is worth examining as a prime source of serious thinking about them. If there are no worthwhile elements in them, then Heidegger is still worth examining as a prime source of serious thinking about them because they must be understood before they are rejected. In any case, in a Scotland politically dominated by a nationalism which seems to reject traditional Romantic and folk influences in favour of a civic nationalism, while at the same time arguably relying on their covered-up influence, Heidegger may be a particularly important thinker to be grappled with.

By Stephen Watt

References and further reading:

An extract from the 1951-2 lectures on thinking can be found in David Farrell Krell (ed.) (1993) Basic Writings Martin Heidegger, London, Routledge, which I’d strongly recommend as the best introduction to actually reading Heidegger’s own works. It also contains the essay, ‘The question concerning technology’.

 Online sources for approaching Heidegger include:

Internet Encyclopedia article on Heidegger: https://iep.utm.edu/heidegge/

The review of Professor Judith Wolfe’s Heidegger and Theology https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-and-theology/  provides helpful hints for examining Heidegger important influence in modern theology further.

The upcoming Saints days are as follows:

St Walthen/Waltheof | 1160AD | Abbot of Melrose Abbey

3rd August

​

​St Berchan/Barochan | 6th Century

August 4th

​

St Angus | 6th Century

August 9th 

​

St Blaan of Bute | 6th Century

August 9th 

As I write this, Humza Yousaf has just won the leadership election for the Scottish National Party and will, in due course, be declared First Minister of Scotland. One of the most striking and yet unremarked features of the election was that the two leading candidates, among whom was the eventual winner, are committed members of monotheistic religions.

The contest undoubtedly did highlight issues relating to religious belief and its interaction with politics in a post-Christian society. But some of those issues are much older than the comparatively recent decline in organised religious practice. I found myself throughout much of the contest thinking about the Jewish, German-America political philosopher, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and his discussion of Islamic, Jewish and Christian mediaeval political philosophy as an important source for the relationship between politics, religion and philosophy. Strauss remains a controversial figure in the US, but in the UK, certainly in academic philosophy, he is more likely to be ignored: a highly critical article by a British expert in Classical philosophy, Myles Burnyeat, dismissed him as ‘a Sphinx without a secret’ and as having ‘no discernible influence in Britain at all’. Although this was written in 1985, I think it’s still a fair assessment of his actual academic reputation in the UK, although I think this reputation is mistaken.

For present purposes, there is no need to decide on Strauss’ abilities: I am much more interested in his focus. In essence, his central point is, in the words of Thomas L. Pangle, that we need to ‘ceaselessly compel ourselves to encounter the challenge of profound modes of thought that do not share our modern assumptions’. In particular, for questions of politics, an important element of these ‘profound modes of thought’ is to be found in the mediaeval Latin-Christian, Judaic and Islamic traditions of political philosophy, which in turn built on the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. If we do this, we will find a number of issues being highlighted which modernity tends to obscure. These issues will include the conflictual, but unavoidable nature of the relationship between philosophy, religion and politics.

A focus on the problematic relationship of religion and politics really ought not to need justification: during the SNP leadership contest, this was only too apparent. Attempts to spell out thoughtful, reasoned philosophical positions in both religious and political spaces are problematic. In religious spaces, they inevitably come up against the authorities of an institutional religion, that authority and its teaching based upon the certainties of revelation, as contrasted with the free exploration of the individual pursuit of wisdom. In political spaces, the need to speak to a wide variety of different people with different views and a limited capacity for rational debate again inevitably causes difficulties. However, for Strauss and the mediaeval thinkers he turns to for illumination, the solution is not to wish away any of these three elements or to distort them by forcing them to adopt the character of one of their competitors, but rather to acknowledge the ultimate irresolvable nature of these tensions. To bring this back to present day Scotland, it is not at all surprising that candidates with a strong religious faith find it difficult to express the values of those faiths, still less their deeper philosophical underpinnings, in a political space of soundbites and ratings grabbing outrage. There might be ways of ameliorating these tensions, but there is no way of avoiding them entirely.

Catholics should need little encouragement to find much of the above of immediate interest. The Middle Ages, as the high point of Latin Christendom, unavoidably exercise a disproportionate claim on our imaginations. Scottish Catholics in particular are surrounded by the ruins, literal and metaphorical, of a once glorious, and now romanticised, mediaeval kingdom. More generally, the intellectual edifice of Scholasticism, especially in the form of the theological philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas remains of intellectual importance to us and to many others. But with this compelling vision come its own dangers: if we once had this Cockaigne of a perfect, frictionless polity, why do we need to seek insights from a babble of conflicting mediaeval voices rather than going ad fontes themselves? Why go to Strauss rather than not directly to Aquinas? The answer to that lies partly in the nature of modernity in Scotland, and partly in the nature of the nature of that original mediaeval synthesis. Whatever we might learn from the mediaeval thinkers, we do not live in that mediaeval period: there is a greater variability and diversity in Scotland, not least from the decline in the social and political influence of Catholicism or even Calvinism. So our (and Strauss’) understanding of the clashes between religion, politics and philosophy will not be exactly those of the mediaeval period, and our application of the lessons learned from those clashes cannot be either. But emphasising more strongly the actual polyphonic nature of discussions in the Middle Ages is both a better preparation for the diversity of late modernity, and also a better preparation for Catholicism in knowing how to deal with it.

Put simply then, what might be the main lessons we learn if, following Strauss, we look back at mediaeval thinkers such as Al-Farabi (c.870-951) and Maimonides (1138-1204), both of whom are heavily influenced by Plato? Here are some possibilities. Philosophy -by which we roughly mean the individual pursuit of wisdom wherever it leads us- is an essential pursuit for human well-being, but will only be performed by few. They will live in jeopardy in both religious worlds and political ones, and will communicate their teachings in ways in which, when expressed publicly, will make use of obscure language and expression to conceal their content from many, but allow some to pick up their intent. Anyone watching politicians and others trying to be honest about what they believe whilst at the same time finding a form of words that does not trigger a Twitter mob will sense the difficulty here.  Religion will express great truths in a symbolic form suitable for more people than philosophy, but may also express truths that go beyond philosophy and rely on revelation. In either case, there will be a tension with philosophy and politics, on the one hand by the need to impose institutional religious authority on spheres which naturally reject it, but also because of the failure of those spheres to acknowledge their own limitations. The tendency in modern Scotland, particularly in its media, to focus only on the most trivial daily business of party politics, rather than the permanent things which underlie and ultimately challenge them, reveals this difficulty. Finally, religion, as involving in part at least a faith commitment to revealed truth, does have difficulty in engaging with politics, particularly in its modern, democratic form. Essentially, if we have a variety of opinions within a society, firmly held, but not easily open to the sort of quick, superficial challenge that modern politics inevitably involves, there is a tension. However, that is a tension common to many viewpoints in the modern world, not just those of institutionalised religions. One lesson we can take from Strauss and his mediaeval sources is that such a tension cannot be wished away or driven out with force or ‘facts and evidence’, but instead has to be lived with uncomfortably through a variety of stratagems including reticence, an emphasis on civility rather than right think, and perhaps above all a recognition that perfection of this life is but an inadequate image of the life to come.

By Stephen Watt

Sources and further reading:

The quote from Thomas L. Pangle is taken from his introduction to:

Pangle, T.L. (ed.) (1989) The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

This collection of essays and lectures by Strauss is an excellent starting point to exploring his thought.

Myles Burnyeat’s essay, ‘Sphinx without a secret’, appeared in the 30 May 1985 issue of The New York Review. An archived version of this can be found here: https://archive.ph/v0Ls0

Online sources for further study of Strauss include:

Batnitzky, Leora, "Leo Strauss", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), (available online https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/strauss-leo/ ).

Priou, Alex (2023) ‘Leo Strauss and the possibility of political wisdom’, in Public Discourse, 22 March (available online https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/03/88012/?fbclid=IwAR19cRTSU5_jmTV2ur47-XsvDROw6XBxcnIURWQ1uyIwodsKdc64nWP8HOc ).

Servant Leadership Course: Begins 19th April

Led by Dr Sue Price, Director of Pastoral Outreach, Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology and Eric Hanna, founder of Mary's Well and Editor of the online Scottish Catholic magazine; St Moluag's Coracle. 

This will be a time of reflection, considering how the servant leadership model supports and develops parish ministries. Each session will last 1 hour, be reflective in its approach and will include some journaling homework. 

Session 1: Apr 19, 2023 07:00 pm Online via zoom.

This session will introduce the idea of servant leadership, and that we are called to be Servants of God through our Baptismal Vocation of being Prophet, Priest and King.

​Session 2: May 17, 2023 7:00 pm Online via zoom.

This session will use scripture to explore how as Servants of God, we need to listen to the still, small voice.

​Session 3: Jun 21, 2023 7:00 pm Online via zoom.

In this session we will begin to explore the idea of a Servant-King and what that may mean for parishes.

​Session 4: Sep 13, 2023 7:00 pm Online via zoom.  In this session we will consider what it means to be Servant-Priests within a Parish. 

​Session 5: Oct 18, 2023 7:00 pm Online via zoom.  This session will be considering what it means to be a Servant-Prophet within a parish setting.

​Session 6: Nov 15, 2023 7:00 pm In person – led by Eric Hanna. 

This session will be an evaluation of all that has been learnt through the previous sessions, an opportunity to re-new Baptismal vows and vocation of being called to be Servants of God as Prophets, Priests and Kings and a celebration. The in-person event will happen within the Highland Deanery of the Diocese of Aberdeen but for those who cannot make it due to distance or time we will set-up a camera so you can at least participate in some of it. 

​Cost:

You are asked to pay £8 per session for the five online sessions totalling a very reasonable £40 for the entire course. You can pay upfront or pay by month. The last session is in person and you will not be asked to pay for that.  

​To book: 

Use the form below, or email: theteam@stmoluagscoracle.com. We will send you the relevant information and how to pay. Once we receive payment you will get a Zoom link.

Dr Sue Price: works for the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge.  Her role as Director of Pastoral Outreach involves working with parishes and schools, providing training, retreats and input that supports their work and mission.  For more information on the Margaret Beaufort Institute please follow the link.  

https://www.mbit.cam.ac.uk/

Dear Church of Scotland

From what I can see from an accumulation of articles and social media postings, the Church of Scotland is in the throes of closing large numbers of churches including many historic buildings. The essence of the crisis appears fairly simple. Active membership of the Church of Scotland has plummeted over the years. The Church of Scotland has inherited large numbers of buildings both from earlier periods of much larger attendance, and also from the creation and then healing of various schisms within Presbyterianism which have resulted in large numbers of buildings from the previously separate churches being found in very close proximity. With this longstanding problem increased by a precipitous drop in congregations as a result of COVID, the Church of Scotland has had to take dramatic action in order to ensure its financial viability. As is the way with many churches facing the inevitable decisions consequent upon secularisation, you have presented this in terms of increasing your missional capacity for the future. However, the underlying reality is more prosaic: the need to reduce expenditure in the face of reduced income.

I don't know what you should do about this. With an increasingly secularised Scotland, it is impossible for churches to maintain their existing buildings and other fixed costs. This is a problem common to most denominations in Scotland and not just the Church of Scotland. However, the Church of Scotland as historically the National Church has within its charge far more historic and culturally significant buildings then most other denominations within the country. And so, if you walk around Scotland just now, you'll see many redundant and increasingly neglected church buildings with the promise of many more to come. But why does this matter to someone who is not a member of your Church?

A Church of Scotland spokesman was reported as saying that the Kirk is not a ‘heritage society’. In one sense that's true: your primary task is not to look after old buildings. But in another sense, it seems wrong: if you are the inheritor of significant cultural assets you have responsibilities to those assets and to the nation of which they are an important cultural heritage whether you like it or not. Whilst I'm sure that any decisions about church closures are being made with some attempt to preserve important cultural heritage, it's hard not to conclude from the published statements I've seen that such decisions result from a contrast between a desire to preach Christ to Scotland and maintaining out of date buildings. It’s that supposed opposition between preaching Christ and the maintenance of religious heritage that I want to focus on and question here.

Aristotle in his Ethics talks about the existence of two sorts of good life: the life of contemplation of divine things and the life of political activity. He is sufficiently vague about what these both entail and the relationship between them to have generated a small industry of scholarly comment on these subjects. However, the very acknowledgement that any well-functioning society needs in some way to pay attention to the contemplation of what may also be called the permanent things is something that strikes me as both true and almost invariably overlooked in modern Scottish political discussions. Churches themselves often seem oblivious to the empirical fact of secularisation and the academic literature around it. Too often churches seem to believe that, with a bit more effort around congregational mission, a long term process of secularisation in Western Europe will suddenly be reversed. So while I understand the Church of Scotland’s focus on how you will maintain congregational life and missions to gather more into those congregations in a time of deep financial crisis, I'd like to switch my attention to how churches will relate effectively to those who are likely to remain outside the boundaries of institutionalised religion in the foreseeable future. In other words, how do churches and in this case the Church of Scotland relate to those who still feel the human call to contemplation of the permanent things or, if you prefer, spirituality, when for various reasons they find themselves unable to partake in a more structured Christian religious membership?

If you look at the state of the unchurched or ‘nones’ in post Christian Western Europe, very few of them identify with hard-line materialist atheism. Instead, many who have become estranged from formal religion have maintained an awareness of the transcendent in the form of values such as the sacred or the beautiful and pursued these through an interest in the arts, walking in nature or visiting heritage sites. One of the things so familiar in the Scottish townscape, so familiar indeed as to become almost invisible, is the presence of monumentally and architecturally striking churches even in the smallest and least attractive villages and towns. You will very often come across a number of striking church buildings towering above their neighbours with an impressive spire or tower. If nothing else, the abandonment and demolition of such buildings would impoverish our architectural environment: we will see less beauty. We will also lose that daily contact with how our ancestors struggled with the permanent things reflected in these buildings. So apart from beauty and monumentality in the service of spiritual values rather than the towers of glass representing the financial services industry, a great deal of the church architecture of Scotland embodies the virtue of pietas or piety which is the respect owed from one generation to its predecessors and their values. 

Whilst there is a great deal more to be said about the nature of these transcendent values, enough have been sketched out here to explain at least initially what might be lost if, as seems almost certain, there is a massive abandonment of church buildings within a very short frame of time. In essence this will be a public performance of a denial of interest in contemplation and spirituality that neither represents the reality of secularised Scotland nor an aspiration the majority of Scots would endorse.

So that's the dilemma: the financial reality of the impossibility of leaving things as they are against the desirability of maintaining such buildings as a witness to spiritual values. I frankly don't know how to resolve this dilemma. Local efforts are sometimes made to retain church buildings in community use. Some buildings will survive functioning as domestic homes, carpet warehouses or some other secular function. Some will be demolished. The very least I would like is a deeper national conversation about what is happening in the face of the Church of Scotland's unilateral decision to abandon large numbers of its buildings. There is almost no reflection in political or even church spaces about what life is like in a secularised but not unspiritual Scotland. Too often such reflection as exists is dominated by Christians who are always waiting for a sudden reversal of decline or by the extreme fringes of destructive humanism which sees secularisation simply as the desirable removal of Christianity. Even for those of us who are fully committed to institutionalised religion have a stake in ensuring that the atmosphere in which we live in Scotland is one of spiritual exploration and interest in contemplation of divine things rather than one that is actively hostile to it. Given that perspective, the mission to bring people to Jesus is not easily separable from being a ‘heritage society’ when that heritage is ensuring that the permanent things of beauty, sacredness and pietas survive in a public form.

So, Church of Scotland, I sympathise with the financial dilemma you’re in. But if you claim to be the National Church, you need to act more as the trustee of our built spiritual heritage rather than as the organisers of a closing down sale.

With best wishes

Stephen Watt

Further reading:

The most comprehensive article on the position in the whole of Scotland I have found is:

Dick Sandra. ‘Dwindling congregations leave Church of Scotland with a different mission’, The Herald, 10 December 2022. (Available online: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-herald-1130/20221210/281956021824947 )

An online search will quickly bring up a host of articles on local closures. For example:

Clarke, Debbie. ‘Save our churches: campaigns launched after closure threat hangs over 50 Fife buildings’, Fife Today, 28 April 2022. (Available online: https://www.fifetoday.co.uk/news/people/save-our-churches-campaigns-launched-after-closure-threat-hangs-over-50-fife-buildings-3671226 )

A Scottish Conversion Story

Connor Stephen recounts his journey of faith, from New Atheism through neo-paganism and finally into the Catholic Church.

St Moluag's Coracle

A Scottish Conversion Story

Christ’s Passion calls us all to faith Pax in Christi. I am a fairly recent convert to the faith, with my baptism happening in April 2021. How I got here is a winding road of failure to find satisfaction with life until encountering Christ and His Passion through prayer…

Read more

3 years ago · St Moluag's Coracle

Brecht’s aphorism from the Life of Galileo, ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes’, gestures at familiar realities: the cult of heroes is manipulated by authority to create obedience; and that cult invariably covers up the vices and flaws of some all too human figures in order to create those heroes. The secularised will doubtless carry such suspicions over to our saints, but Brecht’s justified cynicism about national heroes is a reminder that the recognition of saints is inseparable from the supernatural status of both saint and the process of canonisation. Canonisation proclaims that a Catholic is holy (sanctus). The saint is primarily a model of theōsis or divinisation, a model of being close to God in heaven, and thus enjoying their supernatural end, as evidenced in part by the performance of a miracle through their intercession.

Nevertheless, human beings have always taken other human beings as models. In part, that’s because we are social animals with hierarchies and authority figures within those hierarchies. It’s worth pausing for a little while here and thinking about C.S. Lewis’s conceit of ‘talking beasts’ in his Narnia books: the granting of the powers of speech and reason to animals other than social apes like ourselves. Although the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein boldly proclaimed that, ‘If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him’, there’s no reason to believe that this is completely true. As a social mammal, lions and apes share quite a lot of common concerns at least as far as our natural purposes in life are concerned. Certainly, the lion would be mystified by much of our talk, and we might also struggle to appreciate the finer joys of hunting raw meat. But anyone who has kept a dog or cat as a pet would expect some meeting of minds between a talking lion and a talking ape. Compare this with, say, a talking crocodile, a creature which does not care for its young and which does not establish social relationships. Whatever understanding might be obtained with such a creature, it would be considerably less than we might expect with a talking lion or similar social mammal.

So one of the reasons why it’s important to hold up living and dead human beings as models is that we, as social animals, have a natural tendency to become attached to other humans and to follow them. We may also be attached to ideas and theories and symbols, but an attachment to human beings remains at least as important if not more important than an attachment to these relative abstractions.

Another reason why human beings as models are irreplaceable by more abstract values is that there is something not easily articulated about the virtues of a successful human being. For example, although both Plato and Aristotle think that good laws play a role in passing on the good life to others, both also think that good people are sources of authority which cannot simply be replaced by laws. Plato is perhaps clearest about this in his dialogue the Statesman when he argues that: 

[T]he best thing is not that the laws be in power, but that the man who is wise and of kingly nature be ruler… Because law could never, by determining exactly what is noblest and most just for one and all, enjoin upon them that which is best. [294a-b]

Though laws may be a good alternative, there is a loss in the absence of the living wisdom of the wise person. By holding up a wise person as a model for our lives, we gain an insight into that virtue of wisdom when it goes beyond what can be articulated in general principles.

Whatever Brecht’s suspicion of the hero, modern societies lurch from his cynicism to blind, emotional adoration. The ‘fan’ is a character which it is difficult to envisage in anything other than the modern world, with its curious mixture of obsessive erotic attachment, triviality of object, and dependence on a crafted representation in the mass media. Scotland’s heroes -at least according to the Hall of Heroes in the Wallace Monument- are a mixture of the known, forgotten and unsuitable: Robert the Bruce, George Buchanan, John Knox, Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, Robert Tannahill, Adam Smith, James Watt, Sir Walter Scott, William Murdoch, Sir David Brewster, Thomas Carlyle, Hugh Miller, Thomas Chalmers, David Livingstone, W. E. Gladstone, Maggie Keswick Jencks and Mary Slessor. 

What can we conclude from all this? Modern Scotland, just like all societies, needs its human models. But there is something about modern societies that distrusts such heroes even while it craves them and creates totally unsuitable figures for admiration. Perhaps only the truly sacred can shine through such confusion.

By Stephen Watt

Image: 1971 Berliner Ensemble production; Brechts Life of Galileo; Wikipedia.

The following is something of a jeu d’esprit: what might Roger Scruton, conservative, Anglican and English, have thought if he had been conservative, Catholic and Scottish?

There is a serious purpose behind such a fantasy which is to try and sketch out what a Scrutonian conservatism might look like in Scotland, and how that might relate to Scottish Catholicism. That might strike some readers as scarcely less ridiculous than the original question. Even those sympathetic to explorations of Scottish politics and culture might regard Scruton’s version of conservatism as woefully unsuited to Scotland (or perhaps anywhere else), and especially unsuited to the rather progressive nature of both Scottish Catholicism in particular and Catholicism in general. So this article is going to have two parts. First, I’ll argue for the general interest of Scruton’s actual views, not necessarily because they are correct, but because they do contain a thoughtful account of a conservative approach to life and religion that really ought to be a voice in any deep discussion of humanity, and particularly in a Scotland which too often has indulged itself in simplistic slogans about opposing Tory Scum and being progressive. Second, having argued for the importance of Scruton’s conservative vision, at least as one element in a dialogue around politics and culture, I’ll start to imagine what the key elements of such a general vision might be like if applied to modern Scotland.

So what are the main elements of Scruton’s philosophy and why do they deserve serious consideration? First, a warning: if the second part of this article is in danger of descending into fantasy, the first part runs the risk of a descent into under-evidenced assertion. Part of the difficulty in trying to summarise Scruton’s views is that they have been expressed in a variety of forms over the years -fiction, academic publications, journalism - and also in ways that became increasingly conversational and occasional over his life. Trying to extract and summarise an overall vision from such a maelstrom of thoughts is difficult and one that would, in order to be fully adequate, require careful evidence from his writings. Instead, I’m going simply to state what I take to be the main elements of his approach, and hope that they will be recognisable enough to be accepted as at least a possible interpretation of them. With that warning in mind, let’s try and summarise his views and then argue that they deserve serious consideration.

Scruton strikes me as having three aspects to his work. There is a coherent, philosophical approach to society and culture that focuses on the creation of an imaginative Lebenswelt (life world) by each national culture and the importance of those worlds to human flourishing. Then there is the identification and exploration of Englishness as a particular Lebenswelt with an increasing emphasis on the Common Law and the Church of England as essential elements of that structure. Finally, there is a reflection on the way the transcendent appears in human life, particularly in beauty and the sacred. I’ll take each of these three aspects in turn, starting with the Lebenswelt.

For a philosopher who often seemed to be trying to turn himself into an English country squire, Scruton had a distinct interest in and sympathy for some rather continental approaches, particularly that of German Idealism. Kant is often mentioned by Scruton as a key source of his ideas especially regarding a broad distinction between the world of science and objects and the world of human creativity and freedom. For Scruton, that world of freedom is at least in part culturally constructed and hence fragile: what it is to live well as a free, intelligent human being will vary from culture to culture, will be constructed by the laws and arts and religions of those cultures, and, as a construction, is liable to damage unless it is understood and maintained. Architecture, in which Scruton had a continuous interest throughout his career, serves as a key element in human flourishing both literally and metaphorically: we in fact spend much of our lives surrounded by architecture and it’s therefore going to be a key element in how we live and feel; metaphorically, we live in a constructed cultural Lebenswelt which shelters us and is liable to collapse unless repaired.

Turning from the Lebenswelt to the exploration of a specific cultural form, that of Englishness, Scruton is usually very careful to distinguish Englishness from Britishness. This led him, quite predictably, to favour Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum:

I would vote for English independence, as a step towards strengthening the friendship between our countries. It was thanks to independence that the Americans were able at last to confess to their attachment to the old country, and to come to our aid in two world wars. Independence is what real friendship requires. And the same is true for those, like the Scots and the English, who live side by side.

The sense of an organic form of a culture which needs to be respected and worked with rather than overturned in favour of some universalised understanding of justice is an approach familiar from German Idealists such as Hegel, but also from the more familiar conservative thinker, Edmund Burke. For Scruton, key institutions which maintained this English form of life were the English Common Law and the Church of England.

Finally, there is the direct exploration of how the transcendent qualities of beauty and the sacred enter our lives. One of the ways in which Scruton explores these qualities is through the work of Wagner:  

In other words, [for Wagner] religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols. Through art, therefore, we decipher the mystery that religion conceals, which is the mystery of sacred thing […] Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable myths.

Having laid out the essentials of Scruton’s views, what might emerge if we imagine them applied to Scotland? Certainly, there would be the existence of a certain Scottish Lebenswelt, a way of imagining and constructing the world from a Scottish perspective. And I think that this is the most important suggestion to be drawn from the current exercise: that there are national cultures which need to be reflected on and from within, and that this is something that needs to be done whatever one’s political views about independence. If key elements of English culture are the legal system and the Church of England according to Scruton, then Scottish culture is necessarily different from English culture and this needs to be faced up to whatever judgments you come to about the institutions that might best politically reflect those differences. Certainly, the separate existence of Scots Law as an important element in Scottish society has been a standing claim since the Act of Union, but what precisely that might mean is something less predictable. Finally, there is the Church of Scotland. While Catholics can hardly be exactly happy about the religious situation since 1560, and the Church of Scotland currently seems to be in some sort of death spiral, Presbyterian Christianity has been  a major part of Scottish culture since the sixteenth century. A mature engagement with this fact rather than the dismissal of our religious institutions as best forgotten with no place in a progressive, very secular Scotland would be welcome.

There are elements of Scruton’s views which, even for a conservative Catholic, should be indigestible: his understanding of religion, which at times seems to suggest it is nothing more than a useful fiction, is clearly inadequate. But even for more progressive Catholics, his challenge as a thoughtful proponent of the importance of culture, history and national identity ought to be welcome, not because his views are necessarily correct, but because, amongst much else, they take seriously aspects such as beauty and the sacred which, though fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the world, are nowadays rarely mentioned in polite Scottish conversation.

By Stephen Watt

Quotes from works by Scruton:

A Point of View: Should the English have a say on Scottish independence? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26173128

Wagner and German Idealism https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/275-wagner-and-german-idealism