I confess that I felt a bit of trepidation when Lady Scruton invited me to address the 2022 cohort of students at the summer school that Sir Roger founded before his lamented death, while also being deeply sensible of the honour. The title of my lecture was “Beauty and the Divine”. Like Moses before the burning bush in Exodus, I wondered whether I would need to remove the shoes from my feet, as if I, too, were standing on holy ground.
To touch on beauty is also to touch on the divine, and to consider the divine is also to consider beauty. Both are possessed of elements of transcendence, intangibility and immutability with which I needed to engage to produce some kind of coherent whole. It was a daunting prospect, but in the end any worry was misplaced. My audience – made up of young and not-so-young philosophy enthus-iasts – was kind and receptive, and we enjoyed a fruitful seminar discussion afterwards, not to mention a very jolly dinner.
One point from my preparation still echoes above the others: Scruton’s conclusions, in the context of architecture, about the importance of what he called “the awareness of purpose” in the exercise of judgement. “It raises, for us, the root question of theology, namely, what purpose does this beauty serve?” My mind was thrown back 20 years to an undergraduate paper called “Christian Art & Architecture”, the lectures for which opened my eyes to the way in which eternal truths can be expressed in and through beautiful things.
In the course of my studies I encountered William Durandus, who was born in about 1230 and died in 1296. We can be certain about the latter date because by then he was Bishop of Mende, in what is now Occitanie in southern France. Durandus was a prominent canon lawyer who studied at Bologna and taught at Modena before his erudition attracted the attention first of Pope Clement IV and then of Gregory X, who made him his secretary. One of his most enduring works is his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, of about 1285.
The title roughly translates as “an explanation of the purposes of things pertaining to the divine”. Purposes again, then, and back to Scruton’s question: “What purpose does this beauty serve?” Durandus set out to answer that question centuries before it had received the Scrutonian treatment; his was the age of high-Gothic art and architecture, and he simply applied the question to what he saw in front of him. For Durandus every feature of the building was imbued with significance that spoke to those who entered.
“The glass windows in a church are Holy Scriptures, which expel the wind and the rain, that is all things hurtful, but transmit the light of the true Sun, that is, God, into the hearts of the faithful …
“By the lattice work of the windows, we understand the prophets or other obscure teachers of the Church Militant: in which windows there are often two shafts, signifying the two precepts of charity, or because the apostles were sent out to preach two and two.
“The door of the church is Christ: according to the saying in the Gospel, ‘I am the door’ … The piers of the church are bishops and doctors: who specially sustain the Church of God by their doctrine … the bases of the columns are the apostolic bishops, who support the frame of the whole church. The capitals of the piers are the opinions of the bishops and doctors … the pavement of the church is the foundation of our faith … [and] represents the multitude by whose labours the Church is sustained.”
Perhaps Durandus laid it on a bit thick; nevertheless, he managed to seek out and elucidate that all-important purpose. He linked beauty to the divine by drawing out the message of a building set aside for the worship of his transcendent, intangible, and immutable God; in doing so he guided those on a quest to understand further the relationship between beauty and the divine forces that inspire it.
Where Durandus led, others followed. Augustus Welby Pugin, 600 years later, contrasted what he regarded as the ancient glories of medieval architecture with the tired neo-Classicism of the public buildings of the industrial Victorian cities of his day. He argued loudly that Gothic was the best form of Christian architecture because it was able to provide exactly the sort of conduits to which Durandus had alluded centuries earlier; there was symbolism and meaning in every aspect and detail of its construction.
Pugin was a devout Catholic; dying young in 1852, he did not have to reckon with certain ham-fisted interpretations of Sacrosanctum Concilium which wrecked some of his finest work – although, to be fair, the Luftwaffe also helped. Perhaps he was right about Gothic; perhaps he was not. Either way, it is desperately sad to see what was perpetrated in some cases by a fatal combination of philistinism, sledgehammers and indifference. If only those responsible had had Roger Scruton to guide them, and his mantra that “the beautiful and the sacred are adjacent”.
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