‘The Face of God’: What Does It Mean to Search for the Divine?
A review of ‘The Face of God’, by Roger Scruton; Continuum, 2014.
The Gifford Lectures ‘promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God’. They were set up in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford, at the four ancient universities of Scotland: St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. To be asked to give a Gifford Lecture is an honour: previous speakers include Hannah Arendt, Rowan Williams, John Dewey, Charles Taylor and Hilary Putnam. They also include Roger Scruton, whose 2010 lecture, The Face of God, was adapted as a book of the same name.
The book deals with the question, what does it mean to search for God in an increasingly secular world? Scruton does not mount an argument for the existence of God, which at any rate has been done to death, but rather explores the importance (or non-importance) of religious belief in an age of scientific rationalism. What he aims to show is that belief in God benefits the individual and society, namely by providing and grounding meaning, a system of ethics and a community.
Scruton starts by asserting that we live in an age in which we have raised scientific inquiry above spiritual understanding. Few of us in the West would deny this. But science cannot meet all human needs, especially those connected to meaning and moral purpose. Drawing on art, music and philosophy, he suggests that the idea of God is essential to human experience: ‘Art and the sacred both address us with a sense of the “transcendent” — an experience of meaning and purpose beyond the immediate’. To try to prove the existence of God is to misunderstand the nature of what we are dealing with. The divine is not provable; it is, as Rupert Shortt puts it in his elegant book of the same name, ‘no thing’. It is something we experience, like art or music or love.
But science cannot meet all human needs, especially those connected to meaning and moral purpose.
Religion, Scruton argues, gives us a way to relate to each other and the world we inhabit. He advances this idea through the idea of ‘the face’. The face is a symbol of human connection, trust and vulnerability. It ‘invites us to acknowledge the other as both vulnerable and as a moral subject’. In the face of the other, we perceive her personhood: that she is not an animal, moved by the laws of cause and effect, but someone, who makes choices and provides reasons for doing so. We cannot prove her personhood, in the same way that we cannot prove the existence of God. Her face calls on us to treat as a person. The face is a portal for understanding how we might see God: not as something ‘out there’, but as an idea intertwined with our experiences of each other as moral beings. ‘To recognise the face of God is to recognise the sacredness of the other, the absolute demand for respect.’
To make his case, he leans on the notion of the sacred, a quality he sees as disappearing from a society obsessed with material and empirical proof. He describes the sacred as ‘that which forbids certain kinds of questions and interpretations,’ a part of human life that defies purely rational examination. And he goes further, mounting an argument that the sacred is the basis of moral order, providing meaning and limits that protect human dignity. To see see something as sacred means prizing it for reasons beyond utility, refusing to objectify it, and treating it with respect. The sacred acts as a ‘protective boundary’ around certain aspects of our existence: human life, personal relationships, family bonds, or even religious rituals. We must honour these to maintain a moral and humane order. Without reverence for the sacred, Scruton argues, we are apt to treat people as mere means to an end—the reverse of the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative.
The book is short but ranges over numerous fields, and thus has the feel of a work of cultural analysis as much as one of philosophy. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the relationship between God, the sacred, and the human person, moving fluidly between the abstract and the concrete. He reflects on art and beauty which, immune to purely scientific interpretation, are pathways to understanding the divine. Naturally it helps if you have some familiarity with the Western tradition of art, music and literature, but it is not essential to find some value in his examples.
The book is short but ranges over numerous fields.
Writing as he does for a secular audience in a secular age, such a philosopher’s task—if his book is even entertained in the first place—is to make his argument at least to some extent relevant. Relevance is an overrated quality, but when the ruling mood is one of scepticism, some respect for where one finds his reader, so to speak, is needed. Scruton attempts this by avoiding any real discussing of doctrinal faith, the faith of the Catholic or Muslim. He frames his argument more around aesthetics and ethics, that is to say, theories of value. What he gains by broadening out his discussion he risks losing in a sea of vagueness. On a generous reading one would say that Scruton is deliberately indefinite so as to let the reader discover the meaning of what he says in her own experience. After all, to paraphrase Augustine, if you grasp it, it isn’t God.
Those who are familiar with Scruton’s work will also perceive his own discomfort with his subject. Scruton was always highly intellectual on the subject of God, saying that he had ‘worked his way back’ from atheism and ‘found a place for the God-idea’, which is hardly a ringing expression of personal conviction. For this reason there is something aloof about the way in which Scruton discusses God, or the idea of God. His God is ‘the God of the philosophers’, not that which stirs the hearts of ordinary people. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to you, reader.
The Face of God is a rewarding read for those who are open at least to the God-idea. It is made more so by the rich fund of artistic allusions and references Scruton makes. In the end, he leaves the reader with the powerful suggestion that to see the personhood in the other, that is, to see ‘the face of God’, is an essential path to meaning, compassion and moral death. To recognise, often in a flash, that we inhabit not just a world of facts—the realm of science—but a world of meanings—the realm of religion and philosophy—to recognise that you, reader, and I are persons, not things; to recognise that the idea of God is, at bottom, bound up with that non-empirical, unprovable, yet deeply felt experience—that can be profound, liberating and—dare I say it?—life-changing.
