At the beginning of his thoughtful and erudite new book, Conservatism and Grace, Sebastian Morello writes, “When it seems that every facet of our civilisational inheritance is derided, the burdensome imperative for the conservative is that of making a positive case for conservatism.” Morello challenges the commonplace view that conservatism is a mere “tradition of self-criticism within liberalism” by recovering “the oft-felt and commonly observed connection between conservatism and religion.” Religion for Morello is much more than a vague and amorphous attentiveness to inwardness, or interiority. It requires a vigorous “spiritual and moral vision of the human person,” and deference to the just and merciful sovereignty of God. Morello’s approach is at once political, philosophical, and theological—unequivocally counter-liberal without being ideological or unduly ‘activist’ in character. He sets out to delineate what he calls “a deeply anti-rationalist, non-ideological approach, that is profoundly sensitive to the contextual, relative, particular, historically conditioned, reality of humankind, instantiated in nations, territories, familial associations, and epochs.” At the same time, Morello acknowledges enduring universal truths tied to classical wisdom, to “a broadly religious anthropology,” and to conservatism rightly understood. There is thus nothing relativistic about his rich and compelling defense of civilization along broadly conservative lines.
There are three connecting threads that tie together the book as a whole: a sympathetic but not uncritical dialogue with the late Roger Scruton (Morello’s mentor and doctoral advisor) about the inherent connection between religion and conservatism; a careful examination of “conservative arguments for religion by establishment” made in distinct but overlapping ways by Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre; and, with the help of the later writings of Roger Scruton, a rich articulation of human beings as persons, subjects always to be understood in relation to other persons and to the Divine Person who is Creator and Moral Governor of the universe.
Conservatism so understood draws on the wisdom inherent in tradition without succumbing to mere traditionalism. Only when conservatism acknowledges the givenness of things, and thus the transformative effects of grace freely bestowed, can it truly sustain and renew a civilization fitting for persons endowed with free will but always under the benign—and just—judgment of God. Conservatism so understood combines political sociology and political philosophy with a political theology that is sensitive to the requirements of prudence and particularity informed by truths and goods that are never merely relative. If the Enlightenment, in its unalloyed forms, aimed to liberate the human will from salutary restraints and the superintendence of the Good, the conservatism that arose in response to the French Revolution self-consciously aims to recover the subordination of the human will to truth and goodness. It recognizes that the ends and purposes that ought to inform the exercise of human freedom are in no essential respect invented by human beings.
From secular conservatism to personalism
The first part of the book equitably explores the secular case made for a conservative society. The arguments of Anthony Quinton and other secular conservative theorists are treated with respect but are ultimately found wanting. Morello is much more sympathetic to the argument of the American conservative theorist and writer Russell Kirk, who identifies conservatism with the affirmation of permanent moral truths, inseparable from a broadly religious context and a theistic affirmation. Kirk argued, in fidelity to his great inspiration Edmund Burke, that the “conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.”
As Morello demonstrates, Scruton stands somewhere between Quinton’s secular conservatism and Kirk’s religious-minded traditionalism. In his early writings, particularly 1979’s The Meaning of Conservatism, written during what he once half-seriously called his “atheist apprenticeship,” Scruton vigorously defended the natural and civic pieties—the “transcendent obligations”—as inseparable from the “sacred” that “are widely felt to be bound up with a religious viewpoint.” But Morello formulates the position of the younger Scruton as observing that those things that are “bound up in the human psyche … are not essentially connected.”
In his earlier articulations of the relationship between conservatism and religion, Scruton (in a way that is self-consciously indebted to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim), comes close to divinizing or sacralizing societal bonds as the true source of “transcendent” obligation. Such an approach hardly does justice to transcendence or the sacred in any way that escapes what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame.”
In the 1980s, in works like Sexual Desire, Scruton would begin to move in the direction of a personalism that is appreciably closer to a more traditional Christian affirmation. Beginning in these years, he made a strenuous case that the ‘Great Commission’ (“Go forth to all the nations…”) and the other evangelical requirements of Christian discipleship could be lived, and lived well, within a political community that is secular and non-confessional, but still largely indebted to a Christian account of human personhood and moral obligation. Scruton’s account of transcendence gradually became markedly less sociological, less Durkheimian. The English philosopher even made somewhat strained efforts to argue that “the sundering of Church and State” was “explicitly endorsed by Jesus Christ in his teaching on rendering to Caesar ‘the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’” Of course, Christianity does not posit an authoritative political law that is integral to faith as such, unlike Islam and the Mosaic Law. It is not a theocratic religion or one that supports governance by priests or ecclesiastical officials. It honors the distinction between the sacred and temporal realms (a distinction formalized by Pope Gelasius I at the end of the 5th century). But does it, or its Founder, endorse secularism, or a non-religious state per se? That is a harder sell.
Morello does a splendid job of capturing the nuances of Scruton’s position even as it was evolving in new directions. Scruton came to affirm the non-reducibility of the Transcendentals—the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—to anything other than themselves. He rejected the conceit that settlement, loyalty, and the full range of our moral and civic obligations were primarily the product of contract and consent. Like Burke, the only contract he truly affirmed (besides legal ones) was the great primordial contract between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born. This was a ‘contract’ built upon enduring truths and traditions, one that looked reverently upon the higher sources of holiness, trust, and loyalty. Scruton valued humane national loyalty as the essential glue, the connecting thread, of modern settlement and law, and rejected tribal and creedal sources as viable sources of social and political identification for modern man. He did so in part because he feared that the creedal fanaticism inherent in political Islam could tear apart a crucial aspect of the Western inheritance: constitutionalism and self-government under the rule of law.
At the same time, he respected ordinary Islamic piety, and saw decency and a quiet nobility in it. A fierce opponent of transnationalism and every attempt to weaken the “natural love of country” that sustains humane forms of political settlement, he called himself a patriot and not a nationalist. He despised any national affirmation tied to race or class or the hateful ideologies derived from them. His firm and abiding opposition to every form of ideological despotism was rooted in a Burkean respect for our civilized inheritance, a deep-seated appreciation of the ImagoDeiimprinted in the human soul, and the accompanying irreducibility of personhood to something other than itself. These insights were rooted in Christianity and Kantian philosophy, and in his own experience of the totalitarian negation of the soul when he worked diligently, and with some real risk to himself, with the intellectual underground in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech lands in the 1980s.
Beyond scientism and scapegoating
As a sympathetically critical reader of the work of the French social theorist René Girard, Scruton, freed from his atheistic apprenticeship, came to see that Christianity put an end (both in principle, and largely in practice) to the ‘scapegoating’ of innocent victims in the bloody sacrificial rituals that were central to pagan societies. As Morello points out, that theme had already been richly adumbrated by Joseph de Maistre in his writings responding to the eruption of human willfulness in the French Revolution, culminating in the Revolutionary Terror of 1792-1794. By 1986, in his great essay “The Philosopher on Dover Beach,” Scruton had arrived unequivocally at the view that “without the sacred,” understood capaciously and not sociologically or immanentistically, human beings find themselves bereft in a depersonalized world: “a world where all is permitted, and where nothing has absolute value.” In that essay, brimming with eloquence and a vigorous determination to defend the integrity of the ensouled human person, Scruton took aim at the “hubris which leads us to believe that science has the answer to all our questions, that we are nothing but dying animals and that the meaning of life is merely self-affirmation, or at best the pursuit of some collective, all-embracing and all-too-human goal—this reckless superstition contains already the punishment of those who succumb to it.”
Here we hear the voice of the mature Scruton, full and unalloyed, his key convictions on eloquent display. The forceful critic of the nihilistic ‘culture of repudiation’ also came to see repentance and the sacramental act of penance as necessary steps in the restoration of relations of love and mutual accountability among human beings. Without remorse and atonement, without the desire for forgiveness and the opening of oneself to God’s grace, human beings find themselves trapped in a world without judgment or love. As Scruton writes, “When Calvin removed penance from the list of sacraments, he made the first and fatal step towards the de-Christianization of the world.”
Edmund Burke: providence and prudence
The Anglo-Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke is the second of Morello’s great interlocutors. His reading of Burke is that he is neither a utilitarian nor a pragmatist, however prudent or conservative. Skeptical of apriori approaches in politics, of politics transformed into ersatz metaphysics, he nonetheless articulated what the Burke scholar Samuel Burgess has called “a teleological account of both man and the state, which is to say that he saw them as created by God for specific ends.” Morello’s Burke is a partisan of the primordial “partnership through time.” He is also a champion of natural law and of “providential politics,” although both are incorporated into a politics of prudence that refracts the unchangeable law in light of particular political and historical circumstances.
In this connection, Morello perhaps understates the ways in which the primacy of prudence localizes the natural moral law for Burke, historicizing it without negating its genuine universality. Conversely, in the best pages of his discussion of Burke’s thought and statecraft, Morello shows that the French Revolution revealed the crude and cruel face of “Atheism by Establishment,” as Burke so suggestively called it in the LettersonaRegicidePeace. When the revolutionary secular religion reigns, as it did in France in the 1790s, the Moral Governor of the World is mocked and repudiated, the Church and its ministers are subject to unstinting persecution marked by unspeakable “vices and crimes [that] have no parallel amongst men.” A benign religion of “social benevolence, and of individual self- denial” (Christianity) is replaced by a secular religion at once impious and blasphemous. At best, authentic religion is barely tolerated while its eventual abolition is prepared.
In contrast, Burke defended a Christian religion that honors Divine Providence and safeguards chivalric codes that, in Peter Stanlis’ words, “taught men to defend weakness in every station of life, without inquiry as to moral status or regard to personal merit.” Against atheism by establishment, Burke, an Anglican with no malice toward the Church of Rome, and a critic of Protestants who “protest” too much, supported an English-version of establishment by which “the state is consecrated and holy.” His Christian faith, neither latitudinarian nor merely instrumental to political ends or purposes, was more than ceremonial, without being obtrusive or oppressive. Burke could not imagine English liberty, or civilized life worthy of the name, without a strong theonomic dimension. The great primordial contract and partnership in time is informed and protected by the efficacious Providence of God. Burke’s conservatism, like his Christianity, is marked by generous liberality, and by a fierce commitment to defend the things of the spirit that consecrate and elevate civilized human life.
Scruton and the second-person perspective
The early Scruton was a ceremonial integralist, who saw no problem with an essentially secular state, which could draw on Christian symbols and ceremonies to serve larger public purposes. While always respectful, and often admiring, toward his former teacher, in the final parts of the book Morello expertly shows how works like Sexual Desire, Green Philosophy, The Face of God, The Soul of the World and On Human Nature—all but the first belonging to the last stage of Scruton’s thought—articulate a rich anti-scientistic anthropology focused on the encounter of person with person. The initial, and always formative, encounter of embodied souls takes place when they look at each other “face to face.” The “primordial temptation” for human beings, according to Scruton, is to treat human beings as mere objects or things, rather than fellow human beings with whom we can live in communion. That is his secular version of original sin. In pornography and in the moral pollution that accompanies and informs it, personhood is deeply wounded and momentarily erased. We are left with body parts, understood and treated in a fetishistic and impersonal way.
Scruton insisted that there can be no “full human communication”—no communion, fidelity, loyalty, or mutual accountability—“if we treat all our relations as contractual.” A fully contractual world has no place for “the sacrificial and the sacramental,” for love, duty, friendship, or obligation understood in light of the High, and not of the lowest motives or the least common denominator. When obligations are reduced to mere contractual relations, reverence begins to erode—because the human encounter with the Divine Person is effaced as human beings are gradually effaced as persons.
Morello states this quite well when he writes that, “For Scruton, the presence of the human person and that of the Divine Person rise and fall together, and both can only be known in the I-You encounter.” God is to be found neither in fideism nor in rationalist or metaphysical abstractions, but in the “second-personal relatedness” that belongs to persons as such. In The Soul of the World, Scruton emphatically remarks that the “intentionality” at the heart of the I-You encounter “projects itself beyond the boundary of the natural world, and second, that in doing so recovers our religious need.” In the end, Scruton acknowledges that in closing ourselves off from God, human beings inevitably succumb to “alienation” and “deep disquiet.” These readily give rise to moral indifference, as well to brutishness, cruelty, and metaphysically mad ideological projects. Scruton, now the hero of the book, has reluctantly concluded that the second-person perspective is, in Morello’s words, “downstream from grace.”
Maistre’s assault on the emancipation of the will
In section three of the book, which precedes the final discussion of Scruton’s fully developed personalism sketched above, Morello turns to a more virulent, and less English, version of conservatism and religion “by establishment,” put forth in the counterrevolutionary writings of the Savoyard diplomat and political philosopher Joseph de Maistre. Maistre is among the greatest critics of the metaphysically mad project of human self-deification, of willfulness turned against both the sovereignty of God and the dignity of man. For him, self-will is a powerful chimera that upends the divine order of things and leads human beings to what the scholar Jack Lively called “perpetual frustration” and inevitable self-destruction. Maistre saw the pagan, pre-Christian world as a human world bereft of grace, one where “the sacrifice of human victims” was taken for granted as a necessary precondition of political order.
With the eruption of a French Revolution intent on dethroning God and valorizing the human will as the supreme guide to thought and action, Maistre believed a truly satanic rejection of the order of nature and grace would lead to “frenzied killings” rooted in “the frustrated natural impulse expressing itself diabolically.” To be sure, Maistre could wax poetic about the crucial civilizational role of the executor who dispensed with those guilty of heinous crimes. But Morello convincingly argues that Maistre’s entire moral and political project was aimed at protecting the truly innocent against an order of violence that distorted nature and self-consciously repudiated God’s saving grace. Despite fevered misrepresentations of Maistre as a forerunner of Fascism, his “whole theory,” in Morello’s words, “is advanced to argue for a Christian order as the ultimate way to minimize violence and protect the innocent.” There is genuine moderation and restraint under the Savoyard’s sometimes fiery rhetoric.
Morello presents an admirably balanced portrait of Maistre as a political, religious, and philosophical thinker. Perhaps surprisingly, he was an admirer of English liberty and a critic of theocracy and rule by churchmen and priests. In his famous book Du Pape (1819), Maistre celebrated the Holy Roman Pontiff as the spiritual figure who crucially brought together the temporal and spiritual realms without simply conflating them. But Maistre also saw the need to check papal power. He did not wish to make the pope a “universal monarch” with temporal rulers merely acting as the “pope’s representatives over the nations.” Yet so keen was Maistre in restraining the human willfulness unleashed by the tyranny and terror of the French Revolution at its peak, so concerned was he in de-fanging the totalitarianism implicit in the state as sovereign Leviathan and “mortal god” (as Thomas Hobbes strikingly called it), that he posited a Counter-Will, under God, to crush the revolutionary deification of Man as Man. Morello could have been more sensitive to the paradoxical willfulness that haunts Maistre’s entire theologico-political project.
Thus, for all his deference to tradition in works such as Considerations on France (1797), Maistre breaks with classical and Christian political wisdom by making the political art a mere extension of political sociology: rightly rejecting the remaking of societies by fiat, he denudes the statesman or legislator of the practical wisdom, or free will, that alone can judiciously meld conservation and reformation. The State, as he conceives it, risks becoming too willful (to counter revolutionary capriciousness, to be sure), while conservatism risks becoming mere slavish fidelity to preordained traditions and patterns of social organization. Maistre fiercely and eloquently opposed “the murder of God” (the phrase is Eric Voegelin’s) and wished to welcome that great “instrument of grace, the Church,” back into a political and social order rooted in enduring truths. There was no more determined enemy of the Revolution as a movement of diabolical repudiation. Yet, his conservatism lacked the high prudence that always informed Edmund Burke’s judgments. Paradoxically, in my view, he had imbibed too much of the revolutionary spirit that he rightly rejected. But it is impossible to reflect on the matrix of conservatism, revolution, and counter-revolution without coming to terms with Maistre’s crucial role as the counter-revolutionary par excellence.
Scruton and Maistre, prudence and grace
In the first half of the book, Morello keeps a healthy distance from Scruton’s secular conservatism, but it turns out to be not so secular after all. Now that Scruton has “returned to grace,” Morello acknowledges that, in secularized and de-Christianized societies, “there is a longstanding conservative custom of cooperating and collaborating with all ‘people of good will,’ and it is sensible for Christian conservatives to continue to adopt this attitude if they wish to see their cause succeed.” Thus, prudence and grace come together in a respectful, sometimes amiable, embrace. This reader is led to suggest that there are multiple prudent and principled paths between a maximalist understanding of “religion by establishment,” and increasingly dogmatic forms of secularism.
If Sebastian Morello’s book avoids the temptation to put forward a counter-ideology to combat the ideological subversion of reality, it remains unabashedly counter-revolutionary in a real and important way. It ably defends human nature and traditional patterns of settlement, loyalty, and humble reverence toward the Most High. It makes clear that only by receiving Creation as a gift can fallen men and women open themselves to the sacred as such. And, beyond defending human nature against those who wish to transform it by all-too-human coercive and destructive means, Morello compellingly argues that the authentic conservative must open himself to the grace which is the ultimate remedy for our human and modern discontents.
The “redemption and supernatural transformation of human nature” begins in this world and is infinitely distant from any activist, utopian, or ideological project. It is more of a mustard seed than a blueprint. Human imperfection and sinfulness will continue to mar all human projects and all efforts to build the Kingdom with human hands. At the conclusion of the book, Morello insists that the “remedy” that is supernatural grace “cannot be excluded from political life but must be at its heart.” This can perhaps be done in the form of Scruton’s more discreet affirmation of the second-person perspective open to God’s “transcendental subjectivity,” where “settlement, beauty, culture, even law and religion” point beyond themselves to religious concepts and affirmations such as “the sacred, holy, the sacrosanct and the inviolable.” Maistre’s fiery evocation of a sovereign political will or counter-will, blessed by the authority of God’s Church and determined to keep the willful project of human emancipation at bay, is another way of uniting conservatism and grace. Yet it almost certainly risks becoming capricious and ideological, fighting fire with fire, with all the dangers attendant to that risky enterprise—but that is my judgment more than Morello’s.
In the contest or choice between the two, Scruton’s more subdued and ‘English’ articulation of the quiet complicity of conservatism and grace can perhaps more effectively point the way past the wreckage left by several generations of unremitting repudiation. As his work so powerfully highlights, the path of gratitude, acceptance, and affirmation is the first step in lifting souls and political communities out of reckless civilizational and cultural negation. A world of persons is a world open to the gracious givenness of the created order.
This essay appears in the Winter 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 29:92-97.
