Post on 22-Feb-2023
Scruton’s Wagner on God, Salvation, and Eros
Introduction
Salvation arouses suspicion. It presupposes an
indefensible metaphysical framework. A soteriological
conception of the human telos commits us to something
whose existence is doubtful, beyond the world in which
we ‘live and move and have our being’. The usual
suspect is God, but it could equally be Good on a
suitably inflated interpretation.
Second, it compromises human fulfillment.
Soteriological models presuppose that we can be saved
only by ceasing to be human, because what we must be
united with, if we are to be saved, is not of this world,
and we can unite with it only by relinquishing this
world. We devalue human existence in favour of a
promised land, which turns out to be spurious. If to be
saved is to ascend to heaven, then we need to be saved
from human existence.
We might conclude that nothing we do can make any
soteriological difference. Humanity is the source of
the problem and, as such, cannot provide the solution.
We cannot save ourselves. Yet again we reach a
conclusion inimical to human fulfillment. Not merely
must we devalue human existence; we must acknowledge
incoherence in the very idea of a human realization of
the human telos.
1
If the human telos cannot be humanly realized, it
apparently follows that hope must come from without.
One obvious gloss is that we require God’s help. And
this could easily be taken to compromise our humanity
once more, by taking responsibility out of human hands
and displacing it into God’s. As Levinas said, ‘the
conditions for action and effort are annulled’ and
humanity is cast in the role of a helpless child. 1
The worries are familiar, but each move of this
attack can be questioned.2 We cannot assume that we have
a clear enough picture of God or Good to reject these
ideas out of hand. This response perhaps has more
weight in the case of Good, for everyone would allow
that this idea is central to an adequate conception of
the human telos. However, without a clear conception of
it, we cannot be sure that the Good is not of more
metaphysical weight than some of us are prepared to
shoulder, nor that it can be comprehended in non-
theological terms.
Is talk of salvation bound to take us away from this
world to a heavenly, non-human realm? Again, we must
tread carefully, and remember that interpretation of such
talk is hardly perspicuous. The commitment seems clear in
Plato’s scheme of things, in, e.g., Diotima’s
recommendation that we leave behind the ‘mass of
perishable rubbish’ which is the stuff of ordinary human
existence.3 And yes, we find a clear expression of this
idea in the Christian tradition, when Augustine bemoans
2
our tendency to ‘grovel’ in this world of flesh and blood
rather than aspiring towards the eternal bliss of union
with God. 4 However, we may be danger of distorting the
content of these accounts by interpreting them too
literally.5 There is more than one way of understanding
what it means to go to heaven or unite with God or Good,
and no immediate implication that we can fulfill these
aims only by relinquishing our humanity. 6 It could simply
be a fancy way of describing a fulfilled human existence.
Equally, there are interpretations of what it means to
grovel in the world of flesh and blood which do not imply
that redemption requires loss of humanity. It may simply
be that there are aspects of humanity which require to be
transcended, or controlled, if our telos is to be realized.
The idea that we should focus on what it is to
live a fulfilled human existence is important to
Levinas – hence his worries about those positions –
predominantly Christian, he believes - that view God as
a consoling father figure in the sky. He objects that
God’s nature is seriously compromised by this view, but
that it doesn’t follow that we must forsake all
reference to God. The point is simply that we must give
due weight to His transcendence and our own role in
securing our salvation: ‘Man is responsible for the
universe. He makes and unmakes worlds, elevates and
lowers them. God’s reign depends on me’. 7
Both Platonism and the Judeo-Christian tradition
insist on our taking seriously the possibility of some
3
kind of life after human life, even if it is a
possibility that we can barely comprehend. This will
raise the hackles of those who prefer to work within a
secular framework. But even if we do take seriously this
possibility, it need not imply that human existence is
something from which we need to be saved, nor that our
human efforts can make no difference.
Augustine notwithstanding, the Christian
tradition is packed with testimonies to the
soteriological significance of human existence and
action. St Paul concludes a discussion of the future
resurrection of the body as follows:
Therefore, my beloved ones, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because youknow that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.8
Abounding in the work of the Lord is no mere diversion
from the horrors of our all too human existence as we
await the promised land. Such work – our work - can
move us in the required direction, and transform this
world.9 This should give pause to those who assume that
salvation can be bought only at the cost of our
humanity. And, once we grant significance to what we do
and how we are as human beings, it becomes harder to
insist that salvation is out of our hands – as if we
need only sit back and wait for the promised heaven, no
strings attached and preferably all earthly strings
broken.
4
I shall examine a position which throws all these
issues into stark focus – the position advanced by
Roger Scruton in Death Devoted Heart. The theme of the book
is Wagner’s Tristan, and Scruton examines its
philosophical and soteriological presuppositions. He
has denied in conversation that he endorses Wagner’s
position, but there are significant overlaps with his
own philosophical and religious standpoint, and his
mode of presentation makes it difficult to situate him
with respect to the many voices in the discussion. My
own view is that Scruton is attracted to Wagner’s
position, but retains sympathy for the traditional
religious alternative. This tension is understandable
given the obscurities of the relevant options, and must
be acknowledged if we are to engage with the
philosophical issues. So it is this position that I shall
focus on – this peculiar amalgam of Wagner and Scruton
– and to avoid misidentification, I shall refer to its
author as ‘Scruton’s Wagner’.
Scruton’s Wagner on salvation
Scruton’s Wagner holds that we have a yearning for
redemption, and that this is a religious yearning, but
his religious faith is ‘shaky at best and scarcely
contained within the bounds of orthodox Christianity’.10
He sets out therefore to ‘discover a redemption that
needs no God to accomplish it’, and is ‘detached from
every promise of a life after death’.11 This redemption
5
is spelled out in three ways. It involves ‘a
transcendence of the world of appetite into the realm
of values’.12 It brings about ‘a changed perception of
the empirical world – a recognition that freedom really
does exist in this world and that we possess it’.13 And
it regains ‘the sacred in a world where sacrilege is
the prevailing danger’14.
Scruton’s Wagner distinguishes his position from
the ‘non-religious’ alternative wherein man ‘makes
himself’ only at the cost of desacralizing himself and
the world. He sees sacrilege as a perennial threat, and
cites Mircea Eliade’s definition of the ‘non-religious
man’: the non-religious man believes that the sacred is
‘the prime obstacle to his freedom’, and that he will
‘become himself only when he is totally demysticized.
He will not be truly free until he has killed the last
god’.15
So there are ways of ‘making oneself’ which lead
to a desacralization of man and his world.
Desacralization eliminates what is valuable and sacred,
and, given the contrast drawn between the world of
value and the world of appetite, we are to suppose that
a desacralized world is one where appetite reigns.
However, it is not a world in which freedom is entirely
lacking; the ‘non-religious’ man possesses freedom of a
sort, only he sees the sacred as an obstacle to his
freedom.
6
Talk of the sacred involves a concession to
religion, and we have heard already that the yearning
for redemption is a religious yearning. However,
Scruton’s Wagner resists spelling out these notions in
God-involving terms, which would make redemption ‘an
escape into another world in which the sufferings of
this one are finally compensated’.16 Man would thus be
propelled towards a life after human life, implying
that there can be no sacralizing of man and his world,
for these are things from which one has to escape. Nor
1 “A Religion for Adults”, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. SeanHand (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 15.2 Stephen Mulhall’s Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) discusses this with reference to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. 3 The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1951), 211c-212a.4 Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961) ,VIII, 8.5 John McDowell notes Plato’s ‘penchant for vividly realized pictorial presentations of his thought’ in his “Two Sorts of Naturalism”, Mind, Value, and Reality, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 177.6 Iris Murdoch argues that Diotima’s ‘ladder of love’ is a mythical representation of the journey we must take to full humanity in her Fire and the Sun (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977), 33. 7 “Judaism and Kenosis”, in In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B Smith (London: Continuum, 2007), 112. 8 I Corinthians 15.58.9 See Hugo Meynell, ‘Towards a theology of industrial man and society’, in The New Theology and Modern Theologians (London: Sheed &Ward, 1967), 105-116. 10 Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. All references will be to this work unless otherwise stated. 11 14.12 192.13 183.14 182. 15 182. The reference comes from Mirceal Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1987), 203.
7
could such a redemption be secured by human devices. As
Scruton’s Wagner puts it, it is God who redeems us from
our world.
On the preferred alternative, we can redeem
ourselves ‘without the aid of a god’, and redeem
ourselves in this world rather than from it. Hence, man
‘makes himself by sacrilizing himself, and…by sacrilizing
himself he also sacrilizes the world’.17 In this way
redemption consists in a ‘changed perception of the
empirical world’, a demonstration of its value.18
Some comments
Scruton’s Wagner denies that we need salvation from our
humanity. Rather, we require to be saved from our
appetites – hence, redemption involves a transcendence
of the world of appetite into the realm of value. The
idea that we are to transcend the world of appetite is
ill-defined as it stands, not merely because the notion
of appetite is unclear, but also because it is unclear
what kind of transcendence is needed. These unclarities
will become more evident as the argument proceeds. We
can, however, make some preliminary points. If we do
not require saving from our humanity, and if human
beings do have appetites, one might find a difficulty
in the idea that our appetites are to be transcended.
It would be absurd to suppose that we must transcend
16 183.17 182.18 183.
8
bodily appetites like hunger and thirst, for their
satisfaction is required if we are to continue to exist
and do the things which distinguish us from creatures
living a purely appetitive mode of existence –
creatures like cats and dogs.
Scruton’s Wagner does not recommend abstention
from eating and drinking. So the recommendation is not
that we transcend the world of appetite in this sense.
However, he is concerned with features that distinguish
us from cats and dogs, and will argue that one such
feature is our capacity to erotically love another
human being. Erotic love is significant to Scruton’s
Wagner because although it is irreducible to appetite,
he wishes to retain its essential connection with the
body and reject Plato’s view that one can realize the
true aim of eros only by transcending one’s embodiment.
All this ties up with his wish to define a
soteriological model which accommodates and redeems the
bodily rather than leaving it stranded and detached from
the whole human being. The idea that the bodily is to be
redeemed rather than rejected is important for
understanding what it might mean to transcend the world
of appetite. The bodily appetite in question is sexual
appetite, and the transcendence envisaged is not
abstinence but spiritualization: we may indulge sexual
appetites, but only in a spiritual way. The notion of
spiritualization must remain vague at this stage. But at
least it involves all the notions which must be in play
9
if there is to be genuine salvation. A spiritualized
appetite is not just appetite, and Scruton’s Wagner will
emphasise this by distinguishing between sexual desire
and sexual appetite: sexual desire retains an essential
bodily element, but it is distinct from mere bodily
appetite.
So Scruton’s Wagner readily accepts a
soteriological conception of the human telos provided
that it accommodates and redeems the bodily. However,
he remains alert to the worries which have led
philosophers to reject such a conception. His shaky
religious faith leads him to dispense with any
reference to God, and he believes in any case that a
God-involving soteriology is self-defeating: it
encourages us to devalue and bypass our humanity and
our world. These worries do not lead him to abandon
talk of soteriology – talk which is best translated
into talk about ‘sacrilizing’ self and world. He has no
reservations about describing his position as
‘religious’. As he puts it, his use of the term
‘redemption’ –a regaining of the sacred in a world
where sacrilege is the prevailing danger – restores its
true religious sense. We shall reject this conception
of the human telos only at the cost of retreating into a
‘non-religious’ alternative in which man ‘makes
himself’ only in proportion as he ‘desacralizes’ and
‘demystifies’ himself and world.
10
It should be clear from what I have said that
Scruton’s Wagner’s worry that a God-involving
soteriology encourages us to bypass and devalue our
humanity and the world is unfounded. Furthermore,
‘shaky religious faith’ is hardly a reason for
forsaking reference to God given that the boundaries of
the concept are so obscure. These obscurities come to
the fore when we recall his insistence that the
redemption he favours belongs to a properly religious
framework, and wonder whether he is simply rejecting a
false god, or, alternatively, aiming to articulate a
conception of religion shorn of reference to God. Lucy
Beckett adopts the second interpretation and objects:
The literal meaning of the world ‘religious’ is ‘firm-binding’ or ‘re-binding of the human to the divine. To cut the word loose from divinity, and fromtruth, and to use it for any experience that gives usthe subjective feeling that we are ‘in the presence of the sacred’ is either archly elitist….or actually dangerous. 19
Beckett’s account of the term ‘religion’ is
conjectural, the notions she deploys are questionable,
and, given that Scruton’s Wagner seeks a more
satisfactory conception of religion it cannot be
assumed that her criticism is justified. But we shall
find some evidence for her claims that the real theme
of Death-Devoted Heart is ‘idolatry, or the worship of what
19 “Scruton: Death-Devoted Heart – Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde”, Opera Today, 14 Jan, 2005.
11
is not God’,20 and that Scruton’s Wagner belongs to ‘the
tradition of moral vitalism’ in which ‘man in a
meaningless universe creates his values…rather than
discovering what is good’.
Erotic love, appetite, and desire
We inhabit a ‘morbidly unheroic world’, Scruton’s
Wagner complains. ‘We are tempted to live by rational
self-interest, judging everything – the sexual act
included – in terms of cost and benefit’. We have
exchanged ‘duty for pleasure and value for price’21, and
‘the truly human - the thing which invites redemption
and which may also achieve it’ – has ‘become hidden in
the clouds of appetite’.22 Hidden in the clouds of
appetite, ‘we have become habituated to forms of sexual
interest in which the person, the freedom, and the
virtue of the other are all irrelevant to the goal’. 23
These forms of sexual interest are ‘deeply insulting’,
‘and in every form they compromise not only the person
who addresses them but also the person addressed’.24
We have here a version of Augustine’s claims that
we grovel in the world of flesh and blood, that this
condition deeply compromises our humanity, but can be
overcome. Unspiritualised appetites did not emerge so
recently as Scruton’s perfect tenses suggest: it is not
20 Ibid.21 10-11.22 4.23 141.24 141.
12
only modern man who inhabits the clouds of appetite.
Cost-benefit calculation is perhaps more prevalent than
in Augustine’s day. But it is distinct from appetites.
Appetites may be indulged for pleasure rather than
money and, conversely, non-appetitive activities, such
as philosophy or poetry, may be pursued for a price.
The appetites which concern Scruton’s Wagner are
sexual, and it is no part of his position that we can
lift the clouds only by ceasing to be sexual beings.
The point is, rather, that we can do so by a form of
sexual interest which is irreducible to appetite, and
focuses on all the things which disappear at this
appetitive level – the person, the freedom, and the
virtue of both parties concerned. This form of interest
is erotic love.
It is obvious that sexual interest can take a
purely appetitive form. Nor is it outrageous to suggest
that, in such a form, it tends to bypass the other qua
person, satisfying its urges by any means available.
This provides a clear sense in which the humanity of
the other person is compromised: she becomes a mere
means for sexual satisfaction – somebody who delivers
the required goods, and whose status as a person
becomes irrelevant. As Kant says:
As soon as a person becomes an object of appetite foranother, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one’.25
13
Is the humanity of the person engaged in this
pursuit equally compromised? The case here is more
complex, for we need to distinguish between
dehumanizing a sex object in a particular case and
living a mode of existence focused exclusively on
satisfying one’s sexual urges. The first scenario has
no obvious impact on one’s humanity. One could
occasionally satisfy one’s sexual urges with others
without this compromising one’s humanity. Take the case
of Florentino in Love in the Time of Cholera. We are led to
suppose that his love for Fermina remains spiritually
chaste, but because she is unavailable to him he has
many ‘meaningless’ sexual encounters with other women.
There is no implication, however, that his humanity is
compromised. He has found a way of coming to terms with
an intolerable situation. Or consider the case of
someone who satisfies his sexual urges in an
inappropriate way, but also has deep friendships with
others. That it would be bad to ever do only x, does not
entail that it is bad to do x sometimes.
Nevertheless, there is something deeply
dehumanizing about a mode of existence focused
exclusively on satisfying sexual urges. As Levinas puts
it, there is more to a properly human existence than
‘the hunger one satisfies, the thirst one quenches, and
the senses one allays’. 26 This appetitive mode of
existence fails to accommodate the independent reality 25 Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (London: Methuen, 1930).
14
of the other person, and only by acknowledging this
reality can one enter the dimensions of the ethical,
and the properly human.27 Scruton’s Wagner concurs when
he refers to the freedom, selfhood, and personality
which distinguish us from the rest of nature, and which
we ignore only at the cost of degrading our humanity,
and by virtue of which we relate to one another in
moral terms.28
Where does erotic love fit in? Scruton’s Wagner
resists the temptation to view it as simply a bodily
appetite like hunger or thirst. Nor does he go to the
opposite extreme of insisting that sexual desire is a
mere stepping-stone in the ascent of the soul towards a
desire-less appreciation of the forms of Beauty and
Goodness. Each of these options contains an insight he
wishes to preserve, however. ‘Platonism’ captures the
insight that erotic love takes us beyond the realm of
bodily appetite to the realm of value, but it does so
at the cost of eliminating desiring and desired
embodied beings. It argues that such beings remain
excluded from value. Now if we accept that desiring and
desired embodied beings are essential ingredients in
any satisfactory conception of erotic love and if we
still comprehend them in purely appetitive terms, we
26 “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite”, in Adrian Pepersak: To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993), 114.27 Ibid.28 124.
15
are forced to conclude that erotic love is reducible to
bodily appetite.
Scruton’s Wagner displaces this either/or
framework, and one of his motives is to define a
conception of salvation which incorporates the bodily
and the spiritual. His aim is to defend a conception
of erotic love in which desiring and desired embodied
beings play an essential role. But these beings are no
longer viewed as mere bodies whose sexual behaviour is
dictated solely by appetite. They are embodied persons
whose capacity to erotically love another embodied
person raises them above ‘the generalizing transactions
of the body’. 29 In this way, the person in love ‘leaves
behind everything that is universal, replaceable,
transferable, or consumable’ so as to focus on the
‘irreplaceable incarnate subjectivity of the other’. 30
What does this focus involve? It cannot be
comprehended in appetitive terms, it involves an
essential element of sexual desire, and this desire
focuses on a particular person as embodied. The idea
that the desire focuses on a particular person as
embodied captures the sense in which one’s interest is
not just in any old body or bodily part, but in the
body of a particular person ‘in whom animal and self
exist in an inextricable unity’.31It is as an embodied
subject that the other is desired. It is for this
29 131.30 130.31 136-7.
16
reason that the face plays an important role in sexual
interest: ‘the face provides the picture of the other’s
subjectivity: it shines with the light of the self’.32
It does not:
(f)unction merely as a bodily part but as the whole person: the self is spread across its surface and there “made flesh”. Hence the significance of blushes, smiles, and glances, where ‘the body exalts and reveals the person, shows the subject in the object, and makes of that subject an object of desire– of the desire to be united with this person’.33
This contrasts with an excitement ‘that seeks to bypass
the complex negotiation of the face’ by, e.g.,
concentrating on the sexual organs. In so doing, it
‘voids desire of its intentionality and replaces it
with the pursuit of the sexual commodity, which can
always be had for a price’, returning us to a form of
sexual interest in which ‘the person, the freedom, and
the virtue of the other are all irrelevant to the
goal’.
Erotic love, possession, and the Good
The idea that the person, the freedom and the virtue of
the other are relevant to erotic love captures the sense
32 139. Compare Iris Murdoch: ‘Georgie’s so familiar face, close to mine, in repose at last, her big eyes gentle now, her mouth relaxed, resting from my kisses, was a beloved landscape. Without words we gazed and murmured into quietness, until it was as if we had talked in detail for a long time, so spiritual a thing is the human face’, The Severed Head (New York: Vintage, 2006), .91.33 141.
17
in which it operates within the realm of value –which
is important for its salvific significance. But how is
this to be understood? And can it be reconciled with a
feature of equal importance to Scruton’s Wagner, that
erotic love ‘notoriously bypasses moral judgment’? 34
The focus of erotic love is the embodied subject –
the incarnate person – and true desire is an
‘interpersonal feeling’ rather than the physical urge
which remains when the self is ‘driven from its
incarnation’ to become a mere body.35 Desire goes hand
in hand with respect for and commitment to the other,
an acknowledgement that the beloved is no mere
instrument of my will – no body or thing to be defined
purely in terms of sexual use.36 Rather, she is a ‘free
being bound by flesh’, one who is ‘special, precious,
and worthy of [my] exclusive care’ but who has the
power to refuse the love that is offered, or to
surrender to the ‘free giving of the self’ that we call
falling in love.37 It is in this sense that erotic love
is offered and received as a gift, a manifestation of
grace.38 The further claim, to which I shall return, is
that this enables us to understand the idea of the
sacred.39
So, erotic love involves a relation between free,
embodied selves, and such selves are worthy of care and34 157.35 146.36 146.37 150.38 156.39 152.
18
respect. It is value-involving. However, Scruton’s
Wagner insists also that it ‘notoriously bypasses moral
judgment’ 40 - a claim which, on the face of it,
threatens to compromise this account. The tension
becomes apparent in a discussion of the distinction
between friendship and erotic love. Friendship involves
comfort, help, and security, and your friend wants your
good. Erotic love involves distress, anxiety, and
danger, and your lover wants you rather than your good:
‘Its aim is to possess, to hold, to exclude; and its
object is neither the body of the beloved nor the soul.
It is the embodied person: the free being bound by
flesh’.41 That the person in love wants her beloved comes
as no surprise given the desire involved in erotic
love. But how is ‘possession’ to be understood? The
obvious way of taking it is to suppose that lover wants
her beloved in the way that she might want an ice-
cream. This would imply that such a relationship
bypasses moral judgment, but it would make the beloved
a mere object of appetite, and it is clear that
Scruton’s Wagner rejects this.
Levinas claims that possession cannot be
extricated from an appetitive model, and that we should
drop this vocabulary altogether.42 To ‘recognize its
exceptional place among relationships,’43 we must
40 157.41 153.42 Time and the Other, trans. Richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duequesne University Press, 1987), 88.43 Ibid.
19
distinguish eros from possession and power. Scruton’s
Wagner agrees that erotic love differs from possession
and power in this sense, and that it has an exceptional
place among relationships, hence his wish to identify
what is ‘special about erotic love, what sets it apart
from the other desires which besiege us in our everyday
existence’.44 Levinas justifies this exceptional place
by gesturing, as Scruton’s Wagner does, towards its
religious significance. It involves ‘a relationship
with alterity, with mystery’45:
(T)he caress does not know what it seeks. This ‘not knowing’, this fundamental disorder is the essential.It is like a game with something slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with what can become ours or us, but with something other,always other, always inaccessible, and always still to come.
The claim that erotic love is a relationship with
alterity discards the idea that it is simply possession
and power –which reduces the beloved to an instrument
of my will. The association between alterity and
mystery expresses Levinas’s belief that it is by
relating to others that we stand in a relation to God.46 However, this does not imply that God could ever be
an object of knowledge: ‘If one could possess, grasp,
and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing,
knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power’.47 The
44 133.45 Time and the Other, 88.
20
‘other’ in question is equally the human other, and it
is because of the inevitable mystery which surrounds
one’s relation to the human other, one’s relation to
God, and the relation between these two things, that
the caress does not know what it seeks.
One cannot but have a sense of déjà vu when
reading what Scruton’s Wagner says about the looks and
caresses of erotic love. They have a ‘metaphysical telos’
– a claim he spells out initially in terms of
possession: ‘They are an attempt to appropriate the
other’s body, to make that body your own – in short,
they are an attempt at possession.’ He adds:
The goal that I glimpse in desire is not of this world; no merely empirical transaction could possiblyfulfill it, since it would merely rearrange our bodies and not produce the substantial unity that I crave. Hence the courtly ideal of chastity: lovers faithfully joined, desirous of each other and feedingoff each other’s looks and caresses but never consummating their desire, so that it persists as an endless unsatisfied yearning, come as near as possible to their metaphysical goal, which is a unionin the transcendental with no correlate in the world of fact. 48
The idea that looks and caresses have a ‘metaphysical
telos’ suggests that the possession Scruton’s Wagner
has in mind is far removed from that involved in
satisfying bodily needs. This interpretation might be 46 See Richard A Cohen: Face to Face with Levinas (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 23.47 Time and the Other, 90.48 152.
21
thought to sit awkwardly with the claim that the lover
seeks to ‘appropriate the other’s body’, ‘to make that
body [her] own’, but it is borne out by the suggestion
that the goal I glimpse in desire is not of this world.
What does it mean to say that this goal is ‘not of
this world’? Scruton’s Wagner equates what is worldly
with what is factual, and what is factual with what is
empirical and bodily. In view of the contrast he draws
between appetite and sexual desire, ‘world’ surely
refers to the world of ‘carnal transactions’49, and
‘other-worldly’ refers to the dimension of reality
which incorporates value, personhood, and freedom – a
dimension to which we become responsive when we fall in
love.
Such a distinction carries no particular
metaphysical commitment. We recall, however, that
Scruton’s Wagner resists the implication that we can
achieve the true aim of erotic love only by abandoning
our embodied condition. Its aim can be realized in this
world by desiring embodied beings whose sexual
behaviour is irreducible to bodily appetite. So, the
claim that the goal I glimpse in desire is ‘not of this
world’ might be thought to show how it differs from
that of bodily need or appetite. However, there is no
reason for insisting that it is unattainable for human
beings, nor that it is irreducibly mysterious.
Religious or non-religious? 49 131.
22
This interpretation guarantees that the ascent of
erotic love occurs in this world, but some of Scruton’s
Wagner’s claims – e.g., that lovers seek a union in the
transcendental – undeniably suggest a more radical
notion of ‘other-worldly’, implying that the goal of
erotic love is unavailable to the merely human. At the
other extreme, Beckett’s reading suggests that the
ascent is simply a construction of the lovers:
Scruton’s Wagner belongs to the tradition of moral
vitalism. Beckett presents Scruton’s Wagner as opting
for the non-religious position he expressly rejects,
that man ‘makes himself completely in proportion as he
desacralizes himself and the world’.
What is moral vitalism? How is it related to the
idea that values are created rather than discovered?
Scruton’s Wagner implies that desacralizing something
robs it of value, and that it is man that robs it of
value. One way of robbing something of value is by
thinking that it is not valuable when it really is, or
as less valuable than it really is. So I could,
inappropriately, think of someone as a sex object,
where my thinking alone does not reduce or eliminate
the value of that person. Alternatively, I could rob
something of value by doing something to it that
reduces its value. I could, by treating someone as a
sex object, degrade them to that status. A hybrid
combination of these two alternatives suggests that we
might reduce the value of something simply by thinking
23
of it in a certain way. As a materialist, e.g., I think
that persons are mere bodies and that sexual desire is
purely appetitive. If my thinking affects my
interactions with others, so that I treat them
accordingly, my thinking reduces value. Alternatively,
we might say that these beliefs leave the value of
things intact, even if, at some level, I think that
they do not.
Conversely, these distinctions provide alternative
interpretations of man’s creating value or meaning. This
could be (1) thinking that things are valuable when
they really are not - e.g., thinking that an inanimate
object is a person, or (2) making things valuable by
doing something to them, e.g., treating someone as a
person rather than an inanimate object, or (3) making
things valuable by thinking about them in a particular
way, e.g., thinking of sexual relations in value-
involving terms. Alternative (3) leaves it open that
value has its source in something other than my
thinking. According to moral vitalism, the universe is
meaningless, inherently valueless. The moral vitalist,
like the materialist, views the world in non value-
involving terms. Man is the source of value, creating
or constructing it. Position (3) best fits moral
vitalism: things are made valuable by thinking about
them in a particular way.
My example of (3) was neutral regarding the
question whether value stems from the subject or the
24
object. Moral vitalism claims that its source is the
subject, that our evaluations make things valuable,
leaving unclear whether ‘our’ refers to each of us
individually or all of us collectively. The idea that
our evaluations make things valuable is implausible,
for we distinguish between what we regard as valuable
and what is really valuable, even if these often
coincide. The distinction is preserved even if the
evaluations are ours collectively, since if the idea
that each individual creates value from her own
resources is problematic, the addition of more creators
surely provides just more of the same. The reply might
be that moral vitalism must be accepted, the idea of a
worldly constraint on evaluation is senseless. We shall
see that this argument lurks in Scruton’s Wagnerism,
but that it is inconclusive.
Beckett implies that the attempt to construct
value from our own resources is doomed, and also
unnecessary because things are inherently valuable,
deriving value from God. The moral vitalist robs the
world of value in two ways. He thinks the world is not
valuable, when it really is. He does something to
reduce its value. He views it in degrading terms, and
relocates the source of value within the subject.
Either way the world remains valueless.
Is Scruton’s Wagner a moral vitalist? His claims
about the metaphysics of desire concede a lot to the
other side, and he rejects the ‘non-religious’
25
alternative. However, there is some evidence for
Beckett’s interpretation, such as:
Modern people believe that they are animals, parts ofthe natural order, bound by laws tying them to the material forces that govern everything. They believe that the gods are their invention and that death is exactly what it seems. Their world has been disenchanted and their illusions destroyed. At the same time they cannot live as though that knowledge where the whole truth of the human condition. Even modern people are compelled to praise and blame, loveand hate, reward and punish. Even modern people – especially modern people – are aware of the self at the center of their being; and even modern people tryto connect to other selves around them. They therefore see others as if they were free beings, animated by a self or a soul, and with a more than worldly destiny. If we abandon that perception, then human relations dwindle into a machinelike parody of themselves, the world is voided of love, duty, and desire, and only the body remains. Modern science hastempted us with the ‘as if-ness’ of human freedom; but it could never equip us to live without the belief in it.50
Viewing ourselves as animals is commendable insofar as
we are embodied beings. Awareness of a self at the
centre of our being expresses our status as embodied
subjects – beings in whom ‘animal and self exist in an
inextricable unity’. But we see ourselves and others as
if we were animated by a self or a soul. Even if we are,
notwithstanding, so animated, this ‘perception’ is
still problematic. The problem is science. Science
suggests that the universe is meaningless, leaving no 50 12.
26
room for embodied selves capable of loving, desiring,
and valuing other embodied selves. Yet we abandon this
non-scientific perception at the cost of our humanity,
and the temptation to do so is not one that we can
succumb to in practice. So we must see ourselves and
others as if the relevant concepts applied, while science
suggests that, really, they do not.
This is a version of the idea that thinking in a
particular way can reduce something’s value. Thinking
about reality in scientific terms tempts us to conclude
that reality is not value-involving. Science does not
undermine the ideas of Scruton’s Wagner; it appears to
do so only on the scientistic assumption that it
contains the whole truth about the universe. The
temptation to suppose that it does is resistible and
must be resisted if we are to live a properly human
life. There is, moreover, no suggestion that value is
created by us, only that its status becomes problematic
if we view the world in exclusively scientific terms.
So, thinking about the world scientistically can make
world appear valueless, but it does not show that the
world is valueless, only that its value cannot be
comprehended scientifically. This leaves open the
question of its source. Scruton’s Wagner is still
tempted to suppose that value concepts have an ‘as if’
status. Later, however, he resists scientism, conceding
only that values exceed our comprehension: the
understanding (in Kant’s sense) ‘deals only with
27
empirical objects and falls silent on the threshold of
the transcendental’. 51 We stand on the threshold of the
transcendental by virtue of being loving, valuing
persons.
Standing on the threshold of the transcendental
sounds rather grand and metaphysical, and it recalls
the previous claim that, as lovers, we seek union in
the transcendental. That the transcendental exceeds our
understanding suggests that it lies beyond the world in
which we find ourselves. However, ‘understanding’ may
be just a placeholder for scientific understanding,
leaving open that we can comprehend the transcendental,
albeit not through scientific investigation. A
discussion of Kant’s oscillation between to conceptions
of humanity brings this interpretative difficulty to
prominence:
On the positive interpretation, a human being is really two distinct things – an empirical object and a non-empirical subject, the latter existing in another way and another dimension, so to speak, beingthe real, substantial self behind appearances. On thenegative interpretation, a human being is one thing, known and approached in two separate ways – as objectand as subject. There is no “real transcendental self” behind appearances. But there is, nevertheless,a way of treating people as if there were such a thing: addressing them as free beings governed by reason. 52
The positive interpretation of our dual nature as
animals and selves furnishes one obvious account of our51 123.52 123-4.
28
existing on the threshold of the transcendental: we
stand in relation to a transcendental self. That a
transcendental self exists ‘in another way and another
dimension’ could simply mean that it cannot be
understood in bodily/appetitive terms, so that
‘transcendental’ amounts to ‘non-worldly’ in the
previously defined sense. But this reading fits the
negative interpretation better, while the positive
interpretation suggests that a transcendental self is
not merely irreducible to bodily terms, but itself non-
bodily/immaterial, separable from the bodily form.
Both Kant and Scruton’s Wagner believe that we
must think of ourselves in terms of selfhood,
personality, and freedom. But this idea remains vague,
as does its underlying metaphysics. It is implied that
the positive interpretation is problematic, and that
the negative interpretation is sufficient. Thus, we are
told that it is no part of the negative interpretation
that the self is an illusion. We are then told,
however, that although this negative interpretation
presupposes that there is no real transcendental self
behind the appearances, we can treat people ‘as if there
were such a thing’. It becomes clear that this
treatment involves relating to them as persons, i.e. in
terms already granted by the negative interpretation.
Interlude
29
The threshold on which we exist is every bit as
mysterious as Scruton’s Wagner implies; what we are and
what we are thus oriented towards can never be properly
comprehended. The religious connotations are
unsurprising given his aim to articulate a properly
religious framework. However, there are further
features of his position which threaten to compromise
this vision.
Redemption by our own devices
For Scruton’s Wagner, man is his own redeemer, by
redeeming himself he also redeems the world, and no god
is needed to accomplish this. Some of his reasons for
sidelining God are acceptable, even to adherents of a
more traditionally religious framework. We must avoid
casting God as a consoling father figure, and man as a
helpless child, because it compromises not merely the
reality of God, but also our humanity, rendering us
powerless to help ourselves, powerless to assume
responsibility for ourselves and the world. It may be
this God-degrading picture that Scruton’s Wagner hopes
to avoid by excluding God altogether. If so, then he is
rejecting a false god, not (as Beckett charges)
endorsing a spurious form of religion. That we must
assume responsibility for ourselves and the world
implies that man the redeemer cannot pass the buck. But
what can it be for man to redeem himself? What exactly
must we do? And where does erotic love come in?
30
Clearly we cannot do anything to ‘desacralize’
self and world, through, e.g., offending forms of
sexual interest. We must acknowledge the value of
things, acknowledge, e.g., the freedom, virtue, and
personhood of both parties to erotic love. Erotic love
involves sexual desire, which might seem to obstruct
our path to self-redemption. For desire seems beyond our
control. As Levinas says, it ‘invades’ us, it is ‘not
due to our initiative’.53 If so, it is surely not we who
redeem ourselves, but erotic love that redeems us,
allowing the possibility, so important to Levinas, that
its source is God. One could deny that erotic love is
invasive, and risk stultifying the idea that it is a
love into which we fall. However, Scruton’s Wagner
insists that we are summoned to respond to another
person by a ‘force that overwhelms (us)’,54 that love is
a ‘manifestation of grace’,55 that it is ‘more like an
affliction than a choice’,56 and that ‘(w)e may choose
to give way to this love or to conceal it, but what we
give way to or conceal is not itself a choice’.57 Love
is a force more powerful than ourselves, though it
‘translates itself into voluntary actions, and must do
so if it is to be understood for what it is’. 58 For
Scruton’s Wagner too erotic love is not due to our
initiative. But this ‘force’ lies within the individual
subject and is directed towards another embodied
subject. 59 Unless this were so we could not coherently
claim that it is the individual who falls in love, that
31
she falls in love with another individual, and that
this falling translates into voluntary action.
These conditions must surely be met. But what
constraints do they impose? The idea that the force
lies within the individual may simply mean that the
subject receives the force, that the force afflicts me,
the desire I have is my desire. However, this says
nothing about its source, and allows the possibility
that it is external. If the source is not external,
then the force is self-generated. For Scruton’s Wagner,
it derives from one’s human nature, but not one’s sheer
bodily nature. He believes that, as desiring human
beings, we stand on the threshold of the transcendental
and (with some reservations) that sexual desire has its
source in the transcendental. This could be just a
fancy way of saying that sexual desire is irreducible
to appetite. But his claim to be defining a religious
framework, wherein we are oriented towards a dimension
of reality we only dimly comprehend, should make us to
hesitate before concluding on his behalf that sexual
desire is self-generated. If, alternatively, we do
plump for self-generation, we must acknowledge that the
limits of the self are unclear, and that these limits
may well expand to the point where there is no genuine
53 Time and the Other, 88.54 150.55 156.56 121.57 153.58 173.59 132.
32
contrast between self-generation and its explicitly
religious counterpart.
For Levinas appetite and desire are sharply
distinct. Appetite is self-generated because it has its
origin in the subject and stems from a lack which can
be satisfied: ‘I can sink my teeth into the real and
satisfy myself in assimilating the other’. In desire,
‘there is no sinking one’s teeth into being, no
satiety, but an uncharted future before me’. 60 Desire
can never be satisfied, because it has its source in
and is aimed towards what can never be grasped, ‘can
never become ours or us’, is ‘always inaccessible’, but
is prefigured in the person we desire when we fall in
love.
Scruton’s Wagner agrees that sexual desire can
never be satisfied, and I shall consider this later.
But let us continue with his conception of redemption
by our own devices. Erotic love is a force that
overwhelms us and, whatever its source, it translates
itself into voluntary action, a ‘free giving of the
self’. What is this ‘free giving’? Wherein lies its
redemptive significance? We can begin to answer these
questions by considering Tristan and Isolde.
Tristan, Isolde, and self-giving
‘The urge to sacrifice arises from our very existence
as free subjects’;61 ‘heroes of erotic love….long either
60 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Richard A Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 117.
33
to redeem or be redeemed through an act of loving
sacrifice’. 62 Scruton’s Wagner speaks of a ‘heroic
passion’, which ‘could justify the ultimate sacrifice
and indeed require that sacrifice as its fulfillment and
price’.63 Most loves are not heroic, and do not justify
such sacrifice: ‘Devotion wears thin, the beloved loses
his or her character as an exclusive destiny, and
little by little the thought arises of better versions
and more rewarding deals.’ 64 But genuine love demand
the ultimate sacrifice:
In those sublime moments when love prepares to sacrifice itself for the beloved – in other words, when it wills its own extinction – the shadow of accountancy disappears. And those moments in and out of time constitute our redemption: they are moments of consecration, in which life is shown to be worthwhile. 65
That it is love that prepares to sacrifice itself
suggests that love is a force working through us. But
it becomes clear that it is the lover who wills her own
extinction. This sacrifice endows life with meaning and
brings redemption. But it is not a means to eternal
life – which would imply that human life has no
intrinsic value. So redemption is not a condition that
is purchased through sacrifice. Rather, it occurs in the
act of sacrifice itself. Nor is death itself the 61 150.62 9.63 8.64 10.65 10.
34
redemption. Death acquires this meaning only when
inspired by love. 66
The love is that of Tristan and Isolde. It is a
forbidden love which cannot lead to domestic happiness
or fulfilled old age.67 It is a love without a future,
but it cannot be renounced because ‘self and self are
linked by it’, and it provides the ‘supreme vindication
of their existence’.68 Hence:
Dying for the sake of their love, they offer the final proof of it – as a condition that is more valuable than life itself. But paradoxically, it is life – in its fullest sense of achieved and out-goingindividuality – that is expressed in their love. By valuing their love to the point of renouncing all else for the sake of it, they are therefore also valuing life. In true heroic manner, they prove that life has a value by throwing life away…love can be fulfilled in death, when death is chosen, and this fulfillment is a genuine redemption. 69
So love bestows meaning on their existence, it is more
important than anything else, more important than life
and death. Its religious significance is this:
As self-conscious individuals our primary need is formeaning, and our ever recurring fear is the fear of death. Religion provides that meaning and overcomes that fear; but it does so through baseless promises that offer redemption from a point of view outside our human world and on a metaphysical assumption that
66 13.67 147.68 147.69 192-3.
35
is no longer credible. Only if man can produce meaning from his own resources, and vanquish the fearof death in the same act, is the consolation of religion now available. The lingering afterimage of an old theology tells us that meaning lies in some reward offered after life is over. But more noble, more dignified, and more in tune with the deep needs of religious man is the belief that meaning is its own reward. On this view, life becomes meaningful when it throws rewards away – in other words, when itis self-sacrificed. But enfolding this sacrifice within the sacred aura of the erotic, Wagner offers the final proof that man can become holy to himself with no help from the gods. 70
Our need for meaning recalls the distinction between
appetite and value. An existence focused on appetite is
without meaning, and we can be redeemed by transcending
to value. Meaning and triumph over death cannot come
from traditional religion, only from man’s producing
meaning from his own resources and vanquishing fear of
death in the same act.
Man’s producing meaning from his own resources
need not imply his creating value in the manner of
moral vitalism. Man may simply do something which
allows him to discern what is truly valuable. So is
Scruton’s Wagner as close to moral vitalism as his
language suggests? The answer remains unclear. We are
told that death for love’s sake is ‘a triumph over the
empirical world, a final proof of freedom and
personality against the meaningless flow of causes’, 71
and:70 190.71 193.
36
By setting aside the empirical world and its claims, by scorning death for the sake of a goal that only free beings can embrace or conceive, the act of sacrifice sanctifies the one who performs it. It brings the sacred into being. And once we recognize that the sacred too is a human invention, redemption becomes a possibility – redemption by our own devicesand without the aid of a god.72
That the sacrifice is a triumph over the meaningless
flow of causes need not imply that the world is
inherently meaningless, and that meaning is self-
generated. The point is simply that we can act freely,
leaving open the question of the source of this
capacity and of the realm to which we respond by acting
thus.
The claim that sacrifice ‘brings the sacred into
being’ is equally equivocal. It may simply imply that
lovers appreciate what is sacred, and this appreciation
is nourished by their readiness to die. This realist
interpretation is suggested by the claim, e.g., that
experience of the sacred moves us towards the
supernatural73, and that the sacred is found when we
glimpse the ‘free and transcendental being in the most
ordinary things of the world’. This ‘free and
transcendental being’ is the human subject, and sexual
desire ‘provides us with some of the primary material
from which the experience of the sacred is
constructed’: 72 183.73 180.
37
You are the free self-conscious being whose flesh this is…to touch this flesh without the rite of mutual acquiescence is to pollute what I desire, by recasting your body as an object…This experience prefigures our experience of the sacred. Sacred things are removed, held apart, and untouchable – or touchable only after purifying rites. 74
That our experience of the sacred is so constructed has no
immediate implications for the sacred itself, only the
origin of the concept of the sacred. However, the claim
that the sacred is a ‘human invention’, and that
recognizing this enables us redeem ourselves, is a
concession to moral vitalism, implying that the lovers
produce the sacred in the way that we allegedly produce
value. And if such a creative act falls short of
generating the sacred, then the lovers are no more
redeemed than the non-religious man. However, Scruton’s
Wagner rejects the non-religious position because it
eliminates the sacred. The lovers’ act of sacralization
‘comes about through the recognition in both self and
other of the transcendental freedom that invites us to
sacrifice’.75 This implies that self-redemption makes us
responsive to a reality which is not self-generated.
I shall return to this tension later. For now I
sum up what Tristan and Isolde’s redemption supposedly
achieves. They are firmly within the world of value:
they value each other and value their love in their
74 179.75 182-3.
38
willingness to renounce everything for it. Their
sacrifice is chosen, done ‘with no help from the
gods’: they freely redeem themselves. Their sacrifice
restores the sacred: they become sacred in each other’s
eyes, sanctified by ‘scorning death for the sake of a
goal that only free beings can embrace or conceive’76.
This sacrifice overcomes their ‘fear of death’: they
surrender their lives for a love that eclipses
everything else, proving its worth in this very act.
Picking up the pieces
How does this bear on the metaphysical goal of desire,
which is a ‘union in the transcendental’, not of this
world? Tristan and Isolde do not want an afterlife,
only mutual self-sacrifice. Their goal is not of this
world in that their love is ‘intrinsically death-
directed’. 77 No merely empirical transaction could
fulfill their (and not only their) desire, ‘since this
would merely arrange our bodies and not produce the
substantial union we crave’. So one’s desire for
another person cannot be satisfied by sex. Scruton’s
Wagner is less interested in death than the love that
precipitates it, and adamant that love’s desire is
irreducible to appetite. Sex will not satisfy it
because we want more than simply to satisfy our lust.
The ‘substantial union’ we crave is the relationship of
genuine lovers. Our goal is not of this world in that
76 183.77 187.
39
it does not belong to the world of appetite. Scruton’s
Wagner’s uses the term ‘transcendental’ ambivalently.
How expansive is the realm of the transcendental? The
courtly ideal of chastity brings this ambivalence to
the fore. It requires ‘lovers faithfully joined,
desirous of each other…but never consummating their
desire, so that it persists as an endless unsatisfied
yearning’. This ‘comes as near as possible to their
metaphysical goal, which is a union in the
transcendental’.
For Levinas, the lovers’ desire remains an
unsatisfied yearning because its true object, God,
exceeds our grasp. Scruton’s Wagner wavers between this
view and exclusion of God, with nothing beyond this
world, albeit a world irreducible to ‘carnal
transactions’. Exclusion of God becomes explicit in the
plight of Tristan and Isolde. Their desire cannot be
satisfied because it is forbidden, by ‘their own inner
permitting’, not by the world. 78Any goal but death
would sully their desire:
Marriage, household, budgets, children…would pollute this heroic love, drag it down into the world of calculation, and negate its iconic value as the symbol of what we all, in love’s first passion, can aspire to. 79
Desire is insatiable not only contingently, as Tristan
and Isolde’s is, but essentially: satisfaction degrades78 187.79 187.
40
it to appetite. Scruton’s Wagner wants to explain this
without reference to God, while accommodating love’s
religious and redemptive significance. Once God is
excluded, desire’s insatiability cannot derive from the
excess of its object. But it cannot be satisfied by
sex. This is reasonable if sex is a purely
bodily/appetitive interaction. But why can desire not
be satisfied in an erotic relationship?
Tristan and Isolde’s love is presented as a
prototype to measure inferior loves. Their forbidden
love guarantees the insatiability of desire. Although
they can have sex – it is unclear whether their love is
consummated – they cannot do what this would normally
lead to, and remain fearful of being separated. So
their desire remains all-consuming and insatiable.
Unforbidden desire is insatiable because its object is
inaccessible. But Tristan and Isolde’s object is only
contingently inaccessible – in different circumstances,
they could have got together. The object is a human
person, not God. Levinas avoids the apparent idolatry
here by insisting that we relate to God only through
another person. Scruton’s Wagner denies this, at least
in the case of Tristan and Isolde. But remarks
elsewhere remain compatible with it.
If the beloved is only contingently inaccessible,
she is no God substitute. However, for Scruton’s Wagner
desire is genuine only if it remains unsatisfied. So
although the forbidden beloved could become available,
41
this would be a Bad Thing. To highlight the essential
insatiability of desire, he takes a situation which
embodies insatiability, with no need for God. Provided
the obstacles remain, the desire remains an endless
yearning, and her beloved assumes the role of God in
traditional theology.
However, now the beloved seems less important than
the obstacles: the lovers are engineering a situation
which guarantees that their passion remains pure and
unsatisfied. Perhaps they are in love with being in
love, uninterested in anything else, least of all each
other.80 They really want endless desire, and would
rather die than get their beloved. If so, they have
taken the ‘non-religious’ route, their redemption is a
sham, and Beckett is vindicated. Scruton’s Wagner now
has three options. He can retain insatiable desire, but
not because its object is God, or the beloved. Love’s
object is itself. This fits the claim that erotic love
‘notoriously bypasses moral judgment’, and also Blake:
‘Love seeketh only self to please’. 81 But such self-
seeking, ‘non-religious’ love cannot redeem. Levinas
accepts this, believing agape more apt to divert us from
the realm of selfish consciousness than eros. He still
maintains that desire is insatiable, that its ultimate
object and source is God, and that its insatiability
becomes insatiable responsibility for the other person.80 This is the interpretation adopted by Denis De Rougemont in his Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956). 81 154.
42
Love as agape transports us into the realm of value and
sanctity, but at the cost of making the lover a pure
giver, not a desiring human being. Scruton’s Wagner
declines to jettison insatiability and allow that desire
is satisfiable in unforbidden love: insatiability
distinguishes desire from appetite. But this undermines
the distinction, because love that ‘seeketh only self
to please’ cannot redeem.
If desire’s insatiability is God-involving, it is
not self-seeking, and value and sanctity are no human
inventions. Scruton’s Wagner rejects this option,
believing that it attributes our redemption exclusively
to God. However, traditional religion allows that we
have an essential role to play in securing our
salvation whilst denying that this concession removes
God from the picture. Traditional religion overcomes
the man-God dichotomy: the human being is expansive and
religiously charged, without the limits imposed by the
‘non-religious’ man. There may be good reasons for
setting the limits short of God. But Scruton’s Wagner
has not supplied them. 82
Fiona Ellis, Department of Philosophy, Heythrop
College, London W8 5HN.
82 I thank Mike Inwood, Dominic McLoughlin, John McDade, and Gemma Simmonds for many valuable discussions and comments.
43