Our Church E-Book

Roger Scruton

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. In Our Church, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.

Leseprobe

OUR CHURCH

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2012 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britainin 2013 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Roger Scruton, 2012

The moral right of Roger Scruton to be identified asthe author of this work has been asserted by him in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in anyform or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of boththe copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The author would like to thank Faber and Faber Ltd for kindpermission to reproduce lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’and from Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact allcopyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to makegood any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought totheir attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

978 1 84887 199 1ePub ISBN 978 1 78239 504 1

Printed in

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

Contents

Preface

ONE

Religion, Faith and Church

TWO

A National Church

THREE

My Church

FOUR

Zeal Degree Zero

FIVE

Draw Near With Faith

EPILOGUE

For Ever and Ever Amen

Notes

Preface

This book is not an academic history of the Anglican Church or a systematic account, still less a justification, of its message. It is a personal record of what the Church of England has meant to me, and a tribute to its peaceful and creative presence in our national life. I hope it will be read with interest not only by Anglicans, but also by Christians of other denominations, as well as by non-Christians and non-believers. For it seems to me that our country is greatly misunderstood by the many influential people who fail to see that our national church remains part of its identity, and the key to its past.

Previous drafts of this book have been read by Pat Burke, Mark Dooley, Alicja Geęścińska, Bob Grant and Andrew Lenox-Conyngham, and I am grateful to them for their advice, criticism and suggestions. Here and there I have drawn on material already published in my book England: An Elegy, which contains a brief chapter on English religion, and I am grateful to the publishers of that book, Continuum, for permission to use short passages of the text.

Malmesbury, March 2012

ONEReligion, Faith and Church

Since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 the English way of life has been often under the novelist’s microscope. And we, looking into that microscope, discover that there is no more curious aspect of the English than their attitude to religion. While the Church of England has been all-important in shaping the lives of the English people, the Christian religion has been, since the late seventeenth century, only a subdued presence in their lives. If Jane Austen’s young clergymen were training for the army rather than the priesthood, their relations with the women who assess them would remain unaltered. And if the livings and prebends, the bishoprics and deaconries, over which Trollope’s characters so relentlessly strive, were lucrative situations in the entertainment industry, their social motives would hardly be changed. The philosopher David Hume remarked on the indifference of the English in matters of religion, and George Orwell repeated the observation in his wartime essay The Lion and the Unicorn. A modern observer could be forgiven for thinking that the Christian faith was some kind of mistake that the English once made, from the effects of which they freed themselves in the tumultuous civil conflicts of the seventeenth century. The Church that survived those violent times was one part of the system of English government, with no spiritual claims beyond the minimum required by social tranquillity. And the godless society of modern England, some might say, is exactly what we should expect, when the Church allies itself so closely with the State that it cannot afford the cost of religious passion.

Understandable though such an observation would be, it is not entirely accurate. The England that I knew as a child in the fifties was not godless. Most people declared some kind of Christian attachment, and churchgoing, though a minority pursuit, was not a target of ridicule. Those intellectuals who publicly questioned the dogmas of the established church were not evangelical atheists of the Richard Dawkins kind, but spirited agnostics like Jacob Bronowski, who conceded that they could not be entirely sure about God’s non-existence, even if they were pretty sure about everything else. The Anglican Church was represented in school assemblies across the nation, and the Bible was widely read both in the classroom and at home. Most people responded to the rare official enquiries about their religion with the harmless formula ‘C. of E.’. When, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Church stepped into the centre of public life, few people doubted its right to do so, and even the most grudging of unbelievers was moved by the spectacle of the young Queen as she humbly accepted what she regarded as a sacred duty, and in doing so made it sacred.