Scruton has written a fantastic exploration of the meaning of “subjectivity” and “individuality”, and how the mystery of confronting another person as a person points to the mystery of the God as the ultimate subject. Three major aspects of human life: the city, architecture, and music point to the encounter with the sacred realm and personal encounter, none of which natural causation and science can properly understand. Science tries to explain these things, but merely gives an account of their materials but not their content. For example, in the realm of music, you can speak of various notes sounding a unique frequencies, but you cannot examine movement or intention in the music. Music moves in the “space of reason(s)”, which is its own unique space that is accessible only in treating the music as an engagement with another subject, which would then require engaged interpretive listening. Architecture, at its best, derives its utility in scientific terms from its connection with the sacred temple, which invites a community to enter it for its own sake as a source of communal life and purposeful beauty.

Scruton comes to some dramatic insights about Christianity and the necessity of sacrifice and sacrament to encounter the sacred. He pits two ideas in dialectic: the ritual and faith, which is familiar to debates about worship within the Lutheran church today. We, of course, want to avoid ritualism, but also understand that God communicates himself to us in ritual, through speech and action, and all this is tied to his promises to be with in Jesus Christ and for His sake only. Forgiveness is also wrapped in his this conversation and engagement with God as a person, which comes as a utter gift and expects the free reposes of contrition on the part of the sinner. Scruton recognizes the necessity of religious faith in order to see life as a gift and to understand the nature of the loss of the individual subject, or the experience of death. Creation and destruction point to the edge of what science can explain because science only deals properly with the conversation of matter and causation. Science cannot ultimately answer the “why?” question, which only persons can. Persons are free and act according to reasons and are held accountable for their actions according to the “order of the covenant.”

Appreciation of beauty is a part of the meditation of things as ends in themselves, and therefore as subjects of a transcendent order which comes to us as subjects. Beauty has its own intrinsic values which come with reasons. You can ask why something is beautiful but you can’t prove it scientifically in the sense of just explaining what colors are used in a painting. You begin to talk in terms of sympathy and intention rather than of causation.

Vows point to something beyond the order of contracts which require specifications, while love is open ended, pointing the the continuation of the whole of society and to the vulnerability of personal commitment. Life is filled with these obligations that reside outside of the realm of law, which don’t come as a claim but as gift, which expects a claim in its own unique way. Liberals seek to turn this kind of “claim-less” love into a claim, which has taken the form of universal rights such as the right to health care, which basically the state alone has the power to fulfill because the claim is so abstract from real life. They’ve turned freedom claims, which are usually negative claims (e.g. freedom of religion means not to impinge upon the free exercise of religion), into positive claims, which basically mean that you need to make sure people are worshiping, which only the state could do. This example can be spoken of also in terms of universal housing and other points.

The human face is beautiful and like the face of God. The face is expressive and mysterious because it presents to me the mystery of a free subjective person in a physical body governed by the laws of physics. God in Christ Jesus has a Face, which means he comes to us personally and freely with love and self-sacrifice (the Cross). The face of a person is a mystery, combining both the intentional with the unintentional (laughing as a reasonable action that comes unaffected or sincerely in some sense “unintended”, or otherwise it is evil). I must read Scruton’s chapter on the face again! In the face of another we can then recognize ourselves as subjects for the first time, or prove our existence as opposed to assuming it?

Scruton also makes the point that societies run out of sacrificial steam, if you will, which holds the community together through charity and forgiveness, and through vows such as marriage, so that it remains ever in need of reminders of the source of its sacrificial love. This love comes sacramentally in the encounter with that which is outside the covenant agreements, that which goes beyond the general pattern of society in rights, duties and obligations. The is the place of love, vows, and piety, whose source the border or horizon of the natural order.

Also, Scruton makes a very interesting point about the response to forgiveness being itself undemanded and free. You can see this sort of thinking in the Roman Catholic distinction between attrition and contrition, where contrition comes from a place of free response outside of what is generally owed. ( )