It is with sadness that I greeted the news, on Monday morning, that Sir Roger Scruton had passed away. In his latter days an organist for a parish church of the Church of England, Scruton had a deep appreciation for the aesthetics of English spirituality, and - despite his public struggle with faith - he, on many occasions defended the importance of the Christian faith and the attitudes and dispositions that cement it in its concrete reality. One can only hope that Scruton's relationship with his eminent student, the Thomist John Haldane, helped him appreciate the importance and centrality of supernatural faith at the heart of the Christian life.
In his struggle against both Marxist revolutions of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the Soviet revolution in the East and the Gramscian revolution in the West, Scruton lived with great fidelity to his philosophical beliefs, and ended his life with more battlescars than most, some quite fresh. Through it all, he always presented as a sober and thoughtful defence of a traditional way of life that was coherent with the Christian faith against the radical anti-Christian politics of its enemies.
A great Englishman and philosopher has passed away: may we remember him and pray for his soul in the hereafter.
