Remembering Sir Roger Scruton, Two Years On

“At the time, I would not have guessed my encounters with Roger through YouTube and a handful of books would lead me to studying with him just prior to his death.”

Sir Roger Scruton passed away on January 12, 2020. The world lost a great and important voice for the intellectual life with his death. While Roger is simultaneously remembered as a philosopher of conservatism and aesthetics, the Roger Scruton I knew was, and will remain, a philosopher of love. In fact, all of his writings emanate with his wrestling with love and its meaning and implications for human existence, the world we inhabit, and the world that may lay beyond where we have our feet firmly planted.

I encountered Roger as an undergraduate student in philosophy. I was also beginning to develop an interest in aesthetics and there was this rambunctious English philosopher who looked like a cross between Lord Byron’s messy dress and hair with deep intellectual insight and knowledge. I began listening to lectures and picking up his short introduction to beauty by Oxford University Press. I ended up buying more of Roger as the years went: The Face of God, The Soul of the World, Understanding Music, Death-Devoted Heart, The Ring of Truth. When not study-drinking or reading patristic writings and biblical source materials for my degree at Yale Divinity School, I was reading an English philosopher whom I was growing to love more and more.

At the time, I would not have guessed my encounters with Roger through YouTube and a handful of books would lead me to studying with him just prior to his death. When I had an off-chance run-in with some former classmates at Yale at the National Gallery in London—I was preparing to give a tour through the mythological and religious paintings for a fellow student studying with Roger—one former classmate desired to know how studying with Roger was, given that she had read some of his works for her art and religion coursework at Yale. I filled her in, and she was, admittedly, jealous that I had such an opportunity.