Thoughts from a Life: Scruton’s Wisdom
By Hamza Yusuf
The notion of wisdom, and what constitutes it, seems increasingly less understood, and therefore less appreciated, in our age of imprudence. Wise men—and Sir Roger Scruton was one—have become anachronisms of late, relics of a bygone era. St. Thomas Aquinas described a wise man, using Aristotle’s six attributes, as “a man who knows all things, even difficult things, with certitude, and knowledge of the cause, who seeks science for its own sake, and orders and persuades others.”
Roger Scruton was a philosopher who concerned himself with knowledge of universals and first principles and thus knew all things. Of course, only God can truly know all things, but a metaphysician acquires a knowledge borrowed from God, as Aquinas says, through his cognition of causes. Sir Roger also possessed certitude regarding matters that were dear to him, but that certitude did not stem from base arrogance, common among many who profess certainty, but instead from a deeper, reflective understanding of the positions he maintained. He was a liberal artist who sought truth for its own sake, and he ordered well the pursuits of the world that demand we put first things first if we are to succeed. And he always sought to persuade others, often successfully, of the need to protect the good that still remains in the indiscreet modern world we inhabit: the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty.
These perennial concerns occupied his thoughts, and they grace the legacy of written and oral works that he has bequeathed to us. I feel blessed that I knew him and corresponded with him for many years, had many edifying public conversations with him, and hosted him in my home shortly before he left this world.
His prolific works include a marvelous dictionary of political thought, with excellent entries on Islam; in his essays, he quoted Prophet Muhammad’s sayings; and as a specialist in aesthetics, he had a keen appreciation of Islamic art and architecture. He spoke highly of the great scholastics and philosophers of the Islamic civilization—Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroes among them—and their contributions to the West in philosophy and science. He had a long unrequited love affair with the Arabic language, which he told me did not give back to him as much as he gave to her. He abhorred what he termed Islamism in his dictionary, a political ideology that is supremacist and intolerant of other cultures.
Sir Roger Scruton visited Zaytuna College (where I serve as president) in Berkeley, California, on more than one occasion, and he loved our focus on the liberal arts—the real ones, the seven pillars of wisdom—and our commitment to the great books of the Western and Islamic traditions, which he also cherished.
For those of us who have a love of wisdom (philo-sophia), who subscribe to its meaning as understood by the ancients, including Aristotle, Aquinas, and Avicenna, the passing of a wise man such as Sir Roger Scruton ought to inspire us to honor him by working harder to preserve and protect all that is precious in our collective inheritance, to defend common sense, and to be men and women of integrity in a disintegrated world.
When I called our mutual friend, Dr. Robert P. George of Princeton University, who introduced me to Sir Roger, to offer my condolences, he said to me, "I can't believe he's gone; I'm going to miss him greatly." I could not agree with him more.
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is an American-born Muslim scholar and educator and president of Zaytuna College, which he co-founded in 1999 as America’s first accredited Muslim institution of higher learning.