I confess that I felt a bit of trepidation when Lady Scruton invited me to address the 2022 cohort of students at the summer school that Sir Roger founded before his lamented death, while also being deeply sensible of the honour. The title of my lecture was “Beauty and the Divine”. Like Moses before the burning bush in Exodus, I wondered whether I would need to remove the shoes from my feet, as if I, too, were standing on holy ground.
To touch on beauty is also to touch on the divine, and to consider the divine is also to consider beauty. Both are possessed of elements of transcendence, intangibility and immutability with which I needed to engage to produce some kind of coherent whole. It was a daunting prospect, but in the end any worry was misplaced. My audience – made up of young and not-so-young philosophy enthus-iasts – was kind and receptive, and we enjoyed a fruitful seminar discussion afterwards, not to mention a very jolly dinner.
