ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’s death was the most significant religious news of the week but it is extremely difficult to explain in the context of a news story why he mattered. To get the sense of personal loss that’s appropriate, you have to read him, and to have his books read you back, and scribble in the margins of your mind.
As I write, only The Guardian has carried a proper obituary, illuminating and fair-minded. Still, I thought that the best account of his thought and originality which the web can throw up comes from the London Review of Books, and dates from 2006, which starts: “If there is a single theme running through these essays it is the importance of our commitment to truth. Not just to the truth about ourselves and our relations with others, or to the truth about the world: our commitment must be to the concept of truth as central to human well-being. This, of course, runs counter to one of the philosophical clichés of our time: that there is no such thing as objective truth, that truth is a superstition we no longer need and would be better off without.
“He gives the impression of someone who is willing to say what he believes without the slightest concern for how unfashionable his views might be, or how bloody-minded he might appear. He writes with verve about life’s most important issues; and there is a curmudgeonly openness about his philosophical explorations that is attractive and admirable.”
This rather underplays the relish that he took in appearing bloody-minded. I was struck by a lecture he gave in 2004 when he announced first that “in general in our culture people make far too many moral judgments all the time. This is very bad for moral judgements as well as for the people who are making them,” before qualifying his position. “Had I been part of the allied military government in South West Germany in 1945 I would have done everything in my power to have Heidegger executed. This is not because I don’t think he was a great philosopher. He was a great philosopher who committed a crime against humanity . . . I say this to show that I am prepared to make moral judgements.”
The only time I interviewed him was in 1989. We were in the Hynes Convention Centre in Boston, or the hotel next door to it, where I had come to cover the consecration of Bishop Barbara Harris. I cannot find the piece that resulted anywhere online. Nor can I find the notes I must have made. I remember only that he referred to the episcopal ceremony as “a witches’ sabbath”.
This kind of entertaining gossip does nothing to explain the hold he exerts on devoted readers. Some of it arises from the pure intellectual pleasure of being immersed in thought worlds strange to most of us, whether Aristotelian or Thomist; some from the resulting shift of perspective away from individualism, and into a vision of people as constituted by their relationships, and most constituted by their longest ones. Most of all, though, it comes from the determination — sometimes bloody-minded — that he has to understand and to wrestle with the authors he learns from. In his work, one has the sense of overhearing an impassioned conversation between him and the books in his library in which the books quite often have the better of things. This is far more compelling than the hermeneutic of condescension adopted by those philosophers who have come to tell us all the things their predecessors got wrong.
He called one of his essay collections Against the Self-Images of the Age, and this nicely summed up his struggle. The difficulty comes, though, when you try to find what he wants to put in the place of liberal individualism, and to imagine the kinds of communities in which he hoped we could become what we are meant to be. The Guardian obit put the problem clearly: “Neither the modern nation-state nor the modern family, he argued, can provide the right sort of political and social association. What would? MacIntyre sometimes alluded to the cohesive aims of tiny fishing communities and gestured at the desirability of many small utopias.”
I suppose you might think of congregations as small moral communities in this sense, but they are not guaranteed to nourish virtue. The nearest I can come to imagine what he meant is Auden’s lines: “Yet dotted everywhere, ironic points of lights / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages.” It’s so much less than MacIntyre required.
