The annual Edinburgh Festival is the largest international arts gathering in the world. During summer 1999, in the course of an otherwise generally non-controversial program, the leading Scottish composer James MacMillan gave a talk entitled “Scotland’s Shame,” in which he spoke of “sleepwalking bigotry” and “visceral anti-Catholicism” disfiguring the life of an ancient but newly invigorated nation. The next day, and in the following days and weeks, the Scottish, British, and international media carried discussions of the issues raised by MacMillan, who is a Catholic.
Such, indeed, has been the row surrounding his claims of religious prejudice and bigotry that, in response, the governing coalition in the newly established Scottish parliament has indicated it will reverse its original decision not to include a question on religious affiliation in the planned Scottish national census. The point is that such information would be helpful in trying to ascertain whether, as MacMillan and others have claimed, anti-Catholic prejudice has had an impact on the educational attainment, employment, and health of those populations of Irish and other immigrant origins who are, or traditionally have been, overwhelmingly Catholic.
In addition to this political response, the eminent Scottish historian Tom Devine, director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen and author of the recently published and already very successful The Scottish Nation (New York: Viking, 1999), has edited a volume of essays by academics, writers, and figures from different Christian denominations in which the themes of MacMillan’s lecture—and the reactions to it—are examined (Scotland’s Shame? Bigotry & Sectarianism in Modern Scotland, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000). What follows is drawn largely from my contribution to that volume; a contribution arising from the fact that MacMillan began his Edinburgh Festival talk by quoting from an article I had published in the Catholic Herald on the eve of the May 1999 elections for a Scottish parliament.
Connecting the Past
For most readers of CRISIS, Scotland may be a far-away country, but it is not one about which they are likely to know little or care less. Scottish religious and intellectual history has been dramatic and powerful. For 1,500 years, from St. Columba to John Knox to Cardinal Winning, Scottish religious figures have helped shape both the nation and outsiders’ views of it. In philosophy, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid all gave birth to ideas that have influenced the world. And the greatest impact of Presbyterianism and common-sense philosophy was in North America, especially in the United States. Scots contributed to 18th-century independence and constitutional debates, and many colleges and universities can trace their origins and educational policies to Scottish religious and philosophical ideas. In addition, as the MacMillan affair may show, Scottish experience of politics, culture, and religion could be of more than just historical interest.
In the article from which he quoted, I considered the general standing of the main Christian denominations, commented on the issue of sectarianism, and claimed that Catholics could hope to make a significant contribution to the development of politics and culture in Scotland by advancing certain ideals—in particular, that of society as a moral community in which responsibilities stand alongside rights, material goods are produced with an eye to benefit as well as to profit, and the value of life is respected, as well as its quality promoted. Intellectually and culturally, the Catholic contribution should be to challenge materialism, instrumentalism, hedonism, and short-term gratification.
Quoting from this, MacMillan observed that he had become increasingly aware of the significance of the Catholic influence and inspiration behind his own work as a composer. In his essay in Scotland’s Shame?, he wrote, “Since childhood I was brought up to deal with reflective abstract concepts like the metaphorical, the metaphysical, and the sacramental. In later life there was a thankfully smooth transition of these concepts from the purely religious sphere to the artistic sphere, although these two things are the one and the same for me…. The Catholic and the artist, at a fundamental level, can understand each other because the origins of their most precious metaphorical concepts are the same.”
Since the reports and general reaction to MacMillan’s lecture focused on his charges of anti-Catholic bigotry, it is important to note the positive suggestion that the arts might provide a basis on which to establish a dialogue between Catholicism and the wider culture. MacMillan himself returned to the point, remarking that the arts are the one area of Scottish public life in which he had not encountered anti-Catholic sentiment. He suggested that this may be due to the fact that there is a sense among those working in this area of a need to reconnect with Scotland’s artistic (pre-Reformation) past. These ideas set me thinking about the connection between growing up a Catholic and becoming disposed to the aesthetic and to the arts.
Growing Up
As a child growing up in the west of Scotland in the 1960s, I felt no threat of anti-Catholic sentiment. I was aware of the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers football clubs and their supporters (Catholic and Protestant, respectively) and of the sectarian violence associated with this. But I had no interest in football and rarely saw fans on their way to and from games. Occasionally, I witnessed an Orange Lodge Parade, generally through the windows of my father’s car as we were held back with the other traffic to let the marchers pass. The impression, I think, was one of physicality and roughness: scrawny or fat bodies; pale or flushed faces; ungainly swaggers; cheap, ill-fitting clothes; and crudely colored designs on their banners. These reactions seemed to confirm something I picked up at home, namely that, for the most part, Protestants were in certain ways unaesthetic, without sensitivity or cultural sensibility, particularly in regard to the expressive and the visual.
This aesthetic—and evidently partial—judgment now seems revealing about my own background and relevant to the question of the place of religion in Scottish culture. At home, the sectarianism that characterized inner-city divisions was almost never discussed, even though religion—Catholic and Protestant— was a significant formative influence. I was an only child in a quiet and well-ordered home in the west end of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest (and most Catholic) city. My mother came from an interesting and gifted Irish family, but not one of those who had immigrated directly to Scotland or left for reasons of economic necessity. We had no Irish connections, and until recently, it never occurred to me to think of Ireland as a place that might have special interest for me. My maternal grandfather had served in the Royal Navy, from which he retired to settle in Kent in southeast England.
Growing up there, my mother and her sisters found themselves attracted to the theater and began to travel and work in Europe, where they enjoyed considerable success. Finding herself in Italy at the time of the declaration of war, my mother, who had dual British/Irish nationality, elected to stand by her British identity and paid the price for this by being interred, thereafter remaining in more or less restrictive forms of confinement until the liberation. It was then that she met my father, who was serving in the Royal Air Force, and they were married in Kent at the end of the war.
My father came from a fairly dour Scottish background. An only child of older parents, he was raised in Kirk, his father being a master of the Masonic Lodge. Living within sight of the Ochil Hills, overlooking Stirling Castle and the valley of the River Forth, he spent much of his youth walking the glens and ridges. A solitary and sensitive boy, he took to drawing and photography. He would have liked to study at art school, but my grandfather would have none of it, thinking such an education to be a waste of time. In retrospect, this seems both sad and ironic, for my grandfather was no Philistine: An accomplished keyboard player, he served as organist in the local Presbyterian church. As was typical, his interest focused on religious music—in particular choral works—and I think he cared for little beyond this. My father had been encouraged to learn the piano, and in due course this was a point of shared interest with my mother. By her account, and in my memory, he was the better of the two and could carry off the likes of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. But he remained largely unpraised by my grandfather, who may have resented his son’s broader talents and the fact that they were applied more widely than his own.
On arriving in Scotland, my mother found the gloom very dispiriting. As before, she threw herself into parish life in Glasgow while beginning to build a home there, decorating it far more brightly and with much greater imagination than was common even in middle-class circles at the time. No doubt she was attempting to re-create something of what she had known in Ireland, the south of England, and Italy.
After the death of his wife, my grandfather moved in with us for some time, and so began an interesting time of our lives. A few years previously, my father had converted to Catholicism, being received into the Church by a Franciscan, Fr. Bonaventure. However, my grandfather never knew of his conversion, and I believe he may have died in ignorance of it. What he did know, however, was that his son had married a papist and that I was being educated at Jesuit schools. Even so, I never remember rows over the issue of my schooling, though my grandfather used to tell me that the reason the pope wore “long dresses” was to cover his cloven hooves.
At school, I was not particularly academic and chose to pursue art. The fact that Charles Rennie Macintosh’s famous Glasgow Art School building was across the street from the Jesuit college may have been a factor, though at school-leaving time, no other boy was destined for art school. Most Catholic families were keen to improve their material circumstances, and hence, such an option was not likely to have parental approval. However, my parents were entirely supportive, and I think my father was happy to see me pursue what he had once hoped for himself. We moved to Kent, where I had long spent my summer holidays, and I began my art school education. Following this, I studied philosophy, and in my last year, a post became available at St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university, founded in 1411. I applied, was surprised to be appointed, and, with my wife, returned to Scotland where we have lived ever since, raising a family of four children.
Lost Honor
The town being closely associated with the Reformation and the university being thought of as socially elitist and mostly English, there were only three or four Catholics on the academic staff when I arrived (all English). But I never encountered anti-Catholic bigotry. It was only some years later when I began writing for the press and appearing on the radio that I began to receive pointedly anti-papist insults, and mostly, these came from correspondents in the west of Scotland.
In 1999, an affair involving a prominent Scottish defense lawyer named Donald Findlay, who was then rector of the university (an office combining representation of student interest and chairmanship of the board of trustees), created a major difficulty for St Andrews. On the one hand, as rector, Findlay had by all accounts served the student body very well, and there was every reason to maintain the recent tradition of according outgoing rectors honorary degrees. On the other hand, his loutish behavior following a Rangers victory over Celtic, his singing insulting anti-Catholic songs at a time when the team was trying to put its bad sectarian reputation behind it, caused general embarrassment. My own initial reaction was one of anger. Very quickly, however, I came to the conclusion that Findlay may have been irresponsible, foolish, and vulgar, but that the university ought not revoke the decision to award the degree, at least not without seeing whether he might embark on a course of social reparation.
I decided to write a piece in the (Glasgow) Herald. (Established in 1783, it is the oldest English-language daily newspaper in the world.) Entitled “A Matter of Honor,” it was published on the day that the university senate was due to discuss the affair, and it produced significant mail, both to the paper and to me personally. Among the latter was a particularly abusive letter from a Catholic in the west of Scotland. Though stylishly expressed, his accusations were extreme, bordered on the deranged, and included the suggestion that I might owe my position at St Andrews to a willingness to serve the Protestant cause.
One defense of “Findlay’s Songs of Hate,” as one paper headlined the story, is that they belong to a tribal ritual now far removed from its anti-Catholic origins and all but empty of its sectarian meaning. Likewise, a defense of my sputtering Catholic correspondent is that I had triggered a folk-memory of bigoted oppression. Each might then be excused on grounds of passion. But this is inadequate. Middle-aged men do behave like overwrought juveniles, and not just when they are tired and emotional. But actions occur in contexts and have consequences. The night Findlay misbehaved, a boy wearing a Celtic football shirt had his throat cut, and another was shot in the chest with a crossbow. Meanwhile, blinded by his own prejudices, my Catholic correspondent evidently failed to register the content of my article, grossly misrepresenting it, and no doubt relaying his twisted account to others.
The Findlay affair, MacMillan’s lecture, and other events have exposed veins of deeply rooted sectarianism in Scottish society. The country cannot afford immaturity in regard to such matters. There is much arrested development and cultural retardation on both sides of the divide. Growing up is not an inevitable process; it is an imperative that some find difficult to follow but which is all the more necessary for just that reason. Learning good social manners is an important part of that process.
The Aesthetic Difference
So I return to the aesthetic. Generalizing of course, I suggest that whereas Scots of Catholic backgrounds tend toward uncritical sentimentalism and are fiery in reaction to perceived or imagined prejudices and slights, those of Protestant background tend toward insensitivity and are unyielding in their self-assurance. The first is a defect of superfluity of feeling; the second is one of the lack of it. The former is something I recognize in myself; the latter is what was conveyed to me while watching the Orange Parades and by my grandfather’s lack of response to his son’s artistic talents.
There has been much talk in Scotland in recent years of the importance of the arts. Too often, though, this is perceived in terms of tourism. When art is considered in its own right, the art in question is usually literary. There is no doubting Scotland’s interest in the written word, but this is a medium whose appeal is to the intellect and to the discursive imagination. What is underdeveloped in Scottish culture is a properly aesthetic sensitivity to beauty and transcendence especially present in music and in the visual arts. Our backwardness in this regard is due, I think, to the Reformation and what followed it.
In the late medieval and Renaissance periods, St Andrews was to Scotland what Oxford and Canterbury were to England: home of its oldest university and ecclesiastical capital of the nation. Being poorer and more remote from the sources of European artistic and architectural innovation, it compared less favorably with its southern counterparts even then; but today the historical contrast is marked. Whereas Canterbury Cathedral stands as a proud and enduring witness to the achievements of the Gothic, the cathedral at St Andrews is a ruin only hinting at its glorious past. The medieval and Renaissance university buildings have fared better, but by comparison they are fewer and less grand than their Oxford contemporaries.
Relative wealth apart, a further factor serves to explain the difference—the Reformation. Before 1560, Scotland had a rich tradition of ecclesiastical art and music. Something of the latter has been rediscovered in recent years, but almost nothing remains of pre-Reformation church and college art. Among the few exceptions, the more remarkable for the fact that they are without parallel, are the three medieval maces of St Andrews University, the finest of which is that of St. Salvator’s College, produced in 1461.
Though rich in detail, its true accomplishment is its concise expression of a philosophical-cum-theological worldview. No modernist doubts that the orderliness of the world troubled the designer, for whom architectural, botanical, and human forms are combined in celebration of religion, science, and art. The fact that it was made in Paris hardly detracts from the claim of a rich pre-Reformation Scottish artistic heritage, since its very commission testifies to discerning patronage. Also, human, intellectual, and cultural traffic then moved to and fro, and the artisan may indeed have been a Scot.
The Visual Arts Return
Five hundred years later, there is renewed interest in Scotland in imaginative design. In 1999, the year of the new parliament as well as of MacMillan and Findlay, Glasgow was named UK City of Architecture and Design. These, however, are in general nonrepresentational arts; thus escaping the biblical ban on graven images reaffirmed by the Protestant reformers. There is little doubt, though, that the shift from a theology that embodied religious ideas in visual representations to one that accorded exclusivity to Scripture, had a damaging effect on Scottish art. On the other hand, it may be that the substitution of the verbal for the visual laid the foundations for the Scottish Enlightenment and for the strong literary tradition that continues to the present day. Likewise, Calvinist preoccupation with duty may have been a major factor in shaping the laudable Scottish concern for politics and public service.
Yet the repressed will return: Slowly, and by stages, the visual arts have recovered. Significantly, though, the subject matter has rarely been chosen for its intellectual interest. From portraiture in the 17th and 18th centuries, Scots stepped gingerly out of doors to paint the landscape and then returned to a domesticated version of this: the flower-based still life. More radical spirits moved beyond these themes and began to depict charged human situations but thereby only confirming the deep influence of Calvinistic moralism. The Renaissance never had a chance to influence Scotland’s visual culture, and in certain crucial respects, Scotland’s development was arrested. The situation is recoverable, but it will take great effort and more than this generation to close the gap.
What has not been commented on thus far, however, is that Catholics and Protestants in Scotland now face a common threat prominent in all western countries: egotistic, hedonistic materialism, particularly as this grips the souls of younger generations, including artists. Growing up is hard enough without the temptation of infantile regression. That is a lesson for America no less than for Scotland. Given the historic, yet now often-neglected links between them, it may yet again be, as in the past, that each can learn from the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the other. Although politics matters, the challenge for each of these societies is less political than cultural: it is how to return people to a sense of life directed toward the knowledge, love, and service of God but, first, to bring about some general understanding of what that might involve.