Rubbra's expression ‘triptych’ to characterise his Fifth Symphony is a reminder of the part religion played in his life. The crucial quality determining a religious nature was summed up by Pavese in his aphorism about belief in the importance of everything that happens in the world. Rubbra's copious reading would have shown him comparable things in Christian thought and in Buddhist maxims such as ‘the dharma-body of the Buddha is the hedge at the bottom of the garden’, and some of his most characteristic features can be read as manifestations of an innermost religious nature. There was his extreme care over a starting-point, reminiscent of the pioneer twelve-tone composers' scruples about settling for a tone-row on which to base any given piece. Such concern for a firm foundation (which extended to making sure themes would also work in inversion, according to his recollection of the ‘light reversal’ episode) was in part a highly effective counter to self-doubt, or so Benedict's memoir suggests: on the one hand he happily admitted to letting himself be led by his inspiration, on the other he was known to spend days getting a single bar right and doing what Cyril Scott had called ‘rejecting from [his] creative arena all the obvious and unsuitable and weaker ideas which continually flowed into it’.

As one immerses oneself in Rubbra it begins to become clear that for all their differences in idiom he shares character-traits with Schönberg, as with Webern, behind whose musical bareness lay a sense of annihilation followed by rebirth which he compared to experiences related by the mystic Jakob Böhme.