Rod Dreher wrote the hugely popular “The Benedict Option.” In this work, he proposed that contemporary Christians, who find themselves helplessly paddling against the flood of secularism in the world, should follow the example of Benedict of Nursia. In the sixth century, as a young man, he turned his back on a decadent Rome, with its vice and corruption, and withdrew deep into the country to live a life of prayer and contemplation, and eventually lead a community of monks and nuns who pursued a simple, orderly life consecrated to Christ. In time, the community grew. To guide it, he wrote a little book, now famously known as the Rule of St. Benedict.
Dreher grew up a Methodist and later converted to Catholicism. A long process, his conversion began at age 17, when he visited the Chartres Cathedral in France. “Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the beauty of that French cathedral,” he wrote. “I walked into it a sniffy teenage agnostic and walked out craving to be part of the church tradition that built such a magnificent temple for God.”
This “road-to-Damascus” moment found a lift in his friendship with an elderly Guatemalan priest who was receiving end-of-life care. Dreher recalled how the priest never tried to evangelize him. “He just treated me like a friend and told me stories of his life, including his own dramatic midlife conversion,” he added. “The peace that the gentle, luminous priest had was a thing of beauty, and I desired to possess it—and soon did.”
Always it happens that, when one discovers God, one realizes how great a treasure he has found. Jesus himself stresses this in his parables, in which — in the Gospel of Matthew — he compares the kingdom of heaven to “a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field,” as well as a pearl of great price which a merchant comes across, for which he disposes of all that he has in order to acquire.
Drawing on his experience, Dreher writes that to help others discover the greatest of treasures, the love of Christ, one must rely on beauty and goodness more than on rational arguments. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) said more or less the same thing: “Art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith.” Goodness and beauty, in other words.
Philosophy professor and Catholic author Peter Kreeft’s conversion parallels that of Dreher’s. His parents raised him up as an Evangelical Protestant of the Presbyterian and Calvinist kind. During a visit to New York, he was stunned by the beauty of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He had never seen such a piece of architecture, and asked his father why, if the Catholics were wrong, their churches were so magnificent. His father could not answer him. Kreeft explains his father’s silence, “Well, sermons in stone: You can argue with thoughts; you can’t argue with beauty.”
In this regard, Kreeft recalls how three acquaintances of his gave as their reason for abandoning atheism Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” “Here is the most powerful argument for the existence of God: There is the music of Bach; therefore, there is a God.”
For that matter, the philosopher Simone Weil had her first mystical experience while listening to Benedictine monks singing. She found in the music “a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words.” And even a poem can be for her a door to divine union. While reciting George Herbert’s “Love,” Weil felt that “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”
All of which only proves St. Augustine’s point, that the world’s beautiful, changeable things point to one who is beautiful and unchangeable, God himself.
With beauty and art, goodness provides the biggest draw for people to look for and acquire that buried treasure of the kingdom, that pearl of great price — the love of Christ and of others for his sake. The way the followers of Jesus took care of each other was the main reason why Christianity spread rapidly in the first centuries of its existence. Tertullian reported that the Romans would say this of Christians, “See how they love one another.”
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