Beauty is the battlefield where God and Satan contend for the hearts of men.
—DOSTOYEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov
Late have I loved thee, Beauty so old and so new; late have I loved thee. Lo, you were within, but I was outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong—I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you.
—AUGUSTINE, The Confessions
A friend once told me the story of how she first met God. She doesn’t remember her age; she must have been about five or six. Her family lived in the countryside on the rim of one of our big eastern cities. And one July evening, cloudless, moonless, with just the hint of a humid breeze, her father took her out into the backyard in the dark and told her to look up at the sky.
From one horizon to the other, all across the black carpet of the night, were the stars—thousands of them, tens of thousands, in clusters and rivers of light. And in the quiet, her father said, “God made the world beautiful because he loves us.”
That was more than sixty years ago. My friend grew up and learned all about entropy and supernovas and colliding galaxies and quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity. But still, when she closes her eyes, she can see that carpet of stars and hear her father’s voice: God made the world beautiful because he loves us. Creation is more than an accident of dead matter. It’s a romance. It has purpose. It sings of the Living God. It bears his signature. And it’s our home.
The story of my friend offers a few lessons we might want to consider as these reflections draw to a close.
First, the most powerful kind of witness doesn’t come from a classroom or pulpit. It doesn’t need an academic degree or special techniques. Instead, it grows naturally out of the lives of ordinary people—parents and spouses and friends; people confident in the love that God bears for them and eager to share it with others; people who know the world not as a collection of confused facts but as a symphony of beauty, truth, and meaning.
Second, nature is sacramental. It points to things outside itself. God speaks and creation sings in silence. We can’t hear either if we’re cocooned in a web of manufactured distraction, anxiety, and noise. We can’t see the heavens if our faces are buried in technologies that turn us inward on ourselves. Yet that’s exactly what modern American life seems to promote: a restless and relentless material appetite for “more” that gradually feeds selfishness and separates each of us from everyone else.
Third and finally, every experience of real beauty leads us more deeply into three key virtues: humility, because the grandeur of creation invites awe and lifts us outside ourselves; love, because the human heart was made for communion and for sharing joy, and only the Author of life can satisfy its longings; and hope, because no sadness, no despair, can ultimately survive the evidence of divine meaning that beauty provides.
If the world taking shape around us today seems to make us strangers in a strange land—strangers in our own land—that’s because it does. If, while preaching freedom, the world seems filled with cynicism, ugliness, blasphemies big and small, and sadness, that’s because (too often) it is. What the modern world really wants, wrote Josef Pieper, “is flattery, and it does not matter how much of it is a lie.” But since every lie is an act of violence against reality and a deforming of the truth, the world also wants the right to disguise the lying, so “the fact of being lied to can be easily ignored.” The result is predictable: “The common element in all of this is the degeneration of language into an instrument of rape.”1
And that rape is carried out not just against the dignity of the human spirit, but against the beauty of the earth itself. Just as the face of a beloved shines with the inner light of the person’s soul, so the world as a sacrament shines with the face of God. The atheist culture of our age, says Roger Scruton, has a number of motives—but one of them is the desire to escape from the eye of judgment. And we escape from the eye of God’s judgment by mutilating the face of his world.
Thus the spoiling of the earth with waste and the brutalizing of our human habitats with ugly art and buildings are not just clumsy mistakes of progress, but desecrations. As Scruton notes, “Sacred places [like a sacramentally understood natural world] are the first places to be destroyed by invaders and iconoclasts, for whom nothing is more offensive than the enemy’s gods.” We should recognize “that much of the destruction of our environment today is deliberate, the result of a willed assault on old and despised forms of tranquility.”2
We need to ask why.
* * *
LIFE AS A BISHOP—or at least the life of this bishop—doesn’t leave much time to spend on poetry. But some years ago a friend lent me a volume of Rainer Maria Rilke poems, and, of course, Rilke’s work can be quite beautiful. In it, I found these lines of his verse:
Slowly now the evening changes his garments
held for him by a rim of ancient trees;
you gaze: and the landscape divides and leaves you
one sinking and one rising toward the stars.
And you are left, to none belonging wholly,
not so dark as a silent house, nor quite
so surely pledged unto eternity
as that which grows to star and climbs the night.
To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.3
Philosophers and psychologists have offered many different theories about the nature of the human person. But few have captured the human condition better than Rilke does in those twelve lines. We are creatures made for heaven, but we are born of this earth. We love the beauty of this world, but we sense there’s something more behind that beauty. Our longing for that “something” pulls us outside of ourselves.
Striving for “something more” is part of the greatness of the human spirit, even when it involves failure and suffering. In the words of Saint John Paul II, something in the artist, and by extension in all human beings, “mirrors the image of God as Creator.”4 We have an instinct to create beauty and new life that comes from our own Maker. Yet we live in a time when, despite all of our achievements, the brutality and indifference of the world have never been greater. And that cruelty is also the work of human hands. So if we’re troubled by the spirit of our age, if we want to change the current course of our culture and challenge its ruling ideas, then we need to start with the author of that culture. That means examining man himself.
Culture exists because man exists. Men and women think, imagine, believe, and act. The mark they leave on the world is what we call culture. In a sense, that includes everything from work habits and cuisine to social manners and politics. But most of us focus in a special way on those elements of culture that people consciously choose to create; things like art, literature, technology, music, and architecture. These are what most of us think about when we first hear the word “culture.”
That makes sense, because all of these things deal with communicating knowledge that’s both useful and beautiful. The task of an architect, for example, is to translate abstract engineering problems into visible, pleasing form; in other words, to turn disorder into order, and mathematical complexity into a public expression of elegance and strength. We are social animals. Culture is the framework within which we locate ourselves in relationship to other people. Through it, we find meaning in the world and then, in turn, transmit meaning to others.
In his Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that “beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.” There is “an ethic, even a ‘spirituality’ of artistic service which contributes [to] the life and renewal of a people,” because “every genuine art form, in its own way, is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world.”
He went on to say that “true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience … Art by its nature is a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice [to] the universal desire for redemption.”
Christianity is an incarnational religion. We believe that God became man. As we’ve seen, this has huge implications for how we live, and how we think about culture. God creates the world in Genesis. He judges it as “very good” (Gen 1:31). Later he enters the world to redeem it in the flesh and blood of his son (Jn 1:14). In effect, God licenses us to know, love, and ennoble the world through the work of human genius. Our creativity as creatures is an echo of God’s own creative glory. When God tells our first parents, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28), he invites us to take part, in a small but powerful way, in the life of God himself.
The results of that fertility surround us. We see it in the great Christian heritage that still underpins the modern world. Anyone with an honest heart will grant that the Christian faith has inspired much of the greatest painting, music, architecture, and scholarship in human experience. For Christians, art is a holy vocation with the power to elevate the human spirit and lead men and women toward God.
Having said all this, we still face a problem. And it’s this: God has never been more cast out from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some new cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of the past, consumer greed, subtle genocides posing as rights like the cult of abortion, and a basic confusion about what—if anything distinctive at all—it means to be human.
Science and technology give us power. Philosophers like Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche give us the language to deny God. The result, in the words of Henri de Lubac, is not atheism, but an anti-theism built on resentment.5 In destroying God, man sees himself as “overthrowing an obstacle in order to gain his freedom.” The Christian understanding of human dignity claims that we’re made in the image and likeness of God. Thomas Aquinas said that “In this [likeness to God] is man’s greatness, in this is man’s worth, in this he excels every creature.”6 But this grounding in God is exactly what the modern spirit rejects as an insult to human sovereignty.
Of course, most people walking the planet have never read Nietzsche. Nor will they. Few have even heard of Feuerbach. But they do experience the benefits of science and technology every day. And they do live inside a cocoon of marketing that constantly teases their appetites, makes death seem remote, and pushes questions about meaning and morality down into matters of private opinion.
The result is this: While many people in the developed world still claim to be religious, their faith—in the words of the Pontifical Council for Culture—is “often more a question of religious feeling than a demanding commitment to God.”7 Religion becomes a kind of insurance policy for eternity. Too often, it’s little more than a convenient moral language for daily life. And what’s worse is that many people no longer have the skills, or even the desire, to understand their circumstances, or to think their way out of the marketing cocoon.
Part of what blocks a serious rethinking of our current culture is the “knowledge economy” we’ve created. In its statement Towards a Pastoral Approach to Culture, the Pontifical Council for Culture saw that the constant flow of “information provided by [today’s] mass media … affects the way things are perceived: What people come to know is not reality as such, but what they are shown. [The] constant repetition of selected items of information involves a decline in critical awareness, and this is a crucial factor in forming what is considered public opinion.” It also causes “a loss of intrinsic value [in the specific] items of information, an undifferentiated uniformity in messages which are reduced to pure information, a lack of responsible feedback, and a … discouragement of interpersonal relationships.”
As we’ve already seen, all of this is true. For all of its great benefits, modern technology can isolate people as often as it brings them together. It weakens community as easily as it builds it up. It also forms the human mind in habits of thought and expression that are very different from traditional culture based on the printed word. And that has implications both for the Word of God and for the Church.
There’s also another important point here that even strong religious believers can feel awkward talking about.
Referring to artists, John Paul II said, “In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also … reveals his own personality by means of it.” In other words, “works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life.” This is normal. But it also poses a danger.
A key temptation of our age is the desire for power. It’s most obvious in our politics and science, in the constant erosion of our respect for the weak, the infirm, the unborn, and the disabled. But the impulse to pride—that hunger to smash taboos and inflate the self—appeals in a special way to artists and other creators of both high and popular culture. Genius can breed vanity. Vanity breeds conflict. Conflict breeds suffering. And the vanity of creative genius has a pedigree that leads back a very long way.
* * *
IT’S RATHER ODD THAT in the wake of the bloodiest century in history—a twentieth century in which scores of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed, blown apart, and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity—even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil (Pope Francis is a notable exception). In fact, it’s more than odd. It’s revealing.
Mass murder and exquisitely organized cruelty are not just exceptionally sad “mental and social health” problems. They’re crimes and sins that cry out to heaven for justice, and they carry the fingerprints of an Intelligence who is personal, gifted, calculating, and powerful. The devil is implausible only if we imagine him as the black monster of medieval paintings, or think Dante’s Inferno is meant as a literal road map to hell. Satan was vividly real for Jesus. He was very real for Paul and every other great saint throughout history. And, in Christian belief, he’s profoundly formidable. If we want a sense of the grandeur of the Fallen One before he fell, the violated genius of who Satan really is, we can take a hint from the Rilke poem The Angels:
… when they spread their wings
they waken a great wind through the land:
as though with his broad sculptor-hands
God was turning
the leaves of the dark book of the Beginning.
This is the kind of Being—once glorious, then consumed by his own pride—who is now the Adversary of humanity. This is the Pure Spirit who betrayed his Creator and his own greatness. This is the Intellect who hates the Incarnation because through it, God invites creatures of clay like us humans to take part in God’s own divinity. There is nothing sympathetic or noble about Satan; only tragedy and loss and enduring, incandescent fury.
In 1929, as the great totalitarian murder regimes rose to power in Europe, the philosopher Raissa Maritain wrote a now largely forgotten essay called The Prince of This World. It’s worth reading. We need to remember her words today and into the future. With no trace of irony or metaphor, Maritain argued:
Lucifer has cast the strong though invisible net of illusion upon us. He makes one love the passing moment above eternity, uncertainty above truth. He persuades us that we can only love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil’s victories is to have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he reign in this world.8
If we don’t believe in the devil, sooner or later we won’t believe in God. Try as we might, and as awkward as it might be for our own peace of mind, we can’t cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. The supernatural is real, and his existence is near the heart of this world’s confusion, fears, sufferings, and spiritual struggles. True, Satan is not God’s equal. He’s a created being subject to God and already, by the measure of eternity, defeated. Nonetheless, he’s the first author of pride and rebellion, and the great seducer of man. Without him the Incarnation and Redemption make little sense, and the cross is meaningless. The devil is real. There’s no escape from this simple truth.
We can underline that truth even more strongly. Leszek Kolakowski, the former Marxist philosopher who died in 2009, was one of the great minds of the last century. A fierce critic of the Church in his youth, and later a fan of John Paul II, Kolakowski was never traditional in his religious convictions. But he had few doubts about the reality of the devil. In his essay “Short Transcript of a Metaphysical Press Conference Given by the Demon in Warsaw, on 20th December 1963,” Kolakowski’s devil indicts all of us who call ourselves “modern” Christians with the following words:
Where is there a place [in your thinking] for the fallen angel?… Is Satan only a rhetorical figure?… Or else, gentlemen, is he a reality, undeniable, recognized by tradition, revealed in the Scriptures, commented upon by the Church for two millennia, tangible and acute? Why do you avoid me, gentlemen? Are you afraid that the skeptics will mock you, that you will be laughed at in satirical late night reviews? Since when is the faith affected by the jeers of heathens and heretics? What road are you taking? If you forsake the foundations of the faith for fear of mockery, where will you end? If the devil falls victim to your fear [of embarrassment] today, God’s turn must inevitably come tomorrow. Gentlemen, you have been ensnared by the idol of modernity, which fears ultimate matters and hides from you their importance. I don’t mention it for my own benefit—it is nothing to me—I am talking about you and for you, forgetting for a moment my own vocation, and even my duty to propagate error.9
We live in an age that imagines itself as postmodern and post-Christian. It’s a time defined by noise, urgency, restless action, utility, and a hunger for ever greater efficiencies and practical results. But there’s nothing really new about any of this. Saint Paul would find our age rather familiar. For all the slogans about “hope and change” and “a future we can believe in” in American politics, our urgencies hide a deep unease about the future, a kind of well-manicured and selfish despair. The world around us has a hole in its heart, and the emptiness causes pain. Only God can fill it. In our Baptism, God called each of us to be his partners in that holy work. Like Saint Paul, we need to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22). We prove what we really believe by our willingness, or our refusal, to act on what we claim to believe.
We need to remember that what we do proceeds first from who we are. Nothing is deader than faith without works (Jas 2:17), except perhaps for one thing: works without faith. The questions that determine everything else in our life as Christians are these: Do I really know God? Do I really love him? Do I seek him out? Do I study his word? Do I listen for his voice? Do I give my heart to him? Do I really believe he’s there?
We have a duty as Catholics to study and understand the world around us. We have a duty not just to penetrate and engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ. That work belongs to all of us equally: clergy, laity, and religious. We’re missionaries. That’s our primary vocation; it’s hardwired into our identity as Christians. God calls each of us to different forms of service in his Church. But we’re all equal in Baptism. And we all share the same mission of bringing the Gospel to the world, and bringing the world to the Gospel.
Kolakowski’s urbane and cynically helpful demon was right in one key respect. The fundamental crisis of our time, and the special crisis of today’s Christians, has little to do with numbers, or organization, or resources. It’s a crisis of faith. Do we believe in God or not? Are we on fire with a love for Jesus Christ or not? Because if we’re not, none of our good intentions matter. And if we are, then everything we need in doing God’s work will naturally follow, because he never abandons his people.
Dante Alighieri, perhaps the greatest poet in history, is rightly remembered for the genius of The Divine Comedy. But one line shines more brightly than any other verse in his stunning work. He ends The Paradiso and the entire Comedy with these words: “The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. That Love is the nature of the God we preach. A God so great in glory, light, and majesty that he can emblazon the heavens with a carpet of stars and call life out of dead space; yet so intimate that he became one of us; so humble that he entered our world on dirt and straw to redeem us. We can be forgiven for sometimes running away from that kind of love, like a child who runs away from a parent, because we simply can’t understand or compete with that ocean of unselfishness. It’s only when we give ourselves fully to God that we grasp, finally, that we were made to do exactly that. Our hearts are restless until they rest in him. And so we should never be afraid to believe in God’s love and to make it the basis for our lives; it took even a great saint like Augustine half a lifetime to finally admit that “late have I loved thee, Beauty so old and so new; late have I loved thee.”
God calls us to set the world on fire with his Word. But he calls us first to love him.
* * *
WAIT A MINUTE, THOUGH. Somewhere we took a wrong turn. We started out, some seventy thousand words ago, talking about American politics, identity, and history. Good practical stuff. So how did we end up in the weeds, worrying about beauty, art, poetry, and the devil? It might be true that “Beauty will save the world” (Dostoyevsky). And that “Every experience of beauty points to infinity” (von Balthasar). And even that “Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty he could no longer live” (again, Dostoyevsky). But frankly, so what? Beauty doesn’t help us vote. In fact, it doesn’t actually help us do anything.
There’s certainly very little “beauty” in the following facts.
The Notre Dame law scholar Gerard Bradley has written compellingly about the “institutional martyrdom” now facing many U.S. Catholic institutions and ministries. Many of them took federal funds in a friendlier time. Now they face federal pressure to conform to policies that violate their Christian identity. But as Bradley notes, no public religious ministry is really safe, federal funds or not. And why is this happening? Much of it links to Catholic convictions about the dignity of life and human sexuality—notably the issues of abortion, contraception, gender identity, marriage, and family. These convictions are rooted not just in biblical revelation, but in reason and natural law.
Critics of the Church reduce all these moral convictions to an expression of subjective religious beliefs. And if they’re purely religious beliefs, then—so the critics argue—they can’t be rationally defended. And because they’re rationally indefensible, they should be treated as a form of prejudice. Thus two thousand years of moral truth and religious principle become, by sleight of hand, a species of bias. Opposing same-sex marriage (so the reasoning goes) amounts to religiously blessed homophobia.10
There’s more, though. When religious belief is redefined downward to a kind of private bias, then the religious identity of institutional ministries has no public value—other than the utility of getting credulous people to do socially useful things. So exempting Catholic adoption agencies, for example, from placing children with same-sex couples becomes a concession to private prejudice. And concessions to private prejudice feed bigotry and hurt the public. Or so the reasoning goes. Insufficiently “progressive” moral teaching and religious belief end up reclassified as hate speech.
All of the above makes a forceful case for Catholic political activism. It’s also a damning indictment of scholars, journalists, and publications—some of them “Catholic”—that have belittled for years the Church’s strong concerns about sanctity of life and sexual integrity issues. The right to life is the foundation of every other right, which makes intentionally killing an unborn child, or encouraging, enabling, or deliberately tolerating such a killing, a uniquely vile act.
Saying this, of course, absolves no one from working to help the poor, the immigrant, and the homeless. Quite the opposite. If we call ourselves Christians, we have duties on a whole range of urgent social concerns. But sexuality-related issues are not a separate, idiosyncratic corner of Catholic thought. They’re deeply connected to much broader issues of personal and social morality and the organization of society. Thus fighting—vigorously—in the voting booth, in legislatures and the courts, and in the public square to protect our religious freedom, and the integrity of Catholic institutions and ministries, is a vital expression of our faith. It’s also our constitutional right.
Yet as Bradley himself says, government and media pressure will make it harder for genuinely Catholic social service ministries to survive in the years ahead. U.S. Catholic institutions of the future will likely be “organized but informal networks of properly formed professionals, working for free or whatever people can pay out of their pockets.”11
Moreover, as the John Paul II Institute scholar Michael Hanby argues:
The [Church’s] public and legal defense of religious liberty, as … conducted thus far, leaves the impression that these are one and the same freedom, so that the freedom of the Church finally depends upon the decision of the state. This constitutes a debilitating limit on the Christian imagination and a dangerous self-limitation of Christian freedom. For the freedom of the Church, properly speaking, comes not from the state but from the Truth revealed ultimately in Jesus Christ, and she remains free—irrespective of what the state decides—so long as she can see this Truth, because she is always free to offer herself in suffering witness to it.12
He continues:
The indifference of [America’s system of] liberal freedom to [matters of] truth insures that religious freedom cannot be understood from within the liberal order to be “first” [among the freedoms] … Rather it can only be seen as one freedom among many, one which is not likely to fare well when it comes into conflict with more “fundamental” rights such as the “right” to “build a family,” the right of equal access, or the right to non-discrimination in employment. Because this conflict does indeed concern fundamental things, it is not at all clear that the “tolerance” which Christians are seeking would be logically and legally possible, even if good will were in abundance, and the opponents of the Church wanted to grant it.
For Hanby, there’s “no question that the Church should continue to resist the assaults on her juridical freedom through the judicial and legislative process.” This is obvious and necessary. And it needs to be done not just for the sake of the Church, but for the sake of the best of those qualities that were, and in some ways still are, the American experiment. But three concerns need to guide our longer-term thinking:
First, the defense of Church freedom should not preclude a much greater effort to defend the truth of the human being, and to speak the truth about what our present sexual and social revolution portends.
Second, Church leaders must take better care to distinguish between the freedom that the Church has by nature and by grace, and the purely juridical freedom granted by the state and civil society. Her basic rights and liberty come from God and are not gifts of the government.
Third, the defense of Church freedom therefore depends not mainly on a legal or political strategy, but on a renewal of Catholic thought about nature, the human person, marriage, and even freedom itself in its relation to truth.
It’s good advice for a U.S. political terrain now better suited to Fantasyland than the real world. As this book was being completed in the mid-2016 election season, one of the nation’s two main political parties seemed committed to America contra mundum (“America against the world”), while the other doubled down on an entitlement state that’s morally compromised, bleeding money, and can’t be sustained. In a culture with an unofficial state religion of “choice,” real choices were remarkably few.
And while America has always had an amazing ability to renew itself, some changes in the body politic are unlikely to be reversed. In 2013 Gallup polling, 75 percent of Americans voiced support for a greater influence of religion in national life … but that included the many among those surveyed who had no personal interest in religious faith.13
In other words, “Americans want religion,” as one headline read, for “everyone but themselves.” It’s little surprise that in 2014, 23 percent of adult Americans self-described as atheists, agnostics, or persons with no religious affiliation. This was up sharply from 16 percent in 2007. “Nones” are now the fastest growing religious group in the country, with nonreligious congregations (nicknamed godless churches) appearing nationally. And they’re increasingly organized as a political voice focused on “elevating science over belief” and keeping government and religion strictly separate.14
So where does that leave us as American Catholics? And again, where does beauty fit into any of this?
We need to revisit one last time the question weaving its way throughout these pages: Who is man?
* * *
“WHAT DO WE REALLY mean when we use the word man today? Whom are we speaking of when we defend human rights or engage in the human sciences?” These are the first words of Pierre Manent’s provocative work The City of Man—its title a nod to Augustine’s great masterpiece City of God. One of our era’s best political thinkers, Manent notes that “Our speech is obsessed with man and sings his praises without inquiring who he is … Man commands humanity’s attention everywhere today, yet never perhaps since the time of Homer has the question embodied in the word man” been so little explored or understood.15
The reason for the confusion isn’t a mystery. The identity of man cannot be separated from the God who made him. And who is that God? For the Christian, God is not a “Supreme Being” within reality, but the Author of reality itself, outside the envelope of time and space, transcendent and utterly omnipotent and unknowable—except insofar as he chooses to show himself. He does that through creation, reason, his revealed Word, the community of believers we know as the Church—and above all, through his Word made flesh in his son.
What he shows us in Jesus Christ is not simply his own divine nature, but the face of man fully alive, the face of true freedom and love.
Humanity in its fullness—the complementarity of man and woman—shows its glory in lives of free will, self-awareness, and intellect, subordinated to love. We humans can choose ourselves, but at our best, we choose others. We humans can choose ourselves, but at our best, we choose to love. Love, even more than intelligence, is the genius of man. It’s the way we share in the furnace of love that is the Trinitarian God himself. And as long and as well as we love, faith grows stronger by our actions, and hope has the soil in which to thrive.
What does God ask us to do in a seemingly post-Christian world? The first thing he asks from us is to realize that the words “post-Christian” are a lie, so long as the fire of Christian faith, hope, and love lives in any of us.
We can tag along as compliant fellow travelers with a secular culture that’s now, in so many ways, better described as apostate. Lots of people already do.
Or, to borrow from the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, we can live as a conscious minority in a nation whose beliefs, culture, and politics are no longer our own, yet still nourish our identity, witness our faith with zeal, and add to the common good as the prophet Jeremiah did. This demands humility. It also requires courage and a refusal to be digested and bleached out by the world around us. As Sacks said in 2013, the task “isn’t easy. It demands a complex finessing of identities. It involves a willingness to live in a state of cognitive dissonance. It isn’t for the faint-hearted. But it is creative.”16
Václav Havel put it even more forcefully when he said that the only way to fight a culture of lies, whatever form the lies take, is to consciously live the truth instead of merely talking about it. The power of living the truth does not consist in physical strength or threats, “but in the light it casts” on the “pillars [of a mendacious] system and on its unstable foundations.”17
This was clearly the approach of the first Christians, who refused to pay tribute to the idols of the Roman state and sought instead to build a new life rooted in the truth of the Gospel. We can measure the character we ourselves need by their example.
One of the great pastors of the last century, writing about the tepid Christianity of his era, said that most people’s faith was “like a farmer who needs a horse for his fields; he leaves the fiery stallion on one side, and buys the tame, broken-in horse. This is just the way men have tamed for themselves a usable Christianity, and it is only a matter of time and honest thought before they lose interest in their creation and get rid of it.”18
The man who wrote those words was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Lutheran theologian. For Bonhoeffer, faith was not an academic discipline, or a personal hobby, or a collection of useful wisdom. It was the engine that powered his life. And so it needs to be with us. Knowing “about” Jesus Christ is not enough. We need to engage him with our whole lives. That means cleaning out the garbage of noise and distraction from our homes. It means building real Christian friendships. It means cultivating oases of silence, worship, and prayer in our lives. It means having more children and raising them in the love of the Lord. It means fighting death and fear with joy and life, one family at a time, with families sustaining one another against the temptations of weariness and resentment.
And what about beauty? Beauty can be admired. It can be venerated. It can inspire gratitude or awe. But it cannot be consumed as a product or “used” for instrumental purposes without defacing it. Beauty doesn’t do anything … except the one most precious thing in life: It invites and elevates the soul beyond itself, beyond calculation, beyond utility, and thus reminds us what it means to be human.
Beauty, to borrow from Augustine’s thoughts on the First Letter of John, is like the ring a bridegroom gives to his bride, a sign and seal of God’s enduring love. It’s the antidote to the deeper, demonic pornographies of our age: anger, despair, vanity, violence, cynicism. Roger Scruton describes beauty as the “present symbol of transcendent values.” That’s a big way of saying that beauty refreshes our hearts in this world while lifting us toward the next, “for here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (Heb 13:14).
The idea of the city is so powerful in man’s imagination because it conjures up images of commerce, energy, progress, and community. The cities of man are living examples—signs to the world—of the best and also the worst in human nature. In Scripture, Sodom and Gomorrah are the wicked “cities of the plain.” But Jerusalem is longed for and revered as the “holy city,” the heart of life for God’s people.
In the mind of Augustine, we were made for the City of God, but we pass through the City of Man on the pilgrimage of our lives. We will never have perfect justice in the earthly city because of sin. But we can make the world around us better or worse, more beautiful or more defaced, by what we do and how we live as “resident aliens.”
As Augustine once wrote:
The body by its own weight gravitates toward its own place. Weight goes not downward only, but to its own place. Fire tends upward, a stone downward. They are propelled by their own weights, they seek their own places … My weight is my love; by it am I borne wherever I am borne. By Your gift we are inflamed, and are borne upward; we wax hot inwardly, and go forward. We ascend Your ways that be in our heart, and sing a song of degrees; we glow inwardly with … Your good fire, and we go, because we go upward to the peace of Jerusalem.
My weight is my love. For Augustine, the fire of our love carries us upward on its heat. The more we love, the higher we rise toward heaven.
The point is this: Nations, too, have weight. The “weight” of a nation is the love that animates—or fails to animate—its treatment of the poor, the elderly, the person with disabilities, the unborn child.
Each of our lives lifts up or drags down the soul of the world. Each of our lives matters. What we do has consequences for our own eternity and those around us. In a City of Man that banishes God to the margins, it’s little wonder that men and women, the work of his hands, are foreigners to each other and themselves, and aliens to their own nature.
We were made by God to receive love ourselves, and to show love to others—love anchored in the truth about the human person and the nature of human relationships. That’s our purpose. That’s why we were created. We’re here to bear one another’s burdens, to sacrifice ourselves for the needs of others, and to live a witness of Christian love—in all our public actions, including every one of our social, economic, and political choices; but beginning with the conversion of our own hearts. Every such life is the seed of a dozen others and begins a renewal of the world.
Who is man? What is his destiny? What do our lives mean? The questions aren’t new.
O Lord, our Lord, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor.” (Ps 8:1, 4–5)
The Word of God testifies to the goodness of creation, the gift that is life, and the glory of the human person. With this glory comes a duty. We are born for the City of God. The road home leads through the City of Man. So we are strangers in a strange land, yes.
But what we do here makes all the difference.