The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

by Rod Dreher

The power of sacred places and the relics of saints had such potency to the medievals because God wasn’t present in a vague spiritual sense, like a butler watching silently over a manor house. He was there, writes Taylor, “as immediate reality, like stones, rivers, and mountains.”2 The specific sense in which He was present was a mystery—and a source of speculation and contention even back then—but that He was truly present was not disputed. The only reason the material world had any meaning at all was because of its relationship to God. Medieval man held that reality—what was really real—was outside himself and that dwelling in the darkness of the Fall, he could not fully perceive it. But he could relate to it intellectually through faith and reason, and know it through conversion of the heart. The entire universe was woven into God’s own Being, in ways that are difficult for modern people, even believing Christians, to grasp. Christians of the Middle Ages took Paul’s words recorded in Acts—“in Him we live and move and have our being”—and in his letter to the Colossians—“He is before all things and in Him all things hold together”—in a much more literal sense than we do. Medieval man did not see himself as fundamentally separate from the natural order; rather, the alienation he felt was an effect of the Fall, a catastrophe that, as he understood it, made it difficult for humans to see Creation as it really is. His task was to join himself to the love of God and harmonize ...