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

by Rod Dreher

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.

Truth was guaranteed by the existence of God, whose Logos, the divine principle of order, was made fully manifest in Jesus Christ but is present to some degree in all Creation.

The medieval model held all of Creation to be bound in a complex unity that encompassed all of time and space. It reached its apogee in the highly complex, rationalistic theology known as Scholasticism, of which the brilliant thirteenth-century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the greatest exponent.

core teachings of Scholasticism include the principle that all things exist and have

God-given essential nature independent of human thought. This position is called “metaphysical realis...

what Charles Taylor identifies as the three basic bulwarks upholding the medieval Christian “imaginary”—that is, the vision of reality accepted by all orthodox Christians from the early church through the High Middle Ages: The world and everything in it is part of a harmonious whole ordered by God and filled with meaning—and all things are signs pointing to God. Society is grounded in tha...

modern world could arise from...

Realism holds that the essence of a thing is built into its existence by God, and its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order. This implies that Creation is comprehensible because it is rationally

ordered by God and a revelation of Him.

Metaphysical realism tells us that the awe we feel in the presence of nature, beauty, or goodness—the feeling that there must be more than what we experience with our senses—is a reasonable intuition. It doesn’t tell us who God is, but it tells us that we are not imagining things: something—or Someone—is there.

But if the infinite God reveals Himself through finite matter, does that not imply limitation? Ockham thought so. He denied metaphysical realism out of zeal to protect God’s sovereignty. He feared that realism restricted God’s freedom of action. For Ockham, if something is good, it is because God desired it to be so. The meaning of all things derives from God’s sovereign will—that is, not because of what He is, or because of His participation in their being, but because of what He commands. If He calls something good today and the same thing evil tomorrow, that is His right. This idea implies that objects have no intrinsic meaning, only the meaning assigned to them, and therefore no meaningful existence outside the mind. A table is just wood and

arranged in a certain way, until we give it meaning by naming it “table.” (Nomen is the Latin word

for “name,” hence nom...

A truly omnipotent God cannot be restrained by anything, in his view. If something is good, therefore, it is good because

God said so. God’s will, therefore, is more important than God’s intellect.

importance cannot be overstated. Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not. They believed there is no inner meaning existing objectively within nature and discoverable by reason. Meaning is extrinsic—that is, imposed from ...

revelation...

Nominalism emerged from a restless civilization whose people were questing for something different. The Middle Ages were an age of intense faith and spirituality, but as even the art and poetry of the fourteenth

century

showed, humanity began turning its gaze away from the heavens an...

Metaphysical realism had been defeated. What emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance.

the Renaissance does mark a distinct change in European culture, which shifted its focus from the glory of God to the glory of man. “We can become what we

“Man is the measure of all things,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, in a line that also described the spirit of the new age dawning

Renaissance brought into Western Christianity a greater concern for the individual, for freedom, and for the dignity of man as bearing the image of God.

Medieval Christianity focused on the fall of man, but the more humanistic Christianity of the Renaissance centered on man’s

poten...

Scholasticism emphasized reason and intellect as the way to relate to God; Christian humanism focused on the will.

The danger was that Christian humanists would become too enamored of human potential and man’s capacity for self-creation and lose sight of his chronic inclination toward sin.

the church hemorrhaged spiritual and moral authority, the clamor for change rose. But the Renaissance popes, prisoners of their own greed and tastes for opulence, refused to listen. They thought what they had would last forever. It took an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther to shatter their illusions—and with it, the religious unity of the West. The Reformation,

was not the first protest movement against Catholic Church corruption, but it was the first to hack at the theological and ecclesiological roots of Roman Catholicism itself.

Though there was a great deal of local diversity across Catholic Europe, fidelity to the Roman Catholic institution and its authority to proclaim objective religious truth had been a unifying principle. The Reformation

destroyed that unity and stripped those under its sway of many symbols, rituals, and concepts that had structured the inner lives

question immediately arose: whose interpretation of Scripture?

Wars of Religion were as political, social, and economic as they were religious. But the religious basis for the wars caused weary European intellectuals to explore ways of living peaceably with the schism between Rome and the Reformers.

The Scientific Revolution indirectly suggested a possible way out.

The Scientific Revolution was a roughly two-hundred-year period of staggering advances in science and mathematics that began with Copernicus (1473–1543),

who showed that the earth was not the fixed center of Creation, and ended with Newton (1642–1727), whose breakthrough discoveries laid the foundation for modern physics. The era overturned the Aristotelian-Christian cosmos—a hierarchical model of reality in which all things exist organically through their relationship to God—in favor of a mechanical

universe ordered by laws of nature, with no necessary grounding ...

material world could be studied and understood on its own, without reference to God, then science can exist on its own, free of theological controversy.

Science focused on facts about the material world that could be

demonstrated, and it had an empirical method of testing hypotheses to prove or disprove their claims.

Francis ...

founder of the sc...

natural world was to be taken no longer as something to be contemplated as in any way an icon of the divine, but rather as something to be understood and manipulated by the will of humankind for its own sake. In this way, the Scientific Revolution further distanced

God from Creation in the minds of men.

Descartes taught that the best method was to begin by accepting as true only clear ideas that were beyond doubt. You should accept nothing as truth on the basis of authority, and you should even doubt your senses. Only those things of which you can be certain are true. And the first principle of all under this method is, “I think, therefore I am.”

core, the Enlightenment was an attempt by European intellectuals to find a common basis outside religion for determining moral truth. The success of science led moral philosophers

to explore how disinterested

reason, which was so successful in the realm of science, could show the West a n...

our purposes, the Enlightenment matters because it was the decisive break with the Christian legacy of the West. God, if He was mentioned at all, was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but the nondescript divinity of the Deists. Deism, a rationalistic school of thought that emerged in the Enlightenment, holds that God is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it. Deism rejects biblical religion and the supernatural and bases its principles on what can be known about God—the “Supreme Being”—through reason alone.