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

by Rod Dreher

This outline of Western cultural history since the High Middle Ages admittedly ...

And it is biased toward an intellectual understanding of hi...

The discovery of the New World and the invention of the printing press, both in the fifteenth century, and the invention of the birth control pill and the Internet in the twentieth, made it possible for people to imagine ...

History gives us no clean, straight causal lines binding events and giving them clear order. Histor...

The people of the Middle Ages lived in what philosopher Charles Taylor calls an “enchanted world”—one so unlike ours that we struggle to imagine it.

We in the modern West are on a distant shore, and the worldview of our medieval ancestors is over the horizon, far from view.

Medievals experienced the divine as far more present in their daily lives. As it has been for most people, Christian and otherwise, throughout history, religion was everywhere, and—this is crucia...

In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. The division ...

Another way to put this is that the medievals experienced everything in t...

But sacramentalism had a much broader and deeper meaning in the mind of the Middle Ages. People of those days took all things that existed, even time, as in some sense sacramental.

That is, they believed that God was present everywhere and revealed Himself to us through people, places, and things, through which His power flowed.

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 bu...

He was there, writes Taylor, “as immediate reality, like stones, ri...

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.

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 his own steps with the great cosmic dance. Truth was guaranteed by the existence of God, whose Logos, the divine principle of order, was made fully manifest in...

The church was spectacularly corrupt, and the violent exercise of power—at times by the church its...

Yet despite the radical brokenness of their world, medievals carried within their imagination a powerful vision of integration. In the medieval consensus, men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmoniz...

explained that Plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing.

In what Lewis called the medieval “Model,” everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relationship to God.

Our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is m...

Humankind dwelled not in a cold, meaningless universe but in a cosmos, in which everything had meaning because it partic...

Says Lewis, “Every particular fact and story became more interesting and more pleasurable if, by being properly fitted in, it carried one...

For the medievals, says Lewis, regarding the cosmos was like “looking at a great building”—perhaps like the Chartres cathedral—“overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.”

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.

The core teachings of Scholasticism include the principle that all things exist and have a God-given essential nature independent of human thought.

This position is called “metaphysical realism.” From this principle comes what Charles Taylor identifies as the three basic bulwarks upholding the medieval Christian “imaginary”—that is, the vision of reality accepted by all orthodox...

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 that higher re...

These three pillars had to crumble before the modern world could arise from the rubble, Taylor...

Theologian David Bentley Hart describes the transformation as opening an “imaginative chasm between the premodern and modern worlds. Human beings now in a sense inhabited a universe ...

The theologian who did the most to topple the mighty oak of the medieval model—that is, Christian metaphysical realism—was a Franciscan from the British Isles, William of Ockham (1285–1347).

The ax he and his theological allies created to do the job was a big idea that came to be called nominalism.

Realism holds that the essence of a thing is built into its existence by God, and its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this c...

This implies that Creation is comprehensible because it is rationally ordered by God...

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” says the Psalmist. The sense that the material world discloses the workings of the transcendent order was present in ancient philosophy and...

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...

Aquinas puts it like this: “To know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching.”

Through prayer and contemplation, we may build on that intuition and come to know the identity of the One we sense. For example, the yearning for meaning and truth that all humans have, says David Bentley Hart, “is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality.”

But if the infinite God reveals Himself through finite matter, does that not imply limi...

He denied metaphysical realism out of zeal to protect ...

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

In Ockham’s thought, God is an all-powerful entity who is totally se...

God has to be, taught Ockham, or else His freedom to act would be bound by the laws He made. A truly omnipotent God cannot be restrained by anything, in his view. If something is...

God’s will, therefore, is more important than ...

This sounds like angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff, but its importanc...

Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. N...