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

by Rod Dreher

They believed there is no inner meaning existing objectively within nature and discoverable by reason. Meaning is extrinsic—that is, imposed from the outside, by God—and accessible t...

What was once a radical theory would, in time, become the basis for the way most people understood the relationship between God and Creation.

It made the modern world possible—but as we will see, it also set the stage for man enthroning himself in the place of God.

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 and toward this world.

After Ockham, the so-called natural philosophers—thinkers who studied nature, the precursors of scientists—began to shed the metaphysical baggage bequeathed to them by Aristotle and his medieval Christian successors.

They discovered that one didn’t need to have a philosophical theory about a natural phenomenon’s being in order to examine i...

Meanwhile, in the world of art and literature, a new emphasis on naturalism an...

The old world, with its metaphysical certainties, its formal hierarchies, and its spiritual focus gradually ceased to ho...

The Model shuddered under philosophical assault, but horrifying events outside the world of art and ideas also shook it to the core.

War—especially the Hundred Years War between France and England—wracked western Europe, which also suffered a catastrophic fourteenth-century famine. Worst of all was the Black Death, a plague that killed between one-third and one-half of all Europeans before burning itself out.

Few civilizations could withstand those kinds of traumas without ...

What emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance.

It refers to the cultural efflorescence that accompanied the West’s rediscovery of the Greek and Roman roots of its civilization. It is important to note that the term was not applied to the period bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era until the nineteenth century.

It contains within it the secular progressive belief that the religiously focused medieval period was a time of intellectual and artistic sterility—a ludicrous judgment but an influential one.

Nevertheless, the Renaissance does mark a distinct change in European culture, which shifted its focus from the g...

but those words express the Renaissance’s optimism about human nature and its possibilities.

What was being reborn in the Renaissance? The classical spirit of ancient Greece and Rome, which had gone into eclipse following the fifth-century collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the subsequent advent of the Christian medieval period.

While the late medieval period concentrated on the rediscovery of Greek philosophical texts, Italian scholars of the fourteenth century led the way i...

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

emphasized the study of poetry, rhetoric, and other disciplines we now call the humanities.

Though humanist culture was not as narrowly focused on the faith as its medieval predecessor, it was by no means anti-Christian. The 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 Renaissanc...

Christian humanism was far more individualistic than what came before it, and it sought to Christianize the classical mod...

Scholasticism emphasized reason and intellect as the way to relate to God; Christian hum...

Renaissance Rome was a cesspit of vice, and the corruption reached far beyond the papal court and the Vatican walls. Many bishops were despised for their worldliness, while drunken and ignorant parish clergy, indifferent to the Gospel, were disrespected by their angry flocks.

It took an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther to shatter their illusions—and with it, the religious unity of the West.

The Reformation, as we call the revolution he started, 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.

In 1517, Luther proclaimed his “Ninety-Five Theses” questioning the sale of indulgences, a feature of the Catholic penitential system that allowed the living to buy relief for relatives believed to be suffering punishment in Purgatory.

authority. In 1520, the Vatican excommunicated Luther for refusing to recant his belief that Scripture alone—as distinct from Scripture and the authoritative interpretation of the Roman church—was the source of Christian truth. Thus was the Protestant Reformation born.

Reformation-era Christians—Protestants—would no longer bow before what the Reformers believed to be superstition and idolatry.

The question immediately arose: whose interpretation of Scripture? No Reformer believed in private interpretation of Scripture, but they had no clear way to discern whose interpretation was the correct one.

The Reformers quickly discovered that casting off Rome’s authority solved one problem but created another. As historian Brad Gregory puts it, “Because Christians disagreed about what they were to believe and do, they disagreed about what the...

Because religion was inseparable from politics and culture, the Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, quickly led to a serie...

To be fair, the 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 pea...

The Dawn of the Enlightenment The Scientific Revolution indirectly suggested a possible way out. Even as the Wars of Religion...

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), wh...

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...

Most leaders of the Scientific Revolution were professing Christians, but the revolution’s grounding lay undeniably in nominalism. If the material world could be studied and understood on its own, without reference to God, then s...

This practical proposition allowed science to develop unhindered by metaphysical and religious suppositions. Science focused on facts about the material world that could be demonstrated, and it had an empirical metho...

And science worked, in practical ways. Sir Francis Bacon, an important late Renaissance philosopher and founder of the scientific method, famously said that scientific discovery ought to be applied “for the relief of man’s estate”—that is, to improve the lives of humans by reducing their pa...

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 manipulat...

In this way, the Scientific Revolution further distanced God from Creatio...

The Scientific Revolution culminated in the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, a physicist, mathematician, and unorthodox Christian who fabricated a new model of the universe that explained its...

certainly believed that the laws of motion he discovered had been established by God. Yet Newton’s God, in contrast to the God of traditional Christian metaphysics, was like a divine watchmaker who fashioned a timepiece, wo...

The explosion of science changed Western epistemology, the study of how...

Aristotelian science, which dominated the Middle Ages, was based on metaphysical concepts about the essential nature of things. The new science jettisoned the metaphysical baggag...

Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) would change the approach to the epistemological question even further. Whereas Bacon said we should develop models by reasoning from empirical observat...

Descartes taught that the best method was to begin by accepting as true only clear ide...

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 a...

That is, the only thing that cannot be doubted is one’s own existence. That is the foundation of all other thought, according to Descartes, who in this way made the autonomous, ...