How To Convert The Entire World To Christianity
The truth of the matter is that our world is remarkably adept at rejecting Christ. We’ve steadily broken down our ability to reason, to the point where we can now confidently say, “That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me,” or “I respect your belief but don’t believe it,” and not bust out laughing at the idiocy of it all. Christians are in a unique situation; telling people about Christ is unlikely to lead people to Christ. And, in fairness to the Christ-denying world, Christians aren’t very good at speaking about Christ. The height of ‘witness’ seems to be, “My life is so much happier because of Jesus,” which – if not an outright lie – is completely subjective and should be ignored as such, or “Look, there in the Bible it says that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life,” which – if you do not accept the premise of the Bible – should likewise be dismissed, or – in somewhat of a crime – wearing T-shirts that replace capitalist symbols with Christian ones, making some wonder “Alright, who’s following who here?”
In case you were under any illusions; this ain't helping.
In the midst of all this suckage, shining bright and gorgeous, there is an answer. There is a way to convert the entire world to Christianity, and it is by way of beauty. Christ is deniable – the cock has been crowing incessantly since the 17th century. Beauty, which ultimately comes from God and finds its perfection in the Trinity, is undeniable.
Now, I am fully aware that if there exists any one piece of writing a man with even a shred of literary decency should never, ever use as evidence, it is the YouTube comment. Based on these delicious pieces of culture alone, one might assume that Justin Bieber was the scale for which we measure the value of all things.
But, since I like to think of myself as a badass, I’m going to use ‘em anyways. Listen:
“Although I am atheistic, this makes me want to be Catholic. Nevertheless, I know better.”
“I’m agnostic but if anyone would try to convince me that God exists [...] this probably would be the best proof he got.”
” I am not even religious and I find this breathtaking…”
“I’m an atheist, but this is beautiful no matter what you believe – true beauty is universal.”
“Even athiests like myself are aware that it’s impossible to prove non-existance scientifically, and that we must, in some small measure, remain open to every possibility.”
Wait, what? Atheists are opening up? Call the detectives in! What on earth could it be, this one thing that somehow pierces through the modern shell of disbelief and so clearly leaves the Godless hungering for God? And, more than that, leaves them willing to express that desire, to express doubt over their atheism, to – in general – not be close-minded, thus rebelling against the entire atheistic culture? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not a logical argument for the existence of God, though those are entirely necessary. It’s not a Bible verse. It’s not a Jesus T-shirt. It’s not Christian Radio. It’s not a soapbox preacher. It’s not church. It’s not a personal witness. No, these comments are responses to Gregorian Chant, Latin Mass Parts, and Schubert’s Ave Maria.
It is beauty.
Beauty finds its source in God. And thus any display of beauty focuses the heart towards Him, whether the heart would have it or no. There can be a rejection of Christ. Rarely is there a rejection of beauty. Beauty is the crutch it’s OK to lean on, the opiate no one will get mad at you for being addicted to. But, why, the question hangs, does beauty immediately lead even the atheist to thoughts of God?Why does he immediately and vaguely defend his atheism? After all, it seems that if beauty were just a natural, great thing that this world had to offer, he would have no more need to defend his beliefs against the attack of beauty than he would the attack of ugliness. I have a rudimentary answer to all this. Perfect beauty doesn’t simply lead our minds to God; perfect beauty is God. And the atheist, at some level, knows this. Let’s review: Beauty is made up of three principle parts: integritas, consonantia, and claritas (Aquinas). These three things must exist within any work of art for it to be beautiful. Well, check this out:
Integritas means completion of form. Perfection. Wholeness. All the parts of a thing must serve the purpose of the whole. There is only one being of infinite integritas, and that is the Holy Trinity. Why? Because each part – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – serves the purpose of the whole – God – to an infinite degree, and thus each part is the whole. Three persons, one God. Integritas. Any lesser attempt at integritas admits that there exists an Ultimate Integritas, which all art inherently strives for, but never reaches. Pretty sweet, right?
Consonantia means due proportion or harmony. The Trinity is perfect harmony. The love between the Father and the Son – the harmony between them – is an infinite love. Love that necessarily creates a person, a person that is still one in being with the rest of the Trinity. (That’s a statement that requires another a post.) All harmony in art strives to attain the harmony of the Trinity. A perfect harmony of notes would be so infinitely ‘together’ that they would become one thing, not a group of things. The Trinity is one thing. Thus any experience of consonantia admits the existence of an Ultimate Consonantia.
And, last but not least, claritas means radiance. Is the beauty clear? Does it convey? Or is it gorgeous meaninglessness? The Word of the Father is his conveyance. He speaks. He has a message. Is his message clear? Actually, his message is infinitely clear. He speaks Himself. And because it is infinite, the Word – or rather, the image of Himself – must actually be Himself.
Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of claritas – the message is the messenger, the Word is the Word-giver. Ultimate clarity is not simply the expression of a thing, but the thing itself. So any attempt at claritas admits an Ultimate Claritas.
We cannot strive for perfection without admitting perfection. And perfection can only exist in the infinite. And to admit infinite beauty is to admit God. And that, my friends, is how we will convert the entire world. By being beautiful.
Speak on Christ, by all means, but speak beautifully. Paint beautifully. Sing beautifully. In a thing as small as a blog post or as groundbreaking as the next Great American Novel, strive to write beautifully. Are you aware that, by creating beauty, you are an ambassador for the infinite? Why is Flannery O’Connor read on secular campuses around the world? Why do public high-school choirs sing Mass Parts? Why do atheists and Catholics flock to Mumford and Sons’ concerts? Why is Gregorian Chant praised by atheistic liberals? Because beauty pierces through all the layers of crap we build up around us, and demands that we recognize that greater than ourself.
The closer beauty comes to its perfection – that is to say, God – the greater the recognition of God. So instead of bemoaning the lack of conversion, let us create beauty. Instead of freaking out over the empty pews at our church, let’s get rid of the modern cubist depictions of Christ and make our churches beautiful. Instead of getting grumpy that no one reads your story where “you find out at the end that the old man is actually Jesus, OMG,” write something as beautiful as The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Instead of being bitter and disappointed that no one seems to be praising God when we bust out “Give Us Clean Hands” at Mass, let’s play truly beautiful music. (Gorgeous music like “What Wond’rous Love Is This?”) In our writing, drawing, filming, building, organizing, singing, playing, dancing, acting, speaking, expressing, and in our very act of living each day, let us be beautiful. Then truly, every knee would bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, if only to join in the song.
Nothing compares to singing the Allegri Miserere during the Triduum in a neo-gothic church…No wonder it was only allowed to be sing once a year and only by the Pope’s choir. Chills every time.
Excellent article! Incidentally, my Lit. Theory class is currently studying aesthetics (the beautiful) in literature. Even at a secular university, in non-religious classes, I am constantly confronted with evidence pointing through beauty to the existence of Truth. Absolutely beautiful, the ways in which He works.
Good luck. People in the civilized West today don’t give a f*** about Christianity or religion period!!. God, Jesus, or Allah, whatever you call him doesn’t exist!!. A figment of your deranged imagination. Any form of religion should be permanently banned throughout the world, especially the Middle East and Africa!!. Then we would have less death, starvation, and destruction. And that is using REASON!!. [Editor: No profanity will be allowed, so if you want your comment to show up, don't swear]
Well, Hannah, you’re exceptionally fortunate in that regard.
I would suggest Prof. Daniel McInerny’s blog “High Concepts”, but it looks as if you might already have been reading it. If not, you should.
St. Thomas (or at least Maritain or some Thomist, any Thomist) on beauty really should be required reading for every Catholic. Too many of us have unwittingly absorbed the entirely subjectivist view of art that has dominated popular and academic thought for the last 150 years. So even if we have good taste, it becomes impossible to comment on art without resorting to taste and emotion, which are poor tools.
Kudos for the cogent essay.
My first time reading this blog – great post. Perhaps I should send this to the priest at a certain famous church in Manchester, England (where I’m from). Check out the photo album (there’s a surprise waiting for you at picture no.12, and click on the ‘Stations’ tab if you can stomach a closer look):
http://hiddengem.catholicfaith.co.uk/home2.html
Now go and poor yourself a glass of whiskey.
You, sir, are brilliant. This is one of the best posts I have had the pleasure of reading. Now let’s get to this beauty thing!
Well said…. I’ve started to feel depressed by some of your posts, because they go off of exactly what I’d been thinking on at the very moment, and trying to put into words, except you put it better than I did and quicker than I did.
But, in the words of Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot – “The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.” (Dostoyevsky knew how to write beautifully, too). .
Beauty, whether one likes it or not, forces you out of yourself. It brings about an act of contemplation – you become possessed by something greater than yourself. You stand and wonder, you’re amazed. You recognize something, the fulfillment of something in you, and you step out and while trying to attain it, it attains you. It is also redemptive, because it hurts. That’s why the saddest things move us as the most beautiful. And redemption never happens without blood. The ‘stuff’ running through all beautiful things is the Blood of Christ.
It’s also culture. Art shapes the culture like nothing else. I have found that very few people who call for “redeeming the culture” actually consider that that might have something to do with culture. You’re going to change the culture…. by culture!
“….if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.” Frank Floyd Wright
Thank you for your clarity. What heart could not be moved by such beauty.
Great post, and so the comments.Hans urs von Balthasar wrote “Gloria”. He said:”Thus one can construct above all a theological aesthetique (“Gloria”): God appears. He appeared to Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah, finally in Jesus Christ. A theological question: How do we distinguish his appearance, his epiphany among the thousand other phenomena in the world? How do we distinguish the true and only living God of Israel from all the idols which surround him and from all the philosophical and theological attempts to attain God? How do we perceive the incomparable glory of God in the life, the Cross, the Resurrection of Christ, a glory different from all other glory in this world?
One can then continue with a dramatique since this God enters into an alliance with us: How does the absolute liberty of God in Jesus Christ confront the relative, but true, liberty of man? Will there perhaps be a mortal struggle between the two in which each one will defend against the other what it conceives and chooses as the good? What will be the unfolding of the battle, the final victory?
One can terminate with a logique (a theo-logique). How can God come to make himself understood to man, how can an infinite Word express itself in a finite word without losing its sense? That will be the problem of the two natures of Jesus Christ. And how can the limited spirit of man come to grasp the unlimited sense of the Word of God? That will be the problem of the Holy Spirit.”
One can become completely absorbed in certain compositions by J.S.Bach or G.F.Handel. Perhaps no accident that many of the most beautiful music pieces were inspired by events recorded in the Bible.
TeaPot562
It’s a little interesting to me that in reading these comments we see ugliness only in the comment of the one who spurns religion.
Suckage. I like that, and somehow know exactly what you mean.
Great post! I visited some nuns yesterday, and was transfixed by the beauty of their singing. Not only that, they emanated beauty – the result, I suspect, of spending so much time in front of the blessed sacrament.
JK can gripe all he wants about everyone else being the problem, but when things get tough (as they inevitably do), hopefully he’ll remember that none of us is beyond hope. The door to sainthood remains ajar…
Nothing like the prodigal son returning and kicking his older brother out to the curb….
sorry. Just commented on the wrong article. What an oaf.
Simply Beautiful!
From the little I’ve read of you, Marc, you seem to be doing an important (might I say, beautiful) work with your writing. I’m impressed with the way you’re using your gifts.
With that said, I’m having a hard time coming around to (what seems to be the) overarching point of this post as well as the three about Christian music: that objective beauty, by itself, can and will be recognized, appreciated, absorbed, and parlayed into deep faith, by the masses.
Personal experience seems to suggest (to me) that objective beauty, like fine wine, is most fully appreciated by the select few who, for various reasons, are predisposed to fall under its charm. For the rest, it passes by unnoticed.
What do you think? Maybe you can tackle this in a future post?
Very beautiful indeed! And I enjoyed reading the blog. Also, the ‘civilised west’ largely became that way because of what Christianity brought to it. All the art, music, technology, schools and so on were largely either done by people of the church or it was supported or influenced by it. So I don’t think we should get rid of it, that would mean more death/destruction!
Adriel, something is not either completely objectively beautiful or completely objectively ugly. The things that people appreciate, whether in a perverted or wrongheaded sense or not, have objective beauty in them. It is our job to expose the objective beauty at the root of our subjective appreciation. Then, when people are educated as to why the appreciate, they will see objective beauty wherever it is.
Excellent!
Might I recommend Fr John Saward, “The beauty of holiness”?
Nathaniel, Marc’s preferred definition of beauty (that of Aquinas) dictates that objective beauty must fulfill three major criteria in order to be classified as beautiful. A thing can still be nice, or have redeeming value, but without all three aspects, it is not objectively beautiful.
“The things that people appreciate, whether in a perverted or wrongheaded sense or not, have objective beauty in them.” I think this is precisely the aesthetic subjectivism Marc argues against in his posts. Just liking or appreciating something does not indicate its objective beauty.
“It is our job to expose the objective beauty at the root of our subjective appreciation.” See this is what I’m driving at. Is it merely our responsibility to “be beautiful,” and to produce and promote beauty? Is that enough, in and of itself, to attract the masses?
Or must we also tirelessly defend and define “beauty” as we understand it, to anyone and everyone who might not yet comprehend its relationship to the divine?
If we must also become scholars and teachers of objective beauty (a noble quest, don’t get me wrong), that seems to contradict what I seem to get out of the four posts I referenced: that simply presenting beauty is enough to turn hearts and minds on a mass scale.
Wow. I wasn’t going to comment until I saw that you had the Tallis Scholars there. They are incredible. I saw them in Berkeley once and they were more than my little mind could even appreciate. Beauty more than comprehensible. I don’t know what affect they had on others, but for me they made it stark that beauty has existed longer than our contemporary pop culture might like to admit. The heights of beauty are there for us – we just have to look up.
Adriel, the point I was making was that nothing except God is completely objectively beautiful. Everything in this world is fallen and so the “beauty” that we experience is not perfect. It does however touch the objective perfect beauty of God and have elements of claritas, consonantia, and integritas. There are some things with greater amounts of beauty than other (objectively) but that does not mean that the “lesser” beauties are not in some way objectively beautiful, they are just less perfect. If we are able to become scholars of beauty, then we can show what perfection in beauty is. If not, we can at least expose beauty in whatever state of objectivity and people will respond.
Great post, Marc! I like your style.
I totally understand Adriel’s comment about objective beauty being nonetheless rejected by all but a few. And my reaction is, “It’s always been that way!” Example: if beauty is in fact Godliness, then Jesus was the most objectively beautiful person to ever live, and he was appreciated by only a few, and is even today appreciated by a minority.
We artists are always confronted with this seeming blindness when we finally complete something we KNOW is beautiful and only a tiny percentage of viewers even notice.
But if we create beauty, and everyone doesn’t suddenly understand Christ, it doesn’t mean we’ve somehow failed. God himself does nothing but rain beauty on everyone, and some people respond, and some don’t. That doesn’t mean God fails. Also, I’d venture that although not all people understand Bach, and not all people understand Dostoyevsky (although that one always blows my mind) that doesn’t mean that even philistines might not see the objective beauty in something you or I miss. Like…Lynyrd Skynyrd. (I won’t try to defend that one here but I stand behind it.)
As an artist, to me the most beautiful artistic achievements come from the Catholic Church (Pre-Vatican II!!!) whether it is Literature, architecture, painting, sculpture and music…..and is proof and confirmation that there is God for God manifests Himself through beauty which transcends and uplifts. How else could this be achieved but from God through man and man through God.
Quill and I and some of our family frequently discuss this concept! You articulated it brilliantly–I’ve been trying to figure out how to put everything into words, but you just did that for me.
Thank you for the article. I’m in favor in restoring beauty to the music in the parishes. Some of music sounds like a high school pep rally. An appreciation for Gregorian chant can be developed over time, with some education. In one parish I visited the chant was used as a prelude to the Mass, and provided an atmosphere of beauty and peace prior to Mass.
To bring about an appreciation for truly beautiful music and art is a difficult task in the face of the culture. But, if well presented it will speak for itself.