“The very first sense of the human being is that of facing a reality which is not his, which exists independently of him, and upon which he depends.”1
—Luigi Giussani
I remember watching Notre Dame Cathedral burn.
Three years earlier I stood beneath its vaulted ceiling hushed by its awe-inspiring architecture and transcendent presence. It felt wrong to talk on the inside. My wife and I wandered from painting to sculpture to stained glass windows caught in the beauty of the ancient gothic structure.
I cried along with millions of people as we helplessly watch it burn on live television. My heart melted away and a sense of despair created anxious thoughts and notions.
Within days of the burning, the world showed how much beauty mattered in our society. The restoration effort raised an astonishing 1 billion euros in mere days. People cared about beauty. People cared about this icon. People wanted it restored. They wanted the phoenix to rise from ashes, more brilliant than ever before.
The pace of the modern western world, which has by and large swept much of the globe, leaves us breathless for rest. We live harried chaotic lives of anxiety and despair. We annihilate space with our pace of life. We compound the annihilation with distraction in every form imaginable.
But when catastrophe strikes one of our bastions of beauty, we suffer from the loss.
I read one article about the fire of Notre Dame Cathedral in which the art historian interviewed reminded readers of why the gothic structure captures our hearts.
Much like the great pyramids of Giza or the Pantheon in Rome, {Art history Elizabeth} Lev said, Notre Dame Cathedral stood as a testament to how humanity can "create astonishing things" when people "direct their ingenuity to something outside themselves."
"It reminds us that we are greater than our brief mortal lives and the petty pursuits that fill it," she said. "But when human beings dedicate themselves to the divine, the transcendent, the experience of God redeeming creation, they can make something sublime."2
Art Historian Elizabeth Lev’s words cut to the quick. We actually love when something makes us reach beyond ourselves to understand it, to grasp its wonder, to contemplate its beauty.
Whether you are a believer in Christianity or not, every human’s soul is wired for the divine. We yearn for that which lies beyond. That’s why we can watch the cathedral burn and feel as if we are losing a part of ourselves, a part of our home.
Thoughts for Reflection:
Do you remember the day Notre Dame caught fire? Did you feel anything? Did you care? What thoughts ran through your mind?
If every human being senses beauty and the divine in this world, how important, then, do you think it is to cultivate beauty in our private lives and in our community?
As a religious icon, Notre Dame serves as a good example of how beauty and religion connect. How important do you think it is to maintain our sense of the divine or what some scholars call our “religious sense” in our culture?
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The Importance of Cultivating a Sincere Religion of the Heart
Stay with me here on this idea of our cultural “religious sense.”
Last week I made the point that even though we live in a so-called secular society, unbelievers within our society long for a religious connection in their lives.
Ten years ago, when social media and the big tech companies were young, few saw the drastic effects the digital revolution would have on our society. Even though I co-authored a book about the potential hazards of Christianity adopting this “language of culture,” the Christian elite culture (influencers, leaders, and pastors within American evangelical Christianity) by and large assimilated. The adoption of this digital language of culture has numbed our religious sense.
The cliché, “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship,” exposes an anti-intellectual understanding of world history and cultures.3 The idea that Christianity is essentially based upon the Divine-human relationship should not discount the fact that cultures throughout history treated their religion as primary to their culture and governance.4
The Christian faith stems from God establishing a heavenly family. And we like using family terms to describe the Christian faith—for good reason. But it is also important to remember that God is not a human, he is spirit and divine. It’s hard for you and me to gain a pure understanding of his triune constitution because it is shrouded in mystery.
Too often we ransom the reality of God’s mystery and otherness so that we can have a relatable God who doesn’t mind giving us a high-five or a pat on the back. But there’s a danger in emphasizing one view of God over another. When we give up God’s holy otherness for the high-five Jesus, we fall into the modern trap of reducing the unexplainable into a controllable and easily definable box.
Though Scripture presents God in familial terms as a Father, the excellency of his character and being cannot be fully comprehended by humans, for who can understand the thunder of his power or plumb the depths of his splendour? (Job 26:14)
The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel reminds us that religion encompasses our entire existence and cannot be interpreted apart from the moments in life that drive us to search for meaning.5
True religion prompts the most important questions of humanity—those relating to meaning and purpose. It reaches further than doctrine. Religion undergirds all of life because it attempts to place humans in context with the Divine. And from the Christian perspective, it places us in a relationship as created beings with the infinite God, Creator of the universe.
Thoughts for Reflection
Does it make you feel uncomfortable to describe the Christian faith as a religion? If so, why do you think that is? Is it a conditioned response because for so long we’ve been told that religion is bad but a spiritual relationship with God is good?
Think through the dangers of reducing God to a high-five Jesus. What does the Christian faith lose when we democratize the Divine in this life, making it something we need not fear; making it something that costs us nothing to worship?
Do you think the digital revolution contributes to our nonchalance when it comes to worship and matters of spiritual holiness? Does our distraction saturated and self-focused culture help or hinder our understanding and love for the holy?
Why Has Our Reverence for God’s Holiness Disappeared?
The biblical writers remind us that true religion looks like communion with God, living in reverent fear and awe of him, and keeping ourselves uncontaminated by the behaviours and customs of the world.6 We emphasize the communion part, ready to give Jesus a holy high-five, but would rather keep the reverent fear and awe bit for the locust-and-honey-eating prophets.
When Jesus’s brother, James, writes about true religion for the Christian, the word he uses means, “fearing or worshipping God.” The word’s root, treo, means “to tremble.”7
True Christian religion possesses a sense of otherness and an absoluteness, it represents God and human beings existing in relational harmony to one another; the Creator caring for his children, and his children worshipping him and offering their lives as glory markers for him.
Augustine defined religion as a human being’s utter ontological dependence upon God.8
Why has our holy reverence and relational dependence upon God disappeared?
Because we’ve lost our eyes of wonder and see only a God of utility and convenience, much like we see our world.
“What can God do for me,” we ponder?
“How can my faith help me to be my best self,” we ask?
This kind of self-centred theology is at the core of modernity’s story. It is a story that depicts our radical turn from the supernatural and how that turn shapes modern Christian worship and our view of beauty.
Pagan or Christian, religion at its core testifies to something beyond the human self. And for much of world history, a sense of the Divine was taken for granted (cosmic piety)9; the supernatural was an obvious force in the natural world and within the complexities of the human psyche.
But Modernism built its case for the death of God and such an existential vacuum inflicts more on human beings than simple individualism. It invites a spirit of desecration.
Let’s take love, for example.
Love, in the modern world, is a love that falls from the virtuousness of the Old Testament hesed and the New Testament ethic of redemption. The biblical love we see in God’s covenant-making with Abraham, Moses, and David and the new covenant-making with Jesus Christ, speaks a language of renunciation and faithfulness, of loyalty and emptying.
Modern love, on the other hand, speaks the language of transgression and sentimentality. The goal of modern love is not marriage—something of virtue and beauty—it is, rather, the fulfilment of erotic desire. It is not a love founded upon steadfastness (hesed).
Instead, it is founded upon transience. Such a faithless love has no fulfilment in this life, so it wills its own death. What kind of a world is a world in which humans love without faith, where to love is to invite despair?
The vacuum left by the death of God, given to us by Modernism, presents us with a faithless world. Without faith in God, or even an ascent to some higher divine force, “you take away the power to perceive other and more important truths—truths about our condition which cannot, without the support of faith, be confronted.”10
The modern world made religion a personal preference by making happiness the chief goal of man instead of the vision of God. When we reverse God’s intention for human interaction and flourishing, confusing things happen. Faith in God gets morphed into faith in our selves. Love for God get’s transmogrified into self-gratification. Real human interaction gets set aside for isolation and anxiety.
Thoughts for Reflection
Do you sense that Christians have lost the wonder of the Divine? If so, why do you think this has happened?
Consider Augustine’s definition of religion, as our utter dependence on God. This idea is that you and I depend on God for our very existence. If this is true, how should gratitude shape our spiritual lives? Should we strive and strive with our own strength, or should we live with open hands and accept that reality that God has us? Does our lack of wonder contribute to our lack of trust in him? After all, if we truly thought God holds the whole world in his hands, should we worry as much as we do about our jobs, families, incomes, and life essentials?
Consider the example of love above. I’m using it to show how our isolated digital world takes something beautiful and desecrates it, bending it, corrupting it. Are you beginning to see how a culture devoid of religion in general tends to corrupt the spiritual realities set in motion by God? Can you name any ways where you see the modern ideologies bending or corrupting universal ideals etsablished by God?
Defending Our Beautiful Terrible Life
From our couch, we fade into the invisible, people devoid of tangible interaction. Our real actions glossed over with pithier status updates, our pictures self-curated, our wall-posts filled with trite comments. We miss the nuance, the intricacy, and the beauty of real, in-person social interaction.
In the end, the web offers only feel-good shots of experience. We’ve fallen asleep in the land of handshakes and eye-contact and walks on the beach and awoken in a world where humans look like products in an online shopping cart; downloadable, browse-able, clickable, even deleteable.
More than ever, we feel connected with each other. But browsing life data does not produce relationships. Our lives become strewn about the web. Fragmented. People encounter online life-widgets, but they don’t see the grit; they only see the facade we hoist up for all to see.
Our life story, a mini-wiki page: bookmarked, filed, accumulated. Our avatars and profiles look like mere splinters of who we really are. At the end of the day, we can close our relationships as we close our laptops, untouched and unmoved by the lives of others. But life is not like that. It’s rich with nuance and complexity. It is unrelenting and never shuts off, a concurrence of the terrible and beautiful.
From the Christian perspective life is about the here and now, real people living real lives in a real world. Created beings set forth in the cosmos to create societies, families, and to reflect the glory of God, we live and die in this real world.
But we also look to something beyond the here and now. Rooted in the reality of now, we are catapulted forward by our anticipation of being reunited with our Father God.
Life, then, looks like a beautiful mixture of the real world that we encounter with our senses and the world we cannot see—that place of unapproachable light where God resides. This blend of the real and the transcendent places a certain kind of specialness on each human being. It places us above the brute animals in that we are self-conscious, we have unique personalities, we have the capacity to love and be loved, we can relate to God.
For God weaves every person together in the waiting room of real life—we are "fearfully and wonderfully made," each of us mysteriously living with the ability to reach towards eternity yet frustrating in our efforts because we are finite.
So we exist in a healthy tension of heaven and earth. But at times it seems like humans are determined to erase any uniqueness or specialness from our race. We are now a generation linked to the Facebook understanding of human interaction.
And, no matter how well we defend the ways to connect through this digital medium, we know, in our heart of hearts, that something is amiss. As we power up the computer and browse our friends just before bed, we know that the feeling we receive in our gut isn't a feeling of relational peace.
It is, rather, an understanding that all our online friendships cannot equal one real person sitting next to us listening to our life story, empathizing with our hurt, embracing our body and just "being" there for us.
It’s no surprise that so many of us run to social media. The longing for closeness weaves throughout the fabric of our very being. But collecting digital profiles isn't a shortcut to real relationships.11
The world of social consumption has led us down an unthinkable path to a place where we value a “thing” more than a human.
When Notre Dame burned before our eyes, our religious sense was awakened. We remembered that we loved things that pointed beyond ourselves. We remembered that beauty matters and that we should do our best to support works of beauty and produce the beautiful in our lives however possible.
What if we lived every day like beauty was burning before our eyes? What would our true and utter dependence—our true religion—look like?
Thoughts for Reflection
Take an honest evaluation of how social media and digital devices possess your time and attention? What can you do this week to take back the real beauty in your life?
Let’s take back true religion! Let’s be people of tender and humble hearts, the warriors of beauty and religion. Let’s redefine culture through our pursuit of holiness.
Get with your small group, our homeschool co-op, or weekly Bible study and go through the book of Psalms. As you go through it, right down every instance where the psalmist desribes God as holy, full of splendor and glory, beautiful, majestic, full of wonder, and so on. As you go through the study, consider the significance of this profound element of the Psalms.
Let’s Talk About Beauty & Culture
Are you a beauty chaser? What is the Beauty Chaser Community?
I’m offering a two-part workshop on “Beauty & Culture” this month through a new online community I’ve created. Registration ends this week and the first “Beauty chat” is this Thursday at noon!
We’ll discuss topics like the one here with social media and the value of our cultural education.
Beauty directs our attention and our affections to God. When we as the Church bring beauty back as the jewel of our theology, our faith expressions and cultural engagement change.
I hope you’ll join me for these workshops! I’ll be offering practical tools and live streams on a monthly basis.
Notes
Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense (Montreal ; Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 101
Junno Arocho Esteves Service Catholic News, “Notre Dame Fire Showed That Beauty Still Matters, Art Historian Says,” accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.catholicregister.org/home/international/item/29342-notre-dame-fire-showed-that-beauty-still-matters-art-historian-says.
I am here referring to an idea brought forth first by the church historian George Marsden then expounded by Mark Knoll. It characterizes the early 20th-century evangelical attitude toward culture and the intellect. For more on anti-intellectualism see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870 - 1925, Nachdr. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 7; See also Mark A Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008). Noll presents a nuanced case for the development of the evangelical mind. Evangelical Christians too often create tropes of little significance, like the phrase I’ve mentioned in the text. We ought to understand how religion works and its significance not just for our own faith but the world religions.
Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019), 1-10.
Abraham Joshua Heschel and Susannah Heschel, “The Biblical View of Reality,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 1. paperback ed., 4. print. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 354.
See James 1:16-27, Romans 12:1-12, Ecclesiastes 3, Proverbs 8-9, et al. Augustine implored his readers to restrain themselves from the world. “By avoiding this world; the soul lives. By seeking it the soul dies.” See Augustine, Confessions, BK XIII:30.
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. “θρησκός,” paragraph 4802. “θρησκός; thrēskos (T WH thrēskos, cf. (Tdf. Proleg., p. 101); Winer’s Grammar, sec. 6, 1 e.; Lipsius, Grammat. Untersuch., p. 28), thrēskou, ho, fearing or worshipping God; religious (apparently from treō to tremble; hence, properly, trembling, fearful.”
Michael Fiedrowicz, “Introduction” in Augustine et al., On Genesis (Hyde Park, N.Y: New City Press, 2002), 15.
See last week’s post, “The Disintegration of Beauty & Truth” for a short description of “cosmic piety.”
Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019), 72-81. I am indebted here to Scruton’s incisive reflection on modern culture.; specifically, chapter seven, “Modernism.” Scruton is not making a case for a “Christian” culture. Instead, he is showing the need for a religious culture. A religious culture presents humans with a hierarchy—; a lower and a higher culture in which the higher influences the lower in its excellence and retention of values,; beauty chief among them.
This section was adapted from my book Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society (Zondervan).