If we want to win souls for Christ, we must touch their imaginations. Christopher Dawson’s idea of teaching Christian culture was certainly consistent with that idea of facts, events, history, and description. The adventure, the romance, and the beauty of the story of the Body of Christ after Pentecost shows the splendor of the truth that St. Thomas Aquinas explains so systematically.

The English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) famously believed that ours is a “sub-philosophical” age. Despite the great successes of philosophers and theologians working to teach and popularize the work of St. Thomas Aquinas from the time of Pope Leo XIII in the 1890s until the Second Vatican Council, Dawson believed that what was required for a true evangelization and catechesis was something more than a display of the intellectual coherence and sublimity of Catholic doctrine and thought. He believed that what was required to prepare the minds of our age to receive Christ the Savior and Teacher was an education in the many-splendored beauty of Christian culture.

This does not mean that people don’t have intellectual conversions. A fellow at my parish here in Texas grew up as an atheist in the former Czechoslovakia. A scientist, he was captured for Christ and his Church by the rigorous explanation of reality afforded by Catholic teaching and indeed St. Thomas. My wife, a philosopher, likes to say that this kind of conversion happens more than one thinks. That depends on how often one thinks it happens.

I think it more often the case that purely intellectual apologetics is both necessary and yet still insufficient for bringing people in and keeping them in the faith. It is necessary to counter the claims that Catholic Christian faith is incoherent, contradictory, or inconsistent.  But it is insufficient insofar as many people find it logically consistent and yet are not convinced that it is true.

Aristotle was right that we are rational animals, but the way our reason works is not purely in abstract logic, but also in understanding we describe as located in the “gut” and in “the heart.” Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has reasons of which reason cannot know.” And St. John Henry Newman wrote that it is through the heart that we are persuaded of religious truth. “The heart,” he wrote, “is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”

If we want to win souls for Christ, we must touch their imaginations. Dawson’s idea of teaching Christian culture was certainly consistent with that idea of facts, events, history, and description. The adventure, the romance, and the beauty of the story of the Body of Christ after Pentecost shows the splendor of the truth that St. Thomas Aquinas explains so systematically. The Word was made flesh—and flesh has a history, a story that continues on earth and in heaven since the Body of Christ includes His followers, the Church who pass through time doing the works of the Father. Those works include our whole lives, including all of our actions, most especially our acts of love and our acts of beauty.

Beauty? Pope Benedict XVI was certainly not the only one who thought so, but he put it most pithily: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.”

Though my own journey to the Catholic Church was partly intellectual, it was the work of great writers and artists that often moved my heart. Victor Hugo was not a model Catholic, but the image of the bishop in his great novel Les Miserables as depicted on stage in the musical adaptation was something to which I recurred when thinking through theological questions.

So too have I been nourished by art and culture since coming into the Church. It has been a great blessing of my life to have been able to work with great colleagues who have understood these truths. For nearly two decades I taught and worked in the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota’s Center for Catholic Studies where they follow the lead of Christopher Dawson in teaching students to see the presence of Christ in all culture, especially in the culture that has been produced by Christians who tried to live, think, and make beautiful things that would reflect the glory of the Lord.

For the last couple years, I’ve been similarly blessed to teach at the University of St. Thomas in Texas where my colleagues have a similar understanding that beauty is the brightness emanating from truth—in particular the One who is Truth. We are very proud of our own graduate programs in philosophy and theology (come study with me in person or online for the latter!), but one of the best developments is our Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing, in which students take courses online and then join us in Houston for a two-week summer institute with many successful writers speaking and teaching.

Founded by fiction writer Joshua Hren and poet James Matthew Wilson, it just graduated its first class of students this spring. These newly-minted writers have studied the great works of literature before them, the techniques of writing, and how words can show forth the glory of the Word not merely through systematic explanation of truth but through rhyme, meter, and the drama that comes from a well-told tale in the form of a short story, a novel, or a play.

What is delightful to see is that our students and our graduates, with the great instruction and example of Wilson, Hren, and others, are publishing poems, stories, and criticism in a variety of places. We often complain that the great writers of Catholic history are all in the past. I don’t know about that. There are many who are creating works of beauty here and now. Perhaps some of them will not only pass the test of time but also the test of eternity, leading some future readers to see the splendor of Christ in a well-wrought narrative or a sonnet.

Republished with gracious permission from The Catholic Servant.

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The featured image is “A proposal. Young fisherman and a young woman knitting in a doorway” (1878) by Michael Peter Ancher, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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