A chaplain I knew was on the deck of a training ship at sea. While watching a glorious sunset, in violation of all the rules, he was quietly listening to Handel's Messiah. He noticed that the ship's atheist doctor was also on deck, enjoying the sight. He came up behind him so he could hear the music. The doctor turned to him and said, "That's cheating!"
Well, breaking regulations or not, cheating or not, the doctor returned to the faith. Atheism didn't stand a chance in the face of beauty. The prince in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot says, “Beauty will save the world.” Strong words. Of course, faith is a gift from God. But, as with all things, in his humility, God works —or, as some say, hides — his goodness by using secondary causes.
One day, the atheistic Communist writer Whittaker Chambers was so struck by the intricate beauty of his young daughter's ear that he thought, There must be a God. Yes, the heavens proclaim the glory of God. But, so do his creatures and their work.
Sadly, practical atheism, living as if God doesn't exist, and scientism, the belief that empirical observation, measurement, and experimentation are the only reliable ways to acquire knowledge, are alive and well. Can an SAT test ask students what the weight, measure, and experimental demonstrations are for the existence of love? Perhaps art and beauty can pierce the veil of this merely material mindset.
Buried behind all the election news in today's New York Times is an article, Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe? It talks about how the Jewish abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko visited the monastery cells decorated by the 15th-century Italian monk Fra Angelico. He was dumbstruck. “I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” he wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” The author of the article, Cody Delistraty, a critic and historian, said that for Rothko, "Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience."
Delistraty, a young man who writes for many of the name publications in New York, visited the former convent Rothko visited and a current showing of Angelico's work in Florence. He writes, "...Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago."
The agnostic novelist Henry James wrote after visiting this former convent long ago, “You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one. You yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”
One of the interesting phenomena in the post-pandemic world is the resurgence of interest in faith by many young people. Some American dioceses reported a 30‑70 % increase in new adult converts during Easter 2023‑2024. Many newcomers are in their 20s and 30s. A priest in Manhattan said that “three‑quarters of his new converts are in their 20s or early 30s” and that the growth took off after the pandemic. And this is not just in the United States.
Writing of his conversion in the year 397, St. Augustine said, “The beauty of the world, the splendor of the heavens, the order of nature—these are the first signs that God is present, even before we learn to name Him.”
The pagan philosopher Plato thought, “The good, the true, and the beautiful are the three pillars upon which the harmony of the world rests; each reflects the others, and together they guide the soul toward its fullest fulfillment.”
Related: AI Can Fake a Voice, but It Can’t Resurrect a Soul
Do art and beauty in our lives matter? When there is order in the soul, there is peace in a country. This may explain the attack this week by a possibly drugged-up teen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Two masterpieces, “The Princesse de Broglie” and a “Madonna and Child with Saints,” were vandalized. Beauty and the hatred of beauty matter.
As much as God uses beauty to draw us to himself, there are those at war with beauty. Nihilism —the belief in nothingness — contains the seeds of its own destructive ugliness. As Blaise Pascal said, “The universe is not only more wonderful than we imagine, it is more wonderful than we can imagine. That mystery is the seed of faith.”
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