“If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.” This was the advice that Roger Scruton, a British philosopher and cultural commentator, gave to Ayaan Hirsi Ali a few years ago when she told him about the deep and long-lasting depression she had been battling. Hirsi Ali had tried to cope with her depression by turning to alcohol, and she had also seen multiple psychiatrists and dutifully taken the various medications they had prescribed, but nothing had helped. At least, not until her conversation with Scruton. His pithy comment helped to set her on a path that not only alleviated her depression, but also resulted in a fundamental transformation of her life.
Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia in 1969 and was raised as a Muslim. As a teenager, she had been an active and enthusiastic member of the Muslim Brotherhood. By early adulthood, she had abandoned the practice of her faith, although she still identified as a Muslim. Then the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred. Hirsi Ali immediately condemned the attacks, but she also reports that the attacks caused considerable cognitive dissonance for her. She began to question whether she should continue to identify with a religion that the terrorists had used to justify the attacks they carried out on that fateful day. The following year, while still wrestling with this issue, Hirsi Ali ran across Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Hirsi Ali describes her immediate reaction to Russell’s essay: “Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: ‘When I die, I shall rot.’”
To Hirsi Ali, atheism seemed to offer a way to resolve her cognitive dissonance regarding her identification as a Muslim and to escape her “irrational fear of hellfire.” She chose to become an atheist, and she soon established friendships with some of the so-called “New Atheists,” including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. She reports that the more time she spent with these new friends, the more confident she felt that she had made the right choice—at least, until the depression arrived, followed by the alcohol, and the psychiatrists, and the medications. And then, that fateful conversation with Scruton, shortly before his death from cancer in 2020. After telling Hirsi Ali “If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty,” Scruton made an additional comment that further caught her attention: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.” After speaking with Scruton, Hirsi Ali found that Mozart, opera, and church hymns provided a way out of the darkness of her depression. And they also turned out to be a path toward God.
Earthly beauty can lead us to discover and love the one who is Beauty.
By 2022, Hirsi Ali was taking a serious look at the Christian faith: going to church as well as thinking and reading about the faith. And then, yet another terrorist attack was to influence her spiritual path: Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Hirsi Ali concluded that this attack was more evidence, when combined with the 9/11 attacks, of the threat that radical Islam poses to Western civilization. A little over a month after the October 7 attack, Hirsi Ali published an essay entitled, “Why I Am Now a Christian,” playing off the title of Bertrand Russell’s essay that had first led her to atheism. Hirsi Ali and her husband, Niall Ferguson, and their two sons were baptized into the Christian faith on September 1, 2024.
In “Why I Am Now a Christian,” Hirsi Ali points to both a cultural motivation and a personal motivation for her conversion to the Christian faith. At the cultural level, she believes that the West needs to “uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” in order to be able to respond effectively to “three different but related forces” that threaten Western civilization: “the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.” She contrasts the Judeo-Christian tradition with atheism, which she argues is “too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.”
At a personal level, Hirsi Ali says she converted to Christianity because she “ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable—indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”
It’s not at all surprising that beauty was a significant impetus for the healing of Hirsi Ali’s depression and her turn to the Christian faith. Beauty can evoke a sense of wonder and awe, which in themselves can begin to free a person from the nihilism that is so tragically common today, and from the depression that is so often a consequence of that nihilism. Beauty can also raise questions of meaning and purpose: Why is there such a thing as beauty? What purpose does it serve? In fact, why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? But unlike atheism, which has no convincing answers to such questions, beauty can point us in the direction of the answers.
Hans Urs von Balthasar has argued (and rightly so) that beauty does more than merely bring us pleasure; beauty also points beyond itself: to the very depths of being, to the meaning of life itself. One of the ways beauty does so is via its gratuitous nature: Beauty is a gift, freely bestowing itself on any and all observers. As such, beauty points to the nature of being itself, which is to give. Being is a gift; life is a gift. Because beauty freely gives itself to us, beauty points to the Giver behind the gift. Beauty points to the God who gives, the God who is self-giving love. Beauty points to the God who gives us life itself, the God who gives himself completely to us in the God-man, Jesus Christ. Life is all about giving, because the essence of God, who is life itself, is to give. God invites us to share in the divine life by joining in the eternal circulation of self-giving love that lies at the heart of that life. Only within God’s divine life and love will we find our ultimate meaning and purpose.
Earthly beauty is one of the ways in which God calls us to himself and extends this invitation to share in his divine life, as Hugh of St. Victor pointed out. Earthly beauty can lead us to discover and love the one who is Beauty. This is why, for people who find it difficult to believe in God, the suggestion to “at least believe in beauty” can turn out to be pretty good advice.