My Path to Rome

This is part of a talk give by Peter Kreeft at the 9th Annual Path to Rome International Conference.

There are thousands of conversion stories. How is mine different? How might you profit from hearing mine? How is mine different?

Of course every story is different because every person is different. But how is mine different?

For one thing, I am a philosopher: a fairly unusual occupation. What profit might you get from listening to a philosopher?

Philosophers look for general principles rather than particular facts. So my talk will be unique by not focusing primarily on what is unique and particular to my story but also on what is universal. I will first reflect on some general principles of conversion stories, before I tell my own unique story.

All conversion stories are different and all are the same. They are different in their beginnings and the same in their endings. There are many places to begin from, but all paths lead to Rome. (Some of us are blessed enough to get there in this life.)

All honest conversion stories are journeys from falsehoods to truth, or from partial truths to the fullness of truth. This is the reason why conversion stories begin in many different places and end in the same place: because truth is one and error many. As Chesterton says, there is only one angle to stand upright but many angles to fall.

There is only one honest reason to become a Catholic: because it is true.

No matter how good, beautiful, loving, peaceful, consoling, joyful, or pastoral a church may be, no honest person can enter it unless he is convinced that its good is the true good, its beauty the true beauty, its love true love, its peace true peace, its consolation true consolation, its joy true joy, and its pastoring true pastoring by the true pastors. Truth trumps everything.

Since we all have arrived at one and the same place, and since we have arrived here by such a variety of paths, and since all these paths are paths from error to truth, or from less truth to more truth; and since we all seek truth first if we are honest, therefore the question arises: Of what possible use is a conference like this, in which we share our different conversion stories? Of what use could my story be to you, who already have come to know the same single Catholic truth I have come to know? The only part of my path you do not know is the errors, not the truths. Why listen to error stories?

This is not just a clever logical puzzle, but a real question that honesty demands we ask. Is this conference really only gussied-up gossip? Why wallow in remembrance of darkness when we have emerged into the light?

I have to answer this question in order to know what would be valuable to you in my story. I must first find the universal principle about the value of conversion stories in general before I can judge what is of value in my story in particular.

A universal principle is best seen in a classic instance of it.

Next to the story of the conversion of St. Paul, in Acts 9, the most famous and most important conversion story in history is probably St. Augustine’s. Next to the Bible, Augustine’s Confessions was the most popular book in the world for over 1000 years. It is the book that would still win first place if a contest were held among all the Christians who have ever lived, asking which book they would choose to take with them to a desert island for the rest of their lives if they could choose only one in addition to the Bible. (When Pascal knew he was dying, he gave away all his books except the Bible and the Confessions. That explains much of the power of his Pensees.)

The whole history of the world would have been more radically different, and more individual lives would have been more radically different, and your life would have been more radically different, if Augustine’s conversion story had not happened, than any other since St. Paul’s.

So let us take it as our paradigm case to find out what value conversion stories have. Why did Augustine write the Confessions?

Twice in the course of his narrative, he stops to consider that question: what value is there to others in his telling his story to the rest of mankind, or ‘that small portion of mankind that may chance to read this book,’ as he modestly says? And his answer is: “So that they may know out of what depths we cry to Thee.” Confessing both darkness and light, confessing the emergence from darkness into light, is a way of praising divine grace, and is a rehearsal for what we will do forever without boredom in Heaven. The Confessions begins, in its very first sentence, and ends, in its very last sentence, with praise: like human life itself, like the universe itself. Here is one principle of conversion stories: they should be forms of praise, not complaint or bragging, and they should be theocentric, not anthropocentric—as the universe is, and as human life should be.

Augustine’s question (“Why am I writing this book?”) is an utterly honest question (one among hundreds of questions; I know of no book with more interrogative sentences than the Confessions), and an utterly honest answer to the question. For the whole of the Confessions is ablaze with the burning honesty that comes from its being written in the presence of God. It is addressed not to man but to God, like Job’s speeches, rather than being merely ABOUT God, like Job’s three friends’ speeches. It is not just theology but prayer, or theology as prayer.

And here is a second principle for conversion stories: they should be prayers, they are addressed to God, they are confessions of truth in the presence of Absolute Truth. Other men are allowed to overhear. They are the eavesdroppers, the third party. God is the first. The convert is the second.

And why does Augustine let us eavesdrop? To preach the Gospel of divine grace to us. And here is a third principle: conversion stories should be a form of evangelism. That is their genus, their frame. They are personal, not only in their author but also in their audience. Like the Bible, they are not junk mail or spam. They are arrows shot at hearts.

And here is a fourth principle: the eavesdroppers are allowed to overhear only if they qualify. Not everyone qualifies. What qualifies is an alignment—not yet of head but of heart. Not yet of head because new truth is about to enter the head of the one who is being evangelized, so the two heads, the head of the convert and the head of the prospective convert, the reader, begin in a state of non-alignment. But the hearts must be aligned to begin with, at least in a fundamental honesty. The recipient’s heart must beat for truth, like the speaker’s heart. Otherwise, says Augustine, readers will certainly misunderstand, for “they do not have their ear to my heart, where I am what I am.”

Jesus used exactly the same hermeneutical criterion for understanding scripture in John 7:17 when He told inquirers who asked how they could understand His teaching, “If your will were to do the will of My Father, you would understand My teaching, for it comes from Him.” That is the most important sentence ever uttered about how to interpret the Bible.

This helps us to answer the question why is it good for us to know “out of what depths we cry to Thee,” why it is profitable to study the different roads by which God’s grace draws us home: because it is important for us not just to understand but also to stand under, to stand under the authority of, to be in the real presence of, to appreciate with both head and heart, to be totally tutored by, God’s grace—to do so with our whole being, especially that central point of our being that scripture calls the “heart,” which means not the feelings but the mysterious non-objectifiable subject or “I” or image of God the “I AM.” With this “heart” we understand God and ourselves, the only two realities we will never be able to escape, to all eternity.

So this gives us a fifth principle of conversion stories: they are valuable not just for knowing God and grace but also for knowing ourselves. For to know ourselves we must know what we most ignore in ourselves, namely our errors, of both mind and will, since these two are so closely intertwined: the mind’s ignorance often comes from the will’s ignoring.

So the bottom line is that we are all here to sing variations on “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound That Saved a Wretch Like Me. I Once Was Lost But Now I’m Found; Was Blind But Now I See.”

Our blindnesses, consequences of sin, are inevitable throughout this second act of humanity’s three-stage drama, between the end of Act One in the Garden of Eden and the beginning of Act Three in Paradise. During this stage, i.e. in this world, God uses our own darkness and even our own sins to liberate us from darkness and sin. That sounds like an unintelligible contradiction, but it is neither. For in this present state we appreciate everything best by contrast: life by death, peace by war, riches by poverty, health by disease, pleasure by pain, freedom by slavery, salvation by sin, truth by error, orthodoxy by heresy. (That will no longer be so in Heaven, of course.) That’s one reason why God allows us to err: for us to appreciate truth. That’s why converts usually appreciate their faith more than “cradle Catholics.”

Thus we have a sixth principle of conversion stories: they are useful for appreciating Catholic truth by means of contrasting errors.

The Church is a ravishingly beautiful woman at a very large party. All she has to do to get the men at the party to fall in love with her is to take off her makeup and let her inner beauty shine forth.

And that is not the task primarily of bishops or priests or administrators but of us in the pews. They are just the oil; we are the motor. How many converts the Church has, how much of the world she saves, is up to you and me. And what must we do? Simply what St. Francis said: “Preach the Gospel. Use words if necessary.”

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