Parenting & Family Quote by Bernard Berenson

Berenson’s “dream of life lived as a sacrament” isn’t a pious slogan so much as an aesthetic program with a moral edge. A sacrament is ordinary matter charged with meaning; by importing that religious technology into daily living, he’s staking out a way to make modern life feel consequential without relying on doctrine. The phrasing is telling: “from childhood on” casts the impulse as instinctual, almost pre-ideological, while “dream” admits its fragility. This is longing, not a manifesto.

The subtext is a historian’s confession about what drives the work. Berenson became the great connoisseur of Renaissance painting, and Renaissance art is saturated with the very fusion he’s naming: pigments and plaster made into portals, worldly skill pressed into spiritual intensity. When he says “taking life ritually,” he’s also describing a method of attention. Ritual is repetition with intention; it disciplines perception, makes you behave as if what you’re doing matters enough to warrant form. That’s connoisseurship turned inward: training the eye until the everyday starts to glow.

Context matters, too. Berenson’s career unfolded alongside the late-19th and early-20th century erosion of inherited certainties, when educated Europeans and Americans hunted for substitutes for faith: art, culture, “civilization.” His line carries both the seduction and the risk of that substitution. To treat life as holy can deepen gratitude and responsibility. It can also aestheticize morality, turning ethics into taste. Berenson’s dream is beautiful precisely because it’s precarious: holiness, here, has to be made, not received.