For medieval people, everything was a sign pregnant with meaning. "Dante's universe did not simply exist; it meant, and it meant intensely," writes Louis Markos. "The universe was less a thing to be studied than a poem to be loved and enjoyed." For the medievals, the whole world was an icon of the divine, a manifestation of God. That is, God wasn't a distant, absentee figure but as close as the sun in the sky, the wind in the trees, the cry of a baby, and the sigh of a lover.

Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life, p. 45

In this amazing, ancient town, the very pattern of the place, of the houses and streets and of nature itself, the circling hills, the cliffs and trees, all focused my attention upon the one, important central fact of the church . . . Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church. Every view of the town, from the exterior hills, centered upon the long grey building with its high spire. 

The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rogue, to the winding river, and the green balley of the Bonnette, the town and the bride, and even to the white stucco villas of the modern bourgeois that dotted the fields and orchards outside the precinct of the varnished ramparts: and the significance that was thus imparted was a supernatural one. 

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole. 

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, 36-37

From Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

On the way to Paris from London, the coach stopped in a town around sixty miles southwest of the French capital. Our group was going to see a famous Gothic church, they told us. Fine by me. By then I had shed the small-town faith in which I had been raised. Being a seventeen-year-old man of the world, I was fairly confident that God did not exist, but I was pleased, of course, to look at beautiful churches. 

This is the untutored boy from the sticks who ambled unaware into Chartres Cathedral, one of the great architectural treasures of Western civilization. The complexity, the beauty, the sheer genius of the thing staggered me. I moved past the huge statues of biblical patriarchs, carved into the jamb of the west portal door, and into the narthex, staring gape-mouthed at the soaring arches in the church vault. Who had built this? How had they done it? And in the thirteenth century! It looked like those thin ribs held aloft tons of limestone, and, miraculously, those vast stained-glass windows, great sheets of reds, greens, blues, and golds, glowing in the sunlight like rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in the firmament, forming portraits of Jesus, His mother, the prophets, and the saints. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the glory of this building, and the overwhelming scale and intensity of its beauty. 

I walked out of that cathedral a different man, though I wouldn't understand what Chartres had done for me until years later . . . The bus drove on to Paris, but I recall not one thing about the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower, ate a real French baguette, or much else about my maiden voyage to this city that figured so prominently in my boyhood imagination. I only remember Chartres. It was, to me, a message from another time and place, and a mystery. I did not know what it said, not yet, but I wanted to find out. What kind of religious vision can inspire men to build a temple like that to their God? What is God saying about Himself through the stone and the glass of that cathedral? What is he saying to me?

To be sure I did not become more religiously observant on that trip, or back home for my senior year of high school. What happened was that Chartres put me onto something. I was still a teenage boy full of himself and longing to drink beer and chase girls, but in Chartres I had encountered something that for all its stony mass and solidity, seemed to me a thin veil over a higher reality. It sounds strange but I felt . . . judged by Chartres. I had seen it; I couldn't unsee it. Chartres haunted me, principally because having been there, I could no longer say with any conviction that Christianity was nothing more than middle-class social conformity or a con game for nitwit followers of TV evangelists.