Austin Hall Library

The Need of an Inner Reservoir

Mortal peril has a virtue--it magnifies strength, develops resourcefulness, and fosters courage; that is, if those qualities are latent within the one in peril.

In significant measure, we depend upon the ability to draw upon and make use of, at the right moment, our latent inner resources. The ability to draw upon moral and mental capital in crisis depends upon the existence of a reservoir. And, one of the chief problems of moderns is how to create, discover, expand, and put to use whatever spiritual forces that may be hidden deep inside us.

I first stumbled upon this idea years ago in a dark, moldy, basement filled with stacks of books no one seemed to want. I picked up an old one--Pro Vita Monastica: An Essay in Defence of the Contemplative Virtues by Henry Dwight Sedgwick. It is not a great book but it contains nuggets of gold hidden within its pages. In a chapter on "The World and the Recluse," Sedgwick says: "Society depends for its well-being upon an ability to make use of its latent energy." He goes on to conclude that society's ability to draw upon moral and mental resources in crisis depends upon the existence of a reservoir. The book then discusses how an inner reservoir is created, and it is from this book that I first began to think of the necessity of two disciplines in life: the discipline of a flower garden, and the discipline of a library.

Sedgwick says, and I believe it to be true, that "[a] solitary in quest of values that shall rest upon the ultimate satisfactions of the soul must go by way of a flower garden." I have since sought to establish and cultivate first a flower garden wherever I have lived. The second discipline of a retreat is a well developed library.

All this reminded me recently of something Wendell Berry said in his The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. He said, in an essay titled "The Unsettling of America": "We see the likelihood that our surroundings, from our clothes to our countryside, are the products of our inward life--our spirit, our vision--as much as they are products of nature and work." 

If our inward lives are disordered, then it is likely that our surroundings will be as well. And, if our inward lives are disordered, it is likely that we will not have a sufficient mental and moral reservoir upon which to draw when crisis visits us.  

A Necessary Condition to the Love of Moral Truth

There is an old scholastic axiom that whatever is received is received after the manner of the receiver. As Thomas Dubay says, "A seal makes an impression or not according to the condition of the wax. Cold wax cracks and crumbles, while hot liquid wax retains no impression at all. Only wax at a proper temperature receives and retains the image." The efforts of a teacher in a classroom to instruct students is received according to the background, maturity, and docility of each student. The message of a book impresses its reader to the extent and in the manner of that reader's previous education, receptivity, and experience. Seldom these days does one encounter a person who appreciates Bach or Mozart, because most people are not ready to appreciate either of them unless one has been prepared for and accustomed to receive their music.

So it is with moral truth. Just as one who is richly habituated and educated to appreciate beautiful music is delighted by a magnificent symphony, so does one who loves beauty and goodness thrill to the discovery of truth. As Dubay says, "love of the Good brings one to a love of the Truth."

Reading to Reconcile

I admit to being puzzled at people who refuse to learn from those with whom they disagree. Since refusal to learn goes hand-in-hand with refusal to engage, these people reject ideas they have not even heard from their sources. Thus, they reject Aristotle's (or another such thinker's) thought, not because they have read, contemplated, reflected, understood, and been unpersuaded. Rather, they reject it because, having heard negative references, they presume it to be without value and, thus, do not engage his thought at all.

A.G. Sertillanges wrote that it is an essential condition for profiting by our reading that we "tend always to reconcile our authors instead of setting one against another." His point was not that critical analysis has no place, particularly in an academic context. But, when the aim is formation of the intellect, or personal profit from reading and study, a critical spirit is a hindrance to learning. 

As Sertillanges notes, in such situations, it is not the thoughts, but the truths, that interest us. If truth is a whole (and it is), it is not the disagreements we have with thinkers that should occupy us; it is the agreement any thinker (writer) has with reality that is our search. As Sertillanges says, "the fruitful research is to look for points of contact."

So, it is quite possible that although an Aristotelian, one may lean toward Plato in some things, just as it is possible that, without being an Augustinian, a Thomist might feed his mind constantly on the truths found in Augustine. One might even see Descartes as a corrupter of epistemology (as I do), and yet profit from some aspects of truth found in his writings (as I have).

The person who wants to acquire from authors, not fodder for derision, but truth and reflection, must bring to his reading a spirit of conciliation as well as a grasp of the universal.  

Reading: The Key to Learning

A.G. Sertillanges wrote: "Now reading is the universal means of learning, and it is the proximate or remote preparation for every kind of production" . . . "It is therefore a primordial necessity for the man of study to know how to read and to utilize his reading, and would to heaven that people were not habitually oblivious of the fact!". 

Sertillanges' rules for reading were:

1.    Read little. What he means by this is that a person must be selective when approaching the "deluge of writing" that floods the market. It is a caution against "the uncontrolled habit, the poisoning of the mind by excess of mental food, the laziness in disguise which prefers easy familiarity with others' thought to personal effort."

2.    Read intelligently, not passionately. Reading should be directed and ordered by reason, and accompanied by reflection and concentration, not an uncontrolled delight in an escape from self. Limit the "less solid and serious kind of reading". Beware of novels and newspapers. "[N]ever read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence."

3.    Choose your books. Don't fall prey to catchy titles and flashy advertising. Select your advisers carefully and go straight to the books that "satisfy your thirst." "Associate only with first-rate thinkers"--in your reading. Try to select books that address your subjects first hand; avoid books that just repeat ideas better addressed elsewhere. "The old stock or rather the permanent stock of ideas is best. . . ." Avoid novelty; "love the eternal books that express eternal truths."

Sertillanges recommends the careful choice of an "intellectual father" or guide (e.g., St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas) and, particularly at the early stage of formation, believe him rather than criticize. And he cautions that "[t]he choice of an intellectual father is always a serious thing." "Contact with genius is one of the choice graces that God grants to humble thinkers. . . ." 

Importance of the Right Mentors

“And so I came to Milan to Ambrose the bishop.” These are the poignant words of St. Augustine, simply recording in the late fourth century his arrival to study under the man who would become his mentor. Initially charmed by his rhetorical skills, Augustine eventually realized Ambrose’s preaching the “sound doctrine of salvation,” was “drawing him closer.” (CONFESSIONS, 5.13.23).  Simplicianus, a devout cleric, was Ambrose’s mentor, and his eventual successor in Milan.

In A.D. 397, Augustine wrote a very important watershed work entitled, TO SIMPLICIANUS: ON DIVERSE QUESTIONS, in which he completely upends much of his previous work on sin, free will, grace, and other critical issues. This work came as a result of the effect of St. Paul’s writings on Augustine and a serious and lengthy study on the fallenness of man. From A.D. 396 onward, St. Augustine’s doctrine of the fall of man is central and determinative of virtually everything he wrote. Whether he was right or wrong, failure to understand the development of Augustine’s thought, his mentors, and these watershed events is failure to understand Augustine.

How critical it is to have the right spiritual and intellectual mentors. For good or bad, our lives have a way of becoming intertwined with our mentors. We first choose them, and later they mold us—imperceptibly at first, but powerfully in the end.

The "Culture Wars" Began in the Middle Ages

If one enjoys reading intellectual history, Richard E. Rubenstein's Aristotle's Children is a book not to miss. Following an introduction to Plato and Aristotle, and a discussion of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, Rubenstein shifts his focus to the mid-twelfth century, when a group of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars working together began translating Aristotle's rediscovered works. The dissemination of those translations sent shock waves through Europe and eventually led to Thomas Aquinas's great life work of reconciling faith and reason. It is a rich book and well worth the read.

Of particular interest, however, is chapter seven, "'Ockham's Razor': The Divorce of Faith and Reason". Rubenstein does a good job of showing that with the work of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the Aristotelian revolution took a radically new turn. In fact, their work, and particularly that of William of Ockham, severed the link postulated by Thomas Aquinas between our mind's and God's. Moreover, this radical turn would eventually cut loose natural science, social thought, and all other branches of philosophy from their Christian moorings, and de-intellectualize the Christian faith. In short, the separation between faith and reason, and the drift of Western Civilization did not begin with the Renaissance, but with the work of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham in the late Middle Ages.

And to this day the influence of these two men and their followers can be seen in (among many places)  the so-called culture wars. They may be seen in the potentially destructive idea that one party's views are purely rational and scientific, while the other's rest on pure religious faith. Such claims and views eliminate any possibility of dialogue because, according to modern conceptions that began with Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, rationality relies on reason and objective evidence, while faith is validated, if at all, by non-rational means entirely.

For God's Sake, Think!

In the opening chapter of James Schall's new book, The Order of Things, he describes a delightful New Yorker cartoon by S. Gross, which, though likely unintentional, pretty well sums up what life is all about.

A large cat is depicted as standing upright and walking on his hind legs while pulling behind him a little toy cart on a long string. In the cart at the steering wheel is a little mouse. Behind the cart, however, is another little mouse furiously yelling at the contented mouse behind the steering wheel, "For God's sake, think! Why is he being so nice to you?"

It is the second mouse's cry, "Think!" "For God's Sake!" that captures it all. The cat is being a cat. The  little mouse ought to be able to think, to separate this from that, to identify accurately what each thing is, to see the order of how this thing stands to that thing, to know what it is that cats do. But, he isn't and doesn't. He thinks he is on a joyride. But, the second mouse knows the relation of cats and mice. The rational mouse knows that the cat's goodness, as it relates to mice, is not natural. The cat is being "catlike", but the first little mouse just doesn't get it. He isn't being "mouselike," from our point of view, he isn't being rational.

Schall points all this out and notes that an implicit order is presupposed in the cartoon, and we laugh when we see the incongruity of the scene depicted. But, we notice such incongruity only when we simultaneously see the congruity of things.

It is the second mouse--the rational one--who reminds us that we are commanded to "Think!" But, we are not just to think in some disorderly fashion, but to think "For God's sake!"--that is, by what is the very cause of our being. 

Why We Need Our Imaginations

One of the great books by one of the greatest modern writers is G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. In it, Chesterton wrote:

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not . . . in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. . . . To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

Whether Chesterton's observation is strictly true or not is not the point here. As George Weigel notes, it is the sacramentality of life that Chesterton is emphasizing. "To reduce what we can 'know' to what we can rationally 'prove' is dehumanizing--and it's another deprecation of the world and its sacramentality. You can't 'prove' the 'truth' to be found in friendship or love, in intellectual or political or spiritual passion, in Mozart's 'Prague' Symphony, in Rachmaninoff's Vespers--or in hitting the low outside corner with a 90 m.p.h. slider. But these 'truths' exist, and they give life not only its tang but its meaning. To deny the truth of these things is to lock oneself into the prison of a windowless world. It's stifling. And you'll eventually suffocate." (Weigel).

Slow the Pace

One of the most significant shortcomings of modern life is anxiety created by feverish activity that does little to improve one's quality of life and much to ruin it. When life is feverishly lived, virtually everything we do is badly done, our mind is cluttered, and there is no leisure to reflect upon anything.

Often, those who sincerely long for a reflective and well-ordered life are at the same time deeply entrenched in a feverish life and strangely satisfied with their lot. They are intoxicated. They love the fever and they are concerned that to live in quietness would be akin to no longer living. Whether it is true or not that to live quietly would be like death to some, it is certain that a feverish life is disordered. It is bad for the health of the body, which simply wears out with overuse; it is bad for the health of the mind, which becomes incapable of deep reflection; it is bad for the soul, which no longer maintains its composure.

So, if you are anxious, uneasy, restless, nervous, apprehensive, or suffer from any other such modern  malady, don't seek to suppress such feelings with more feverish activity. Rather, slow the pace, learn to to say no, work on the discipline of small things, relish the gift of monotony, build a fire, pick up a book and reflect. 

A Thought on the Relationship Between Intellect and Will

Reading Jacques Leclercq this morning I came upon the following quote: "It is one of the miseries of our human state that the intelligence sees good more easily than the will embraces it."

It is very often overlooked that the health of the mind depends upon seeing things as they really are. Seeing things as they really are depends, in some measure, on the health of the will. The health of the will depends upon the object of its love.