Sertillanges, A.G. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Catholic University of America Press, 1992.
The French have, we must admit, a particular way about them, and their pronouncements bear a certain joie de vive and a confident, Salic élan. The Frankish style is free of the Anglophone tongue’s circumspect irony and its English throat clearings ringed with English hedges, like so many English pastures. So a reading of the English translation of Frenchman A. G. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods can give a native English speaker the feeling of having just quaffed either a heady Bordeaux or an intoxicating elixir handed down from an intellectual god. “Intelligence only plays its part fully when it fulfills a religious function, that is, when it worships the supreme Truth in its minor and scattered appearances,” Sertillanges declares, in one of his more mundane lines. In The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges seeks to sketch just that, the intellectual’s life, as an active dedication to the contemplation of Truth, all for charity’s sake.
And that vocational life of the intellectual, which Sertillanges describes in such moving prose, is full of seeming paradox. The intellectual must pursue times of solitude, but “as life-giving as is solitude, so paralyzing and sterilizing is isolation.” Study, for the intellectual, is “an act of life, not an art pursued for art’s sake” or “an appropriation of mere abstractions.” Rather, study must “be governed by [the] law of oneness of heart,” namely charity, for Truth, for God, for neighbor, in the widest sense of that Christian term. “More than ever before,” he writes, “thought is waiting for men, and men for thought. The world is in danger for a lack of life-giving maxims. We are in a train rushing ahead at top speed, no signals visible. The planet is going it knows not where, its law has failed: who will give it back its sun?” The answer, of course, is the Christian—and for the Dominican Sertillanges, especially the Catholic—intellectual.
But the book is in no way narrowly sectarian in scope or utility, in part because it weds exalted principles with eminently practical advice. Sertillanges insists that in addition to serving God, “the intellectual . . . must . . . give his heart to truth; he must remember that he is her servant.” But alongside such high Continental thoughts are the simplest practical proverbs of the shire: “Remember the saying of the English doctor: “Those who do not find time to take exercise must find time to be ill.” And often, high sentiment is woven together with the most concrete of plans of a successful intellectual life:
You, young man who understands this language and to whom the heroes of the mind seem mysteriously to beckon, but who fear to lack the necessary means, listen to me. Have you two hours a day? Can you undertake to keep them jealously, to use them ardently, and then…can you drink the chalice of which these pages would wish to make you savor the exquisite and bitter taste? If so, have confidence. Nay, rest in quiet certainty.
Such a high, heroic calling; such a simple formula: “Many have declared that the two hours I postulate suffice for an intellectual career. Learn to make the best use of that limited time.”
Nor does Sertillanges leave his reader unprovided for the bitter chalice of profound, disciplined use of those two hours. Surprisingly, he suggests refreshing that contemplative time with active duties to community, family, and individual friends on the grounds that it helps the intellectual avoid the ideological pitfalls of fantasy and dreaming: “The individual is the real, as opposed to the themes of the mind. By plunging through action into the real, we find new forms in the matter of our observation, as the artist at work enriches, corrects, and completes his conception.” He recommends, somewhat famously, keeping “a box of slips” at hand any time an insight bubbles up in the conscious mind, often at odd hours, after the intellectual has left his study. Sertillanges even suggests keeping that box of slips by the bed to “make a note” even “without waking up too fully.” In this, and in many other matters—full disclosure—I have happily followed Sertillanges’s advice, especially in writing my own dissertation, the box of notecards (not “slips” exactly) for which I still have near my desk as a resource and an homage to the methods of Sertillanges.
But this review would be a deception if I did not point out first a weakness of the work and then a failure of my review. Sertillanges, as a Dominican, contemplative religious, sometimes paints an impractical picture of what a married-with-children intellectual like myself, with many duties of the active life, might carve out for him or herself in all but those two important hours of study each day. Evenings with the family he describes as a relaxation and a sharing of ideas—but with a toddler or a complaining teenager with too much homework? Not likely. But my review also paints a false picture of critical judgment of this book which I love. We might better take Sertillanges’s advice for reading: “The book is your elder; you must pay it honor, approach it without pride, read it without prejudice, bear with its faults, seek the grain in the chaff.” So if you are an intellectual, a teacher of any sort, or if you are considering either of those professions, please value more than my review the great many things in The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, which I have passed over in silence. For as Sertillanges teaches, “Silence is the hidden content of the words that count. What makes the worth of a soul is the abundance of what it does not express.” In this, and much else, I will follow my French friend, Sertillanges.
Dr. Matthew Mehan is the Associate Dean and Assistant Professor of Government, Graduate School of Government. He has been teaching and designing humanities curricula for twenty years. Dr. Mehan is a graduate of the University of Dallas and the valedictorian of his class. He received a B.A. in politics, an M.A. in English, and a Ph.D. in Literature (with honors) for his dissertation on Shakespeare, Thomas More, and the education of leading citizens. For the last five years, he has also taught for the College’s Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program for undergraduates.
Dr. Mehan has consulted for national leaders and heads of state. He has written for various outlets both scholarly and popular, including Moreana and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of The Handsome Little Cygnet as well as Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals, an illustrated, best-selling book of poems that one critic called “a new classic” in children’s literature. His lovely wife and their passel of children live in Virginia. He graduated from Okemos Public High School in Okemos, Michigan, and he misses Michigan summers.