Tag: Vocation

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From my Commonplace Book: Vocation, Silence, and Knowing

One of my English professors in college had us keep a commonplace book where we wrote down important quotations, interesting images, central ideas, etc. from the things we were reading. It’s a practice I’ve more or less maintained since college, and when I taught high school English, I had my students keep a commonplace book as well.

A commonplace book is like a travelogue of the mind or a kind of map for the ideas and images that have served as landmarks. Mapping the world in this way is not an attempt at mastery but a desire for orientation, the desire to see what can be seen, to know what can be known in a lifetime, while recognizing the limitations of a single person to map the world in any comprehensive way. Loren Eisley reminds us of this with his striking image of the human journey in time and the desire for knowledge as a kind of caravan:

“We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all we hunger to know.” Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Here is a picture of one of the pages from notebook. Good luck reading it.

I recently filled up a notebook, so I thought I would collect some of my commonplace quotations here that dealt with similar themes. One benefit of keeping a commonplace book is the ability to review the themes and preoccupations that emerge over a period of time. As a preacher and teacher of scripture and as a student of theology, one perennial theme for me is the need for intellectual modesty and humility. Every intellectual pursuit has temptations and presumptions, but presuming to speak for and about God might be the biggest presumption of all. And yet as Pope Benedict XVI notes, it is the vocation of the theologian to speak, but before speaking one must listen:

“Silence and contemplation: speaking is the beautiful vocation of the theologian: in the loquacity of our day and of other times, in the plethora words, to make the essential words hear. Through words, it means making present the Word, the Word who comes from God, the Word who is God.“

The theologian speaks the word of God, but the theologian must first hear the Word and then speak. Theology then begins in contemplation, with closed lips and open ears. But the theologian does not stay silent. There are words to speak precisely because there is a Word who has spoken. There is a Word that has made and that even now upholds all things. There is a Logos that makes the -ology of theology not only possible but vital.

Such an approach to theology, one that begins in silence and then speaks, guards against two dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger of hubris, the delusion that in saying true things about God that we have said everything about God. On the other hand, there is the danger of paralyzing agnosticism. It is a kind of fear to say anything about God since it is impossible to say everything about God. Though this fear might masquerade as humility, real humility and silence in the face of mystery do not result in an agnostic throwing up of the hands or in a despairing resignation, but in a desire to more deeply indwell the mystery and then to speak truly of it.

Naming and knowing can be forms of appreciation and can be real knowledge, even if they are not comprehension and mastery. As Robert McFarlane says, “I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not knowing.” Robert McFarlane, Landmarks

And mastery itself is the wrong goal. As Balthasar reminds us, “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat

Moreover, the God we speak of is love, and so we know him truly by loving him. “The person who prays begins to see: praying and seeing go together because—as Richard of St. Victor says—‘Love is the faculty of seeing’…All real progress in theological understanding has its origin in the eye of love and its faculty of beholding. “ Joseph Ratzinger, Beholding the Pierced One

In sum, what begins in silence ends in praise. Praise and thanksgiving are the fruit of true theological reflection.

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Bonhoeffer on the Interplay of Mystery and Joy

In the latter part of his biography of Bonhoeffer, Charles Marsh carefully works through Bonhoeffer’s prison writings. The prison letters have come to be seen as some of Bonhoeffer most important and challenging theological work, and in this post I’d like to reflect on two recurring themes from those letters, namely the themes of hilaritas and arcnaum. Hilaritas is Christian joy that embraces the this-worldliness experience of life and Being, while arcanum is the unfathomable mystery of God as God. I’d like to suggest that these two themes are deeply entwined, that the proper response to mystery is in fact joy, that the recognition of arcanum is not a throwing up of the arms in the face of mystery but a joyful embrace of life as life and God as God.

Bonhoeffer’s reflections on these themes speak to his understanding of the vocation of theology. In a purely academic setting there might be no place for mystery at all, expect perhaps to solve it or to dispel it. But this is not how Bonhoeffer ever saw his own theological vocation, and especially not in prison at the end of his life. As Marsh writes: “It was a great mistake, Bonhoeffer said, to think of theology’s purpose as being the unveiling of mystery, ‘to bring down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of experience and reason!’ Theology should rather, as its sole mission aim to ‘preserve God’s wonder as wonder, to understand, to define, to glorify God’s mystery as mystery,’ ‘In the arcanum,’ he said, ‘Christ takes everyone who really encounters him by the shoulder, turning them around to face their fellow human beings and the world.’ Theology’s task was to preserve the eternal mystery in a catastrophically demystified time.” (from Strange Glory)

And it is precisely at this point that joy enters the conversation because the preservation of mystery is not a dour task, but a deeply joyful invitation into the life of God and into the world itself. Bonhoeffer sums this theme up as hilaritas. Bonhoeffer’s initial reflections on hilaritas emerged from his reading of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics II.2 in prison. In that volume, Marsh notes, “Bonhoeffer discovered the value of hilaritas—good humor—as the quality of mind, body, and spirit most important to animating the greatest human achievements.” But it was more than this too. Hilaritas is also a joyful resistance to the nihilism Bonhoeffer saw around him. It is a refusal to accept the construal of the world as nothing more than power, an absolute determination to not surrender. But it is more than a No; it is first a Yes. As Marsh writes, “hilaritas is “saying the Yes and the Amen in gleeful defiance of the Nothing” (366).

Thinking of the interplay of mystery and joy, I’m struck that the book of Ephesians is both the most extended meditation on the mystery of God as revealed in the gospel and the most breathlessly doxological book epistle in the New Testament.

Joyful doxology is the proper response to mystery. If mystery becomes simply something to be solved, then two possible dangers emerge, one being a throwing up of the hands and the other being the temptation to move on once the mystery is “solved”. Balthasar expounds on this second danger, writing, “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should always become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat

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Doing the Work – “Wise Application of Energy”

“One does not need extraordinary gifts to carry some work through; average superiority suffices; the rest depends on energy and wise application of energy. It is as with a conscientious workman, careful and steady at his task: he gets somewhere, while an inventive genius is often merely an embittered failure.” (The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges, 8).

As we saw in the last post, vocation begins with a moment of ecstasy. This moment of ecstasy, this summons of the self out of the self towards the True, towards the Good, towards the Beautiful, is essential and necessary, but it is not sufficient. The ecstatic moment ignites, but cannot sustain the vocation itself, and this is where the work really begins.

The ecstatic moment can only provide a sense of what to work on, or at least a sense of what to move towards, but it cannot in itself provide the how. How will I move forward? How will I make progress? These questions take us into the very heart of the intellectual vocation, or really any vocation. Let’s say I want to be a sculptor. I’ve been carried away by some great work, enraptured by the possibilities of the medium. But now to begin. What must I do? What must I learn? Or even more basic, how do I hold this chisel? These are questions related to what Sertillanges means by the use of energy and the application of energy.

I’m particularly taken by the phrase the “wise application of energy”. It seems exactly right to me because it compactly summarizes something I’ve discovered about intellectual work. I’ve found that using the right time of day to do the right kind of tasks has a compounding effect on my work that little else does. An hour of hard reading, writing, and studying anytime before noon is equivalent to two or three hours of work in the afternoon, or maybe even four in the evening. This basically means I’m good for nothing in the evening in terms of intellectual work, so it’s a wiser application of energy at that point to spend time with my wife, my kids, enjoy a drink, read some fiction, watch some TV. My energy is neither infinite nor consistent across time, which means part of the work is to pay attention to my own crests and troughs and then make the most of them.

Moreover, since I am not just a student, but also a priest and a father and a dad, I’ve found that the wise application of energy is the only way to survive. But even more than survival, there is actually something freeing in having other things to do. Having other work can be freeing in its own way because the intellectual work, the quest for truth, becomes on one hand a place of freedom and play. Other work also brings clarity. With other obligations the time devoted to the work must be intensely guarded and intensely focused. The guarding of the time is in one sense the most difficult thing, at least for me. More than distractions themselves or the desire to do something else, I’ve found working on a PhD that often the most arduous task, and so the thing that so often sabotage me, is protecting the time that I need in order to do the work. Once I am in the space, after an initial bout of inertia, generally the work takes over.

The application of energy is also about pacing yourself, and I was struck by the phrase “careful and steady at his task”, which reminded me of a phrase I came across in Helen Sword’s book, Air and Time and Light and Space—the snail conquers all. These words have kept me going and have kept me sane. It’s another way of saying be a tortoise and not a hare. It’s about chipping away, it’s about committing to a set of behaviors and tasks knowing that repetition will lead to accumulation. It is slow, yes, but it is momentum none the less.

So what to make of what he is saying here? On one hand he provides a workable model and workable time frame. One of the most astonishing things about the book is that he says you can cultivate the intellectual life with two hours a day. But on the other hand, he is not talking about a leisurely two hours. He’s talking about intensity of focus. As he says later on, “The life of study is austere and imposes grave obligations. It pays, it pays richly; but it exacts an initial outlay that few are capable of. The athletes of the mind, like those of the playin filed, must be prepared for privations, long training, a sometimes superhuman tenacity. We must give ourselves from the heart, if truth is to give itself to us. Truth serves only its slaves.” (4). In other words, the “work” itself may take place in two hours a day, but the vocation demands more than just the two hours a day. It means that the rest of my time is in some sense in service of those two hours and this is where the comparison to the athlete is instructive, because athletes don’t just train and then do whatever they might want. No, what they eat, when and how they sleep, everything is in service of that training. If, as we have seen in previous posts, the great work of the intellectual life happens in quiet and silence, then how we spend the rest of our time must in some sense serve that sense of quiet and silence. This is what I think he means by athlete of the mind.

What other practices and viruses does he commend? We will turn to that in the next post.

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Vocation as Summons – What does ecstasy have to do with calling?

Vocation and Ecstasy

“Vocation calls for response which, in one effort to surmount self, hears and consents” (xxi). Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

I want to take a pause from reflecting on what Sertillanges has to say about reading and loop back to the beginning of the book and draw out some of his thoughts about the intellectual life itself and in particular the summons to the intellectual life. His thoughts on vocation are interesting in themselves, but what I find most fascinating is the way he consistently discusses vocation and ecstasy together. For him they are twined themes because both are a summons for the self to move outside the self. To answer the call, to respond to vocation, one must move beyond the self, and this is literally the nature of ecstasy, ek-stasis, the self moving out of the self toward the object of desire, in this case Truth. The pursuit of truth is the telos of the intellectual life, and from Sertillanges’ point of view, whether one is a theologian or a physicist, both are after the same thing, Truth with a capital T. And this quest for truth is not simply one of duty but one of delight as well. As he puts it, “Every intellectual work begins by a moment of ecstasy; only in the second place does the talent of arrangement, the technique of transitions, connection of ideas, construction, comes into play. Now, what is this ecstasy but a flight upwards, away from self, a forgetting to live our own poor life, in order that the object of our delight may live in our thought and in our heart?” (xix).

One reason I’m interested in this idea is because in my doctoral research I’m looking at some of the things Hans Urs von Balthasar has to say about ecstasy as it relates to beauty. Ecstasy, ek-stasis, as I said requires the movement of the self out of the self toward the object of desire. Both Sertillanges and Balthasar agree on this but approach the question from two different starting points. Sertillanges insists on the ecstatic nature of Truth, while Balthasar insists on the ecstatic nature of Beauty. Both are looking at the same question from different angles, namely the question of Being, and its constituent transcendentals—Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In Balthasar’s image each of the three transcendentals are different doorways into the cathedral of Being, and right contemplation of Being is a part toward knowledge of God.

On the question of Truth and its relation to Being, Sertillanges makes this seemingly startling statement when he asserts, “the quasi-incarnation of God in being, of eternal Truth in every separate instance of the truth, should also lead up to a heavenly ecstasy.” (131) One might be taken aback by the incarnation language, but what he says is perfectly aligned with St. Thomas and much of the theological tradition. He is saying in effect that every instance of truth participates in Truth, and the Truth is constitutive of Being itself. What Sertillanges says is really just a riff on St. Thomas, whom is the master theologian of ecstasy: “For St. Thomas, ecstasy is the child of love; it carries you out of yourself, toward the object of your dreams. To love truth ardently enough to concentrate on it and so be transported into the universal, into the heart of abiding truths, is the attitude of contemplation and of fruitful production. One is then in a sense like the animal in the forest, concentrated, watchful, crouching with his eye on his prey; and the inner life is intense, but with a sense of distance as if one were moving among the stars. One feels at once delivered from all trammels and yet enchained, free and enslaved; one is fully oneself in surrounding to what is above self; one exults while forgetting self: it is a nirvana in which the intelligence is intensely happy and active” (133).

What we all want it ecstasy and what is important here is the necessity of contemplation. Contemplation is the fundamental act of the intellectual life, and without it there can be no summons, no vocation, no ecstasy, because contemplation is the posture of receptivity, what Sertillanges referred to in the reading section as docility. We cannot hear a call, a summons, if we do not have ears to hear. Contemplation is a path outs of the self towards the other, and so is a path of love. As a path of love, it is also a path of joy: “According to the Angelic Doctor, contemplation begins in love and ends in joy; it begins in the love of the object and the love of knowledge as an act of life; it ends in the joy of ideal possession and of the ecstasy it causes” (255). Ideal possession means to receive things in the manner that they are meant to be received, to love things in the manner in which they are meant to be loved, and one can only come to know such things through contemplation.