A.G. Sertillanges The Intellectual Life: A Call to Arms

By Thaddeus J. Kozinski

More than ever before thought is waiting for men, and men for thought. The world is in

danger for 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 it: who will give

it back its sun?

--A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

Many of wish in later years that, when we were younger, someone would have told us

about certain things, often certain books that, as we look back on them, would have

greatly helped us know the truth of things. Some of these books are directed to what is

true, to reality, to what is, but a certain number are rather directed to the question of

“how do I go about knowing?”

--Father James Schall, from the Foreword of A. G. Sertillanges, The

Intellectual Life

Many of us live much, perhaps most, of our intellectual life on blogs. I don’t condemn this, of

course, for the irony and hypocrisy of such a condemnation would be off the charts. Yet, the

kind of intellectual habits that we are forming and the quality of intellectual fare of which we

are partaking—the overall character of the intellectual life we are living—in and by long-term,

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virtual inhabitation in blog culture is something we vitally (literally) need to consider, even if

such consideration takes place right smack in blog country.

So, talking about a book on a blog isn’t the worse thing one could do, for we might be talking

about a blog-about-a-blog on a blog, or some such ridiculous cyber-iteration. Indeed, talking

about a book that was written before computers existed, let alone the Internet, by an old-

school, French, Dominican Thomist, with the title The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions,

Methods is, all-things-considered, about the best thing one could be talking about on a blog.

Such talk is bound to shed rare light on our contemporary situation as virtual intellectuals. Let

me begin this four-part series of reflections on Sertillanges’ magnificent book with some words

of his that provide a profound critique of and warning against our blog culture with regard to

soulcraft:

We want to develop breadth of mind, to practice comparative study, to keep the

horizon before us; these things cannot be done without much reading.

But much and little are opposites only in the same domain. . . [M]uch is necessary in the

absolute sense, because the work to be done is vast; but little, relatively to the deluge of

writing that…floods our libraries and our minds nowadays. . . . What we are proscribing

is the passion for reading, 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. . . . The passion for reading which many pride themselves on as a

precious intellectual quality is in reality a defect; it differs in no wise from other passions

that monopolize the soul , keep it in a state of disturbance, set it in uncertain currents

and cross-currents, and exhaust its powers. . . . The mind is dulled, not fed, by

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inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and

therefore of production; it grows inwardly extroverted, if one can so express oneself,

becomes the slave of its mental images, of the ebb and flow of ideas on which it has

eagerly fastened its attention. This uncontrolled delight is an escape from self; it ousts

the intelligence from its function and allows it merely to follow point for point the

thoughts of others, to be carried along in the stream of words, developments, chapters,

volumes. . . . [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.

There could hardly be a more sobering critique of blog addiction than this, written before there

was even any information about the information age. Yet, Sertillanges was not a Luddite (he

instructs us how to take notes on note cards and categorize then in cabinets, not because of

any peculiar primitivism, but because the filing cabinet was the latest technology at hand), and

if he were alive today, he would certainly make good use of the incredible mind-expanding and

cave-escaping potential of the Internet. Of course, of all people, Sertillanges would be keenly

aware of its special soul-suffocating and cave-constricting dangers.

But all this is to say that The Intellectual Life is a book as relevant today as it was almost a

century ago when it was written. The intellectual life has not evolved, mutated, or corrupted in

its essence, for it is the life of the human soul made in the image of likeness of God, and thus

can change as little as God can change. Perhaps it is a book even more relevant today, as

intellectual life in the post-modern, post-Christian, post-industrial, post-Empire, post-rational—

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and post-intellectual?—age—becomes even more virtual, artificially sustained, and counterfeit.

Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

What they set themselves to achieve . . . was the construction of new forms of

community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and

civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. . . . What matters at

this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the

intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already

upon us.

The “they” to whom MacIntyre refers here are St. Benedict and his followers in the sixth

century, who did all they could to preserve the precious Christian and classical civilization, the

literature, history, philosophy, and spirituality that had formed the basis of civilized society up

to then. “We,” however, are charged with preserving the existence and character of, not just

the artifacts of intellect, but intellect itself, which seems in real danger of being supplanted and

replaced with some sort of communal electric brain a la The Matrix or C.S. Lewis’s That

Hideous Strength of which individual human persons are to be its willing, mindless circuits. The

barbarians are not just among us but have been ruling us for some time, as MacIntyre has

pointed out, and if we want our culture once again to be ruled by Intellect, the Good, the True,

and the Beautiful, then we ourselves must be so ruled, and so we must read Sertillanges.

Do you want to have a humble share in perpetuating wisdom among men, in gathering

up the inheritance of the ages, in formulating the rules for the present time, in

discovering facts and causes, in turning men’s wandering eyes towards first causes and

their hearts towards supreme ends, in reviving if necessary some dying flame, in

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organizing the propaganda of truth and goodness? That is the lot reserved to you. (11-

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Sertillanges is an antidote to our anti-intellectual culture, and a lens by which to discern its

myriad pseudo-intellectual surrogates and expose its dangerous distractions. In the remainder

of this review essay, we shall examine its major themes and comment on selected passages.

This is especially not a book that can be adequately summarized, for it is essentially a set of

aphorisms, though systematically and adeptly combined into a flowing whole, so I shall quote

often and generously, and I will leave off commentary on the last few chapters in the hopes

that the reader will tolle lege.

As the above quote reveals, Sertillanges sees the intellectual life as essentially a vocation, and in

the most spiritual sense of the word. It is, as he says, “a sacred call.” Thus, it is not for everyone,

in the same way that a vocation to the religious life is not for all Christians. It is, of course, an

obligation for every human being to develop his intellectual life, since the intellect is at the

heart of our being, and our job in life is, if nothing else, the care of the soul. Yet the special

calling to the intellectual life is distinct from the universal call to soul-craft, just as the call to the

religious is distinct from the universal call to holiness. Moreover, it is, like the religious life, only

for an elite few:

It implies a serious resolution. 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 must be prepared for privations, long training, a sometime superhuman

tenacity. We must give ourselves from the heart, if truth is to give itself to us. Truth

serves only its slaves (4).

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For Sertillanges, the intellectual vocation is a calling to discover, articulate, and transmit truth.

How far this is from the understanding and practice of the intellectual life in contemporary

academia, in which one’s soul becomes grist for the collective academic mill, the function of

which is to recuperate a perpetually dying, artificial, stillborn “intellectual life” of truth-

indifferent and jargon-ridden journals, ruthless career-worship, status-quo opportunism, and

inner-circle gossip-mongering. Try to live a genuinely intellectual life in the midst of that!

But there is hope, for Sertillanges notes more than once that the intellectual’s best and most

essential friend is solitude, though isolation is to be avoided: “The man with too much solitude,

“grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: he stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just

come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look on you as if you

were a ‘proposition’ to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook”

(59). The intellectual’s worst and most dangerous associate is the world, especially a world like

contemporary academia!

When the world does not like you it takes its revenge on you; if it happens to like you, it

takes its revenge still by corrupting you. Your only resource is to work far from the

world, as indifferent to its judgments as you are ready to serve it. . . . Do not busy

yourself with the sayings and doings of the world, that is with such that have no moral

and intellectual bearing; avoid useless comings and goings which waste hours and fill

the mind with wandering thoughts. These are the conditions of that sacred thing, quiet

recollection (xxiii, 47).

Of course, most of us have no choice but to dwell in the vengeful, worldly and wordy halls of

academia, where much thought is “wandering,” and where bureaucratic “useless comings and

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goings” are endless. What Sertillanges counsels is not a flight from the world but,

simply, balance. For example, the intellectual desperately needs the support of a robust and

authentic community of fellow intellectuals, but sometimes it is enough, he says, just to know

there are others laboring at the same task, whether or not there is face-to-face or close

proximity to such a community. Perhaps blog communities fulfill this purpose in our

community-starved day!

With regard to solitude, specifically, the amount of concentrated intellectual work that is

required in the intellectual vocation, Sertillanges’ prescription is quite surprising:

Have you two hours a day? Can you undertake to guard them jealously, to use them ardently,

and then, being of those who have authority in the Kingdom of God, can you drink the chalice

of which these pages would wish you to make you savor the exquisite and bitter taste? If so,

have confidence. Nay, rest in quiet certainty (11).

Two hours a day, when one thinks of it, is not an inconsiderable amount, especially when we

consider the difficulty of engaging in even a few minutes of genuine, contemplative intellectual

activity in a culture “distracted from distraction by distraction” to use T.S. Eliot’s incredibly apt

phrase. For Sertillanges, the fundamental virtue required of the intellectual is attention, and

two hours a day of it is plenty. Here he is in accord with Simone Weil in her fantastic essay,

“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”: “Although

people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the

real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”

Like Weil, Sertillanges sees the pursuit of knowledge as the pursuit of God, a form of prayer,

and just as attention is the sine qua non of the contemplation of God, so is it the indispensable

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virtue for the attainment of knowledge and the discovery of truth. How to develop one’s faculty

of attention? Live a moral life! Sertillanges makes this absolutely clear. Inordinate and

uncontrolled passions destroy the intellectual life more than anything else. What to give our

attention to precisely? This question is a bit more complex; Sertillanges’ direction on the

organization of the intellectual’s life and work shall be the topic for the next installment, and it

is a quite rigourous systematic plan he gives us! But for all that, Sertillanges’ is a balanced

approach--both mystical and down-to-earth. Before we get down to earth, let us follow

Sertillanges into the heavens:

Every truth is a reflection; behind the reflection and giving it value, is the Light. Every

being is a witness; every fact is a divine secret; beyond them is the object of the

revelation, the hero witnessed to. Everything true stands out against the Infinite as

against its background; is related to it; belongs to it. A particular truth may indeed

occupy the stage, but there are boundless immensities beyond. One might say a

particular truth is only a symbol, a symbol that is real, a sacrament of the absolute (31).

Having in the first three chapters provided the raison d’etre of the intellectual life, its precise

essence, a vocation, its efficient causes, the moral and intellectual virtues, and its telos, the

discovery, contemplation and transmission of truth, in the remaining six chapters Sertillanges

uncovers for us the “matter,” as it were, of the vita intellectus, that is, its proper conditions.

When, what, and how to study? In what spirit? How, and how much, to sow the seeds of

reading and memory to reap a fruitful harvest of creative production? How to strike the right

balance between life qua intellectual and lifequa human being?

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St. Paul tells us to pray constantly, meaning that prayer is to be engaged in not only during

those hours set-aside daily for liturgical and vocal and mental prayers, but at every moment.

Prayer is spiritual breathing, the heartbeat of the soul. For Sertillanges, the intellectual life must

be similarly continuous and perpetual. How? “What do we need, in order to utilize this

permanent life in the service of truth? Discipline only. The dynamos must be connected to the

turbines; the turbines must be turned by the steam; the desire to know must, regularly and not

intermittently, set the conscious or unconscious activity of the brain in motion” (71). And the

intellectual life must not only beunlimitedtemporally, but also spatially, with an ubiquity

analogously equal to its all-the-time operative dynamism. This is a tall order.

Perhaps the best section of The Intellectual Life is Sertillanges masterful treatment of that most

thorny issue for the scholar: how to achieve expertise in one area of study without thereby

sacrificing ignorance of others—how to attain both breadth and depth? It would seem futile

nowadays (and ever since, say, the Middle Ages) to aspire to anything other than a mastery of a

very narrow field—and even then, can we attain complete mastery anymore?—the sheer

amount of accumulated knowledge seems virtually infinite. On the other hand, to attain an

educated gentlemen’s acquaintance with all fields of knowledge would seem to be the

dilettante’s errand. Is it possible now to become educated in the Aristotelian sense?

Every systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two

distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of

the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an

educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgement as to the goodness or

badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to

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be able to do this; and even the man of universal education we deem to be such in

virtue of his having this ability. It will, however, of course, be understood that we only

ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all

or nearly all branches of knowledge, (Parts of Animals 639a1-6).

Can we be "critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge"—now?

Sertillanges has done the best job of anyone of solving this dilemma in his chapter “The Field of

Work.” And here, in condensation, is his solution:

We may assert without any paradox that every branch of science pursued home would

lead to the other sciences, science to poetry, poetry and science to ethics, and then to

politics and even to religion on its human side. Everything is in everything, and partitions

are only possible by abstraction. . . . When one knows something thoroughly, provided

one has some inkling of the rest, this rest in its full extent gains by the probing of its

depths. All abysses resemble one another, and all foundations have communicating

passages (102, 120).

Sertillanges is telling us that specialized knowledge is not only helpful for the scholar, but

absolutely necessary; but at the same time, we are not to think that specialization necessarily

excludes generalization, or vice versa. The key is somehow to balance depth with breadth, for

only when these are properly balanced can the intellectual obtain either of them.

But it’s more than a balance, for Sertillanges: breadth is depth, and depth is breadth. This

doctrine is Sertillanges’ most brilliant and hard to grasp, and so most difficult effectively to

summarize. Let me quote his distinct advocacies of both breadth and depth, and then try to

convey how they are to be brought together, indeed, identified. On breadth:

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If you want to have a mind that is open, clear, really strong, mistrust your specialty in

the beginning. Lay your foundations according to the height that you aim to reach;

broaden the opening of the excavation according to the depth it has to reach. . . . A

specialist, if he is not a man, is a mere quill-driver; his egregious ignorance makes him

like a lost wanderer among men; he is unadapted, abnormal, a fool. The intellectual

Catholic will not copy such a model (103).

Okay, so we lay the liberal-arts foundations down in college, most effectively (in my opinion) by

an integrated curriculum a la Thomas Aquinas College, University of Dallas, Wyoming Catholic

College, etc., and then we begin to specialize in graduate school, after our foundations have

been widely laid and our excavation widely dug, after which we specialize further, digging

deeper in what’s left of our professional life into our initial masterpiece with specialized

research.

Not quite, says Sertillanges, for the widening process is never-ending as well, lest we become a

fool:

To follow up to a certain point the explorations of every seeker is for you an obligation

which results at last in a tenfold capacity for your own research. When you come back

to your special study after having thus made a special survey of different fields, widened

your outlook, and acquired the sense of deep underlying connections, you will be quite

a different man from the prisoner of one single narrow discipline (104).

And, now, the obligation of specialization:

Science is knowledge through causes, and causes go down deep like roots. We must

always sacrifice extent to penetration. . . . When the whole field of study has been

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surveyed and its connections and unity estimated in the light of fundamental principles,

it is urgently necessary, if one does not want merely to mark time, to turn to some task

which is precise, defined in its limits, proportioned to one’s strength; and then to throw

oneself into it with one’s heart (119).

How to integrate, balance, synthesize, and even identify these two apparently antithetical

pursuits? “Ite ad Thomam!”

The Summae of old were the Bibles of knowledge: we have now no Summae, and no

one among us is capable of writing one. Everything is in chaos. But at least, if a collective

Summa is premature, every man who thinks and really desires to know can try to

establish his personal Summa, that is, to introduce order into his knowledge by an

appeal to the principles of order; in a word, by philosophizing, and by crowning his

philosophy with a concise but profound theology (109).

For Sertillanges, philosophy and theology are not just for philosophers and theologians. For

they are the queen and divine sciences respectively, and where either is absent or neglected or

misapprehended in the intellectual life, the other sciences that are present, cultivated, and

apprehended will suffer. “Now that philosophy has failed in its duty, the sciences fall to a lower

level and scatter their effort; now that theology is unknown, philosophy is sterile, comes to no

conclusion, has no standard of criticism, no bearings for its study of history; . . . it does not

teach” (108). Theological wisdom, which is to say, what can be intellectually gleaned from the

immeasurable depths of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the authoritative teachings of

the Church, is the sine qua non of the intellectual life.

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Does that mean that only Christians can live authentic intellectual lives? Yes. Sertillanges, in

making Christian, particularly Catholic, theology a necessary foundation of and end-point for all

intellectual inquiry and contemplation, was well ahead of his time; this is, after all, the main

thesis of the Radical Orthodoxy movement. Of course, it must be stated Blessed Cardinal John

Henry Newman made an analogous claim, almost a hundred years before Sertillanges, with

regard to theology’s essential integrating role for any genuine liberal-arts university curriculum

in The Idea of a University.

Now, theology is a big subject, so Sertillanges boils it down for us. Read St. Thomas Aquinas,

particularly, his Summa Theologiae—and in Latin. Why? In addition to Leo XII’s official

resurrection of and authorization of Thomistic studies for seminarians and clergy of the Catholic

Church in the nineteenth century, Sertillanges provides several independent reasons for being a

Thomist. The first is the Angelic Doctor's unsurpassable provision of a “body of directing ideas

forming a whole and capable like the magnet, of attracting and subordinating to itself all our

knowledge” (114). He goes on:

The intellectual position of Thomism is so well chosen, so removed from all the

extremes where abysses of error yawn, so central as regards the heights, that one is

logically led up to it from every point of knowledge, and from it one radiates, along

continuous paths, in every direction of thought and experience (116).

In the last section of the chapter “Field of Work,” Sertillanges explains further his puzzling

notion that the intellectual must be both a specialist and a generalist, possessing both universal

knowledge of overarching principles as well as detailed knowledge of things on the ground. Lest

we despair of ever effecting such a seemingly impossible balancing act, he admits that

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something does indeed have to give--what is to be sought above all is depth, even at the

expense of breadth. Any extension and scope we achieve in our knowledge must always be for

the sake of intension and formation—and definitely not for encyclopedic virtuosity, which he

calls “an enemy of knowledge.”

Sertillanges discussion of the question of "when to go deep," when to choose one particular

discipline over another—even if that be the meta-discipline of philosophy--when to select a

“major,” as it were, in one’s intellectual life absolutely stunning in its lucidness; his treatment

of why we must at some point choose something to study to the exclusion of others is at once

illuminating and consoling. We aspirant intellectuals have all experienced a kind of vertigo

when confronted with the virtual infinity of great books there are to read; for, about every one

of them we are compelled to say, “That is the book I must read right now!” And when we do

choose to study one book or a selection of books relating to one particular discipline, we know

that we are thereby excluding from our consciousness others just as worthy and enlightening.

How to reconcile oneself to this seemingly tragic situation?

The answer, for Sertillanges, is twofold: the mysterious connection of one to all in the depths of

knowledge, and the mystical communion of scholars. About the first, “When one knows

something thoroughly, provided one has some inkling of the rest, this rest in its full extent gains

by the probing of its depths. All abysses resemble one another, and all foundations have

communicating passages” (120). About the second, “Everyone in life has his work; he must

apply himself to courageously and leave to others what Providence has reserved for others”

(120).

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Sertillanges' wisdom about this subject is so profound that I can’t bear, and an unable to,

summarize it. So, here are his words:

Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a

noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we

must submit and rest content as to the things that time and wisdom deny us, with a

glance of sympathy which is another act of homage to the truth. . . . We are not much,

but we are a part of the whole and we have the honor of being a part. What we do not

do, we do all the same; God does it, our brethren do it, and we are with them in the

unity of love (121).

I shall end this discussion of The Intellectual Life with a treatment of some of Sertillanges’

prescriptions for fruitful intellectual work, including what one should read, both in general and

particular, to fulfill one’s vocation of producing work that glorifies God and sanctifies men.

What I shall not discuss here are Sertillanges’ thoughts, found in the last few chapters, about

the right relationship between the work of the intellectual qua intellectual, and the life of the

intellectual qua person, the assimilation and integration of life experience to the life of the

mind, the virtues that need to be developed, cultivated, and exercised in the process of

writing, especially courage, perseverance, patience, and relaxation; and the paramount

importance of self-knowledge, the sober awareness of what is and is not to be attempted in the

light of one’s particular intellectual, God-given vocation. Sertillanges must simply be read on

these topics, and it is my hope that these reflections have helped to prepare and inspire the

reader to read The Intellectuial Life.

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The first axiom of the intellectual with regard to preparation for work, is to “read little." This

sounds quite counter-intuitive, especially for the aspirant philosopher who, it would seem,

needs to know a lot about a lot to avoid both dilletantism and narrowness. Yet, there is a

greater danger: “What we are proscribing is the passion for reading, 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” (146). One of the telltale symptoms and

“daughters” of the vice of sloth is, as St. Thomas teaches, hyperactivity, a frenetic busyness that

displays an apparent diligence of effort and dedication to the good, but is in fact a neurotic

rejection of fruitful labor and a studied avoidance of any deep, receptive, life-changing

encounter with truth. It is an escape from being, including the being of one's ever-more-

uncomfortable self: “The mind is dulled, not fed by inordinate reading, it is made gradually

incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production; it grows inwardly

extroverted . . . becomes the slave of its mental images, of the ebb and flow of ideas on which it

has eagerly fastened its attention” (147). I can think of no more powerful occasion for this

intellectual sin of gluttony than blog surfing, where the increasing quantity and movement of

words and images becomes a vitiated substitute for quality and depth of ideas.

Sertillanges knows that the intellectual, especially in our frenetic, news-overloaded global

village, can not completely avoid downloading contemporary events and opinions; he is

incapable of repairing by a simple act of will to the Platonic world of ideal and eternal forms.

Furthermore, we need the matter of worldly goings-on to ground and feed our incipient

universal ideas. His advice: “A serious worker should be content . . . with the weekly or bi-

monthly chronicle in a review; and for the rest, with keeping his ears open, and turning to the

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daily papers only when a remarkable article or grave event is brought to his notice” (149). How

best to apply this advice in webland—RSS feeds?— is something we need carefully to consider.

In terms of what to read in one’s discipline and for general education, Sertillanges tells us to

read only those books “in which leading ideas are expressed at first hand.” This cuts things

down nicely. He also provides us with a four-fold, hierarchically organized categorization of

reading materials: fundamental, accidental, stimulating, and recreational. Fundamental reading

is for formation, not information; we seek a guide to which to be docile, not an interlocutor

with which to be dialectical. “Three of four authors for one’s specialty.” Accidental reading is for

gaining information and examining ideas directly related to the task at hand, and this requires

an attitude of freedom and detachment, of analytical utility, a more pragmatic cast of mind.

Stimulating reading is for inspiration, edification, and healing—one needs one’s favorite authors

to quicken the soul when it flags, to provide momentary sabbaticals before and after which we

can press on with our work. Finally, recreational reading is for nothing more than distraction,

when the mind needs a good rest, with the particular genres and authors most effectively

depending solely upon idiosyncrasy—novels are restful to some and antagonizing to others. I

personally like Netflix instant stream on my Wii. (Sertillanges, you'll just have to be tolerant).

The top of the hierarchy among these readings are works by “men of genius.” A common

question posed to me by devoutly Christian students of the Great Books is why exactly they

should be reading, and paying to read, the writings of heretics, apostates, pagans, and atheists.

Why not just St. Thomas, the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Catholic novelists and essayists?

Sertillanges provides a splendid answer:

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Their errors are not vulgar errors, but excesses; in their very mistakes they are not

without depth and keenness of vision; following them cautiously, one is sure to go a

long way and one can avoid their blunders. “To them that love God, all things work

together unto good,” says the Apostle; for those who have a firm grasp of truth,

everything can be useful. Having formed our mind under good teachers, keeping the

framework of our thought well adjusted and firmly jointed, we may hope to grow

through contact with the errors of genius. . . ; the deepening required by the very act of

resistance strengthens us: we shall be better formed, more effectually safeguarded, for

having incurred these sublime risks without succumbing to them. (163)

Sertillanges is precisely the “good teacher” we need now to form our minds and teach us to

keep the framework of our thought well adjusted and firmly jointed. Error is ubiquitous, more

so than ever in this history of human existence, and “existence-in-untruth,” to use Voegelin’s

phrase, is the default position for the ordinary denizen of our techno-totalitarian, anti-intellect

regime. He needs our help, and so do we. The Intellectual Life is our battleplan, Sertillanges is

our general, and our comatose culture is both battlefield and hospital. We are the soldiers and

medics.

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