Joys and Travails

      Fr. James V. Schall, SJ, Professor of Government at Georgetown University, has written yet another delightful, if challenging, book:  The Life of the Mind – On the Joys and Travails of Thinking.  Challenging, not in the sense of being hard to follow, but in the sense of gently urging the reader to take up the joyful and at times painful project of thinking.  Many delights await the one who accepts this challenge, for he or she launches out onto the project for which the human mind was created in the first place – to know, and to thus experience the delight of fulfilling one’s nature. 

      I know Fr. Schall personally, having had the privilege of spending a few days with him and others on a priest retreat, where one thing about him stood out forcefully:  he never suffers from boredom, a “human” affliction only really diagnosed as an affliction about two centuries ago.  How can it be that we moderns, with all our “leisure”-producing machines and gadgets, could possibly be bored, when all around us is the wonder of things to know?  Schall, following G. K. Chesterton, declared that the problem is not that things are not interesting, but that people are just not interested. 

      There is any number of explanations for this modern affliction of boredom, one supposes.  A big one is the turn in philosophy, legislated by Rene Descartes, that began to see the world of things, what is, as possibly only a figment of the human mind deceiving itself.  To secure some hold on reality, Descartes began with the human mind, namely his own, and not with the things around him.  Once he had established his own existence – “I think, therefore I am” – he only then was able to secure any reality of existence for his own body and the world of things around him by reducing everything to that which is simply measurable, quantifiable according to the laws of mathematics.  Perhaps this was all very interesting to him, but to most of us such a mathematically circumscribed world is, quite frankly, boring: things which are are no longer wonderful, but simply measurable. 

      It was St. Thomas Aquinas, I believe, following the great tradition of philosophy (with which Descartes intentionally broke), who said that there is wonder in the fact that anything exists at all; therefore, everything is interesting, first and foremost because it simply exists, and consequently, because the mind can know them.  Rather than things being quantifiable extensions of human thought, they are things-in-themselves, the knowing of which expands the mind.  And this knowing is pleasurable; it is “the life of the mind,” the joy – and travail (growing pains) – of thinking.  It is joyful and difficult, but never boring. 

      The great key, according to Schall (and so many others worthy of being listened to), to experiencing this “life of the mind,” this pleasure of thinking and knowing, is to explore what others have learned.  And this is accomplished chiefly through reading.  Good books are, Schall insists, along with C. S. Lewis, the avenue to living the lives of others, a project that is always interesting, because we are enabled to know what they discovered.  And this is true of many different kinds of books, including fiction; and perhaps with great fiction it is most true of all. 

      Speaking of great fiction, it was fascinating to me that a few years ago J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was voted the greatest book of the twentieth century in a poll of British readers.  Our “higher” literary critics were dismayed, and subsequently a number of other surveys were done, extended to worldwide readership, with even broader support – an easy majority voting the work “the greatest book of the millennium.”  Tolkien’s The Ring was lampooned by its opponents with a work entitled Bored of the Rings.  It is telling of modern life that this “spoof” was by those “bored,” and that their remedy was saturated with sex, cover to cover.  Really, how boring!

      The Lord of the Rings is popular, one can only surmise, from the fact that it engaged its readers with the fantastic, only to lead us deeper into reality, to a knowledge of things, including those so very important virtues, almost gone now, of courage, generosity, friendship, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.  In The Rings, the reader enters a “made-up” world that is then amazingly familiar; he or she enters into the lives of fictional characters, who are nevertheless so very real (as are all characters of great novels).  We live their lives, and we learn through them.  And it is pleasurable. 

      The life of the mind.  It has its joys and travails:  joys, because it enables us to experience the pleasure of fulfilling our human nature (coming to know more and more); and travails, because with a growth in knowledge comes an increasing awareness of the reality and truth one ought, more and more, to conform himself to, and that then requires self-discipline and even self-sacrifice, both of which, however, lead only and always to a deeper satisfaction.  Some, though, would rather be bored, and find some distraction (so much of what entertainment really is) from this high endeavor:  they will settle for that kind of “entertainment” that allows them to passively live in their own minds rather than live the life of the mind.  The latter is always directed toward the things that are, away from self, and entails then a growth in one’s inner life by means of the knowledge of the outer. 

      Our best means of accomplishing this is most often reading good books.  Fr. Schall concludes his The Life of the Mind with an appendix of “Schall’s Twenty Books that Awaken the Mind”; I share some of them with you:  An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis; The Philosophy of Tolkien by Peter Kreeft; Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder by Dennis Quinn; St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton; Guilt by Caryle Houselander; Plato by Eric Voeglin; and Selected Essays by Samuel Johnson.