Autor: Sertillanges A. D. (Gilbert)

Buch: The Intellectual Life

Titel: The Intellectual Life

Stichwort: Kreative Arbeit; Schreiben 5, Freuden d. intellektuellen Lebens; Intellektuallität - Heiligkeit;

Kurzinhalt: It is an astonishing thing that the true intellectual seems to escape those sad effects of age ...; that sanctity and intellectuality are of the same essence. Indeed, truth is the holiness of the mind...

Textausschnitt: IV
Appreciating Our Joys (eü)

32/9 However, there are other things in work besides vexations; it has its joys; and it is a happy thing when joy alone disposes us to work and affords us relaxation after our effort. (254; Fs)

We ought to be joyous even in afflictions and contradictions, after the example of the Apostle: I exceedingly abound with joy in all our tribulation. Sadness and doubt kill inspiration; but they kill it only when one yields to them. To rise above them by Christian joy is to rekindle the drooping flame. (254f; Fs)
"The weak brood over the past," writes Marie Bashkirtseff, "the strong take their revenge on it." That can always be done, and to help us to do it, God allows us sometimes to rest in tranquil joy. (255; Fs)

33/9 A sense of altitude awes but also thrills the soul of the worker; he is like the mountaineer amid rocks and glaciers. The world of ideas opens up scenes more sublime than those of the Alpine landscape, and they fill him with rapture. "To see the order of the universe and the dispositions of divine Providence is an eminently delightful activity," says St. Thomas of Aquin.1 (255; Fs)

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.2

34/9 The Catholic intellectual has chosen renunciation; but renunciation enriches him more than proud opulence. He loses the world, and the world is spiritually given to him; he sits on the throne from which the twelve tribes of Israel are judged. (Luke 22:30.) His reality is the ideal; it replaces the other reality and swallows up its blemishes in beauty. Detached from everything in spirit, and very often literally poor, he grows by all that he gives up or that gives him up, for hiddenly he enters again into magnificent possession of it. If he is completely immersed in the most absorbing interior activity, he might from the depth of that apparent sleep say with the Spouse: "I sleep and my heart watcheth." "In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth. ... I hold him, and I will not let him go." (255f; Fs)

35/9 When one has the necessary dispositions and one's whole soul is in what one is doing, when one studies well, reads well, makes notes well, when one takes unconsciousness and night into one's service, the work that one is preparing is like the seed beneath the sun, or like the child whom its mother brings forth in anguish; but in her joy that a man is born into the world she does not remember the anguish any longer. (John 16:21.) (256; Fs)

The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it. (256; Fs)

It is an astonishing thing that the true intellectual seems to escape those sad effects of age that are death before their time to so many men. He remains young up to the end. One would think that he had a share in the eternal youth of the true. He generally matures early, and is still mature, neither soured nor spoilt, when eternity gathers him in. (256; Fs) (notabene)

36/9 This exquisite lasting quality is also found in the saints; it would suggest that sanctity and intellectuality are of the same essence. Indeed, truth is the holiness of the mind; it preserves it; as holiness is the truth of life and tends to fortify it for this world and for the next. There is no virtue without growth, without fruitfulness, without joy; neither is there any intellectual light that does not produce these effects. Savant according to its etymology would mean sage, and sagesse, wisdom, is one, comprising the double rule of thought and action. (256f; Fs) (notabene)