Autor: Sertillanges A. D. (Gilbert)

Buch: The Intellectual Life

Titel: The Intellectual Life

Stichwort: Zurückgezogensein (retirement) als Werkstätte des Geistes; Wüste; Dichter (Offenbarung d. Stille); Legion - Zerstreutheit

Kurzinhalt: Retirement is the laboratory of the spirit; interior solitude and silence are its two wings. All great works were prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world... If the Spirit is to lead us into the regions of interior solitude ...

Textausschnitt: 13/3 Retirement is the laboratory of the spirit; interior solitude and silence are its two wings. All great works were prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world. The precursors, the followers, the Master Himself, all obeyed or have to obey one and the same law. Prophets, apostles, preachers, martyrs, pioneers of knowledge, inspired artists in every art, ordinary men and the Man-God, all pay tribute to loneliness, to the life of silence, to the night. (48; Fs) (notabene)

In the primeval night and its solemn emptiness the universe was shaped by the creative hand. He who desires the joy of creating must not be in a hurry to pronounce his fiat lux, nor especially to pass in review all the animals in the world; in propitious darkness let him take time, like God, to prepare the material of the stars.

13/3 The most exquisite songs in nature are heard at night. The nightingale, the crystal-voiced toad, the cricket, sing in the darkness. The cock proclaims the day, and does not wait for it. All who bear a message, all poets, all seekers also and those who are on the alert to pick up the truths that lie scattered round us, must plunge deep into the vast emptiness which is plenitude. (48; Fs) (notabene)

14/3 No great man has tried to escape this law. Lacordaire said that he had made for himself in his room between his soul and God "a horizon wider than the world"; and had procured for himself "the wings of rest." Emerson proclaimed himself "a savage." Descartes shut himself up in his "heated room." Plato declared that he used "more oil in his lamp than wine in his goblet." Bossuet would get up at night to find the genius of silence and inspiration; great thoughts came to him only when he was far from futile noises and preoccupations. Has not every poet the impression that in his verses he is but translating the mysterious revelations of silence, which according to the formula of Gabriele d'Annunzio he hears as "a voiceless hymn"? (48f; Fs)

15/3 The things that count must set up a barrier between him and the things that do not count. Commonplace life and the ludibria that St. Augustine spoke of, the games and the quarrels of children ending in a kiss, must cease under the kiss of the muse, under the delight-giving and tranquilizing caress of truth. (49; Fs)

"Why hast thou come?" St. Bernard asked himself about the cloister: ad quid venisti? And you, thinker, why have you come to this life outside the ordinary life, to this life of consecration, concentration, and therefore of solitude? Was it not because of a choice? Did you not prefer truth to the daily lie of a scattered life, or even to the noble but secondary preoccupations of action? That being so, will you be unfaithful to the object of your devotion by falling-back into the grip of what you have freely given up? (49; Fs)

16/3 If the Spirit is to lead us into the regions of interior solitude, as He led Jesus into the desert, we must first offer Him the solitude we have created. Without retirement, there is no inspiration. But within the circle of the lamplight, the stars of thought gather above us, as it were in a firmament. (49f; Fs)

17/3 When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquility of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings. (50; Fs)

Solitude enables you to make contact with yourself, a necessity if you want to realize yourself-not to repeat like a parrot a few acquired formulas, but to be the prophet of the God within you who speaks a unique language to each man. (50; Fs)

18/3 We shall come back later, at length, to this idea of an equipment special to each person, of a mental training which is education, that is, the drawingout and unfolding of a soul: a soul that is unique, that has not had nor will have its like in all the ages, for God does not repeat Himself. But we must bear in mind that one can only unfold oneself in that fashion by first living with oneself, closely, in solitude. (50; Fs)

19/3 The author of the Imitation said: "I have never gone amongst men without coming back less a man." Carry that idea further and say: without coming back less the man that I am, less myself. In the crowd one loses one's identity, unless one keeps firm hold of oneself, and this hold must first be created. In the crowd, one has no self-knowledge, being burdened by an alien self, that of the multitude. (50f; Fs) (notabene)

"What is thy name?-Legion." That would be the answer of your spirit dispersed and scattered in the life outside you. (51; Fs)

20/3 Hygienists recommend three things for the body: the bath, the air bath, and the inward bath of pure water; I should like to add for the soul the bath of silence, in order to tone up the organism of the spirit, to accentuate the personality, and to produce the active consciousness of it, as the athlete feels his muscles and prepares their play by the inner movements which are their very life. (51; Fs)

Ravignan said: "Solitude is the homeland of the strong, silence is their prayer." What a prayer indeed there is to truth, and what a power of cooperation with its influence in prolonged recollection-frequently resumed at specified times, as it were for a meeting which will gradually become a continuous contact, a life in close community! One cannot, says St. Thomas, contemplate all the time but he who lives only for contemplation, directs everything else towards it, and resumes it when he can, gives it a sort of continuity, as far as may be on earth.1 (51; Fs)