Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at, The Religious Life

                                                                                         by Brother Dominicus




Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at, The Religious Life,
Cambridge, University Press, 2023.


​Zena Hitz has written two sympathetic little books. One is an ode to
thinking for thinking for thinking's sake, called Lost in Thought, The Hidden Pleasures
of an Intellectual Life. A pleasant somewhat meandering, questioning book.
Recently she published  A Philosopher Looks at The Religious Life, a lovely
and slightly more focused book.

Hitz is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Hers is a story of a
convert to Catholicism. After graduating from St. John’s, she found her way
to the university of Cambridge and a Ph.D. program in classical studies at
Princeton. She was on her way to building a comfortable academic career
when she came to a fork in the road and decided to take the one less
traveled by. Partly because of a gnawing doubt that a successful career in
academe was all there is to life, she explored whether a religious vocation
was her destiny. She decided to find out in the Madonna House in Canada.
Ultimately, she decided that her calling was to return to the academic life of
study, writing, and teaching, so after a couple of years up north, she
returned to St. John’s as a professor.

As is inherent to the nature of her philosophical approach, she does
not get lost in too many historical details but addresses more general
themes. The fundamental question she touches on is why we turn to God
and seek to lead a religious life - in the broad sense of the word - at all. She
invites us to start thinking about this through a question: Is there anything
worse than death? Well, possibly yes. Imagine that we are the last human
generation on earth. We can no longer procreate. We are truly the last
people on earth. After the last person has died, our human future is
annihilated and vanishes. All the "projects in which we have concretely
placed our future" have turned to dust. 

What is worse, us dying or having nothing to do as humans anymore
other than wait for our death? No more raising of children, no more growing
food, no more teaching of the faith, no more building houses, no more
writing books, no more teaching your son how to throw a ball? The
poignancy of this thought experiment flows from the universality of it. On an
individual level, after all, each one of us will be faced with the severe
objective reality that we will have to abandon all our earthly attachments.
We die. The reality of our life is, as Hitz remarks through the words of sister
Martha, "What you don't give up, life takes from you."

Of course, human activities and accomplishments are one thing.
Human love is another. The severe objectivity of our lives also requires that
we have to accept that "love requires the projected acceptance of
debilitating grief" the sorrow of physical and mental suffering, loss and
absence. Now out of the recognition of the transience of things and people,
the question arises whether all this drains ordinary life of its value. Vanity of
vanities, everything is vanity.

It is entirely possible to argue that the transience of things, the
inevitability of death, does not drain ordinary life of its meaning. Hitz quotes
the philosopher Thomas Nagel who has famously argued that if something
matters, it is of no import how long it lasts. Life only appears meaningless
because we humans endlessly debate its meaning. She formulates an
intriguing response to this proposition:

Life is pointless and absurd not because we can always seek a
further justification, but only when we deeply care about things
we cannot have. The absurdity that matters is when our
passions for the unattainable drive us to approach life with the
wrong tools, like emptying a lake with a sieve. Whether this is
true can only be settled by looking at what human beings care
deeply about, asking if they can have it, and, if not, how the
desire for it might be managed.

What do people want? Most people, at least those who have
experienced real love of any kind, want that love to last. They do not want a
skill like playing the violin to vanish. They do not want their family name to
die out. They do not want to be away or permanently separated from their
beloved. So is death the worst thing? On the one hand, experiences,
accomplishments, and relationships would lose their poignancy if we did
not die. On the other hand, it is true that the possibility of evaporation of all
this "would not be poignant at all if we did not long for them to last, even
unto the end of time".  So in a certain sense, our confrontation with the
severity of the final objectivity of reality causes sadness. However, we also
recognize in ourselves a desire for joy. A joy that lasts. Because of this,
one of the core questions Christians face is whether there is anything that
can satisfy this human desire for joy outside time. What are the right tools
to satisfy that desire?

The answer, if it can be found, seems to me cannot be merely
discovered through theoretical speculation. Christianity, in all its complexity,
ultimately comes down to the striking thesis that fundamental reality is
irreducible love in a welcoming relationship, most fundamentally, in
abandonment to the will of Him Who calls us into relation with Him and his
creation. Love and joy seem connected. We Christians have struggled to
shape this relationship from the apostles' days and the early church
onwards. One distinct way is in the form of religious communities, their
specific disciplines and wisdom accumulated over the centuries. Hitz has
many insightful things to say about what the experience and reflection on
religious life can teach all of us who try to shape our lives in the mold of
Christ. All of this makes her book very much worth the time to read it.

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