Archive, Reviews
Zena Hitz on Religious Life
This review appeared in the February 2024 issue of First Things.
At first glance, it seems odd that a major academic publisher should commission a volume on, as it were, the phenomenology of religious life. In so far as they are perceptible at all, religious have retreated to the margins of our imaginative universe, as defendants in court cases, amiable extras in musical comedy, or (weirdly) characters in gothic horror. Sure, there are religious who teach in schools here and there. There are the Sisters of Mother Teresa. There are a few incurable eccentrics opting for a life of enclosure. But these are marginal groups. What is more, are they not headed for extinction? Recent decades have seen a catastrophic fall in vocations in the West. In one of the Holy See’s most notable recent documents on religious life, the instruction Cor orans from 2018, the tenor is defined much more, I’d say, by the chapter on ‘Suppression’ (that is, the closing of moribund communities) than by the one on ‘Foundations’. This is not unuseful. We have lacked clear procedures for closure. Still, it makes you think.
Religious agonise over the demise of their state of life. When I was discerning a call to monastic life 25 years ago, vocational literature, published in the 70s, still exuded self-confidence. Fading brochures showed photographs of monks and nuns, sisters and friars doing all sorts of enterprising and holy things, usually in crowds. This pictorial projection did not quite match the reality on the ground. Communities were becoming geriatric. More often than not they were giving up traditional works. Religious schools were being closed or passed over to lay trustees solemnly pledging to keep the institutes’ ‘charism’ alive. Hospitals and care homes, privatised or state-run, no longer accommodated religious who, through untold sacrifices, had laid foundations for healthcare. Even monasteries were restructured. In the early 2000s it was no longer financially viable for an abbey such as mine to live by agriculture, as our community had done for almost 200 years. Monks and nuns closed down their farms and turned to … what? Hard choices had to be made. It is tough to set up shop afresh in a competitive landscape with a tired, diminishing workforce. One temptation has been to establish token industries to keep able-bodied brethren gainfully employed while in real terms communities started living off savings. This is a shortsighted policy in any walk of life, one expression among many of resignation to seemingly dismal long-term prospects.
Many communities have negotiated change with a supernatural attitude: ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away’. Though even from within such a mindset, a mindset solidly anchored in faith, ambiguous discourse has issued. I think of a tendency, for example, to recast death as purpose, as when communities long without recruitment proclaim, ‘Our present task is to witness to dignified dying’, or when an elderly monk, rattling around in a cavernous monastery, says, ‘Oh well, as long as I can die here!’ There may be heroism in such statements; but there may also be self-indulgence, the satisfaction of acting out a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think, too, of a refrain that has long puzzled me. One hears it regularly. It articulates what I would call an essentialisation of consecrated life. Faced with the circumstances described above, religious tell one another: ‘Take courage! What matters is not what you do but what you are’. The attitude, once interiorised, has attendant risks. It invites me to idealise a sense of my mere presence and erodes the significance of mission. Now, a community without a clear mission will have no force of attraction; one can, after all, be anywhere. We might ask if such a community would even have a raison d’être.
Only against this socio-cultural backdrop can one appreciate the timeliness of Zena Hitz’s book. It is presented as a philosopher’s view of religious life. What does that mean? Hitz is a learned woman. Not only has she mastered the canon of philosophical writings; she refers to Plato and Husserl with the easy familiarity of friendship, as if they were squash partners with whom she lunches. The point of the book, though, is not to shower the reader with quotations or technical terms. Hitz shows herself a philosopher chiefly in the sense that she asks ‘Why?’ about things we take for granted. She states that her intention is not ‘to do justice to the enormous variety of religious communities and their influence on Christian life’, to analyse, say, the neo-Platonist strain in the Cappadocians, the mendicants’ part in rehabilitating Aristotle or the Benedictine response to the French Revolution. No, for this is not a book designed to flaunt learning, but to seek understanding: ‘I am a philosopher, and my gross ignorance, like the ignorance of Socrates, provides opportunities in its defects.’ The approach works. It is refreshing, given that literature on religious life is often weighed down by ponderous self-affirmation.
The book is composed in the manner of a three-part invention. One theme is the repeated strain of ‘Why?’ asked on a foundation of first principles. A second theme is the author’s experience of religious life, during a few years spent at Madonna House. This reference adds an intimate note, though it is deployed with such discretion that it never becomes invasive. The third theme gives voice to a polyphonic chorus. Hitz notes, ‘I am promiscuous with my sources’. Promiscuity isn’t always bad. The breadth of her references provides illumination, surprise, and touches of humour. In the index, under ‘P’, you find Paul, Péguy, Priam of Troy, Pseudo-Dionysius, Ezra Pound, and Elvis Presley.
There are five chapters. The first, entitled ‘The Call’, addresses the nature of vocation matter-of-factly. This is helpful in a climate given to mystifying this whole business to such an extent that ‘vocation discernment’ becomes a lifelong task, almost a vocation in its own right. Hitz stresses the primacy of self-knowledge. To follow a vocation is to assume that God in his providence has seen something in me I had not noticed, then to try, letting go of inadequate notions of self, to rise to true perception. This process is arduous but also, pursued with integrity, freeing. It widens the heart. It lets me see ancient perils, fears and desires lodged deep within me, in a new light. In an arresting image, Hitz describes a visit paid decades ago to the old World Trade Center:
We took the elevator to the top of one of the towers. Through vast windows, we saw a thunderstorm, well below us, flashing lightning as it moved across the city, from Brooklyn into lower Manhattan. I had never been above a thunderstorm, before – or since. It was magnificent to see something that would be overwhelming or dangerous on the ground reduced to a beautiful entertainment, harmless as a school of tropical fish.
Subsequent history made her reflect with grief that no earthly vantage point is final: that particular view across New York exists no more. Yet the symbolic impact remains. To follow a call is to learn to see more clearly. It is to contemplate oneself and one’s history from a higher altitude, in an ever broadening perspective.
Sister Aquinata Böckmann, doyenne of scholarship on St Benedict’s Rule, wrote a crucial, slim volume in 1981 called Touchstone Poverty. Religious authenticity is measured, she surmised, by the extent to which genuine, enduring poverty is practised. It is tempting to make excuses in this area, especially in a culture saturated with material wealth. Many of us who are professed religious have cause for self-examination. In her second chapter, ‘Blessed Are the Poor’, Hitz holds up a mirror useful for this exercise. She does not prettify poverty. She evidences its existential grandeur: ‘the link between catastrophe, poverty, and love is mysterious’. She also explains why poverty, rendered concrete in self-denial, makes sense for people resolved to live in the truth. Mortification is ‘training in rational desire’, a farewell to blind appetite. It touches intimate depths, ‘desire for a certain kind of helplessness’, that is, desire ‘to live in a way that recognised that I was, in truth, helpless’, so available for grace, relieved of the illusion of self-sufficiency. Poverty can have a secret apostolic dimension: ‘The cultivation [through renunciation] of one’s own character, to burn out greed and to cultivate compassion and humility, if practiced writ large, would transform the surrounding community.’
Of such transformation we have need. Yet the finality of religious life goes beyond it. It seeks an encounter with God, for which self-knowledge is a preliminary stage, a way to learn where our treasure, and so our heart, is. Only thus can we direct our heart well: ‘When one’s private life is a dual life, what is kept in secret reveals what is authentic about us, the truth of what we care about.’ This can be an exultant realisation. It can also be damning. The desirability of knowing God is spelt out with reference to Julian of Norwich, ‘no pious idiot’, we are assured, but a woman ‘gripped’ both by the turmoil and terror of earthly living and by the palpable reality of divine consolation. Julian knew the possibility of a contemplative outlook foreshadowed in the one Hitz enjoyed in New York at an altitude of 1,300 feet. From such a stance it is not only defensible but reasonable to affirm, faced with things as they are, that ‘all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’.
The constitution Lumen Gentium tells us that the Church is called to be ‘a lasting, sure seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race’. A religious vocation is necessarily oriented towards communion, even if one is a hermit. A hermit, Evagrius noted, is simply one who is ‘separated from everything’ in order to be ‘united to all’, banishing indifference and wishing to learn compassion, embracing the horizontal axis of the Cross. To pursue unity in this way is to enact charity. This is the subject of Hitz’s insightful fourth chapter, ‘The Family of Humanity’. Charity, she writes, ‘is a single and undivided condition of a person’, vertically touching God, horizontally touching neighbour: the condition is cruciform. A community living within the axes’ point of intersection is ‘a community that looks like humanity’. I suspect that when the classicist Hitz speaks of ‘humanity’ here, she intends to play not merely on the register of ‘pertaining to the human species’ but on that of ‘philanthropy’, ‘kindness’. Charity on these terms ‘is beautiful’, but ‘makes constant war with our comforts’, taking us back to the question of our priorities. Hitz speaks of celibacy within the optic of charity, a sensible approach too rarely practised. She is, she admits, ‘severe on sexuality’, though ‘not out of prudishness’; rather, ‘to counter the overwhelming rhetoric on the other side.’ We act, she writes,
as if life without sex is impossible, and entertain the thought, even if less commonly nowadays than in my youth, that sex with strangers is harmless. Both cannot be true: Either sex reaches down to the core of our being, and so ought to be treated with reverence and caution, as something which might bear life’s meaning for us, or it is harmless, like chewing bubble gum, and can be given up without a second thought.
Hitz sets out from this framework to engage with fundamental aspects of religious life: intercession, doubt, loneliness, ‘the strange consolations of the Christian, the lights in darkness’, and forgiveness. I did not follow every turn of her argument in speaking of the love of enemies. I endorse the claim that at a human level ‘the ultimate defiance is to take the sting out of [one’s enemy’s] bite, to use what one receives from them for one’s own good and the good of others.’ But I do not see how one can say that a Christian love of enemies ‘requires the capacity to see one’s sufferings as good, as successes or blessings’. Suffering is always scandalous. It is the possibility of its transformation through love that is sublime.
The final chapter is less strong. One gets the impression of an author rushed, subject to flustered emails from her editor. The terms named in the heading, ‘Abandonment and Freedom’, are evidenced with reference to Walter Ciszek, Edith Stein, and Takashi Nagai. Hitz has penetrating things to say about each, of course, but her argument remains, uncharacteristically, a little superficial. The story of Edith Stein ‘Facing Death’ just cannot be told on five pages, with Mother Posselt’s life as sole reference. We are touching the abyssal perspective opened in Stein’s Kreuzeswissenschaft, a work that remained unfinished on the table in her cell when she was rounded up from the Carmel of Echt on 2 August 1942. There’s really a new book in this chapter. One can only hope Hitz will write it one day.
By way of criticisms, I have two. Overall, I found the stress on ‘stripping away’ a little excessive. Hitz relates that when she entered Madonna House, her director, ‘a former dentist’ — I am still pondering the significance of this detail — had told her: ‘If you didn’t come here to die, you came for the wrong reason.’ This corresponds to the myth whereby Trappist monks of old greeted one another with the words, ‘Brother, remember you shall die’ (though the lore from which the myth arose also insists that the monks were vowed to silence). By all means, this element matters, indeed is essential, but as a means: the end is life and thriving. St Benedict in his Rule for Monks spells out two criteria by which to evaluate a religious vocation: Does the candidate truly seek God? Does he desire fullness of life? The religious life lived well, albeit precariously, is a happy, joyful life. This fact does shine through now and again, but could have been made more prominent.
My second criticism is directed at the publishers. The volume is part of a series in which ‘A Philosopher’ looks at lots of interesting stuff: science, work, architecture, sport, and so forth. This is all very well. My fear is simply that a readership which ought to be targeted, religious themselves, will feel put off by the packaging, presuming the book to be a dry, academic treatise. That would be a monumental pity. For they have in this book a great resource, a source of renewal.
Having read Hitz’s book pencil in hand, I have drawn from it a small anthology of apophthegmata. ‘What we love follows from what we see, […] we can long for something after glimpsing only a shadow of its garment.’ ‘I reckon that to hold something in loving attention while reconciled to its permanent annihilation is not humanly possible.’ ‘Anger must be used well.’ ‘Our distractions are incursions of our real desires.’ ‘Grief brings us into contact with the nature of things’. This book is the work of a philosopher who asks pertinent questions, reasons clearly, sees deeply, and loves wisdom. It is itself wise, and companionable.
