Leisure, Tranquility, and the Man of Letters

I am ashamed to write what I myself do night and day in this out-of-the way place. For I have indeed left my life in the city, as giving rise to countless evils, but I have not yet been able to leave myself behind. On the contrary, I am like those who go to sea, and because they have had no experience in sailing are very distressed and sea-sick, and complain of the size of the boat as causing the violent tossing; and then when they leave the ship and take to the dinghy or the cock-boat, they continue to be sea-sick and distressed wherever they are; for their nausea and bile go with them when they change. Our experience is something like this. For we carry our indwelling disorders about with us, and so are nowhere free from the same sort of disturbances. Consequently we have derived no great benefit from our present solitude. What we ought to do, however, and what would have enabled us to keep close to the footsteps of Him who pointed the way to salvation (for He says, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me” [Matt. 16.24]), is this.

Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, is unknown to the American layman, and the career of his small but profound book in this country will teach us something about our capacity to receive criticism from a point of view to which most of us are hostile. Our failure to reach a thorough understanding of the rapid totalitarian drift of Western culture, says Pieper, is the result of an earlier failure of thought which occurred when philosophy was completely divorced (at the time of Kant) from theology. This looks at first like a comparatively useless academic distinction, but its consequences in Pieper’s profound insight are impressive and even formidable.

The “emancipation” of philosophy left it vulnerable to the modern mystique of “work,” which has eliminated from philosophy the ancient pursuit of wisdom based upon a just notion of “leisure.” The result is that philosophy has become either the errand boy of the natural sciences or the playboy of linguistic shell-games whose name at present is logical positivism.

On this point T. S. Eliot in his introduction observes: “For as surrealism seemed to provide a method of producing works of art without imagination, so logical positivism seems to provide a method of philosophizing without insight and wisdom.” The force of this observation may well be lost on us, who as a people have not had a vigorous theology since the eighteenth century. Largely because of this lack we take for granted a long chain of inevitable “separations”—not only of theology from philosophy, but of church from state, religion from education, work from play, love from sex, the individual from the community.

To the question, What should the man of letters be in our time, we should have to find the answer in what we need him to do. He must do first what he has always done: he must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true. But at our own critical moment, when all languages are being debased by the technique of mass control, the man of letters might do well to conceive his responsibility more narrowly. He has an immediate responsibility, to other men no less than to himself, for the vitality of language. He must distinguish the difference between mere communication—of which I shall later have more to say—and the rediscovery of the human condition in the living arts. He must discriminate and defend the difference between mass communication, for the control of men, and the knowledge of man which literature offers us for human participation.

Humanity was never more gregarious and never before heard so much of its own voice. Is not then the problem of communication for the man of letters very nearly solved? He may sit in a soundproof room, in shirt-sleeves, and talk at a metal object resembling a hornet’s nest, throwing his voice, and perhaps also his face, at 587,000,000 people, more or less, whom he has never seen, and whom it may not occur to him that in order to love, he must have a medium even less palpable than air.

What I am about to say of communication will take it for granted that men cannot communicate by means of sound over either wire or air. They have got to communicate through love. Communication that is not also communion is incomplete. We use communication; we participate in communion. 

Men of letters and their followers, like the parvenu gods and their votaries of decaying Rome, compete in the dissemination of distraction and novelty. But the true province of the man of letters is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself. The state is the mere operation of society, but culture is the way society lives, the material medium through which men receive the one lost truth which must be perpetually recovered: the truth of what Jacques Maritain calls the “supra-temporal destiny” of man. It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time.