A. D. Sertillanges on the intellectual life II
The true is the brother of the good
A member of the Dominican order, Father A. D. Sertillanges was a French philosopher and spiritual writer, writing books on a wide range of subjects, including political thinking, art, moral philosophy, and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. These lessons are taken from his book The Intellectual Life, which addresses “the management of the mind” and was published in 1921, when Sertillanges was 58. This is the second of two sets of quotes from the book. The first can be read here.
I.
Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her . . . . The true springs up in the same soil as the good: Their roots communicate. Broken from the common root and therefore less in contact with the soil, one or the other suffers; the soul grows anemic or the mind wilts. On the contrary, by feeding the mind on truth one enlightens the conscience, by fostering good one guides knowledge. By practicing the truth we know, we merit the truth that we do not know.
II.
[T]here is something still more important, namely, to submit not only to the discipline of work, but to the discipline of truth. . . . Truth will not give itself to us unless we are first rid of self and resolved that it shall suffice us. The intelligence which does not submit is in a state of skepticism, and the skeptic is ill-prepared for truth. Discovery is the result of sympathy; and sympathy is the gift of self.
III.
The time given to duty or to real need is never lost; the care bestowed on these things is part of your vocation. . . .
You will not imagine that your work is of more importance than you, and that even an increase of intellectual possibilities should prevail over the achievement of your true self. Do what you ought and must; if your human perfection requires it, the different demands it makes will find their own balance.
The good is the brother of the true: it will help its brother. To be where we ought to be, to do what we ought to do, disposes us to contemplation, and feeds it; it is leaving God for God, according to the saying of St. Bernard. . . .
On certain days it is only indirectly, by way of moral progress, that our intelligence will gain.
IV.
When the world does not like you it takes its revenge on you; if it happens to like you, it takes its revenge still by corrupting you.
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