Intellectual Life

Can someone who is not a scholar by profession lead an intellectual life? The book that answered that question best in the twentieth century is short, practical, and almost austere: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Its Conditions, Its Methods, published in 1921 by the Dominican friar Antonin Sertillanges. More than a hundred years later it is still read — entirely outside any religious context — as the finest manual of the ethics and discipline of study ever written. This article surveys its central theses, following the very structure announced in its subtitle: the spirit, the conditions, and the methods of intellectual work. ...

Antonin Sertillanges Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges (1863–1948) — born Antonin-Gilbert — was a French Dominican friar, moral philosopher, and one of the most influential popularisers of Thomism in the early twentieth century. Born in Clermont-Ferrand, he entered the Order of Preachers in 1883 and was ordained a priest in 1888. He became professor of moral philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris and, in 1893, was among the founders of the Revue Thomiste, a journal that would become central to the renewal of studies on Thomas Aquinas. In 1918 he was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Although he produced a substantial body of Thomist exegesis, his name reached a wide readership chiefly through a small book of 1921, La Vie intellectuelle (The Intellectual Life), which became an enduring classic on the discipline, the ethics, and the method of the work of the mind. ...