Sertillanges's The Intellectual Life: Study as a Vocation, Its Conditions and Its Methods
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. ...