Tools for the Art and Science of Living

The summer that I began graduate school I attended a lecture by a person whose name and subject I no longer remember. What I have never forgotten though, is a statement that he made about concepts. He said that these were the tools with which we consider and work through our ideas. I liked this metaphor so much as it gave a concrete basis to the process of achieving understanding. At the time I didn’t reflect on the manner in which the concepts that help to frame the ideas and accepted truths of one era are themselves subject to being replaced by others more in tune with the history and requirements of another. Still it was a thought that brought me to remember an earlier experience of using a particular tool for enlightenment.

During the two-year period of a novitiate, each novice has a special year following the six months of postulancy, called the canonical year. Stipulated by canon law, that is, the law of the church, it is a period dedicated exclusively to the study of theology and to the rules and customs of the religious order which the woman has joined. Secular subjects and books are not allowed. During my postulancy I had been given permission to use textbooks that had been left at the Provincial House by another young sister who had been up-grading her scholastic record. As the Congregation had determined to send its newly professed sisters to university, readying them for the greater demands of the era, I was allowed to try my hand at picking up a couple of the grade 13 courses that I had either not taken or had dropped during that not exactly sparking period of my academic career. Being in the novitiate, away from the anxieties and distractions of “the world,” I lept at this challenge and enjoyed it tremendously. For the following four months along with the usual classes given by the Novice Mistress, Sister Coderre, our “offices,” that is daily chores, the busyness of Tuesday laundry days, prayers, periods of gathering with the other novices, etc., I had times each afternoon and evening (before 9:30 lights out) to focus on my study of Trigonometry, Botany, and Zoology. At the end of June, I went into Kingston to write the departmental exams.

That August after an eight-day silent retreat I became a novice, taking on the religious habit, and beginning my canonical year. Before long I realized that I was experiencing a palpable dissatisfaction with the studies then allowed. Sister Coderre, who had been a mentor to me, had moved on to other duties on the Provincial Council. The Mistress of Novices unfortunately did not have the breadth of learning and assiduity that so marked Sister Coderre. Her instructions seemed to me like dried bread, containing little of satisfying depth. I saw that I needed some intellectual challenge to keep a balance in the life that I was leading and I stumbled upon a solution. When I had left the School of Nursing to join the congregation, I had brought my nursing texts with me. The plan had been for me to return to the three-year program that I left in mid-stream at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston. One of the texts was a book on ethics, and importantly, it had been stamped with an imprimatur – the legitimation of its use by the Church. I asked for permission to study it as a part of my canonical year. No one challenged my desire to take on such a seemingly strange project. I think that it was recognized that this was something that I needed. And so each afternoon and evening during times allotted for reading, I would sit at the desk in my room, making notes and thinking about ethical considerations. Their focus derived from Thomas Aquinas’ reflections on the writings of Aristotle available to him in his 13^th century university and monastery.

I believe that I quite deeply imbibed those readings into my subsequent views and understandings though I can now remember only one issue: Aristotle’s recognition of things modiingfy one’s responsibility in actions. There were five modifiers listed. I remember three of these: force, fear, and ignorance. You have committed an act which is some fashion reprehensible but in judging your responsibility, there are factors that must be examined if one is to determine the extent to which you are at fault. What is articulated as an intellectual exercise is in fact one of humanity, a recognition of the fallibility and weakness of human beings, an understanding that using purely black and white categories to judge people and their actions runs rough-shod over the true nature of human beings and human interactions.

Reading Sarah Bakewell’s ‘How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’ is taking me back into a consideration of philosophical concepts/tools. It’s pretty clear that in all ages and in all cultures people have wrestled with the same basic questions about what it is to be human and how to live life well. Montaigne and his Renaissance contemporaries had access to the philosophers of antiquity, a privilege lost to most of the West during the centuries following the gradual decline of the Roman Empire. Manuscripts that had been preserved despite centuries of neglect, of catastrophic wars, and of the spread of Christianity – in many ways inimical to “pagan” authors – were available in the Middle Ages to denizens of monasteries and later to the early universities. But by Montaigne’s era these could be accessed by scholarly private gentlemen who could ponder and discuss among themselves the wisdom of the ancients (even as had gentlemen of the Hellenistic and Roman periods). Bakewell focuses on the three pragmatic schools of thought of that era: those that gave guidance in the art and science of thriving, of enjoying life, and of being a good person. During the Christian era guidance in these areas would consist primarily in the following of the commandments and the teaching of the Church. Montaigne and his contemporaries did not distain this approach nor did they set up an opposition between their Christian faith and the teachings of the ancients. But they found in the practices of the ancients, ways that they could refine their own activities and modes of thinking to more precisely deal well with the exigencies of life.

The three schools of thought that they studied and strove to emulate were those of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism. It seems to me that our own general sense of these approaches bears little resemblance to their origins. Briefly, I would have considered a Stoic a person who accepts all the difficulties that life throws his or her way as simply to be borne without complaint, a person of strength but perhaps with not a great capacity to struggle for happiness; an Epicurean, someone who gives him or herself over to the pleasures of life without restraint; and, a Sceptic, a person who perhaps out of the bitterness of thwarted hopes, maintains a position of opposition to most of the accepted wisdom or practices of his or her culture. Each stereotype obliterates the true nature of these philosophies. In origin all three schools had in common the quest of understanding how to live and die well. For each to live well was to thrive, to experience happiness, and to be a good person, goals difficult to attain without control over one’s emotions. To achieve the needed imperturbability each school developed different approaches and “tricks.” Epicureans lived together like cultists in settings sheltered from the distractions of the ‘world,’ as did monks of the later Christian world. While the monks’ focus was more strongly on their promised life after death, Epicureans sought balance and equanimity in this one. Sceptics remained within public life but approached it with an inner attitude of doubt or of questioning, a stance which enabled them to maintain poise under pressures, less liable to be swept up in transient happenings or emotions. Stoics also remained involved in public life but reserved separate spaces for themselves where reflection and what we might called “grounding” could occur.

Stoics and Epicureans understood that maintaining equilibrium involved both control over one’s emotions and a capacity to live in the present. Because both are difficult, they devised ‘tricks’ to refresh their inner states. For example, pretend to yourself that today will be your last day of life. How would you want to live this day? Who and what are important to you? How would you want to deal with them today? So now, live in that fashion for this day. A couple of hundred years before the Hellenists were discussing these ideas and this way of being, the Buddha had articulated a similar approach. Repelled finally by the extreme ascetic practices of his earlier attempts to achieve ‘enlightenment,’ he began to teach a perhaps physically simpler, but spiritually more taxing path. Live a simple life; live each moment in the present; have compassion for all living beings. Montaigne took from the Hellenists what was of value to him in his study and practice of living a good life. He established what Virginia Wolff called “a room of one’s own,” in a tower of his chateau where he could read and reflect; he considered his own behaviour and that of others from the perspective of learning rather than of judgement, never in his writing giving himself special airs, always being careful to demonstrate a capacity for doubting even his own conclusions; and, he engaged in the daily life of his home and culture in an open-hearted manner.  

In our own era the ideas and practices of the Hellenists that Montaigne valued have filtered to us perhaps more through the influence of Buddhism as it found its way into the 20^th century West: meditation and ‘mindfulness’ are proving to be not just antidotes to the pace of modern life but practices that develop greater self knowledge and self reliance. Moreover, they promote the general health and healing power of the body. The basic questions of life: how did we get here? where are we going after death? is there a meaning to our lives? how ought we to live? These questions are as old as is humanity. Each generation in some fashion struggles with or distracts itself from them, but they remain as backdrop to all human endeavours.