A Sabbatical Summer
Sabbaticals are partly a misnomer, since they are not for absolute
rest, but merely for rest from the accustomed rounds. This past summer I enjoyed a 14-week
sabbatical from my library work that allowed me to finish writing a book long
in process, and to begin another that will also likely take a long time. In these days of the Instantaneous,
increasingly an ideal even in what for so long has been the painstaking labor
of research, long-term projects do seem to belong to another world—the world of
the sabbatical or perhaps more simply of the Sabbath rest, however we are open
to experience that. Long-term projects
move only very slowly to their conclusions, so as to seem almost motionless, at
rest. My inspiration for these projects
is a rosary bead in the Cloisters museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
which is only a 15-minute walk from my home.
A wooden bead on display there holds inside its tiny space a fully realized
carving of the Crucifixion. It is not
that motionless long-term projects are crucifying; it is that each sentence or
footnote added to the project, if it is indeed a book, feels like the barely
visible pinky finger on one of those tiny figures in the minute complexity of
that rosary bead scene.
The finished book is entitled: Philosophical Spirituality: From
Ecclesiastes to Simone Weil. It is a
study of how some of the standard philosophers encountered in introductions to western
philosophy classes, such as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel can be read for guidance
they provide to the spiritual life. But
not all those included are really standard philosophers—certainly the two of
the title are not, but hopefully they serve to skew expectations away from
standard readings of all these thinkers, towards the sense of the sacred they
may all have carried, but which is not often the focus of interpretations
of them.
The other book, only just started, carries a tentative title: A
Liminal Space: Between Judaism and Christianity. The aim of this book is to imagine what
western religion would have been like if Judaism and Christianity had not
separated in antiquity; for it is generally agreed that they did. What is increasingly argued, though, is that
they need not have. It was less
theological or spiritual pressures that caused what is sometimes called “the parting
of the ways” than pressures of self-definition, of identity, that were only resolved
by the parting. Suppose the identity had
been allowed to languish or even suffer in tension, in suspension? Might it have never split? I like to think philosophical currents from the
ancient world, especially Alexandria, might have worked in binding ways across
what later became the two religions, whose names, after all (Judaism and
Christianity) are in some ways quite artificial. If only wise old Adam could be invoked to
name the religion that might have existed if Judaism and Christianity had not
parted—he after all was really the master of nomenclature. Did he not name things into their full being,
only begun by the divine?
If Ecclesiastes, that great philosopher, was right to imply that
there are too many books, then perhaps it will be a grace for the first of
these books not to be published and the second not ever to be finished. Time will tell.
