Although I am on sabbatical, this week I went into my office to work, in part because I needed to use some books that I didn’t have access to while I was doing research in Paris last month. The focus of my sabbatical project is the theology of Mother Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661) who reformed the convent of Port-Royal in the early seventeenth-century and eventually connected it, through her choice of confessor, to the controversy over Jansenism. While in Paris, I wrote a chapter providing historical context to all this, and then two chapters on her theology, one on the idea of divine providence and the other on her understanding of sin and grace. Thus, I needed Augustine’s Confessions and City of God (among other sources) to contextualize her ideas in an Augustinian perspective. This week I focused on the chapter on sin and grace.
While going through the chapter, I found myself starting somewhat longingly at the City of God. I read that text during my master’s program, when I had the opportunity to spend a whole semester just on that text in a class with Susanna Elm at UC Berkeley (I completed my master’s degree at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology which, as part of the Graduate Theological Union, granted me access to courses also at UC Berkeley.) It has thus been quite a long time—maybe almost 20 years—since I’ve been able to read that text in full, instead of going back to the sections that are relevant to what I am writing about in my current project.
Then, from the copy of the City of God, which was sitting next to me on my desk, my eye was drawn to the “Augustine” section of my bookshelf, then just generally down to other sections of my bookshelf. My bookshelves in my office include books that I’ve read, books that I either started and never finished or only read parts of (like when only some parts were assigned in classes), and, of course, books that I bought intending to read or inherited from family and colleagues that I never found the time to read.* As I looked over these books, I found myself sighing to myself, bemoaning my lack of time to just sit and read.
As an academic, despite my position at a teaching-focused institution, I have to consistently produce research. And given my normal teaching load, that means that there is very little time to read things that are not directly supporting either my classes or a research project. (Let alone to reread something as massive as Augustine’s City of God!) Even now that I am on sabbatical, most of my reading is very targeted to what I need for this project. I recently picked up three ILL books from the library: one on the Cistercian tradition, which was the tradition of Port-Royal; one on early modern convents in France; and one on Augustine’s theological anthropology. I can’t help but wonder what ideas might come to me instead if I had time to read, for example, Shannen Dee Williams’s Subversive Habits—which I’ve wanted to read for a long time—or, given all that is going on in France right now, to reread any of the books about the French Revolution from another class that I took at UC Berkeley, with Carla Hesse.
In fact, I find myself a bit jealous right now of those outside of academia who have time to read these types of books for pure interest. I’m thinking right now especially of my father. As part of his funeral mass, I delivered some words of remembrance that talked about his faith and there commented on how, in the words of my mother, he was “always reading about Jesus.” As I said, “My father was always reading about Christianity and religion along with his poetry and fiction. In fact, before he went into his first surgery back in February, he was reading Michael White’s From Jesus to Christianity. He was a faithful reader also of everything that I wrote, whether on the Women in Theology blog or in academic journals. He was always interested in knowing more about his own religious tradition.” Sometimes, I wonder who is reading my work now that my dedicated and consistent reader will not be doing so.
I would say that part of that yearning that I was feeling as I looked at my books is that same yearning to know more about my own belief— “faith seeking understanding” as Anselm described theology—that led me to become an academic theologian. Yet it is ironic that the position that I now have as an academic theologian, that allows me to make reading, writing, and teaching about the faith into my work, also requires me to suppress some of that yearning when it leads me in directions that do not directly support my research.**
As I noted previously, the chapter that I was working on in my office was on Mother Angélique’s theology of grace, so the desire to read other books that I was ignoring really stood out in that context. In the chapter, I quote a letter that Angélique wrote to Louise-Marie de Gonzague (1611–1667), the queen of Poland and a supporter of Port-Royal, on November 21, 1647. In this letter, she wrote, “it is necessary that your majesty be faithful to follow the movement of his divine grace, namely, to take away that which he will make known which displeases him, or to do that which it will inspire to you for his glory.” Rereading this quote as I read through my chapter, I couldn’t help but think that it seems like I am doing exactly what she warned against by not following “the movement of divine grace,” in my desire to read these books that do not have a direct connection to my research.
To the readers of WIT, I ask: What are your reading practices? Especially those who are academic theologians, what do you read? How often to you read outside of your own research area?
In all this, I can’t help but wonder for myself: What is God calling me to through these desires, and what am I thus missing out on because I have to suppress them?
* I have to confess that I am a bit more of a book “dragon” than a book “worm.” For reference, see:
** Side note, as I have written about in the past, Antoine Furetière, in his seventeenth-century French dictionary, defined a theologian as one “who knows theology, who teaches it, or who wrote about it” (Qui sçait la Theologie, qui l’enseigne, ou qui en a escrit).
Image is of the books that I was using for my research in Paris at the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal.
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