A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life

Philosophers who study religion have typically focused on religious beliefs and the reasons that can be given for or against them. To do justice to religion as a form of life, however, philosophers should also develop the tools to study religious practices, including rituals and ceremonies, liturgies and spiritual disciplines, meditation and prayer, child rearing and protest marches. A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life by Zena Hitz contributes to these efforts by reflecting on Christian renunciant life.

Hitz spent several months in a religious community where she observed oaths of poverty, chastity, and obedience (xxii). In this book, she describes what she calls “the practice of total renunciation,” that is, sacrificing what one loves most, analogously to what Abraham was asked to do with Isaac (2, 9-11). The goal is to reach “a state of abandonment,” a “Christian freedom” (xx, xxiv), in which one can receive whatever happens—even death (99), and even the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan (157-9)—as willed by God and as good. As she puts it in a nice phrase, total renunciation is “the practical resolution of the problem of evil” (xx).

The book is most eloquent, I found, when the author writes of actions in ordinary life—including those of academics—as attempts to create value in the face of the annihilation brought by the passage of time. Academics often seek to secure their worth with publications, citations, promotions, and recognition, but “death makes all acquisition futile” (26). Wanting an alternative, Hitz sought out activities from which she would receive nothing. “I developed a distinct longing not to make a difference” and the renunciant life enables her to ask how she would live if rewards were stripped away (48). Living in that community also shifted her extroverted personality because she learned to see social life as a place where the arduous work of love could be practiced rather than a sort of candy store for the attention and approval she craved (105). It also led to insights, such as the realization that a vow of silence is not restful but instead cacophonous with inner noise and obsessive thoughts, and that these anxious energies can eventually be settled (92). Joining a group that was not organized around the status of education also led her to see how finely tuned and exclusive her social preferences had been, even while she had thought of herself as an outsider (111-113). The book will appeal to those who want an apologia for a life that embodies helplessness.

The central limitation of the book, from an academic point of view, is that the author presents the renunciant life in an exclusively positive light. The motivation to give up ordinary life, Hitz contends, “isn’t a losing or a fleeing but a finding and a seeking” (23). The renunciants are simply “in love . . . with God as transcendent and eternal” (23). (Oddly, the author sometimes supports her interpretations by pointing to characters in novels or films that extol the religious life [e.g., 23]). The book does not mention women who fled to nunneries to escape unhappy marriages, nor the social capital gained by dedicating oneself visibly to the church, nor the ambitions of those who sought to advance themselves within this life. The story is uniform: no matter which order one joins, the historical period, and whether one lives as a beggar, a cleric, or in a lay community, the meaning of renunciation is the same, namely, to live for God alone (xviii). The book mentions no differences between the ways that renunciants have understood God, the Bible, work, or politics; these matters are presented simply “according to Christian tradition” (e.g., 83).

Given this goal, the book then explains the renunciant life exclusively with insider accounts. What motivated the individual to take up this life? God had sent a vision or a dream (85, 87). Why did they persist in their devotions despite remonstrations from their families? Because they were wholehearted in their love of God (86). Why did the saint retreat to solitude? Because it was there that she consummated her marriage to Christ (97). How did they learn to love those they despised? They were sent a vision of the despised as Christ (107). Hitz treats the miracle-filled narratives by the renunciants themselves, by their hagiographers, or by the Bible as forthright explanations for religious behavior.

Academic philosophers of religion may be frustrated by the absence of philosophical arguments in the book. Hitz proposes that the renunciant life seeks meaning in the face of death, death that shows that the search for mastery is vanity, as Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job teach (chapter 1). She does cite Samuel Scheffler, Thomas Nagel, and Søren Kierkegaard once each, but the book does not have a sustained engagement with them. This may be because, ultimately, Hitz thinks that the justifications for renunciant life cannot be put in rational terms. The unity of human interests that renunciants seek, she writes, is mystical (67). Similarly, “atonement is in its essence a mystical process” (67). Sacrificing one’s own pleasure for the good of others is also mystical (76).

The study of renunciant orders raises good questions for philosophers. For example, how does one reconcile the renunciant’s longing not to make a difference, or Hitz’s claim that “to seek justice or practice mercy is pointless” (27), with the renunciants’ activities of ministering to those in prison and hiding Jews from Nazis? How do we understand value in life when one adopts the perspective of eternity? Such questions can feed a revised philosophy of religion that attends more adequately to forms of religious practice.

Kevin Schilbrack is a professor of religious studies at Appalachian State University.

Kevin Schilbrack

Date Of Review:

July 14, 2023