Category Archives: Study Habits

My Post on Catholic Bible Study at the Verbum Blog

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As a blogger known as “Catholic Bible Student,” I felt honored to be asked to write a blog post for the Verbum Blog on “Catholic Bible Study.” So, while I know most of my blog posts show up here, I thought my readers would not mind if I did a guest column somewhere else as long as I provided an excerpt and a link. Over at Logos/Verbum/Faithlife (providers of the best Bible software known to man), they have been doing a series of posts on the distinctive nature of Bible study done by different denominations. So far, they have posts on:

St Jerome by Bernardo Strozzi – Gallerie Accademia

They needed a Catholic take, and I’m glad I could help. Of course, the post comes with a hefty helping of links to Verbum-provided electronic resources that can help further your journey in studying the Bible, along with references to Dei Verbum and Verbum Domini. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of my post:

Catholics love the Bible. From the Easter Sunday stroll on the road to Emmaus when the risen Jesus conducted the very first Christian Bible study—“he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45)—to today, Christians have always been drawn to the Lord through the sacred page.

Catholics are conscious of abiding in a millennia-old tradition that is mediated by Jesus and moderated by the successors of the apostles, that is, the bishops. As the Second Vatican Council taught, “It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others” (Dei Verbum 10).

Since the time of St. Jerome, the patron of Catholic Bible study, we have been told that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.

You can read the full post here: https://blog.verbum.com/2024/03/catholic-bible-study/

Study as a Spiritual Exercise in Judaism and Protestantism—but not Catholicism?

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One of the biggest differences between Catholicism as it is actually practiced and the parallel spiritual traditions of Jews and Protestants is the almost total absence of study as a spiritual exercise.

The Jewish Tradition of Torah Study

For Jews from ancient times to now, the way to express devotion to God was to study the Torah. All other intellectual labor is forbidden on Sabbath, but Torah study is upheld as a worthy goal, a shining ideal especially on Sabbath. This study, however, is not carried out in isolation, but in vigorous conversation and even argument with fellow Jews. The place to grow closer to God is not just at synagogue prayers, but in the Beit Midrash, the House of Study—a room full of books: Torah, Talmud and other Jewish sources.


What happens during Torah study is not an idle, passive, quiet reading, but a lively interpersonal exchange of opinions, a comparison of interpretations, an open-ended dialogue in which participants take positions and defend them, pose questions and pursue their answers. Even the rabbinic sources themselves unfold in a dialogic pattern, where they offer up a multitude of contrasting opinions about the interpretation of various biblical passages. This study, this argumentation, this exchange of opinions is one of the highest spiritual exercises of the Jewish faith, upheld as the ideal to be sought.

The Protestant Practice of Bible Study
In Protestantism, we find a similar focus on the Word. While it is true that the Protestant world is dynamically fracturing before our eyes, one of the basic concepts of Protestant piety is a serious attention to the Bible. The way one gets closer to God is not merely through silent prayer or singing worship songs or hymns, but through detailed and intellectual engagement with the Sacred Page. For Protestant practice writ large (with obviously unending diversity in how it is actually done), one studies the Bible in order to spiritually grow. You bring your Bible to Church with you. The sermon is exegetical in focus, a deep Bible study by an expert interpreter (your pastor), and hopefully long enough to feel like a satisfying lesson (maybe an hour). If you want to go to the next level of commitment, the choice is clear: join a Bible study. There, while yes you might share about your life and hear about others, the ostensible goal is a deep and intellectual engagement with Scripture in the context of a community.  If you attend a well-run Protestant Bible study, you won’t find a sleepy, tired reading, but an active conversation, a communal wrestling with the meaning of the text. While the Talmud will not be consulted, participants might be looking at Study Bible footnotes, commentaries and other works to help them understand as they read, converse and engage with both the text and one another.

Catholic Apathy Toward Bible Study

Catholics, however, suffer from a certain intellectual apathy about such things. Our tradition (again, as it is typically practiced) prizes doctrinal conformity, silent prayer and receptivity. These are hugely important values in our spiritual practice, yes. They lead to receiving Scripture, Tradition and the Church itself as gifts from God, but these tendencies can lead us into a false passivity. While some Catholic Bible studies have followed the Protestant model and become engaging intellectual communities, the general trend in Catholic practice is less intellectually vigorous. That is, a diversity of views, a robust exchange of opinions over the meaning of the sacred text is not regarded as a spiritual exercise, but as an educational one. Bible study groups and other types of small groups might be accepted, but they are viewed as community events, educational opportunities, while the “real prayer” happens at Mass, in adoration or at the retreat house. Homilies tend to be very short and typically shy away from serious exegesis of Scripture—a serious departure from the example of the Church Fathers.

This situation that has developed in the Catholic realm has produced a prejudice against an intellectual engagement with the faith. I view it as a latent anti-intellectualism we American Catholics inherited from an early twentieth century social location of poorly-educated Catholic immigrant communities that prized conformity and eschewed intellectual distinctions in order to maintain their minority identity over-against the prevailing Protestant world. But in an era where more and more people are attaining high degrees of education, it is hard to maintain a merely sentimental engagement with Catholicism. The deep things of faith, which only are considered in the context of study, questioning, argument and dialogue, are often left on the table, or the bookshelf. Few parishes have theological libraries for parishoners. Few homilists offer serious and lengthy exegesis. Few Catholics own a Study Bible.

My Proposal

What I am proposing is that we learn a few things from our Jewish and Protestant friends, that we pick up our Bibles and read them, that we view study as a spiritual exercise, that we talk with one another, share opinions and swap ideas—that we truly become “Catholic Bible Students.”

Photo credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassyta/6673333713
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ljguitar/394494009

Conservation and Concentration of Energy

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I got to thinking about the conservation of one’s personal energy because of a story told by the British historian, Paul Johnson, about his boyhood encounter with the great man, Sir Winston Churchill. The story goes that the precocious young Johnson, in his youthful wisdom, asked Churchill for a piece of advice for life. This in itself shows that Proverbs is right about the fact that wisdom is not an achievement, but an attitude. The boy could hardly be adept in worldly matters, but displayed the right desire—the desire to know, to learn, to be taught. This desire in itself, so it seems, constitutes wisdom. The path to knowledge is wisdom.

A Legend
So much for my panegyrics! On to the story: Apparently Churchill replied to Johnson that “economy of effort” was his most important life principle. Johnson himself recited the 1946 story to the Wall Street Journal a few years ago:

He gave me one of his giant matches he used for lighting cigars. I was emboldened by that into saying, “Mr. Winston Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” and he said without hesitating: “Economy of effort. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” And he then got into his limo.[1]

The story might be apocryphal, or at least colored by the passage of time, but it has stuck with me. Two details stand out to me. First, Churchill’s stated idea is in one way confirmed and in another way belied by his own life story. That is, it is said that he used a standing desk[2]—so he didn’t sit whenever he had the opportunity—which seems to fly in the face of his own example of never standing when you can sit down. But lest we think the great Prime Minister a hypocrite, he is also reputed to have taken regular daily naps.[3] Second, Churchill punctuates his dictum with such a hilariously apt embodiment of his stated principle: getting into a limo, the most effortless way to get around.

Conservation of Energy
“Economy of effort” could also be labeled “conservation of energy,” which is how my memory has preserved Churchill’s idea. I suppose it stuck with me that way because of the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, which I must have memorized at some point in my schooling. Obviously, there are no physics at work here in Churchill’s idea, only commonsense. That is, a person only has so much energy in a given day, a given workweek, a given lifespan. That energy must be conserved and then deployed at the right time. If you tire yourself out doing the wrong things—say wasting thousands of hours on Facebook—then you have substantially less energy to engage in the right things, like writing the next great American novel or building a treehouse.

Economy of Force
Churchill himself might have borrowed the idea of “economy of effort” from the military strategy idea of “economy of force” proposed by the 19th century Prussian strategist, Carl con Clausewitz.[4] This strategic concept is actually part of U.S. Army doctrine:

Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts.
A-10. Economy of force is the reciprocal of mass. Commanders allocate only the minimum combat power necessary to shaping and sustaining operations so they can mass combat power for the decisive operation. This requires accepting prudent risk. Taking calculated risks is inherent in conflict. Commanders never leave any unit without a purpose. When the time comes to execute, all units should have tasks to perform.[5]

When thinking in military terms, this makes perfect sense. In war, there’s nothing worse than wasting effort and resources on the wrong objectives. If you leave 1000 troops on guard duty and only take 100 into battle, you might be overwhelmed by superior forces. It’s better to spend little and economize in the areas where you can in order to spend the most resources on the most essential task.

Dissolution
Now to my mind one of the greatest evils of our age is dissolution, the opposite of economy of force. You could call it “dithering” or “procrastinating” or something else, but the point is that so many us of us so much of the time simply waste our time. While it is easy to regard one’s own era as worse than previous ones—and most such regarding is off-base—I do believe that we have seen an uptick in dithering for one simple reason: there are so many new ways to waste time! If you wanted to waste time 100 years ago, you might have to read a long novel or write a silly letter in longhand to an old friend, activities which we would consider highly productive. But now, to waste time, all you have to do is reach in your pocket, pull out the smartphone and wile away the hours on Candy Crush or YouTube or Twitter or texting. A new study from dscout just showed that on average, we are touching our phones 2,617 times per day.[6] While it’s true that some useful, efficient business is conducted via smartphone, the largest share of activity in the study was given over to Facebook.

Concentration of Forces
So what should we do to combat our own dissolution and dithering? Well, I think it goes back to another related military doctrine: concentration of forces. You economize your use of forces in order to concentrate them. The Army also adheres to this doctrine:

Concentrate the effects of combat power at the decisive place and time.[7]

This is what I think most of us struggle with a lot of the time. We have a lot of effort, time and attention to give, but it can easily be squandered on ephemeral pixels rather than on what really matters. If you don’t believe me, have you ever found yourself repeatedly clicking the send/receive button in your inbox? There’s something about digital information that makes us twitchy. It is very easy to fall into a pattern of seeking quick hits of information, looking for some sort of stimulus that will prompt us to act—a new email, a new task, a new article—rather than planning out our strategy from the beginning and concentrating our forces on what we are actually trying to accomplish. Why do you think so many people read internet articles under 1000 words and so few people read long books?

Concentration of Energy
While the Army tries to concentrate military assets “at the decisive place and time,” each of us individually must do the same thing in order to be remotely effective in our own lives. Advertisements, for example, are the precision-strike enemy of our ability to concentrate. They deliberately distract us from our purposes and show us information we didn’t need to know or want to know, about products, prices, services and the like, most of which we don’t need, all of which we don’t need now. That’s why people hate watching TV with commercials and instead binge on Netflix. They’d rather concentrate on what they want rather than on what other people want them to concentrate on. But Netflix brings us back to the dissolution problem.
In order to meet our goals, launch our projects, achieve our personal objectives, we need to concentrate our own energies in the right direction. Allowing our attention span, our physical energy or our motivation to be sapped by the forces of distraction, whether they be low-priority, easy tasks like email or time-sucks like Netflix or Facebook, brings us down into a vortex of useless behavior, wasted time, unproductive days. Instead, we could and probably should limit the distracting inputs and focus on concentrating our time and energy in order to bring it to good effect “at the decisive place and time.”

I’m still trying to figure out how to do this in my own life and work, but I don’t think I’ll easily forget Paul Johnson’s encounter with Winston Churchill. If Churchill attributes his success to such a simple principle of “economy of effort,” then there must be ways to implement it now in the digital age. A kind of digital austerity might be a solution—deliberately avoiding unnecessary media stimulation. Some people have tried, in fact, by turning their smartphones to black-and-white,[8] implementing screen color changing software,[9] or adopting typewriter-like digital composition tools.[10] I don’t think any one of these tweaks is a total solution, but perhaps they point in the right direction. They represent efforts to concentrate one’s forces and act according to the economy of effort principle. Only time will tells, perhaps, whether we become incapacitated phone zombies[11] or effective, creative humans.

References

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703558004574583820996589810

[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24532996

[3] http://www.artofmanliness.com/2011/03/14/the-napping-habits-of-8-famous-men/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_force

[5] https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-0.pdf

[6] http://blog.dscout.com/mobile-touches

[7] https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-0.pdf

[8] http://pocketnow.com/2016/06/07/pocketnow-challenge-one-week-with-a-black-and-white-smartphone-screen

[9] https://justgetflux.com/

[10] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adamleeb/hemingwrite-a-distraction-free-digital-typewriter

[11] http://www.salon.com/2014/08/08/rise_of_the_smartphone_zombies_what_we_lose_when_technology_gives_us_everything/

St. Augustine and the Memory Palace

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I have talked about memory and memorization before, but not about the Memory Palace. What brought it to mind was this passage from Book X of St. Augustine’s Confessions:Illuminated_Manuscripts_(Middleton)_figure00

And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses.

While St. Augustine is waxing eloquent about the beauty and power of memory, he drops this line which contains a relatively inconspicuous idea that is incredibly profound: the Memory Palace.

Several writers have explored the concept of the Memory Palace, how and why to build one, but let me simply just get at what it is: A Memory Palace is an imaginary building you can make in order to store information. Think of it as a mental hard drive from the Middle Ages. Hard drives have sectors where information is stored in chunks, all the way down to bits and bytes. Similarly, human beings can only store information by breaking it down into pieces and filing it away in our minds.

Unfortunately, most of us were never taught how to memorize, we were just given a pile of information and told to memorize it. Memorizing without any technique is what we call “rote” memorization, where a person simply repeats and repeats the information until it sticks. Because rote memorization is so difficult and seemingly fruitless—most of us lose whatever we had memorized in a couple days—a lot of schools have simply given up on memorization altogether. But this is a mistake.

The ancients and medievals had to memorize loads of information because few knew how to read and write proficiently and of those who did, writing utensils and parchment were expensive and hard to come by (kind of like how a pack of sticky notes will cost you ten bucks now, only worse!). So, these people had to compensate with the only computer on hand: the brain. But they weren’t lazy about it. They didn’t just throw their heads at information and hope that the two would stick together. No. They developed battle-hardened techniques over a long period of time. The essential technique is the Memory Palace.

It starts with associating an idea with a physical object like a door, or a chair. One then can “walk” through say, your own house or apartment and stow pieces of information “in” different objects. There are two themes to the technique. One is the word-object association, the other is proceeding through the palace in a certain order.

800px-Hans_Vredeman_de_Vries_(Nachfolge)_Ideale_Palastarchitektur

For example, imagine you had been asked to give a speech on the classification of living creatures. If your house has five rooms, you could put each the five kingdoms in a separate room (Bacteria, Protozoa, Plants, Fungi, Animals) and then each piece of furniture in the room could represent the phyla within that kingdom. As you proceed through this Memory Palace, you could recall each of the phyla of all five kingdoms as you give your speech. In fact, the Memory Palace was the origin of speakers saying “in the first place…” and “in the second place…” The “places” they refer to are the rooms within their memory palace.

I have found it to be a very helpful memorization technique, especially when paired with the link system and other memorization aids (e.g., making exaggerated and silly word-pictures). As our generation copes with information overload (deluge, tidal wave), we have to find ways to remember the information that is important to us, the information we need to use, connect and synthesize, not the trivia we can look up. If we want to avoid becoming Google Glass fixated cell phone addicts who can’t hold a coherent conversation because we’re so distracted with looking things up online, we might need to recover the Memory Palace that St. Augustine stood in awe of and thanked God for saying, “Great is the power of memory; very wonderful is it, O my God.”

Hark, Hearken, Harking

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800px-Boar_and_Bear_Hunt,_V&A_Museum

Every once in a while my inner grammar bully comes out. Today, I keep harking back to “hark.” It is one of those dangerous archaic words. That is, it sounds so great, but means well, nobody knows. It shows up in a Christmas carol: “Hark! The herald angels sing…” But it might as well be up there with “mean estate” and “fum, fum, fum” as far as our actually knowing what on earth it means. You could throw in “behold,” “thine,” and “God rest ye” for good measure. Of course, “hark” and “harking back” often gets confused with “hearken.” So…I decided I had to clear the air. Here we go:

 

1. Hark is usually a verb that means to “listen attentively,” as in “Listen up!” Here you would simply use the word as it shows up in the carol, solo, with no object: Hark! It’s a command. Now, “hark” the verb can also be used with an object, but this is weird (aka archaic), as in, “Hark the bell.” Yes, in this case, “hark” is an annoyingly transitive verb. The OED gives a poetic sentence from Tennyson: “Hating to hark The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone.” “Hark” can also be used with “to,” which sounds extra strange to our ears: “Hark to the train whistle!” I don’t recommend using “hark” ever, but if you really have to, don’t use the transitive form.

2. “Hark back” is probably the only way to use this word that people will really understand, so it’s worth exploring how to do it correctly. “Hark back” actually comes from hunting for rabbits or birds with the use of a hunting hound. The dog might lose the scent and need to retrace his steps to find it again. This would be “harking back.” So, when you or I “hark back,” we are acting like hunting dogs, retracing our mental steps until we pick up the scent again so we can go forward after the quarry.

3. Now, there is another word, “hearken.” This word is derived from the same Old English word as “hark”: heorcnian. Basically what we have here is a usage problem. American English prefers “harken” but English English prefers “hearken.” (Kind of like center and centre, theater and theatre.) The word “hearken” is again usually an imperative and intransitive verb, simply, “Hearken.” But it can be used transitively, if oddly, as “hearken my words.” While you can “hearken” and be doing the same thing as someone who “harkens,” you cannot “heark back,” but only “hark back.”

Most stylists look down on the use of archaic words, but if you must use “hark” or “hearken,” then please use them the right way. I guess I could say, “Hark to my advice” or “Hearken my grammatical wisdom” so you don’t come “harking back” to find the right way to employ “hark” in your writing.

Mental Labor – Helpful on the Path to Holiness?

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There is a great article on spiritual theology in the old Catholic Encyclopedia. When it comes to explaining the “Means for realizing the Christian ideal” it suggest five activities that will help us head in the right direction: prayer, self-denial, labor, suffering and the virtues. I found the segment on labor to be curiously enlightening–partly because preachers seem to avoid the topic of work for the most part and partly because way fewer people in American society do manual labor than formerly. Most of us are doing some form of mental labor. Here’s the passage from the Encyclopedia:

(3) Labour, also, is subservient to the striving after perfection. Untiring labour runs counter to our corrupt nature, which loves ease and comfort. Hence labour, if well-ordered, persistent, and purposeful, implies self-denial. This is the reason why the Catholic Church has always looked upon labour, both manual and mental, as an ascetic means of no small value (cf. Cassian, “De instit. coenob.”, X, 24; St. Benedict, Rule, xlviii, li; Basil, “Reg. fusius tract.” c. xxxvii, 1-3; “Reg. brevius tract.”, c. lxxii; Origen, Against Celsus I.28). St. Basil is even of the opinion that piety and avoidance of labour are irreconcilable in the Christian ideal of life (cf. Mausbach, “Die Ethik des hl. Augustinus”, 1909, p. 264). Source: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14613a.htm

I have often heard of manual labor being something that can help one pray. I mean, the monks take “Ora et Labora” as their motto, that is, “Pray and Work.” But their work is usually farm work, cheese making, or even brewing. Only a few monks engage in the “mental labor” of handling the monastery finances or theological scholarship. But in our time, as I  mentioned above, most of us are engaged in mental labor–whether that be computer programming, organizing business deals, investing, accounting, advising, etc. From attorneys to customer service representatives to money managers to theologians, many, many people are doing mental labor rather than manual labor. But I don’t think most of us assess our mental labor as an “ascetic means of no small value.” But maybe we should.

The article provides a few references on the topic. Here are the quotes I could find:

Rule of St. Benedict, article 48 (I’ve bolded the parts that equate “reading”/mental labor with work. Monks were required to read during the work periods of their day. Note also that reading was an ascetical practice for Lent.):

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading. Hence, we believe that the time for each will be properly ordered by the following arrangement; namely, that from Easter till the calends of October, they go out in the morning from the first till about the fourth hour, to do the necessary work, but that from the fourth till about the sixth hour they devote to reading. After the sixth hour, however, when they have risen from table, let them rest in their beds in complete silence; or if, perhaps, anyone desireth to read for himself, let him so read that he doth not disturb others. Let None be said somewhat earlier, about the middle of the eighth hour; and then let them work again at what is necessary until Vespers.

If, however, the needs of the place, or poverty should require that they do the work of gathering the harvest themselves, let them not be downcast, for then are they monks in truth, if they live by the work of their hands, as did also our forefathers and the Apostles. However, on account of the faint-hearted let all things be done with moderation.

From the calends of October till the beginning of Lent, let them apply themselves to reading until the second hour complete. At the second hour let Tierce be said, and then let all be employed in the work which hath been assigned to them till the ninth hour. When, however, the first signal for the hour of None hath been given, let each one leave off from work and be ready when the second signal shall strike. But after their repast let them devote themselves to reading or the psalms.

During the Lenten season let them be employed in reading from morning until the third hour, and till the tenth hour let them do the work which is imposed on them. During these days of Lent let all received books from the library, and let them read them through in order. These books are to be given out at the beginning of the Lenten season.

Above all, let one or two of the seniors be appointed to go about the monastery during the time that the brethren devote to reading and take notice, lest perhaps a slothful brother be found who giveth himself up to idleness or vain talk, and doth not attend to his reading, and is unprofitable, not only to himself, but disturbeth also others. If such a one be found (which God forbid), let him be punished once and again. If he doth not amend, let him come under the correction of the Rule in such a way that others may fear. And let not brother join brother at undue times.

On Sunday also let all devote themselves to reading, except those who are appointed to the various functions. But if anyone should be so careless and slothful that he will not or cannot meditate or read, let some work be given him to do, that he may not be idle.

Let such work or charge be given to the weak and the sickly brethren, that they are neither idle, nor so wearied with the strain of work that they are driven away. Their weakness must be taken into account by the Abbot.

John Cassian, Institutes of the Coenobia, Book X, chapter 24 on the ascetical value of manual labor:

LASTLY, Abbot Paul, one of the greatest of the Fathers, while he was living in a vast desert which is called the Porphyrian desert,[374] and being relieved from anxiety by the date palms and a small garden, had plenty to support himself, and an ample supply of food, and could not find any other work to do, which would support him, because his dwelling was separated from towns and inhabited districts by seven days’ journey,[375] or even more, through the desert, and more would be asked for the carriage of the goods than the price of the work would be worth; he collected the leaves of the palms, and regularly exacted of himself his daily task, as if he was to be supported by it. And when his cave had been filled with a whole year’s work, each year he would burn with fire that at which he had so diligently laboured: thus proving that without manual labour a monk cannot stop in a place nor rise to the heights of perfection: so that, though the need for food did not require this to be done, yet he performed it simply for the sake of purifying his heart, and strengthening his thoughts, and persisting in his cell, and gaining a victory over accidie and driving it away.

St. Basil explains a lot about the ascetical value of work in his Longer Rules, Regulæ fusius tractatæ (Discussed in this book: E.F. Morison, St. Basil and His Rule, Chapter IX, “The Monk at Work” here: http://archive.org/stream/basilsrule00moriuoft/basilsrule00moriuoft_djvu.txt).

Ah, and here’s a link to the Mausbach book on the Ethics of St. Augustine, p. 264.

The main point of all this is that labor can be a means of sanctification and that “mental labor” — reading, research, email, thinking, meeting — can be just as sanctifying as manual labor.

St. Thomas Aquinas Sixteen Precepts for Acquiring Knowledge

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About six years ago, I did a post on St. Thomas Aquinas’ “16 Precepts for Acquiring Knowledge.”  The precepts are from a letter that Aquinas wrote to a certain “John.” Now, some scholars doubt the authenticity of the precepts and I’m no Medievalist to argue over such things, so I’ll leave that up to you. I first became interested in the precepts upon reading A. G. Sertillanges’ book, The Intellectual Life, which is loosely based on the precepts. Last year, I used the precepts in an introductory course that I co-taught and for lack of a standard translation out there, I did my own. I’ll provide the Latin alongside my translation here so you can judge whether it’s a good one or whether there are errors. I hope you all find it useful. And this is the only place you’ll find it on the whole internet.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Sixteen Precepts for Acquiring Knowledge (De modo studendi)

Because it was asked of me, John, my beloved in Christ, how you ought to study in the in acquiring of a treasury of knowledge, such counsel is delivered to you by me:

  1. That by rivulets, and not immediately into the sea, we choose to enter, because by the easier we must come at the more difficult. This is my warning then and your instruction:
  2. I bid you to be slow to speak
  3. and slow in coming to the place of talking.
  4. Embrace purity of conscience.
  5. Do not cease to pray.
  6. Love to keep to your cell on a regular basis if you wish to be admitted to the wine cellar.
  7. Show yourself amiable to all.
  8. Pay no heed to others’ affairs.
  9. Do not be overly familiar with anyone, because excessive familiarity breeds contempt and yields subtraction from the ability to study.
  10. In no way enter into the sayings and doings of secular persons.
  11. Above all, flee conversation; do not omit to imitate the footsteps of the saints and the good.
  12. Do not consider from whom you learn,
  13. but commit to memory whatever good is said.
  14. It is the same with what you read and hear, work so that you may understand; resolve each of your doubts.
  15. And busy yourself to store whatever you are able in the closet of your mind, as desiring to fill a vessel.
  16. do not seek what is too high for you.

 

Following these footsteps, you will put forth and bear branches and fruit in the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts as long as you have life. If you pursue this, you will be able to obtain that which you desire.

 Quia quaesisti a me, in Christo mihi carissime Ioannes, qualiter te studere oporteat in thesauro scientiae acquirendo, tale a me tibi traditur consilium:

  1. ut per rivulos, non statim in mare, eligas introire, quia per faciliora ad difficiliora oportet devenire. Haec est ergo monitio mea et instructio tua.
  2. Tardi loquum te esse iubeo
  3. et tarde ad locutorium accedentem;
  4. conscientiae puritatem amplectere.
  5. Orationi vacare non desinas;
  6. cellam frequenter diligas si vis in cellam vinariam introduci.
  7. Omnibus te amabilem exhibe;
  8. nihil quaere penitus de factis aliorum;
  9. nemini te multum familiarem ostendas, quia nimia familiaritas parit contemptum et subtractionis a studio materiam subministrat;
  10. de verbis et factis saecularium nullatenus te intromittas;
  11. discursus super omnia fugias; sanctorum et bonorum imitari vestigia non omittas;
  12. non respicias a quo audias,
  13. sed quidquid boni dicatur, memoriae recommenda;
  14. ea quae legis et audis, fac ut intelligas; de dubiis te certifica;
  15. et quidquid poteris in armariolo mentis reponere satage, sicut cupiens vas implere;
  16. altiora te ne quaesieris.

 

 

 

Illa sequens vestigia, frondes et fructus in vinea domini Sabaoth utiles, quandiu vitam habueris, proferes et produces. Haec si sectatus fueris, ad id attingere poteris, quod affectas.

Latin text: Thomas Aquinas, De modo studendi (Textum Taurini, 1954), Corpus Thomisticum, http://www.josephkenny.joyeurs.com/CDtexts/Latin/ModoStud%28false%29.htm (accessed June 29, 2011). Translation is mine. Copyright 2011 CatholicBibleStudent.com.

I should note that the “wine cellar” (cellam vinarium) in Precept #6 is a quotation from the Vulgate rendering of Song of Songs 2:4, “introduxit me in cellam vinariam ordinavit in me caritatem” (He brought me into the wine cellar, he ordered charity in me). This little idea, which in the Hebrew is closer to “house of wine” and dynamically, “banquet hall,” becomes important in Medieval spiritual reading of the Song.

Stand up at Your Desk

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So, I decided to go for it and get a standing desk. Yep. It’s a bit of a craze right now and I got inspired. For some background, there’s a NY Times article on standing desks, a few blog posts (LifeHacker, Wired, ProfHacker) and a great info graphic on how “Sitting is Killing You.” [Edit 5/23/13: Link removed by request.]

I found myself often slouching in my chair and getting that yucky tired feeling toward the end of the day. My desk is L-shaped and was relatively easy to adjust, so half of the “L” is now at my elbow height and half is at sitting height. I put my computer keyboard and monitors at standing height. So far, I love it! It’s only been a few days, but I feel less drowsy at the end of the day; I feel more alert at my desk. I don’t slouch. My legs are doing fine–it feels like I just took a walk when I leave work. I’ve been sitting down sometimes, but only after standing for 2-3 hours. Yesterday I stood for 4 hours straight. I’m hoping that I’ll shed some pounds, gain some muscle and become more productive. We’ll see!

How to Read (A lot of) Books

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I found a helpful blog post by Matthew Cornell on how to read a lot of books in a short period of time. Students and scholars alike always need to be reading a lot of books. A book that has been helpful to me is How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. It’s a classic, but it is more about reading in general than it is about reading fast. It will help you read faster, but more importantly, it will help you read better. Adler understands and explains the purpose of reading and how to go about it in the most productive way. As far as quick reading, I have looked through The Complete Idiots’ Guide to Speed Reading by Abby Marks Beale and Pam Mullen. This book pulls together a lot of advice from   many different speed reading approaches and techniques. It’s kind of a buffet of techniques rather than a particular approach.

The principles that have been helpful to me are:

  • Set apart a large block of time for reading.
  • Avoid all distractions. (Usually this means going to a place for reading, like a coffee shop or library, where you are less likely to be distracted than in whatever normal place you have like your living room or office.)
  • Stop sub-vocalizing! (Most people sub-vocalize words as they read them, because they learned to read by speaking. Once you overcome this problem–by humming, breathing, or just not doing it–your reading speed will increase.)
  • Use a card to guide your eye. (This technique involves using an index card to lead your eye down the page more quickly than it would go by itself. I don’t do this all the time, but sometimes.)
  • Don’t read every word and skip some stuff.
  • Read in a brightly lit environment, the brighter the better.
  • Interest yourself in your author’s ideas. (That means you have to “get” what the author is talking about so that your mind can ride on the track which he has laid down. If you don’t get the story he’s trying to tell you’ll find yourself lost and hopelessly uninterested.)

Speed reading is kind of like swinging a golf club. There’s a whole lot of techniques and things to remember and you can only utilize so much them at any given time. But with some effort, anyone one who can read can read faster.