Princeton-trained philosopher Zena Hitz found herself dissatisfied with her life despite her success and prestige. Seeking spiritual fulfillment, she became involved in acts of charity, including setting up a Bible study in a Maryland women’s prison. She had previously felt drawn to the Catholic Church and a life of “wholeheartedness,” which she did not experience in her academic work. This led her to enter the Madonna House community in rural Ontario, where she lived for three years before leaving to teach at Saint John’s College in Annapolis.
Hitz’s 2020 book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life, received critical acclaim and attracted the attention of former rapper MC Hammer, who conducted a public interview with Hitz. Her latest book is a reflection on the call to religious life, specifically in the Catholic sense of taking vows and living in community apart from the world for the sake of God.
Through a study of spiritual classics, biographies of celebrated religious, and reflection on her own experiences, Hitz arrives at a series of powerful observations about the religious life. She argues that love of any finite thing is ultimately a love of death, and that the only eternal reality is God. Religious life entails surrender and self-denial, but these acts must be understood both in themselves and in terms of their ultimate aim, which is to achieve love and fulfillment.
The religious life involves seeking spiritual poverty and serving the poor, practicing silence, solitude, and contemplation, and loving one’s neighbor without forming deep personal attachments. These practices of asceticism lead to freedom from temporal attachments, allowing for total abandonment to love of God and neighbor. Hitz emphasizes the importance of self-denial and restraint as essential to our lives.
However, Hitz’s book neglects the intellectual or philosophical basis of the religious life. Plato and Aristotle viewed philosophy as a way of life, with supernatural graces and inspirations, disciplines, vows, and self-denials, all for the sake of happiness found in the contemplation of the divine. Religious vows are, in part, refinements of the way of life the classical philosophers proposed. Hitz’s study shows the poverty of a life concerned only with worldly achievements and the desire for truth, happiness, and self-giving that enables us to pursue a life of religious devotion.
