The intellectual life is in some ways necessarily lonely--in his book on The Intellectual Life: Its Spirits, Conditions, Methods, the French Dominican Friar Antonin Sertillanges insists that the intellectual life requires solitude. He is not wrong. Researchers in history, for instance, spend hours, days, years alone in mysterious musty basements, poring over documents that unveil their mystery to only the most persistent elect. And then the practice of writing takes additional hours (and days and years) of discipline and solitude before the essays or books are ready to go out into the world. But not all Christians who live the intellectual life are professional scholars, first and foremost. And unlike Sertillanges himself, many are married and have children. Some might be lawyers or pastors or doctors or missionaries or various professionals, or stay-at-home moms, or homeschooling mothers, or simply overwhelmed mothers of small children. These factors definitely take a toll on the possibility of solitude.
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Nadya Williams
Nadya Williams is the Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University and is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church; Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity; and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming Zondervan Academic, 2025). She and her husband Dan joyfully live and homeschool in Ashland, Ohio.
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