Zena Hitz, a successful, Princeton-trained philosopher, was dissatisfied with her life. A self-described “social climber,” for whom prestige meant much, she found that it did not mean enough. She began to crowd the free hours of her life with acts of charity, including setting up a Bible study in the darkest of places, a Maryland women’s prison.

This was just one of several signs of spiritual hunger in Hitz’s life. She had felt drawn into the Catholic Church years before. She had sensed a calling to mortify her craving for success, but also to live a life characterized by “wholeheartedness,” a quality she did not experience in her academic work. At last, this twin calling, to mortify worldly desires and attain a life of total abandonment to and freedom for God, led her to enter the Madonna House community, in rural Ontario.

Madonna House is a Catholic lay monastic community founded by Catherine de Hueck Doherty in 1947. For three years, Hitz lived a life of work and prayer with others in the community, remaining just long enough to profess final vows, before discerning to leave. She now teaches at Saint John’s, the well-known great-books college in Annapolis, and has since become something more unusual — a widely read philosopher and apologist for the life of the mind. Her 2020 book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life, part memoir, part defense of the study of the great books, not only received critical acclaim but attracted unexpected praise from the former rap star MC Hammer, who subsequently conducted a public interview with Hitz.

This new book is also part memoir, part philosophical reflection, though Hitz makes no attempt to connect her previous reflection on the intellectual life with the present one on the religious life — a choice that determines much of what she says. First, to offer a point of clarity: By “religious life,” Hitz does not mean the life of people who are simply practicing Christians or adherents to a religion. She means the term in the exact Catholic sense: the life of those who take vows and live in community apart from the world for the sake of God.

Hitz in the book aims to explain the call to that life and what it entails. Through a study of spiritual classics, films about religious life, biographies of celebrated religious (those who have taken vows), and reflection on her own experience, Hitz arrives at a series of powerful, interrelated observations. In the experience of grief, such as over the loss of a child, we sometimes discover that to love any finite thing is, as Augustine put it, to be in love with a death. Our love of any finite thing in isolation may initially seem to give our lives meaning, but the temporal failure of that thing will eventually lead that meaning to “collapse.”

Hitz the philosopher does some of her best work here, answering philosopher Thomas Nagel’s counterintuitive claim that life can have real meaning even if that meaning does not last and the world as a whole is absurd. For Hitz, the example of such monastics as Walatta Petros and Mother Maria Skobtsova says otherwise. They were moved by grief at temporal loss not to shun the world but to fall in love with the only eternal reality, which is God. They abandoned their love of the world, but for the sake of giving themselves wholly to that “indestructible knowledge” of the eternal that alone can satisfy our “deepest longings.” In this, they illustrate the unpredictable but absolute “call” that has drawn so many through the ages to religious life.

In our day, people will often view the “unusual” life of the religious as a mere renunciation of good things. Hitz wants to emphasize that indeed it is a way of life that entails surrender and self-denial but that such ascetic acts must be understood both in themselves, as deprivations, and in terms of their ultimate aim, as pathways to love and fulfillment.

What follows from answering the call to religious life are at least three acts, each of which has a dimension of asceticism and fulfillment. The religious learn to seek spiritual poverty and also to serve the poor. They do so, however, not in the spirit of believing they can save anyone, which can lead to a “tyrannical” and “patronizing” attitude characteristic of modern “do-gooders.” Rather, they love the poor to discover their own spiritual poverty and to unite themselves with and accompany the poor. We cannot save, but we can be saved through service to the poor.

All religious, in various ways, practice silence, solitude, and contemplation. The self-denial of not speaking awakens us, Hitz writes, to what a “racket” our thoughts make. In learning to silence thought, in entering into silence altogether, the religious attains intimacy with God. Saint John of the Cross taught that the “dark night of the soul,” the state of complete emptiness analogous to Christ’s self-emptying on the cross, is a perfect instance of this intimacy. As Hitz notes, such interior silence enabled Etty Hillesum, even as she awaited death in Auschwitz, to look on beauty and atrocity with steady eyes of faith.

A similar unity of denial and fulfillment occurs in the religious life’s call to love of neighbor. Religious vows often forbid the forming of deep personal attachments, not just marriage but close friendships. The monastic is to take no “consolation from the brethren.” This is not to forbid love but rather to increase it: to ensure that his love will find universal expression, in the religious community, among his “neighbors,” and also in the love of his enemies.

The result of these practices of asceticism is freedom from temporal attachments, for the sake of total abandonment to love of God and neighbor. Hitz provides an eloquent and wide-ranging explanation of why the taking of vows — a seemingly intolerable imposition on personal freedom — actually is the most effective means of spiritual freedom. Her emphasis on the importance of self-denial and restraint as essential to our lives is especially salutary.

Hers is not a perfect case, however. I was struck by how separate Hitz holds the life of the intellect and the religious life. In her early professional life, philosophy had been tied to reputation and other superficies, which she then supplemented with the more authentic goods of charity. Her account of religious life rightly focuses on the practices that discipline and transform love. And yet only briefly does she gloss foundational texts for the religious life that establish its intellectual or philosophical basis. Jacob’s dream of the ladder and his wrestling with the angel, so essential to understanding knowledge of God as the deepest drive and most vital struggle of human existence, are mentioned, but only in passing. The thought of Plato, and of Aristotle, who taught us to “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us,” which, for those Greek intellectualists, is the contemplative act of the mind, is also introduced but kept to one side.

At the end of the book, Hitz notes that the “use of reason, in my view, is critical. It can show up falsehood and inconsistency, . . . but its capacity to break through the motivated rationalizations that keep us from reality is limited.” Philosophical reason, in other words, can remove obstacles, but it cannot lead us on the way toward the fulfillment for which we long. Its logic chops but is analytic rather than holistic.

There is something to be said for her emphasis on love and practice over reason and the search for wisdom, not least because knowledge is so bound up with the self that to overcome the self will inevitably entail acts of forgetting: self-forgetfulness in the silence of God but also, in a sense, forgetfulness of natural knowledge for the sake of the knowledge of grace, insofar as we have come to think of our knowledge as a possession. There is still more to be said for Hitz’s suspicion of reason because of how personal the book is: For her, at least, philosophy was a professional pursuit and a source of pride to be overcome more than it was a prolegomenon to conversion.

Overall, however, Hitz leaves out too much. T. S. Eliot once wrote of modern analytic philosophy that it “seems to provide a method of philosophizing without insight and wisdom.” In the same place, he laments the modern “divorce” of philosophy and theology. The result has led to modern academic philosophy’s becoming merely a critical examination of our everyday activities. It provides a commentary or a dissection at one remove from life itself.

It was otherwise, however, for Plato and Aristotle. For them, philosophy was a way of life; it had its supernatural graces and inspirations, its disciplines, its vows, and its self-denials, all for the sake of a happiness to be found in the contemplation of the divine. As Paul, Justin Martyr, and Augustine, among other fathers of the church, argued, the true heirs of the philosophers are nuns and monks. The life of religious orders arises out of the philosophical desire for truth and satisfies it in the supernatural contemplation of God. Charity flows from that contemplation, because God himself is love. Religious vows are, in part, refinements, transformed and deepened by scripture and revelation, of the way of life the classical philosophers first proposed. The philosophers aimed for the knowledge that would fulfill the self and which culminates in a life of happiness; Christian religious recognize that such knowledge lies in a reality infinitely beyond themselves and so seek to give their lives away in imitation of Christ. The ends are indeed very different, but their foundation in the needs and orientation of human nature is the same.

Hitz’s study shows us well the poverty of a life concerned only with worldly achievements, and how we are sometimes suddenly called to something better. A study also showing us how deeply rooted in human nature is the desire for truth, happiness, and self-giving that enables us to hear that call in the first place and to pursue it as the true meaning of our lives would make a fine complement to this stirring and beautiful book.