Divine summons: Working in the horizon of God’s call

I have learned over the years that students, wearily carrying out a writing assignment, often have recourse to the dictionary. Assigned to write on a specific topic, they will begin with a dictionary definition. Let it never be said that I have learned nothing from reading their papers all these years. Look up the word vocation in a dictionary, and you will find that the first two meanings given will be something like the following: “1. a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action: esp: a divine call to the religious life; 2. the work in which a person is regularly employed: occupation.”

It was in part the genius and in part the danger of the Reformations of the 16th century that they tended to collapse the first of these into the second. One’s vocation became simply one’s work. To be sure, for the Reformers this was a wider concept than what we have come to mean by work—which is, roughly, a job for the doing of which one is paid, a way to make a living. For example, familial responsibilities, though they do not belong to the sphere of work, were clearly understood by the Reformers to be part of one’s vocation. Hence, a man could be very conscientious in the duties of his occupation and still fail terribly in his calling as a father.

Even granting such qualifications, however, it is true to say that for the Reformers vocation came to be associated with the responsibilities of everyday life, rather than with a divine summons to do something extraordinary. To that sanctification of everyday work—and to the dangers of such sanctification—I will return in a little while. It is one of the tensions built into our concept of vocation.

Even if we connect vocation not only with work but also with the domestic and familial responsibilities so essential to life, there may be other duties that call us as well. When Ken Burns produced his much acclaimed series of public television shows on the Civil War, one of the most powerful moments for many listeners was the reading of a letter written by Major Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island regiment to his wife, Sarah. Believing that his regiment would engage in battle within a few days, and reckoning with the fact that he might not return alive to her or to his sons, he wrote to Sarah, using quite naturally the language of vocation: “I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in thus hazarding the happiness of those I loved and could not find one. A pure love of my Country and the principles I have often advocated before the people, and ‘the name of honor that I love more than I fear death’ have called upon me, and I have obeyed.” In such an instance we may find it harder to say whether we are still talking about the duties of everyday life, or whether a sense of vocation is here associated with something more heroic and extraordinary. In any case, this example begins to push us in the direction of the first—and deeper—tension I want to explore.

Students writing their papers tend to look simply at the several dictionary definitions of a word, but an unusually diligent student might also find ways to make use of the etymological information supplied in a dictionary entry. In the instance of the word vocation, this is not very complicated. Our English word has its root in the Latin vocare—to call or to summon. A vocation is a calling—which implies a Caller. It is a summons. Taking this seriously will, I think, draw us into reflection upon a disturbing problem built into the idea of vocation. It reminds us also that—however often the concept of vocation has been connected especially to the Reformers, Luther and Calvin—the concept also has other important roots in Western culture.

It is, after all, Aeneas, depicted by Vergil as the destined founder of Rome, who says, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: “I am the man / Whom heaven calls.” The Aeneid is, among other things, a poem about vocation. In their recent book, Heroism and the Christian Life, Brian Hook and Russell Reno have noted how Vergil’s poem, certainly one of the formative epics of our culture, compels us to ponder what is the deepest problem in the idea of a vocation—namely, whether obedience to a divine summons diminishes or enhances the one who has been called. So I begin there.

Of the Aeneid C. S. Lewis once wrote that no one “who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent.” What he had in mind was the Vergilian sense of vocation, which distinguishes the Aeneid from Homer’s equally great epic, the Iliad. Homer’s subject is not really the great contest between Greeks and Trojans; it is the personal story of Achilles’s refusal to fight and of the events that bring him, finally, to change his mind. It is a story about the personal glory and honor of an heroic figure, and in such a story there may be fate but not vocation. There are personal triumphs and personal tragedies, but not a calling or a destiny in service of which greatness is exhibited. There is fate, but she is blind and, in her blindness, establishes a kind of equity among the warring parties. Both the nobility and the tragedy of heroes such as Achilles and Hector are set against a background of meaningless flux. Thus, Simone Weil writes that “the progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw.” What is absent is divine purpose—and, therefore, as Lewis notes, none of the events in the Iliad can have the kind of significance that the founding of Rome has in the Aeneid.

Aeneas’s story is quite different. He is, Vergil tells us at the very outset, one who “came to Italy by destiny.” Suffering countless setbacks both on land and sea—“so hard and huge / A task it was to found the Roman people”—still he was “a man apart, devoted to his mission.” To be the man whom heaven calls exacts a great price. Having already endured the ten-year siege of Troy and its fall, having lost his wife while making his escape with a small band of surviving Trojans, Aeneas must still suffer the wrath of Juno—storm, plague and warfare—as he journeys from the ruins of Troy (on the western coast of modern Turkey) to Italy.

Seven summers after Troy’s fall, Aeneas’s company—still on the way—takes refuge from a storm at a port in Sicily. There they hold a festival to commemorate the death of Aeneas’s father, Anchises. But in the midst of these games the Trojan women are moved to consider how long they have been wandering and how many hardships they have suffered.

But on a desolate beach apart, the women
Wept for Anchises lost as they gazed out
In tears at the unfathomable sea.
“How many waves remain for us to cross,
How broad a sea, though we are weary, weary?”

All had one thing to say: a town and home
Were what they dreamed of, sick of toil at sea.

The women set fire to the ships, hoping—though unsuccessfully, of course—to compel the company to settle permanently in Sicily. They force Aeneas himself to wrestle with “momentous questions.”

Should he forget the destiny foretold
And make his home in Sicily, or try
Again for Italy?

Finally, he accepts the advice of Nautes that those “too weary of your great quest” should be permitted to remain behind and settle in Sicily. “Set them apart, and let them have their city / Here in this land, the tired ones.”

A vocation exacts a price, and not all can pay it. Even though it may seem to draw us, its point is not happiness. It is, as C. S. Lewis notes, the nature of vocation to appear simultaneously both as desire and as duty. “To follow the vocation does not mean happiness; but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do not follow.” The price of a calling had been made clear to Aeneas himself even earlier. In one of the most famous books of the Aeneid, Vergil recounts the love affair of Aeneas and Dido. Their ships buffeted by a tremendous storm at sea, the Trojan company has made it to shore on the coast of North Africa, where the new colony of Carthage is being founded by a group of immigrants from Tyre and their queen, Dido.

Weary of the endless journeying to which Aeneas’s destiny has committed them, the Trojans are glad to stay for a time at Carthage while they repair their ships. Aeneas, in particular, finds happiness and seeming fulfillment in overseeing the work of building Carthage, and, ominously, he and Dido fall passionately in love. But when Jupiter learns this, he commands Mercury to remind Aeneas of the task he has been given.