On Work and Leisure

Dr. Krom delivered the opening lecture of the 2007 program and recently had it published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review (July 2008). This essay serves as an introduction to the overall theme of instilling a sense of the richness of a Catholic life; a life grounded in prayer, rooted in divine leisure, and blossoming into good works that manifest Our Lord's sacrificial love.

Working Toward Leisure: A Criticism of a Most Modern Malaise

Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God . . . . And they [who were invited to eat this bread] began all at once to make excuse.

~Luke 14:15-18

In his Confessions, St. Augustine asks himself ‘What is time?’ Before proceeding to investigate this most central aspect of Creation, he observes that “if no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.”[1] This is a great example of what is entailed in the quest for Truth, for the lover of Wisdom challenges him- or herself and others to think reflectively upon ordinary aspects of human life whose reality we take for granted. We all “know” what justice is and assume its existence in that we cannot help but demand that we receive what is ours and are angered when we are wronged; we all know the feeling of having been wronged by another and naturally cry out “that’s unfair!” at a perceived injustice. However, when we read one of Plato’s dialogues and see Socrates’ interlocutors frustrated in their attempts to define justice, we come to realize that our “knowledge” is only partial, that our ignorance lies just beneath the surface. The aim of the Socratic gadfly is to foster wonder and kindle the desire to know; the awareness of our ignorance should be an occasion for thought and lead us to pursue wisdom ever more ardently.

Such is the effect of reading Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture upon the honest reader. We all “know” what leisure is . . . until Pieper boldly claims that one can have free time and yet be incapable of leisure: are leisure and free time two different things? When we hear the word leisure, do we not conjure up images of Friday night amusements with our friends? Of listening to music or playing sports? Of watching TV as we unwind at the end of a busy day? These may occupy us in our free time, but Pieper challenges us to consider whether they constitute leisure. Leisure, as it turns out, may have a deeper and more central connection to who we are than is suggested by innocent frivolities and recreational activities.

What follows is not so much a defense of Pieper’s ideas (although I happen to think Pieper is profoundly right) as an invitation for us to consider his meaning with a sympathetic ear. This is important because we are prone to misunderstand and wrongly attack people’s positions when we have not attempted to interpret them with the principle of charity. For example, when St. Augustine tells us that we should never eat food except in the way we take our medicine, that eating food because it tastes good rather than because it nourishes us is a sin, we cannot help put accuse him of a puritanical spirit that rejects the goodness of God’s gift of the fruits of the earth to man.[2] However, let us remember that St. Augustine thinks of his relationship with God as a love affair whose joys and pleasures surpass anything physical delight could provide; for St. Augustine, focusing on the fleeting pleasures of food over the unchanging love of God would be like a man enjoying a romantic dinner by delighting in the food rather than his beloved wife. Such a man denies to his wife the attention and care that she deserves and, ultimately, robs himself of true happiness. Even if we may think St. Augustine goes too far in his condemnation of physical pleasures, for surely the pleasant food could enhance the romance felt between husband and wife, nonetheless a sympathetic and charitable reader is open to initially surprising or even seemingly wrongheaded views.

The way I have chosen to open us up to the possible verity of Pieper’s claims concerning leisure is to paint for us a picture of the “Worker” who Pieper has in mind; the Worker will turn out to be a likeable and familiar character (at least to me). He works hard, sacrifices for his goals as well as for others, and is generally well-intentioned. However, in the process of laying bare his character, we will see that he suffers from a serious flaw that prevents him from being that which God intends: a creature “that God has willed for its own sake”[3] who “is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life.”[4] He is called to God’s heavenly banquet and yet is too busy to attend, for there is always work to be done. This essay consists of three parts: first, I will give a brief background of our Worker with an example of his inability to be at leisure despite possessing free time; second, I will use the three characteristics of the Worker outlined in the third chapter of Leisure, the Basis of Culture as a means to explain why the Worker has free time but no leisure; third, I will conclude by discussing what we as individuals and as a society need in order to avoid becoming Workers.

1) The Worker

The Worker can occupy any socioeconomic class, for this phenomenon can be found just as much among the rich as it is among the poor. I have chosen the example of an upper-middle class individual: he has enough to be comfortable and yet needs to work hard to maintain this state. After providing a brief biography, I will discuss his relationship to his family and his lack of leisure.

Our Worker was born into a middle class family; his parents could always ensure that there was a roof over his head, food on the table, clothes on his back, and medicine when he was not well. And yet he often went without: he was never without necessities, but often went without luxuries. When he played little league baseball, he was the one with the old, second or third generation equipment, while the popular kids had the $200 gloves and brand new bats. At school, his clothes were neat and clean, but not caught up with the latest fashions; and when he went out with his friends, he found his wallet empty when others had only begun to spend. Although his parents cared about his happiness and even insured that he attended church as well as was told about the Gospel message to seek treasures that rust not, they never ensured that this informed his daily life; they were too busy to talk about such intimate life lessons and over time he formed his opinions about happiness out of envy for the goods others enjoyed.
When he went off to college, our Worker told himself that he was going to “make it,” that he was going to be better off than his parents and be able to afford all those things denied to him at home. He happened to be good at math (though it in no way interested him) and he had been told by his high school counselor that engineers make a good salary without having to spend too many years in school. One of his friends was in chemical engineering, and although electrical engineering was more interesting to him, he wanted to hang out with his friend and, besides, the class wasn’t at 8 am! Finally, as it turned out he met his future wife in the class and everything seemed to work out for him.

Let us move forward about 15 years in the Worker’s life. Our Worker now has a stable and relatively high-paying job in a lab working for a major research company; while he does not have everything that he could want, he and his family rarely need to deny themselves the luxuries that they desire. Further, he is insured of many raises in the coming years just by sticking with his work; while he finds what he does dull and monotonous, the money is good. Lest we think of him as frivolous and consumed by the pursuit of luxury, let us bear in mind that most of his money goes toward providing for his family. He is a decent man and the luxuries his money produces are such things as top-notch private schools, sports equipment, spending money for the kids, and family vacations. His great joy is not in bigger and faster cars for himself, but in ensuring that his kids do not go without. He takes his family to church every Sunday, although this is more for social reasons and the lessons he wants his kids to learn are vague notions such as being “good” or “helpful” to others. Let us complete our picture of the Worker with the family vacation; here we will see the free time that his paycheck affords, but the leisure that his mentality denies.

Our Worker has been working overtime for the last three months straight, and his wife keeps begging him to spend time with the family. She loves him dearly (as he does her) and keeps telling him that they have enough money but not enough time together. While he is apprehensive and fears what taking a break will do to his career and investment portfolio, he decides to take his family to the mountains for a much-needed Spring Break vacation. He is excited about the vacation for he had always loved hiking, camping, and fishing, and he feels as much as his wife that some free time would be nice. Unfortunately, as it turns out the Worker’s mind will not let him leave the lab.

On the first night he rushes through dinner and is thinking the whole time about those last few details from work that he needs to sort out. The conversation is about what they are going to do over the course of the week, and yet his mind is on the Monday following and the work he needs to do to be prepared. He rushes to get the kids in bed rather than go stargazing or play board games because he needs to put an hour or two in before bed. As it turns out, that hour or two turns into four and he wakes up exhausted the next day.

First thing in the morning his children are excited about the prospects of going hiking after breakfast. While our Worker wishes he could put just a little work in before lunch, he concedes and takes them to a beautiful summit where they can soak in the vistas and the warmth of the sun’s rays. As much as he enjoys himself on the hike, once again his mind turns to work and he remembers that he needed to discuss the upcoming project with a colleague at work. Once they get to the summit, he quickly glances at the view and gives the obligatory exclamations of wonder and joy for the sake of his kids, but immediately gets on his cell phone (that infernal destroyer of leisure!) and spends the next half hour or so on the phone while his wife and kids are snacking. He apologizes to his wife, who tries to understand and yet cannot help but wish she could throw the phone off the cliff! In short, the entire vacation goes by without our Worker ever leaving the lab.

Hopefully this portrait helps us to see what Pieper means: our Worker clearly has free time, and could have even more if he was willing to settle for less money, and yet he has rendered himself incapable of leisure. He works so that he can have money, he has money so that he can provide his family with luxuries, he provides his family with luxuries so that they can . . . have luxuries? What he and his family needs in order to enjoy one another and find the happiness they desire is to spend time together; his wife and children need his love and affection. He knows this and yet he thinks these will come once he has enough money in the bank. Our Worker cannot heed God’s call to be at leisure.

2) The Three Characteristics of the Worker

In order to uncover the reasons why our Worker lacks leisure, let us turn to the third chapter of Leisure, the Basis of Culture; here Pieper brings together the results from the previous chapters and, in exploring the nature of the Worker, simultaneously outlines the nature of leisure. Leisure turns out to be 1) the opposite of acedia (‘sloth’ or ‘idleness’); 2) consenting to man’s true nature in a celebratory spirit; and 3) perpendicular to the world of work. Let us explore these by laying out the characteristics of the Worker.

The Worker is characterized firstly as one whose whole life focuses on the development of “the industrious spirit of the daily effort to make a living.”[5] As Pieper explains, the Worker cannot help but think of rest from work as laziness, or even worse, as idleness. One could say that this is a secularized form of the Protestant work ethic: one must be working in order to possess moral value as an individual. This is a gross misunderstanding of what it means to be idle; the vice of idleness (acedia in the Latin) is not refusing to work, but refusing to love Our Lord and His gift of life. As Pieper explains, according to St. Thomas Aquinas idleness is a violation of the Third Commandment, for the idle person is incapable of observing the “holy rest” of the Sabbath.[6] Leisure, which is the true contrary of idleness, consists in affirming our very existence as a gift from God. The Worker is ever-working, ever-in-motion, and yet he is not “at one with himself.”[7] All his work is in vain, for when he goes to enjoy the fruits of his labor by taking a family vacation, though his body is in the mountains his spirit remains tethered to the lab.

Second, the Worker stands in “readiness to suffer in vacuo unrelated to anything;”[8] life is work and work is meaningless toil. Instead of consenting to the gift of life by responding to God’s ever-fervent call to know Him, our Worker fills the void that can only be filled by God with work. So long as he is working, he feels himself justified. Not that he lives for himself – he is not a selfish man – yet he sacrifices by working harder without ever asking what the point of his sacrificial work might be. By contrast, the man at leisure responds to his social role by filling it with celebration; he “consents to his own true nature and abides in concord with the meaning of the universe.”[9] As Pieper goes on to say, leisure is at root festival, or man’s free offering of the fruits of his toil and of his very self to His Maker. Even further, the purest and highest feast takes place when man accepts God’s sacrificial offering of Himself in the Eucharist.

Third and finally, the Worker demands of all his actions that they are “complete[ly] absor[bed] in the social organism.”[10] Even when he takes a break, he demands that relaxation serve the purposes of the state – the refreshed man is a better worker. While we should be thankful that we are exempted from 15 minutes out of every four hours of work, this still stands in the world of work. A break makes us better at working, not better at being at leisure. Pieper provides us with a nice mathematical image: leisure “runs at right angles to work . . . [and] cuts across it, vertically” (30). Life as work provides us with a horizontal horizon; the infinite limits of the world of work provide no meaning but only one pointless event after another; like TV sitcoms, in such a world there are episodes but no narratives. The man at leisure, on the other hand, understands why the Gothic cathedral stands so vertically: the loftiness of its spires calls to mind the soaring heights to which we can ascend by abiding in God’s salvific embrace. Leisure elevates us above work and allows us to take part in the divine life to which we are called.

3) The Work of Leisure

As odd as it initially seemed, we now understand why Pieper says that leisure does not necessarily coincide with free time. Paradoxically, leisure is something that we must “work” for. How can we be at leisure? Further, how can we help society keep at bay the tendency toward producing Workers? I will conclude with some thoughts on this vexing challenge.
I consider myself a recovering Worker; now that I have left behind the joyous days of being a career student, and now that I am trying to maintain my position as a professor while helping to raise three children, I know what it is like to become a Worker. While the outline of our model worker was not autobiographical, I could describe him so vividly because I have felt and thought as he does. I do not have a particularly strong proclivity toward material goods, nor did I pursue my line of work because I thought it would provide me with material comforts (anybody who pursues philosophy for the money has not thought things through!). However, as a husband and father I have experienced the sleepless nights and worry-filled mind that only the most steadfast in faith can avoid. I see in myself the tendency to combat this by working more and more rather than by trusting in God’s providence. This is an all-too human response to the need for security, and the only solution is rising above work by accepting God’s ready embrace. We can all become Workers, and only a solid spiritual life will suffice in overcoming the temptation to solve material woes with material solutions.

Knowing this, what can we do for society? Once again, the solution is not activism; demanding more free time from employers and governments is arguably necessary but certainly not sufficient, for free time does not help us to rise above the mentality of the Worker. We ourselves must be at leisure and let our “light shine before men.”[11] The man at leisure is a witness merely by being a steady boat in stormy waters, just as the Church’s sacramental life is a barque in the midst of a flood. To speak more concretely, what we are doing here, now, and for the remainder of our lives, is training ourselves to be at leisure. If we do so, we will go out into the world with the armor of Christ, and our battle will be to change the minds and hearts of others by giving them a glimmer of the new life that is in those who have accepted His call to “have leisure and know that . . . [He is] God.”[12] This inward and silent witness is and ought to be the response to a world that loves to work but cannot answer why it does so.

Work is directed toward celebration, and at root the festive spirit is made possible through the Eucharistic banquet. As Pieper says, the stillness of the man who is withdrawn from the outward exertion that characterizes the Worker is precisely he who can appreciate the “sacramental visibility” that the Incarnation makes possible.[13] Delighting in the presence of the Lord begins with the Eucharistic banquet, and it is through this that we can heed His call to join in the Heavenly banquet: we are called to His banquet and yet as Workers we are tempted to “make excuse,” for we are too busy to attend. Let us work toward such leisure, bearing in mind always that the act of Creation itself was consummated by a day of rest.[14]

Michael P. Krom, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy
St. Vincent College
Latrobe, PA

[1] Augustine, Confessions 11.14.17.
[2] See ibid., 10.31. In 10.31-34 St. Augustine works through the temptations of the sense under the heading of “lust of the flesh.”
[3] Gaudium et Spes 24.3.
[4] CCC 356.
[5] Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, tran. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 29.
[6] See ibid., 29-30.
[7] Ibid., 27.
[8] Ibid., 24.
[9] Ibid., 29.
[10] Ibid., 24.
[11] Mt. 5:16.
[12] Ps. 65:11.
[13] Pieper, 60.
[14] I would like to thank the participants at the 2007 Sophia Institute Summer Program held at the Perron Family farm in Sumter, ME, for providing the occasion for the original drafting of this essay. Special thanks go to Fr. Paul Dumais for allowing me to deliver this as the opening lecture of the program. In addition, I thank the members of my ethics courses in the Fall of 2007 for their leisurely patience with me when asked to read an earlier version of this. They rose to the occasion and provided helpful criticism; special thanks go to Br. Nathanael Polinski, O.S.B.