Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

There are a few book that those interested in Classical Education are told they HAVE to read. Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper is one of them. For such an impactful book, it is surprisingly short: only about 50 pages. Yet every word is packed with insight and wisdom. It is one of those very rare books in which I was marking just about every paragraph for further reflection.

His thesis is simply that without intentional leisure, culture withers and dies. He worries that in our too-hurried and work-focused world, leisure will be lost and culture along with it. He returns to the ancients, as so many of us do for wisdom. For while leisure is decidedly not work, it is in fact its opposite, it is not sloth either. It is divine contemplation. It is knowing God. This the ancients understood.

“It should, however, be added that even the philosophers of antiquity (which here and elsewhere always means the philosophers of Greece and the Middle Ages) looked upon the active effort of discursive thought as the properly human element in our knowledge; it is the ratio, they held, which is distinctively human; the intellectus they regarded as being already beyond the sphere allotted to man. And yet it belonged to man, though in one sense ‘superhuman’; the ‘purely human’ by itself could not satiate man's powers of comprehension, for man, of his very nature, reaches out beyond the sphere of the ‘human’, touching on the order of pure spirits. ‘Although the knowledge which is most characteristic of the human soul occurs in the mode of ratio, nevertheless there is in it a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings, of whom it is therefore said that they possess the faculty of spiritual vision.’ That is how the matter is put by Aquinas in the Quaestiones disputate de veritate. It means to say that man participates in the angelic faculty of non-discursive vision, which is the capacity to apprehend the spiritual in the same manner that our eye apprehends light or our ear sound. Our knowledge in fact includes an element of non-activity, of purely receptive vision—though it is certainly not essentially human; it is, rather, the fulfilment of the highest promise in man, and thus, again, truly human (just as Aquinas calls the vita contemplativa ‘non proprie humana sed super humana’, not really human but superhuman, although it is the noblest way of life).” (p. 10)

Pieper gives a wonderful example of the beauty that results when we no longer have to work hard to do the right thing, when our contemplation simply becomes who we are.

“The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one's enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility one might almost say, of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty. And therefore, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether—it would be more meritorious still.’” (p. 15)

Yet we are so defined by work.

“This implies nothing against training and nothing against the official. Of course specialized and professional work is normal, the normal way in which men play their part in the world; ‘work’ is the normal, the working day is the ordinary day. But the question is: whether the world, defined as the world of work, is exhaustively defined; can man develop to the full as a functionary and a ‘worker’ and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence?” (p. 20) 

No, Pieper answers. There is more to being human than working.

“In the Middle Ages the same view prevailed. ‘It is necessary for the perfection of human society’, Aquinas writes, ‘that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation—nota bene, necessary not only for the good of the individual who so devotes himself, but for the good of human society.’” (p. 23)  

Yet, as stated earlier, Pieper is definitely not advocating for sloth or laziness.

“Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man prefers to forgo the rights, or if you prefer the claims, that belong to his nature. In a word, he does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally, is. Acedia is the ‘despair from weakness’ which Kierkegaard analysed as the ‘despairing refusal to be oneself’. Metaphysically and theologically, the notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being; that behind or beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not at one with himself, or, as the medieval writers would have said, face to face with the divine good within him; he is a prey to sadness (and that sadness is the tristitia saeculi of Holy Scripture).” (p. 24) 

And what is behind this all-pervasive desire to truncate humans into simple workers? Pieper sees an insidious intent to enslave humanity to the power of the state by depriving them of the very means to be free.

“This inner constraint, the inner chains which fetter us to ‘work’, prompts a further question: ‘proletarianism’ thus understood, is perhaps a symptomatic state of mind common to all levels of society and by no means confined to the ‘proletariat’, to the ‘worker’, a general symptom that is merely found isolated in unusually acute form in the proletariat; so that it might be asked whether we are not all of us proletarians and all of us, consequently, ripe and ready to fall into the hands of some collective labour State and be at its disposal as functionaries—even though explicitly of the contrary political opinion.” (p. 39) 

Therefore, leisure is no luxury or superfluous pursuit. It is the very essence of a fully-formed human.
It is, in fact, a gift from God.

“All this is true too of leisure: its possibility, its ultimate justification derive from its roots in divine worship. That is not a conceptual abstraction, but the simple truth as may be seen from the history of religion. What does a ‘day of rest’ mean in the Bible, and for that matter in Greece and Rome? To rest from work means that time is reserved for divine worship: certain days and times are set aside and transferred to ‘the exclusive property of the Gods’. (p. 45) ... cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.” (p. 48)