On Leisure
Essay on an essay
Hello, fellow peregrinos! I’m Walther, and this is Peregrino, a newsletter about the journey. Today, I bring you an essay based on my notes from Josef Peiper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture.” I read this book during my weekly holy hour for the last few months. It was a great read. It is even more relevant today than when it was written in 1948, in post-war Germany. Apropo of Labor Day (in the US), here’s some food for thought.
Total Work
Josef Pieper introduces the concept of the “world of total work” or the “religion of total work” that only considers "valuable" things that require effort and putting in the work. It mistrusts everything that is effortless, only able to enjoy, with a good conscience, what is acquired with toil and trouble. It refuses to have anything as a gift.
The religion of total work values useful activity and intellectual work that produces something. If it doesn't produce, it is useless. It thinks less of them, considering them "a waste of time."
Can activities that don't produce anything be bad or harmful to society? There are effortless things that can come to us. Are those less valuable? We didn't work for them.
It's hard to have rest and recreation. We have been putting our worth in terms of output, what I have produced. Using that same idea, kids and older people don't produce. Still, they aren't less valuable than those able-bodied to work.
What do we do with all of this?
Leisure
The word for leisure in Greek is skole, where we get scola in Latin and school in English, but we wouldn’t think of school and leisure being the same. How are we to understand leisure, then?
Aquinas once said we are to apprehend the spiritual like the eye apprehends light and ear sound. This is a novel idea for me, to think that our soul has the capacity to be receptive. But it makes sense for our souls to be receptive to the spiritual/supernatural.
Pieper says that leisure and contemplation have a lot in common. Looking and contemplating are synonyms. They don't entail work. Observing, on the other hand, does entail work. So, we get a clue from that comparison.
Then we are told that acedia is the despairing refusal to be oneself, not waiting to be as God wants us to be, and leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself. Leisure is a mental and spiritual attitude of nonactivity, inward calm, and silence, of not being busy but letting things happen.
Silence is the soul's power to answer. I found great consolation in Peiper saying that a man at leisure is not unlike a man asleep since one can only fall asleep by "letting oneself go," I’m constantly tired and falling asleep, or should I say I’m always at leisure?
God's great, imperishable intuitions visit a man in his leisure moments. Therefore, we should strive for silent and receptive moments.
Festival
The premise for leisure is that man consents to his true nature and abides in concord with the meaning of the universe.
Pieper quotes Karl Kerényi, saying, "[The festival] is the union of tranquility, contemplation, and intensity of life." The festival is the origin of leisure and the inward and ever-present meaning of leisure. Leisure is, by nature, a celebration, the direct opposite of effort.
So far, we know that leisure is effortless, and now we get another clue: a celebration. Leisure is not to be a restorative pick-me-up; it’s not rest, as I thought of it until reading this book.
If leisure is not rest, then leisure should involve activity. Activity which is not work. Let’s go back to the concept of the festival or celebration; this contains the three elements that Piper gives leisure: relaxation, effortlessness, and superiority of "active leisure" to all functions.
But if a celebration is the origin or core of leisure, then leisure can only be made possible and justifiable on the same basis as the celebration of a festival. That basis is divine worship. This is where many people start struggling with Piper’s idea of leisure.
He says that divine worship (contrary to the world of "total work") of its very nature creates a sphere of real wealth and superfluity, even in the midst of the direst material want because sacrifice is the living heart of worship. And what does sacrifice mean? It means a voluntary offering freely given. It definitely does not involve utility; it is, in fact, absolutely antithetical to utility. Thus, the act of worship creates a store of real wealth that cannot be consumed by the workaday world. It sets up an area where calculation is thrown to the winds and, goods are deliberately squandered, where usefulness is forgotten, and generosity reigns. Such wastefulness is, we repeat, true wealth, the wealth of the festival time. And only in this festival time can leisure unfold and come to fruition.
I immediately connected this to the liturgical calendar. Holy Mother Church, in its wisdom, has weaved festivals in its fabric. Every Sunday, we get to participate in the holy sacrifice of the Eucharist. On top of that, we get Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary time sprinkled here and there with memorials, feasts, and solemnities.
But Peiper said leisure is the basis of culture; how is this so? According to him, everything that lies beyond the utilitarian world is leisure. Culture lives on religion through divine worship. And when culture itself is endangered, and leisure is called into question, there is only one thing to be done: to go back to the first and original source.
He continues by saying that celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake. That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure. Christian Cultus transports man into an unending holiday, into the heart of the universe.
I feel bad for transcribing those last few paragraphs, but trying to use my thoughts when I could report what he says seemed a better service to you. I’m still reading “The Philosophical Act,” another one of Pieper’s essays that is included in the book “Leisure: The Basis of Culture,” which is very interesting as well. I may write an essay on it as well once I finish it.
In the meantime, I hope you got something out of this summary essay, and you may embrace leisure in your daily life.
Before you go
I have some questions
What do you think of Pieper’s definition of leisure?
Is there something you disagree with?
Would you say you live leisurely?
Do you think leisure would make your life better?
Is this better than work-life balance?
There is so much here, Walther. It's great stuff. Active leisure, to festival time. So much more than checking off a holiday but abandoning oneself to festival, to generosity. Teaching moment, thank you!