I’m re-reading Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. As Pieper plausibly, and I think correctly, discusses matters, the loss of leisure and the consequent loss of culture is bound up, at least in this age of men, with the process of proletarianization, that is, the limitation of men to their laboring aspects. Pieper writes:
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the essence of the artes serviles was held to consist in their being directed, as St. Thomas [Aquinas] says, `to the satisfaction of a need through activity’. `Proletarianism’ would then mean the limitation of existence and activity to the sphere of the artes serviles — whether this limitation were occasioned by lack of property, State compulsion, or spiritual impoverishment. By the same token, `deproletarianizing’ would mean: enlarging the scope of life beyond the confines of merely useful servile work, and widening the sphere of servile work to the advantage of the liberal arts; and this process, once again, can only be carried out by combining three things: by giving the wage-earner the opportunity to save and acquire property, by limiting the power of the state, and by overcoming the inner impoverishment of the individual. [Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Liberty Fund, reprint of edition published by Random House, Inc., 1952, page 40]
Later in the book, in the second essay, he argues that leisure is related to the spirit which he considers, plausibly and without superstition or enthusiastic mysticism, to be a relationship to the entirety of Creation, certainly within the context of what you can be expected to know of the various realms of created being. After all, he’s an admirer of Aristotle and Aquinas, neither of who could have imagined how vast and rich and complex created now seems to be, but those thinkers tried to understand all that they thought to exist.
To have leisure, or to take leisure by making sacrifices in your practical life, is to have a sense of wholeness, of Creation and, by reflection, of your own self. It is to have a self in the fullest sense. If man is capable of understanding all of Creation and even a little about God in His transcendence, that man reaches his greatest fulfillment in gaining some such understanding, however imperfect and incomplete it will be. Moreover, by gaining that understanding, man makes a foundation for a civilization, an immature and incomplete Body of Christ — most likely very immature and incomplete for sure but we must grow slowly and carefully toward a higher state of communal being as well as toward a higher state of individual being.
Leisure can be active in its own way, at least in some phases of a healthy and more complete human life. It’s even possible that leisure might seem much like servile labor at times. It’s been ten years since I’ve lived where I could have a garden, but in those days — partly because I grew vegetables and flowers for pleasure and not out of need — gardening was leisure and yard-work was servile labor in that older language that Pieper uses to good purposes. I mowed the lawn so it would be neat and relatively free of annoying bugs; the goal was to have finished mowing and that goal was often on my mind as I pushed the mower around. When I gardened, I would lose myself in the activity — not always to be sure, but often. I gardened because I enjoyed the activity and it was a break from my reading and writing, giving me a chance to let ideas and plots and character developments stew around quietly in the back of my mind. But, even that need to relax from the strains of writing was not the real point. I enjoyed building soil and seeing plants grow. I enjoyed the feeling when I stuck my arm up to my elbow in soil which had been supplemented by home-baked compost and which had not known human shoes for a few years. I achieved a state of oneness with certain aspects of Creation by working with the things and forces of nature.
I think that even some farmers who live off their produce are in a state of leisure part of the time when they go about their tasks. In a similar way, someone like me is often in a state of leisure when I’m doing difficult reading to prepare for advancing in my thoughts or just because I have a feeling that it might be good, perhaps useful by accident, to know something about an era in human history or about a field of physics. Even when I’m struggling through a boring stretch of a history of the Middle Ages or through some calculations hard on my middle-aged brain, I’m doing what I wish to do, what I feel called to do, and I’m often in a state of contemplation about the greater scale aspects of my work.
Perhaps leisure is the state in which our active responses to Creation and Creator begin to bear fruit, the state when we become something like images of our Creator because we’ve encapsulated the thoughts He manifested in created being, however incomplete and defective that encapsulation might be.