Leisure: The Basis of Culture, chapter 2, part 1

[I love this chapter, but it's so full that I'm going to have to go over it a little at a time. This is a summary of the first half of the chapter. Be sure to read all the other posts on the book.]

Near the end of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Captain Wentworth realizes how foolish he has been and how little deserving he is of Anne Elliot’s love. It is a painful realization:

“I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses,” he added with a smile, “I must endeavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”

This is the heart of Pieper’s second chapter. “Man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.”

According to Pieper, the philosophers of Greece and the Middle Ages saw knowledge as two elements that work together: ratio, and intellectus. Ratio, the Reason, is active. It searches and examines, defines and draws conclusions. Reason is hard work. But intellectus is passive. It is contemplative and meditative. “Intuition” seems to be the English word that is closest to its meaning. There is a strong element of grace in human knowledge, since the intellectus is, according Aquinas, “not really human but superhuman.”

But modern philosophy has come down to us through Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who held that “knowing and philosophizing… must be regarded and understood as work,” since for Kant, knowledge “is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating – all of which are forms of active intellectual effort.” In this view, knowledge is Herculean labor, therefore:

[I]f to know is to work, then knowledge is the fruit of our own unaided effort and activity; then knowledge includes nothing which is not due to the effort of man, and there is nothing gratuitous about it, nothing ‘in-spired’, nothing ‘given’ about it.

Kant’s idea is that the effort involved in philosophizing was its justification, and intellectual contemplation, intellectus, is worthless because it is effortless. Pieper says this leads to the idea that the effort of acquiring knowledge is a reasonable assurance of the truth of that knowledge.

And here, in turn, we are not so very far from the ethical notion that everything man does naturally and without effort is a falsification of true morality – for what we do by nature is done without effort.

Even moral good is judged by the standard of effort: “the more difficult a thing, the higher it is in the order of goodness.” But, to quote Aquinas, “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult,” or, as Pieper says, “The highest moral good is characterized by effortlessness – because it springs from love.”

This is not to deny the importance of hard work in acquiring knowledge or in pursuing virtue.

The highest forms of knowledge… may well be preceded by a great effort of thought…; but in any case, the effort is the cause; it is not the condition. It is equally true that the effects so effortlessly produced by love presuppose no doubt an heroic moral struggle of the will. But the decisive thing is that virtue means the realization of the good; it may imply a previous moral effort, but it cannot be equated with moral effort.

Think of our faith, how rooted it is in Grace. “In the beginning,” says Pieper, “there is always a gift.”

Work and Sabbath rest

A rabbit trail off of the Leisure discussion.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
Genesis 2:1-3


Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Exodus 20:8-11

I've spent so much time thinking about issues raised the first chapter that I've only read the first page or so of the second chapter. I need to plow ahead, but in order to do that I've got to get this settled first. I'm sure Pieper is going to define what he means by "servile work" in his book, so I want to clarify where I am right now before proceeding.

Mike and I didn't grow up in a Sabbath-keeping tradition so when we decided we needed to do something to make Sunday a more special day -- to remember it and keep it holy -- one of the things we did was excuse the family from certain chores on Sunday: making beds and doing laundry, for instance. (There were "positive" things too, but in this post I'm only focussing on "negative" things we did since I'm trying to get at the nature of work.)

Then, three and a half years ago we got dairy goats. Dairy animals have to be milked, fed, and watered twice a day every day, and the barn has to be cleaned every day in cold weather, which is the only time we keep them indoors.

Also, we're trying to grow more of our food, but that's a different story -- the garden doesn't have to be plowed, planted, weeded and watered, nor the crops harvested every day, but only at certain appropriate times. The first thing you come to realize when gardening is that you don't have to set out plants or build new beds on Sunday -- those are things that properly belong to the "six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work" part of the commandment.

So what does it mean to work six days and rest one when there's so much work that has to be done every single day?

The younger children and I have spent the better part of the past year memorizing the creation week from Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, and it's been such a blessing. One thing it did was make very clear the kind of work God was doing on those six days -- the work of creation. He has entered his eternal Sabbath, as Hebrews 4 says, so he is no longer doing the work of creation, but obviously he is working every day to sustain that creation.

That, then, is the model that we use in our family. We've had to redefine work into two categories: work proper, and chores. Chores are the things that have to be done every day in order to sustain life. Work is productive in nature, and is the kind of thing that can be rested from on Sunday in order to enjoy the blessings of that rest.

Work and honor

(Reposted from September 1, 2007)

Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasue and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.

(from the essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” by Wendell Berry, in The Art of the Commonplace)

Leisure: The Basis of Culture, chapter 1

Randoms thoughts on the first chapter of Josef Pieper's book, which I'm reading along with Cindy's Book Club this fall.

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Pieper says that in our "world of planned diligence and 'total labour'" we have trouble understanding the concept of leisure because we overvalue the sphere of work. Contra the modern idea that one lives to work, Aristotle says that "We work in order to have leisure." Literally it is, "We are unleisurely in order to have leisure," as Pieper points out that "Greek only has the negative, a-scolia."

I realize the New Testament Greek isn't quite the same as the classical, but still I thought it would be instructive to look up the words that get translated as work, toil, and labour in the Bible. Here's what I found from Strong's online concordance:

Strong's G2038 - ergazomai
1) to work, labour, do work
2) to trade, to make gains by trading, "do business"
3) to do, work out
    a) exercise, perform, commit
    b) to cause to exist, produce
4) to work for, earn by working, to acquire

Strong's G2041 - ergon
1) business, employment, that which any one is occupied
    a) that which one undertakes to do, enterprise, undertaking
2) any product whatever, any thing accomplished by hand, art, industry, or mind
3) an act, deed, thing done: the idea of working is emphasised in opp. to that which is less than work

Strong's G2872 - kopiaō
1) to grow weary, tired, exhausted (with toil or burdens or grief)
2) to labour with wearisome effort, to toil
    a) of bodily labour


That was a worthwhile study because I'm the kind of person who's inclined to quote from what I've been reading, and it would have been embarrassing to quote this passage to a Bible scholar who is familiar with the three words above. I suppose the disparity is because Koine is different from the classical Greek.

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A passage that gave pleasure to my sorta-Sabbatarian eyes: "We still speak of 'servile work' as unsuitable on Sundays and holidays."

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On the theme of Sabbath-keeping: It is often pointed out to us that before the Resurrection, the sabbath came at the end of the work week, showing that we work in order to rest, but now it's at the beginning, signifying the reverse -- we rest and worship in order to work.

At the end of the chapter, Pieper says that we must "base our conclusions on a philosophical and theological conception of man," so it will be interesting to see where he goes with this.

One of my favorite passages of Scripture is Ephesians 2:8-10:

8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

The word works in "good works" is ergazomai, and I like to remind myself that not only the traditional "good works" of evangelism, charity, et al, but all my labour at home is "good work" for which Christ saved me.

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But here's something beautiful I didn't know before -- the word "workmanship" is the word poiēma. We are his poem. :-)

That word is used only one other time, the phrase "the things that are made" in Romans 1:20, "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse."

Limbo

It feels like nothing's happening. Our Missouri house is finished but we're waiting on paperwork so the construction loan can be converted. And waiting... The renovation cost us a lot more than we'd estimated, so we're rethinking our original plan, which was for me and the four younger children to move out there next month. We think we ought to get the extra debt we went into paid down first before starting to move...

On the other hand, a lot is happening. My oldest son has been taking EMT classes this summer, and right now he's running some errands related to putting in his application for a volunteer position at the local fire and rescue station. This afternoon will be his first day on the job as a bagger (working for tips) at the commissary.

Tomorrow, the kids are going down to the county fair -- their group of volunteers at George Washington's birthplace is putting on a play in the evening. Mike won't be able to go since he has to stay home and milk the goats, but a friend and I are going. I haven't been to a county fair in ages and I'm looking forward to it.

We had a yard sale last weekend, advertised in the local paper and everything, but we had a lousy turnout. We've always done really well at yard sales, but this (along with an unadvertised attempt two weeks earlier) is the first time we've had one since moving here four years ago. I don't think it'll be worth it to try again. We were trying to get rid of stuff preparatory to moving, plus make a little money. Usually we just drop stuff off at the local charity thrift store. We have a few items that the thrift store won't take, like a bed, so I guess we'll try Craigslist or something like that. I'd hate to have to take it to the dump.

And of course, there's painting and repairs that we need to do to get the house ready to go on the market in the spring.

So I have plenty of regular, daily work to be doing, but I don't like not knowing for sure what our longer-range goals are. I have a hard time staying on task when I don't have a clear goal and timeline before me. So far, all of our deadlines have been receding, which makes it feel like we're not accomplishing our goals, but when I compare where we are today with where we were this time last, we really have made progress... just a whole lot slower than we originally thought.

All this slowness and waiting gives us plenty of time to second-guess ourselves, too. We keep wondering if we're really making the right decisions. We know that in the end God works all things together for good, but it sure would be comfortable if we had some way of knowing that what we're doing now, today, is Good in itself -- is pleasing to the Lord -- and not just stupid mistakes that he'll eventually make good in spite of us.

Eldorado

by Edgar Allan Poe

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old —
This knight so bold —
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow —
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be —
This land of Eldorado?”

“Over the mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied —
“If you seek for Eldorado!”

Good news!

I just discovered (tipped off by a commenter at Cindy's blog) that all my blog posts from the WordPress blog are still available. I subscribed to them myself via Google Reader so I could figure out how the thing worked before I started subscribing to other people's blogs.

Of course, the comments are lost, and I'm sorry for that -- the conversation is the fun part of blogging -- but I'll be reposting the worthwhile ones here, under their original dates, as time allows.

Not every "environmentalist" is a wacko

It's been a while since I mentioned this, but when we moved out here four years ago our area hadn't had enough rain in a couple of years. The people we bought our house from told us to be careful about watering gardens because we have a shallow well (it's about 40' deep and also known as a surface well, as opposed to a deep well -- the kind that's hundreds of feet deep and goes into the underground water in the bedrock).

When a contractor started putting up two houses close to ours a few months later, a visiting neighbor and longtime resident of this area said that he was worried about how many people were moving out to our county and drilling deep wells. He said that the water table was dropping and he was concerned about there simply not being enough. I thought it was a bit of an overreaction.

Then, a year later, our well went dry.

The next day, the level had come back up enough to reach the pump, but we instituted emergency rationing of water.

We also bought a truck load of water from a company in a nearby town, which resold city water they bought from various municipalities in our area. I've forgotten how much it was now -- something like 300 gallons for several cents a gallon. It filled our well, and it's never gone dry again for which I'm very thankful because the drought has gotten so bad that the cities here quit selling water a month or two after we bought.

It's been raining a lot this year -- almost back to normal as the natives tell us, but I've only let up a little on the water-rationing.

We never watered our grass, but since the well went dry we no longer water our gardens from the hose. Instead we use old water from the animals' drinking buckets and grey water from the house. We don't let the water run at the sink while brushing teeth or washing hands. We scrape plates into the chickens' scrap bucket instead of rinsing the dishes. We take quick showers (or "military" showers where you get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water and rinse). And guess what -- we don't flush the toilets after every use.

I've gotten so much in the habit of not wasting water that it freaks me out when I see people running the kitchen faucet full-blast while they slowly rinse dishes... one at a time... and place them... slowly... one by one... into... the... dishwasher...

And it saddens me to read about people wasting water on purpose just to spite the enviro-wackos, as the first commenter under in this post says he did.

People, clean water is a precious thing and not to be taken for granted.

Lamentations 3

22 It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed,
because his compassions fail not.

23 They are new every morning:
great is thy faithfulness.

24 The LORD is my portion, saith my soul;
therefore will I hope in him.

25 The LORD is good unto them that wait for him,
to the soul that seeketh him.

26 It is good that a man should both hope
and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.

27 It is good for a man
that he bear the yoke in his youth.

28 He sitteth alone and keepeth silence,
because he hath borne it upon him.

29 He putteth his mouth in the dust;
if so be there may be hope.

30 He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him:
he is filled full with reproach.

31 For the LORD will not cast off for ever:

32 But though he cause grief,
yet will he have compassion
according to the multitude of his mercies.

33 For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.

blog worries

I'm getting ready to update my blogger template -- I never have before because I prefer doing things in HTML and I'm a little worried that if I get the "new and improved" template it'll make things worse for me, but I can't figure out what else to do. Blogger's comments have never worked for me (there's some conflict with my code) and I'm trying to get Disqus comments instead, since I already have an account with them, but trying to figure out where to put the code is taking too much time -- I can't simply replace the old Sensus Plenior code for some reason. It makes the comment box and all the comments show up under each post on the main page.

Well, here goes nothin!