In Search of the "Wisdom Possessed by God": Review of Leisure the Basis of Culture
by Allen Tate
Feast of the Holy Martyrs Timothy, Agapius, and Thecla
Anno Domini 2020, August 19
Leisure the Basis of Culture
by Josef Pieper with Introduction by T. S. Eliot
Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, is unknown to the American layman, and the career of his small but profound book in this country will teach us something about our capacity to receive criticism from a point of view to which most of us are hostile. Our failure to reach a thorough understanding of the rapid totalitarian drift of Western culture, says Pieper, is the result of an earlier failure of thought which occurred when philosophy was completely divorced (at the time of Kant) from theology. This looks at first like a comparatively useless academic distinction, but its consequences in Pieper’s profound insight are impressive and even formidable.
The “emancipation” of philosophy left it vulnerable to the modern mystique of “work,” which has eliminated from philosophy the ancient pursuit of wisdom based upon a just notion of “leisure.” The result is that philosophy has become either the errand boy of the natural sciences or the playboy of linguistic shell-games whose name at present is logical positivism.
On this point T. S. Eliot in his introduction observes: “For as surrealism seemed to provide a method of producing works of art without imagination, so logical positivism seems to provide a method of philosophizing without insight and wisdom.” The force of this observation may well be lost on us, who as a people have not had a vigorous theology since the eighteenth century. Largely because of this lack we take for granted a long chain of inevitable “separations”—not only of theology from philosophy, but of church from state, religion from education, work from play, love from sex, the individual from the community.
The difference between work and leisure which we take for granted today follows the presupposition that leisure is merely compensatory—an empty, compulsive escape from dehumanized labor. This is precisely the theme of Josef Pieper’s book. His ultimate purpose is to restore the identity of leisure and the contemplative life, which has a tradition, even older than Christianity, in Plato and Aristotle. although contemplative leisure is “listening” and receptive, it is not passive and slothful. It is rather a quality that the social man, when his being is properly ordered toward a certain end, may achieve in his ordinary activity, which may be quite as strenuous as the compulsive escape.
From this point of view the end of man is not labor, for the end of labor must be the end of man himself. This end cannot be the “loving search for any
kind of wisdom” but rather the “wisdom which is possessed by God.” We must look sharply at the word “search.” It distinguishes philosophy, whose search is never done, from Christian theology, or the ordering of revelation, which is final, but which we never fully understand.
We never “understand” it because ratio, or pure reason, is only operative and empty, and without wisdom. And this kind of reason, the servile work of the mind, has suppressed the liberal and receptive leisure of intellectus, the spiritual activity of the free man. Thus, though philosophy and theology are distinct modes of the mind, philosophy has no end without theology; it doesn’t know where it is going.
Pieper then proceeds to a comprehensive indictment of a decaying civilization. The modern reduction of all human action, including philosophy, to servile labor is daily creating a proletarian society from top to bottom, from executive to machine tender. This society uses men for ends that defy definition beyond the latest “project” or “plan,” economic, social or political.
Pieper’s message for us is plain. The American democracy is not blissfully immune to the Western blight; we have in fact done our part in generating the totalitarian epidemic. The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common man—all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society. “Leisure the Basis of Culture” may help to show us that we had not known all this as well as we had supposed.
*Originally published in The New York Times on Sunday, February 24, 1952.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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