Teachers are contemplating how a biblical understanding of leisure (and the liberal arts) should impact our school life and our guidance of students in their studies. As we continue this, here is a collection of short passages from a classic essay on the topic:

"But the Gods, taking pity on mankind, born to work, laid down the succession of recurring Feasts to restore them from their fatigue, and gave them the Muses, and Apollo their leader, and Dionysus, as companions in their Feasts, so that nourishing themselves in festive companionship with the Gods, they should again stand upright and erect." ~Plato

"Have leisure and know that I am God." ~Psalm lxv, 11.

Let me begin with an objection…. Now of all times, in the post-war years is not the time to talk about leisure. We are, after all, busy building our house. Our hands are full and there is work for all. And surely, until our task is done and our house is rebuilt, the only thing that matters is to stain every nerve. …Assuming all too rashly, for the moment, that our new house is going to be built in the Western tradition—a thing so arguable that it might almost be said to be the decision which is hanging in the balance—it is essential to begin by reckoning with the fact that one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure. …And even the history of the word attests the fact: for leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school.” The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “leisure.” “School” does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure. (20)

It is a quotation from Aristotle; and the fact that expresses the view of a cool-headed workaday realist (as he is supposed to have been) gives it all the more weight. Literally, the Greek says “we are unleisurely in order to have leisure.” “To be unleisurely”—that is the word the Greeks used not only for the daily toil and moil of life, but for ordinary everyday work. Greek only has the negative, a-scolia, just as Latin has neg-otium. (21)

The Christian and Western conception of the contemplative life is closely linked to the Aristotelian notion of leisure. It is also to be observed that this is the source of the distinction between the artes liberals and the artes serviles, the liberal arts and servile work. (21)

The value we set on work and on leisure is very far from being the same as that of the Greek and Roman world, or of the Middle Ages, for that matter—so very different that the men of the past would have been incapable of understanding the modern conception of work, just as we are unable to understand their notion of leisure simply and directly, without an effort of thought. (22)

A new and changing conception of the nature of man, a new and changing conception of the very meaning of human existence—that is what comes to light in the claims expressed in the modern notion of “work” and “worker.” These great subterranean changes in our scale of values, and in the meaning of value, are never easy to detect and lay bare, and they can certainly not be seen at a glance. …It becomes necessary to dig down to the roots of the problem and so base our conclusions on a philosophical and theological conception of man. (22-23)

The Middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The faculty of mind, man’s knowledge, is both of these things in one…. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives that which it receives. (26-27)

For man, of his very nature, reaches out beyond the sphere of the “human,” touching on the order of pure spirits. …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. (27)

Antisthenes is not only the author of the phrase just quoted about hard work; he is also responsible for making Hercules the human ideal, because he performed superhuman labours: an ideal that has retained (or has it reacquired it?) a certain force from the days of Erasmus and Kant—who labeled philosophy with the heroic term “herculean”—down to those of Carlyle, the prophet of the religion of work: You must work like Hercules. …Antisthenes the Cynic was the self-sufficient moralist, an autarchist, with no sense whatsoever of divine worship, even cracklying Voltairian jokes about it; he was insensible to the Muses and only liked poetry when it served to express moral truths; and as for Eros, it evoked no reply in his heart: “Best of all,” he remarked, “I would like to exterminate Aphrodite.” (30)

We find St. Thomas propounding a contrary opinion: “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than the difficult.” …What Aquinas says is that virtue makes us perfect by enabling us to follow our natural bent in the right way. In fact, he says, the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love. (31)

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.” (31)

On one occasion St. Thomas speaks of contemplation and play in the same breath: “because of the leisure that goes with contemplation” the divine wisdom itself, Holy Scripture says, is “always at play, playing through the whole world” (Proverbs viii, 30 f.). (32)

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; …he refuses to have anything as a gift. We have only to think for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life depends upon the existence of “Grace”; let us recall that the Holy Spirit of God is Himself called a “gift” in a special sense; that the great teachers of Christianity say that the premise of God’s justice is his love; that everything gained and everything claimed follows upon something given, and comes after something gratuitous and unearned; that in the beginning there is always a gift—we have only to think of all this for a moment in order to see what a chasm separates the tradition of the Christian West and that other view. (32-33)

Put in this form the question will seem to many people an anachronism, and the very terms “liberal arts” and “servile arts” sound antiquated and meaningless. But translated into the terminology of the present day the question means precisely this: Is there a sphere of human activity, one might even say human existence, that does not need to be justified by inclusion in a five-year plan and its technical organization? Is there such a thing, or not? The inner meaning of the concepts “intellectual work” and “intellectual worker” points to the answer “No.” Man, from this point of view, is essentially a functionary, an official, even in the highest reaches of his activity. (34-35)

Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of “worker” in each and every one of the three aspects under which it was analyzed: work as activity, as toil, as a social function. (40)

Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. …For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation. (41)

There is also a certain serenity in leisure. …There is something about it which Konrad Weiss, the poet, called “confidence in the fragmentariness of life and history.” (41)

Sleeplessness and the incapacity for leisure are really related to one another in a special sense, and a man at leisure is not unlike a man asleep. …Or as the Book of Job says, “God giveth songs in the night” (Job xxxv, 10). Moreover, it has always been a pious belief that Go sends good gifts and blessings in sleep. …It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visisted by an awareness of what holds the world together …only for a moment perhaps, and the lightning vision of his intuition has to be recaptured and rediscovered in hard work. (41-42)

In his fragment "Leisure," Hölderlin writes:

I stand in the peaceful mowing
Like a loving elm tree, while sweetly life plays
And twines around me like vines and clusters of grapes. (42)

Now the highest form of affirmation is the festival; among all its characteristics, Karl Kerenyi tells us, is “the union of tranquility, contemplation, and intensity of life.” …The feast is the origin of leisure, and the inward and ever-present meaning of leisure. And because leisure is thus by its nature a celebration, it is more than effortless; it is the direct opposite of effort. (43)

A break in one’s work, whether of an hour, a day or a week, is still part of the world of work. …The pause is made for the sake of work and in order to work, and a man is not only refreshed from work but for work. Leisure is an altogether different matter; it is no longer on the same plane; it runs at right angles to work—just as it could be said that intuition Is not the prolongation or continuation, as it were, of the work of ratio, but cuts right across it, vertically. Ratio, in point of fact, used to be compare to time, whereas intellectus was compared to eternity, to the eternal now. (43)

The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without a breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man—and that means that he should not be wholly absorbed in the clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function; the point is also that he should retain the faculty of grasping the world as a whole and realizing his full potentialities as an entity meant to reach Wholeness. (44)

In leisure—not of course exclusively in leisure, but always in leisure—the truly human values are saved and preserved because leisure is the means whereby the sphere of the “specifically human” can, over and again, be left behind—not as a result of any violent effort to reach out, but as in an ecstasy (…a state of extreme tension is more easily induced than a state of relaxation and ease although the later is effortless); the full enjoyment of leisure is hedged in by paradoxes of this kind, and it is itself a state at once very human and superhuman. Aristotle says of leisure, “A man will live thus, not to the extent that he is a man, but to the extent that a divine principle dwells within him.” (44-45)

Is it going to be possible to save men from becoming officials and functionaries and “workers” to the exclusion of all else? Can that possibly be done, and if so in what circumstances? There is no doubt of one thing: the world of the “worker” is taking shape with dynamic force—with such velocity that rightly or wrongly, one is tempted to speak of daemonic force in history. (46)

The “total work” State needs the spiritually impoverished, one-track mind of the “functionary”; and he, in turn, is naturally inclined to find complete satisfaction in his “service” and thereby achieves the illusion of a life fulfilled, which he acknowledges and willingly accepts. (50)

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. In that case, spiritual immunization against the seductive appeal and the power of totalitarian forms must, surely, be sought and hoped for at a much deeper level of thought than on the level of purely political considerations? (50)

“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.  (51)

A social doctrine steeped in the tradition of Christian Europe would not only hold firmly to the distinction between an honorarium and a wage, it would not only hesitate to regard every reward as a wage; it would go further and would even maintain that there is no such thing as a recompense for a thing done which did not retain in some degree the character (whether much or little) of an honorarium, for even “servile” work cannot be entirely equated with the material recompense because it is a “human” action, so that it always retains something incommensurable with the recompense—just like the liberal arts. …It is alleged that only useful, “paying” work makes sense; on the contrary there is an attempt to extend the character of “liberal art” deep down into every human action, even the humblest servile work. The former aims at making all men into proletarians, the latter at “deproletarianizing” the masses. (53)

There is one Institution in the world which forbids useful activity, and servile work, on particular days, and in this way prepares, as it were, a sphere for a nonproletarian existence. (54)

P.J. Proudhon … was not so far wrong in beginning his work with a pamphlet on the celebration of Sunday, the social significance of which he expresses in the following words: “On one day in the week servants regained the dignity of human beings, and stood again on a level with their masters.” (54)

The provision of an external opportunity for leisure is not enough; it can only be fruitful if the man himself is capable of leisure and can, as we say, “occupy his leisure,” or (as the Greeks still more clearly say) skolen agein, “work his leisure” (this usage brings out very clearly the by no means “leisurely” character of leisure). (54-55)

“That is the principle point: with what kind of activity is man to occupy his leisure”—who would suspect that that was a sentence taken from a book more than two thousand years old, none other than the Politics of Aristotle? (55)

The soul of leisure, it can be said, lies in “celebration.” Celebration is the point at which the three elements of leisure come to a focus: relaxation, effortlessness, and superiority of “active leisure” to all functions. But if celebration is the 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. (56)

There is no such thing as a feast “without the gods”—whether it be a carnival or a marriage. That is not a demand, or a requirement; it does not mean that that is how things ought to be. Rather, it is meant as a simple statement of fact: however dim the recollection of the association may have become in men’s minds, a feast “without gods,” and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown. (56-57)

Certainly we must ask whether the great epoch of artificial festivals is not still to come[,] …illusory, semi-opaque semblance of “holidays” that would be devoid of the true and ultimate affirmation of the world that is the essence of the festive. Such holidays, moreover, are in fact based on suppression of such affirmation; they derive their dangerous seductiveness precisely from that. (57)

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.” Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. (57-58)

There can of course be games, circenses, circuses—but who would think of describing that kind of mass entertainment as festal? (58)

Divine worship, of its very nature, creates a sphere of real wealth and superfluity, even in the midst of the direst material want. …Thus, the act of worship creates a store of real wealth which 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 feast time. And only in this feast time can leisure unfold and come to fruition. (59)

One can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire’s Journal Intime that is fearful in the precision of its cynicism: “One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.” (59)

The celebration of divine worship, then, is the deepest of the springs by which leisure is fed and continues to be vital—though it must be remembered that leisure embraces everything which, without being merely useful, is an essential part of a full human existence. (60)

Plato’s Academy was a genuine religious association in which, for example, one of the members was explicitly appointed to prepare the sacrifice. Perhaps the reason why “purely academic” has sunk to mean something sterile, pointless and unreal is because the schola has lost its roots in religion and in divine worship. (61)

Well, the considerations put forward in this essay were not designed to give advice and draw up a line of action: they were meant to make men think. Their aim has been to throw a little light on a problem which seems to me very important and very urgent, and is all too easily lost sight among the immediate task in hand. (61-62)

Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end, even though that end be “the salvation of Western civilization.” (62)

In so far as the Christian cultus is a sacrifice held in the midst of the creation which is affirmed by this sacrifice of the God-man—every day is a feast day; and in fact the liturgy knows only feast days, even working days being feria [see note below]. (63)

[Note (from Wikipedia): A feria (Latin for "free day") was a day on which the people, especially the slaves, were not obliged to work, and on which there were no court sessions. …In the Roman Rite liturgy, the term feria is used to denote days of the week other than Sunday and Saturday. Various reasons are given for this terminology. The sixth lesson for December 31 in the pre-1962 Roman Breviary says that Pope Sylvester I ordered the continuance of the already existing custom "that the clergy, daily abstaining from earthly cares, would be free to serve God alone." Others believe that the Church simply Christianized a Jewish practice. The Jews frequently counted the days from their Sabbath, and so we find in the Gospels such expressions as una Sabbati and prima Sabbati, the first from the Sabbath.]

The full power of worship will only be felt if its sacramental character is realized in undiminished form, i.e., if the sign is fully visible. In leisure, as was said, man oversteps the frontiers of the everyday workaday world, not in external effort and strain, but as though lifted above it in ecstasy. That is the sense of the visibility of the sacrament: that man is “carried away” by it, thrown into “ecstasy.” Let no one imagine for a moment that that is a private and romantic interpretation. The Church has pointed to the meaning of the incarnation of the Logos in the selfsame words: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisiblium amorem rapiamur, that we may be rapt into love of the invisible reality through the visibility of that first and ultimate sacrament: the Incarnation.

We therefore hope that this true sense of sacramental visibility may become so manifest in the celebration of the Christian cultus itself that in the performance of it man, “who is born to work,” may truly be “transported” out of the weariness of daily labour into an unending holiday, carried away out of the straitness of the workaday world into the heart of the universe. (63-64)