What is leisure, and what does it have to do with learning? You may already know that the Greeks used the same word (σχολή, or scholế) for both “school” and “leisure.” And on a basic level, this makes perfect sense. Leisure has everything to do with school, because only those with free time are able to go to school in the first place.
The term “leisure,” though, means much more than “free time.” It means more than taking off work or having a spa day. Defining leisure precisely and robustly is especially important in our world that idolizes work and utility. Perhaps no one has tackled this topic more poignantly than the twentieth century German philosopher Josef Pieper (1904-1997). His essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture defines and defends true leisure over against the utilitarian culture that still pervades our western world. In this newsletter article (and the next couple articles from me!), we’ll take a look at Pieper’s definition of leisure and how it applies to both school and the Christian life.
Pieper starts his essay by showing the importance of passivity. Knowledge, Pieper says, is more than active “intellectual work.” We come to know things not just by the labor of our minds, but also by a passive reception. It’s true that working with our reason is a faculty unique to human beings, and that it’s both necessary and good. But if we think of knowledge as nothing but intellectual work, we miss out on the further knowledge gained by receiving. Pieper compares this passivity to an observer simply soaking up the view of a landscape, and by doing so, actually getting a whole lot out of it. Leisure (as we’ll see soon) has much to do with reception.
As a second point, Pieper points out that people idolize difficult work when they measure the worth of something merely by the quantity of effort put into it. Since it took lots of work (the common thought runs), it must be true or valuable. Pieper explains the problem this way: “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.” This obsession with our own achievements seems to be inherent to our fallen nature. Yet as Pieper points out, our own labor and struggle is no litmus test for whether the result is good or true. That just isn’t logical. Besides, something good or true might come to us with little or no work at all. And we should certainly not despise things that are a gift to us.
Finally, after dispelling these pitfalls in modern thinking, Pieper defines leisure. To sum it up, leisure is an attitude of serene contemplation and reception of the world, and of happiness and peace with one’s place in it and his place before God. A man at leisure looks at himself and the world and says, “It is good!” Leisure is not lounging about in idleness. It is really the opposite. Idleness is the attitude man takes when he despises the place God gave him in the world. The idle man has decided to shirk his unique calling as man, to quit receiving from God and delighting in the world. The man at leisure, on the other hand, loves and embraces what he is called to be and receive. He rests from everyday work not for the sake of more work later, but to enjoy and receive the things he couldn’t contemplate or enjoy while in the office or on the assembly line.
It’s helpful to keep this definition of leisure in mind as we go about our lives as Christians. God has called us to work, but also to receive. It is not a waste of time, or an abuse of our unique human capacities, to stop working for awhile in order to contemplate, rejoice, and receive. It’s actually a way that we learn, and it’s a way of confessing the goodness of our Lord, His creation, and the place He’s given us in it.
The next article on leisure will discuss its relationship to the liberal arts!
In Christ,
Miss Hahn
