The Courage to Rest: Thomas Aquinas on the Soul of Leisure

Whenever the topic of leisure is raised in conversation, whether in the classroom or among friends, inevitably someone will ask the question: "Have you read Pieper's essay?" The question is inevitable because, in conversations about leisure, it is exactly the right question to ask. For seventy years now, Josef Pieper's "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" has exemplified what discussion of leisure as a perfective human activity should be.² In order to clarify their thinking on the subject, professors, students, and the general reader still rely on Pieper's succinct and compelling description of the nature of leisure, as well as his correction of any number of erroneous notions of human rest that we might entertain. With Thomas Aquinas as his guide, Pieper resists the modern tendency to regard leisure simply as the cessation of work or, worse, to equate leisure with sloth. Instead, Pieper emphasizes leisure's nature as an activity rather than a lack of one, and as a joyful celebration of reality rather than a sorrowful retreat from it.

What I would like to do this evening, in celebration of the essay's seventieth anniversary, is to review Pieper's description of leisure, but with a view to expanding it. With Thomas Aquinas as our guide, I want to build on Pieper's description of leisure by exploring in greater detail than he does the soul of leisure, or better, the soul capable of leisure. We will conclude that, in addition to being a soul receptive of reality, as Pieper notes the leisurely soul is, the soul of leisure courageously dreams big dreams, and it does so humbly.

I

When he wrote "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" in 1947, Pieper had a particular end in view. He recalled the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of leisure in order to combat the modern, and what Pieper calls the totalitarian, view of work. This view exaggerates the importance of work in human life, making work, or labor, the whole for which and in which all human activity takes place. Max Weber describes the modern notion of work like this: "One does not work to live; one lives to work."³ Pieper opposes this notion of work, noting that it corrupts not only our understanding of human industry but also our understanding of human epistemology and human morality. For example, in the realm of epistemology, Pieper observes how the totalitarian notion of work corrupts Emmanuel Kant's theory of human knowing. For Kant, Pieper explains, reason is all work. It indulges in no play. All reasoning is striving. Nothing known, according to Kant, is received or gained by resting.⁴

Similarly, the totalitarian notion of work corrupts our understanding of morality. It turns all moral activity into pure striving. "It is normal and essential," Pieper writes when articulating the totalitarian view of morality, "that the effort of will required in forcing oneself to perform some action should become the yardstick of the moral good: the more difficult a thing, the higher it is in the order of goodness."⁵ In the realm of doing, as in the realm of knowing, all is work according to the totalitarian view. The moral man indulges in no play.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, the old adage says. The same holds true for the totalitarian view of work. All work and no play makes knowing and loving dull activities.

Pieper warns his reader that, when the totalitarian view of work exaggerates the importance of labor—and, by extension, reduces thinking and loving to pure striving—then something like leisure begins to appear as something vicious, if not completely monstrous. From the totalitarian point of view, Pieper writes, "leisure appears as something wholly fortuitous and strange, without rhyme or reason, and, morally speaking, unseemly: [leisure becomes] another word for laziness, idleness, and sloth."⁶

In his essay, Pieper employs the classical and medieval notion of leisure to rehabilitate our understanding of all three of these areas of human activity—labor, knowing, and loving.

Against the modern notion...