On leisure and culture: why human things exist and why they are "unimportant"

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by James V. Schall

The point is that we are to respond both to creation and to God not after the manner of need but of true delight. It is bound up with the very idea that God is complete in Himself, that He need not create anything, that if anything besides God does exist, it does not change God. We exist then not out of a need God had for anything, as if He lacked something, but out of His superabundance. And if God alone is "serious," it can only mean that He does not lack anything including our praise or worship. Yet, this is why we exist. We are the creatures who exist to acknowledge in the universe the glory of God in itself, for its own sake. The completion of the universe in some sense includes this chance that the free creature will recognize what is not himself, will recognize God and respond to Him simply because of what He is.

The difference between ourselves and Plato is largely due to the fact that, with revelation, we have been given the proper way to express an appropriate worship of God. This is what the Mass is all about. It is that worship for its own sake because of the Incarnate God who offers this Sacrifice in our name, in our presence. Moreover, the word "serious" when applied to God does not imply a lack of delight and joy. It is in fact to be surrounded by music and song. But also it implies an accurate knowledge of God. Our worship has and must have an intellectual component. This is why the Church insists that we recite the Creed each Sunday, the Creed which begins "Credo in unum Deum...." "I believe."

The two words "leisure" and "culture" have curious meanings and origins. There is a famous discussion in Aristotle about health and the activities of health. He asks, in effect, what is the difference between what a doctor does and what a healthy man does? The point can be made indirectly. When a man is not healthy, he sees the doctor to help him become healthy. The doctor does not decide what it is to be healthy. But beginning from not being healthy, he decides how to restore us to health. Once we are restored to health, we have no desire or need to see the doctor, ever again. So the activity of the doctor has a natural limit or purpose, namely, what it is to be healthy, something the doctor does not constitute but only serves. If a doctor wonders about whether he should aid us in becoming healthy, he ceases to be ruled by the end of medicine and becomes a danger to all of us.

But once I am healthy, what do I do? What are the "activities" of health? We can only answer such a question by knowing what we are. The specialist in what to do once we are healthy is not the doctor. True, we can exercise, diet, brush our teeth daily in order to remain healthy, but these are not the activities of health. In short, all those activities or professions that are primarily geared to keeping us healthy or in being, worthy as they are, are not what we represent. I revert back to the word "strain" that Aristotle used when he told us to use every faculty we had to know as much as we could about the highest things, about what is, even if it be little.