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

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by James V. Schall

What is leisure about? Essentially, it is about knowing, and knowing the truth, "to know of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is not," to cite Plato. In an old Peanuts, we see Charlie on the mound. He is earnestly looking at Lucy wearing what looks like an oversized baseball cap. She tells him, "Does this look all right? I've got the ball under my cap. I'm pulling the old hidden ball trick!" As Lucy walks away, we see Charlie on the mound yelling at Lucy who has a frown on her face, "How are we going to start the game if you have the ball under your cap?" In the final scene, Lucy turns around angrily to shout back at Charlie, "Do I have to think of everything?" (6) I suppose the proper answer to this exasperated question of Lucy is, "No, but you can think of anything." This is precisely the Aristotelian definition of intellect: the capacity to know all things, to know what is. But it is not necessary that we think of everything, but we can, we have the capacity to do so. What we lack is time and opportunity--which just may be why we are given eternal life. "Thinking of everything," especially the highest things, is precisely what we are about, even in this world.

But we are not just "thinking machines," not just disembodied spirits. Every truth can have a reflection in our world, in this world within our own minds. We often forget that there is a pleasure also in just knowing, for no other reason than that we want to know something, to know its truth. We are indeed the lowest of the spiritual beings; we have to know first by knowing through material things. But we do know this way. And our knowing of things not ourselves is part of the "redemption," as it were, of those things that have no intelligence, and even more so of those that do. We want to know most of all other persons, other spiritual beings precisely in their inner souls. We have a suspicion that we do not fully "exist" until we too are fully "known."

Thus if our affairs are "unserious," if God could do without us, how do we go about thinking of those dire threats against living improperly that seem to come from revelation itself? Indeed, they even come from Plato. God, if I might put it that way, seems to be in the situation of someone trying to enable or to encourage someone to enjoy the very best thing possible or even imaginable. But no matter what He does, the other person will not accept what is offered. And the only way the latter can have this gift is if he freely accepts it. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy,

  ... to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way.
  In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not
  eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the
  thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to
  speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to
  the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care
  that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a
  man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call
  him damnable. (7)