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

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by James V. Schall

However we construe it, and adventure it is, if we refuse the gift that is offered freely to us, we must live with that refusal. And in this case, God could not give us His life unless we freely chose it. There is no datur tertium, no way to accept what it is unwillingly.

Even our taking ourselves seriously is suffused with laughter. I once came across the following item in a book called Poor H. Allen Smith's Almanac. John XXIII is reported to have said that "it often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope." (8) We would be in a terrible fix, I suspect, if our popes did not have some sense of the unseriousness of even their serious lives.

The subtitle of these reflections is "Why Human Things Exist and Why They Are 'Unimportant.'" Human things exist but not of their own making. The cultural things that are of human making presuppose beings that did not make themselves. Human beings exist out of a superabundance of God who need not have created them. They are thus "unimportant" in comparison to their cause. But they are precisely human beings. This means they are beings with hands, passions, brains, and free wills. God deals with them according to what they are.

If I give a gift to someone I love, I do not want that gift to command or to coerce the elation of the receiver. Rather, I want the receiver really to delight in the gift and in the fact that I gave it. Joy is the delight in having what we love. Our unimportance in one sense means that we take a chance in our givings. We do not know what someone will make of our beautiful gift, and a part of ourselves. It means nothing to us, but disappointment, if we receive back an artificial or strained thanks. We want the thanks to be really from the freedom and the understanding, from the being of our love.

If we say that we want to know certain things not for our sakes but "for their own sakes," it means that we can actually behold the existence and beauty of something, respond to it because we really know what it is. Paradoxically, in the background of this consideration is Augustine's reminder that we are made for God from the beginning and that we cannot cease until we discover the rest for which we were intended. Yet, this is said not to depreciate or to minimize the beauty of the things that are not God.

Cultus and skole, culture and leisure mean that we accomplish the highest purpose in creation not in necessity or in obligation, but in delight and in freedom. What we really want is what is given to us. God, for His own part, does not want our praise because He commands it. He wants it because we see that what God is, is indeed lovely, worth our awe. What we create in our human way, in our leisure and culture, ought primarily to arise out of this initial realization. The world is only complete when finite beauty is the free response to divine beauty. Only God is "serious," Plato told us. All else is "unserious." But the seriousness that is God can only mean that He prefers that we love Him for His own sake, for the sake of His beauty, because we "see" it, delight in it, after the manner in which it is given to us, as a grace that we can chose not to accept. Without this possibility of refusal, there would be no adventure, human or divine.