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Tag Archives: Effort

The Value of Leisure

10 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ Comments Off on The Value of Leisure

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3, Catholicism, Christian, Christianity, Effort, ethics, forgiveness, Greek philosophy, Industrialism, Josef Pieper, laziness, Leisure, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Love, Restlessness, Sloth, Thomas Aquinas, Work

Josef Pieper

“Work is necessary, and it’s good in its place: as a means to an end, the end being to provide the necessities of life. From the time of the Greeks to the rise of industrialism that was the idea — work was a means to an end. But when work was over was the time of true human life: time for family, friends, community, for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

At the zenith of the Middle Ages… it was held that sloth and restlessness, ‘leisurelessness’, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of ‘work for work’s sake’. It may well seem paradoxical to maintain that the restlessness at the bottom of a fanatical and suicidal activity should come from the lack of will to action…

Our culture feels in its bones that ‘hard work is good.’ Aquinas, the great medieval philosopher, propounded a contrary opinion: `The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult. Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more virtuous; it must be more difficult in such a way that it achieves a higher good as well as being more difficult.’

The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility… of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty…’

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless… he refuses to have anything as a gift. We have only to think for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life depends upon the existence of ‘Grace’; let us recall that the Holy Spirit of God is Himself called a ‘gift’ in a special sense; that the great teachers of Christianity say that the premise of God’s justice is his love; that everything gained and everything claimed follows upon something given, and comes after something gratuitous and unearned; that in the beginning there is always a gift—we have only to think of all this for a moment in order to see what a chasm separates the tradition of the Christian West and that other view [of classical Greece].”

__________

Pulled from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

A couple days late for Labor Day. I would’ve posted it earlier, but, well, work got in the way.

Read on:

  • Ronald Dworkin goes deep into the issue of valuing a human life
  • Noam Chomsky’s take on the true value of work
  • A poem about working late: Louis Simpson’s “The Light in My Father’s Study”

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Talent Is a Question of Quantity

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Effort, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, novel, Persistence, Skill, Talent, Wisdom, Work, Writing

Jules Renard

“Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.”

__________

From Jules Renard’s journal, in an entry from 1887. Renard would have been 23 years old at the time of this writing.

In one of his more cryptic jottings, which appears eight years later in these same journals, Renard wrote: “There are good writers and great ones. Let us be the good ones.”

You can find that epigram, along with other highlights from the first half of Renard’s journals, at the link below. Later this month, I’ll publish selections from the second and arguably more remarkable half of his largely overlooked masterwork.

Jules RenardThe Brilliant, Unread Journals of Jules Renard

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