Presented at the 2025 Front Porch Republic Annual Conference.

Josef Pieper in Leisure, the Basis of Culture argues that leisure is not the antithesis of work. “No one who looks to leisure simply to restore his working powers will ever discover the fruit of leisure.” Leisure is not entertainment, play, or a chance to catch your breath in order to return to work restored. Pieper takes this position because understanding leisure in relation to productivity embeds it more deeply in a thorough-going market society: a society in which all “value” is identified and determined by the market. Already in 1952, Pieper is asking, “How can [one] be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer of mass-produced goods and a subservient follower beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim?” Yet more than consumerism, it is the ontology of leisure that is at stake. Leisure has to do, as Pieper states, with “the very essence of reality,” the “fulfillment of human existence” and “the mystery of creation.” Without a true ontology, authentic leisure is impossible. Writing over seventy years ago, Pieper could not have fully foreseen how technology is now the dominant ontology of our age, making leisure as the basis of culture almost incomprehensible. In what follows, I argue that in contrast to a technological ontology, authentic leisure requires and flows from an ontology that is at once incarnational and sacramental.

At a recent session on technology at a global Christian conference, one of the speakers said that a key rule for using technology is, “who sets the value system?” The assumption, a common one, is that technology is a neutral tool, one which our values direct us in how to use. From this understanding, it is important then to know which values are directing one’s use of technology. A doctor, for example, can use a particular medical technology to help or harm a patient.

Such a description, however, fails to register how technology itself is more than only a human activity or technique. In his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger describes how technology turns the world into potential raw material, placing it at the disposal of one’s will. For example, writing in the late 1940s, Heidegger argues that technology “reveals” the earth to be a “coal mining district” rather than a field to be nurtured and worked. “The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain.” Coal mining technology sees nature as essentially “on call” for further use.

We might well ask, “doesn’t the peasant also use technology, only of a more primitive kind?” Yes, the difference is that the peasant is in the position of attending to a harmony in the natural world whereas the coalminer is not. As Heidegger observes, “[t]he work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase.” Heidegger’s philosophy moves in a dark direction, but his diagnosis of technology rightly shows how it carries with it an ontology, a way of being where nature stands over against us as always potentially useful: a “standing reserve.” As David L. Schindler puts it, “It is of the essence of the technological worldview that it perceives technology more or less simply as the sum of things that are made—televisions, computers, automobiles, and so on, but also economic and political institutions—and that it then begins to assess these only in terms of how they are used.” Modern technology posits nature as “indifferent to worth and purpose…[as]something that is always yet to acquire its worth through its being-used or being-available-for-manipulation.”

In light of this reduction of nature, one might be tempted to turn to the language of “values” or “value systems.” Isn’t leisure itself a “value” that restores harmony in the midst of a technological ontology that can only interpret nature or being as potentially useful? A university mission statement, for example, emphasizes the importance of values: “Education concerning values is important in general education—not seeking one right way to behave but recognizing that choices cannot be avoided. Students should be aware of how many choices they make, how these choices are based on values, and how to make informed choices” (University of North Dakota, cited in Dennis O’Brien, “The Disappearing Moral Curriculum,” The Key Reporter 62 (1997): 44.)

As the emptiness of this statement reflects, such values language compounds the problem. George Grant rightly notes that in the last century the language of the “‘good’ has largely been replaced in our ethical discourse by the word ‘value’.” This replacement is directly correlated to a technological ontology. Values understood as choices of one’s creative will is the flipside of seeing nature as a neutral landscape on call for our manipulation or use. One might be well advised to make informed choices, but there is no real way to say why one value is better than any other.

C.S. Lewis opens The Abolition of Man with reference to an elementary school English textbook in which its authors object to the use of “sublime” to describe a waterfall. According to the authors, one should not say, “The waterfall is sublime,” but “I have sublime feelings.” The textbook authors argue that while the waterfall is an objective fact, “sublime” belongs to a person’s emotional response. This leads to the wider conclusion, says Lewis, that while a work of literature might seem to be saying something universally significant about the whole of reality, the truth is that this sentiment is only a subjective state. With this story, Lewis is exposing a technological ontology in which values are an imposed part of the nature of things. The Psalmist, for example, might say that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 91:1), but it cannot be literally true. His words are more like an emotional response, or a subjective “value,” on top of an otherwise neutral landscape.

To understand leisure properly, then, one must see a technological ontology for what it is: a sinful distortion that disfigures our lives. To return to Schindler, this ontology “empties love of any intrinsic relation to the order or intelligibility of things, even as it renders beauty incapable of bearing any intrinsic reference to truth.” Pieper’s phrase, “the mystery of creation,” is a reminder that all being is at once both created and mysterious. Walter Rauschenbusch, in a prayer titled “For the World,” describes the mystery of creation as follows: “Grant us, we pray thee, a heart wide open to all this joy and beauty, and save our souls from being so steeped in care … and [so] unseeing when even the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.” Rauschenbusch is relying on an ontology radically at odds with Lewis’s textbook authors, and thus with a technological ontology. The thornbush, far from being essentially a neutral object, is aflame with Divine glory. This is no subjective feeling or personal value but the way the thornbush really is.

A bush aflame with divine glory calls to mind the book of Exodus where “the angel of the Lord appeared to [Moses] in flames of fire from within a bush [and] Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up” (Exodus 3:2). Yet is this not a highly subjective or even mystical experience, thus underscoring that for most of us thornbushes are simply mundane, neutral phenomena, their thorny growth often getting in our way? The phrase “mystery of creation,” however, refers to the fact that there is no purely mundane being or neutral nature. As Michael Taylor Dominic states, “[T]here is no such thing as a purely physical universe, for nothing can exist without immaterial principles and the gift of existence, given freely to each creature in each instant.” All of nature, including our own, is already embedded in the goodness and mystery of God.

Creation is of course fallen, impacting our knowledge as well as our wills. Yet, as Athanasius states in On the Incarnation, the “renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning.” Through the incarnation—the life, death and resurrection of Christ—all things have been filled with the knowledge of God. This knowledge is not information or neutral data, but knowledge of the purpose intrinsic to creation, to all being. This is why Athanasius states that to lose such knowledge (of God) is also to lose existence: “The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it…” One loses existence not in the sense of immediate death, but one lives a shadowy half-life, ignorant of both God and nature.

An ontology that is incarnational rather than technological acknowledges that created being is not, as Stefan Oster states, a neutral “it.” Being is rather “a self-communication of the Creator … this creative self-communication is a form of personal love” As such, the ends of an incarnational ontology are not chosen but given.

William Poteat states in “The Banality of Evil: The Darkness at the Center,” “the myths that now liturgically embody our hopes and make bearable our pain and death”—modern rationalism, scientism, the reign of technique, among others—“have systematically shut us off from transcendence.” As I have indicated, technology as an ontology that is purely immanent allows no space for transcendence much less any understanding of being as personal communion with God and others. A technological liturgy can only see objects as interchangeable since our choices and values now determined by the market can regard no one thing, place or time as better than another. As Wendell Berry puts it, our current system requires obedience “to the industrial economic ideals of high productivity and constant innovation. . . . The cutting edge of science is now fundamentally the same as the cutting edge of product development.” If there is no end or telos intrinsic to being as such, then productivity and usefulness easily triumph. It is in this light that Berry describes the dominant liturgy, especially of the modern university: “regimen of time = work = original discovery = career.” A similar liturgy dominates modern society: time = work = productivity = acquisition and self-creation. This distorted liturgy is one of forgetfulness: a loss of memory about what we and all creation are truly for. Such a liturgy cannot speak of heaven and earth or of the grandeur of a waterfall. A technological liturgy can have no Sabbath since all places and times are interchangeable. “In pure modernity,” says Stratford Caldecott, “there can be no up or down, no getting closer to hell or heaven, and there are no sacred places and times which participate in the divine.”

By contrast, an incarnational ontology acknowledges that there is a transcendent person, place and time in the material world that makes true leisure possible. Creation has received God in the person of Jesus Christ. As Irenaeus states in Against the Heresies, “The proclamation of the Church alone is true, namely that God’s own creation, which depends for its existence on God’s power and art and wisdom, has borne God.” Irenaeus emphasizes, “What He appear[s] to be, He really [is].” Similarly, St. Ephrem the Syrian states: “Mary carried the Babe in silence, while in Him were hidden all tongues! Joseph carried Him in his arms and in Him [the Babe] was hidden a nature more ancient than anything that is old! … Though Most High, yet He drank the milk of Mary, and of His goodness all creatures now drink! He is the Breast of Life, and the Breath of Life.” To call this ontology “sacramental” is to say that the incarnation is not only a past event but an ongoing reality.

While the number and understanding of the sacraments have been divisive in Christianity, the language of sacrament relates the present Christ, God transcendent and immanent, to particular times and places, and as such to all being. The Holy Spirit breathes over the waters of baptism making possible new creation. Christ is the agent who now gives participants his body and blood at the Table.

From the perspective of an ontology that can only see leisure as the opposite of work, sacramental worship is beside the point. To describe leisure as sacramental means that leisure is not the antithesis of productivity and efficiency. Liturgy itself means the “work of the people,” but this is work of a different kind. A sacramental liturgy does not see the world as a “standing reserve,” on call for manipulation. Rather it sees the material world as the place where God already is, but not in a pantheistic sense. The living Christ as Agent makes himself known in concrete and particular ways. “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. ** **Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” (Luke 24:30-31)

In a sacramental liturgy, leisure is not the antithesis of work but makes our true work possible.

Image Credit: Claude Monet, “The Tea Service,” (1872) via Wikimedia.