By Morgan Whitmer
If Josef Pieper is known in the English-speaking world, it is usually for his work Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Frequently, moderns misunderstand leisure as a break from work, a time for refreshment before returning to the grindstone.1 For Pieper, however, leisure is not mere “free time.” Rather, Pieper argues that true leisure, according to the classical notion, is the pinnacle of human life. Pieper’s notion of leisure, both philosophically and etymologically, is more similar to our understanding of school and can even require a fair bit of hard work! Through silent, celebratory, and receptive leisure, a person becomes capable of seeing life and the world in its totality.2
Often, Pieper’s Leisure is cited by those attempting to understand the decline of goodness, truth, and beauty in our culture. Pieper is touted as the champion of some form of the following argument:
- Modern life oscillates between work and entertainment. Man’s physical needs and desires are met, but he does not experience or pass down the goodness, truth, and beauty that are preserved in culture.3 As a result, society is culturally barren.
- How do we revive culture? Here, Pieper is cited: Leisure is the basis of culture. Thus, a restoration of culture must be preceded by a return to leisure.
- Modern man has more “free time” than ever before, but he does not know how to be at leisure. We must learn how to practice leisure. Through leisure, we till the barren cultural landscape, allowing fresh shoots of beauty, truth, and goodness to spring forth.
To state the argument in more emphatic terms: Read Shakespeare as though the salvation of Western civilization depends upon it!
Albeit persuasive, this common argument represents a subtle but important distortion of Pieper’s thought. The issue lies with Pieper’s supposed claim that “leisure is the basis of culture.” Shockingly, Pieper himself never claims that leisure is the basis of culture.4 Although the English translation of Pieper’s work bears this title, it seems to be an addition of either Alexander Dru, the translator, or T.S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction for the English publication of the work. There are two lines in the work from which I believe the English title was understandably derived. Pieper opens the work by insisting that “it is essential to begin by reckoning with the fact that one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure.”5
Second, in the preface to the English edition, Pieper writes, “Culture depends for its very existence on leisure.”6 Taking these passages in the context of the whole work, however, it is clear that Pieper is arguing that leisure and culture have a symbiotic relationship, not, as is commonly understood, that leisure is the cause and culture is the effect.7
In the original German, the work is titled Muße und Kult (Leisure and Cult). The German title is far more clarifying of Pieper’s argument: Although he makes some introductory remarks about the relationship between leisure and culture, his primary aim is to argue that both leisure and culture must be rooted in divine worship (Kult). As Pieper puts it:
To repeat: today it is quite futile to defend the sphere of leisure in the last ditch but one. The sphere of leisure, it has already been said, is no less than the sphere of culture in so far as that word means everything that lies beyond the utilitarian world. Culture lives on religion through divine worship. And when culture itself is endangered, and leisure is called in question, there is only one thing to be done: to go back to the first and original source.8
Only the celebration of cult, divine worship, can provide the “deepest of the springs by which leisure is fed and continues to be vital.”9 Genuine worship, for Pieper, cannot “arise on purely human foundations.”10 Its form and object are divinely given. For the Christian, there is no doubt about the matter: “true and final form of celebrating divine worship, the sacramental sacrifice of the Christian Church.”11
Having laid out Pieper’s primary argument in Leisure, we may now return to the consideration: Can leisure revive culture? Explicitly, Pieper himself insists that any efforts to rescue Western culture through leisure alone will fail. Ultimately, Pieper insists, “leisure is not susceptible to the human will… Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end, even though the end be “the salvation of Western civilization.”12 If leisure is not rooted in divine worship it “becomes laziness.”13
One scholar commenting on Pieper describes a contemporary manifestation of this problem. Many educators seeking to recover classical — especially great books — education in the West are inclined to believe that we can rebuild Western culture and civilization by: “(1) memorizing principles from the classical trivium (especially those of rhetoric and syllogistic logic), the quadrivium, plus religious apologetics; (2) rotely memorizing principles of natural law from Aquinas’s writings about it; and (3) developing refined tastes in classical music, combined with an eventual appreciation for drinking fine wine and smoking first-quality cigars.”14 This attempt to revive leisure without cult does not succeed in preserving Western culture, but in cultivating philosophical elitists who, despite much learning, still fail to understand reality.
True understanding of reality can be recovered only through cult, the “most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole.”15 Divine worship, however, cannot be done for the sake of reviving leisure or culture. As Pieper puts it, “Celebration of God cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake.”16 Our primary hope, then, cannot be in the restoration of Western culture. Instead, Pieper calls for a revival of sacramental Christianity, not primarily for the sake of preserving “culture” but for the sake of preserving the humans within it. Leisure and cultural flourishing, like happiness, can only be achieved as a by-product of pursuing another greater good: genuine affirmation of reality in divine worship. Those who wish to save Western civilization must first turn to saving themselves, to availing themselves of the sacramental reality of Christianity. Our hope, concludes Pieper, is that man may, in the sacramental visibility of the Christian cultus, “be rapt into love of the invisible reality through the visibility of that first and ultimate sacrament: the Incarnation.”17
1 As Pieper puts it, “Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of ‘worker.’” Josef Pieper, Leisure—The Basis of Culture, translated by Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 40.
2 For Pieper, leisure has three basic characteristics: silence, affirmation of oneself and the world, and the full use of one’s faculties. Pieper, Leisure, 40-45.
3 For Pieper, the word “culture” has a very specific meaning. It refers to “the quintessence of all the natural goods of the world and of those gifts and qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his needs and wants.” Pieper, Leisure, 17.
4 I want to thank Peter Redpath and Thomas Austenfeld for initially pointing this out. Peter A. Redpath, “‘Leisure Is the Basis of Culture’: Was Josef Pieper Wrong?” in The Great Ideas of Religion and Freedom, eds. Peter A. Redpath, Imelda Chłodna-Błach, and Artur Mamcarz-Plisiecki, 286–298. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2021. Thomas Austenfeld, “Josef Pieper’s Contemplative Assent to the World,” Modern Age (Chicago) 42, no. 4 (2000): 372–82.
5 Pieper, Leisure, 20.
6 Ibid., xix.
7 As Pieper points out: “leisure embraces everything which without being merely useful, is an essential part of human existence.” Here, Pieper is clearly alluding to the definition of culture found earlier in the work: “the quintessence of all the natural goods of the world and of those gifts and qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his needs and wants.” Ibid., 60, 17.
8 Ibid., 61.
9 Ibid., 60.
10 Ibid., 62.
11 Ibid., 63.
12 Ibid., 62.
13 Ibid., 59.
14 Redpath, “Leisure Is the Basis of Culture,” 287.
15 Pieper, Leisure, 63.
16 Ibid., 62.
17 Ibid., 63.
