Otium Sanctum or Holy Leisure: The Lost Art of Doing Nothing Well

     The modern world has solved the problem of survival and created, instead, a problem of rest. Technology has enabled life to be extended, days to be more “productive,” and has altogether eliminated the pesky sound of silence—only to discover that man cannot live by technology alone. 

     When God gave Moses the Law on Mount Sinai, He did not say, “Remember the deadline—keep it productive,” but “Remember the sabbath day—keep it holy.” Since we are made in the “Image of God” (Genesis 1:27), God’s action is the model for our human action. If God “labored” creating the universe in six days and on the seventh day rested, then man ought to do the same. In fact, it is deeply human to do so.

     Only humans can partake in what Aristotle calls “leisure” (schole in Greek for those interested, from which we get the English word “school”). No animal nor computer can rest in this sense. Leisure consists in pursuing something for its own sake, not its usefulness, but because it is worthwhile on its own. St. Augustine (who, so to speak, coined the term otium sanctum) observes that God is the ultimate end worth enjoying for His own sake: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions I.1). The world reverses this. We try to enjoy things and use God when convenient. 

     We can, ultimately, take leisure in the things God creates like friendship with others who are made in the image of God. The best friendships are useless. Leisure is about useless stuff. A friendship that is merely useful is not a deep lasting friendship, but a business partner. It is only with our closest friends that we spend carefree quality time—useless, but not meaningless. To this end, Aristotle reminds his own students, “As I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure” (Politics 8.3). All that useless stuff. In other words, we work so that we can have free time—leisure—to pursue God and godly things: all that is good, true, and beautiful.

     It is only in leisure that man finds human flourishing (what Aristotle calls eudaimonia and what St. Thomas Aquinas calls eutrapelia, the virtue of right recreation). That is why God commands it: “Be still (scholasate) and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) which could just as correctly be translated as “be at leisure, and know that I am God.” A very common question in the States is “What do you do for work.” We tend to define ourselves by our work. I am a teacher. I am doctor. I am an accountant. But, someone who works in their free time will have a very difficult time enjoying heaven, let alone retirement. It is poor practice for eternal life. A much more poignant question to ask someone you just met (in order to get to know them) would be “what do you do for leisure?” You work in order to do what? Do you have a family? Do you read? Write? Paint? Travel? How do you play? How do you worship? These questions reveal much more about who we are. A man becomes what he attends to. And a culture becomes what its inhabitants do in their free time. Leisure is the basis of culture.¹

     The modern world confuses work with leisure and leisure with idleness. Screens are the new sacrament of this inversion: they promise rest but deliver restlessness; they promise connection but give isolation. Søren Kierkegaard says, writing in the mid-1800s, “If I were a physician and I were allowed to prescribe one remedy for all the ills of the world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise?” How much truer are his words now with the advent of the internet and smart phones? The average American spends seven hours looking at a screen.² America has become a culture (or lack thereof) dominated by screens: streaming sites, social media, “adult sites” etc. ad nauseum. A culture that never stops scrolling cannot stop to worship, which is what leisure is properly ordered to. Work is not bad. As Augustine puts it, “The love of truth seeks holy leisure; the necessity of love undertakes just work” (City of God, XIX.19). Work, as with all things, must be properly ordered: work  to leisure and leisure to worship. 

     Sunday is set aside as a day not merely for leisure but holy leisure, otium sanctum. It is a special day of rest from ordinary labor for the worship of God. Which is why Christians are dually obliged to worship on Sunday and refrain from unnecessary servile work, even servile work “done for pleasure without any gain” because it remains categorically work and not leisure (Baltimore Catechism Q. 239). Scrooge McDuck might find pleasure in counting the gold coins in his money bin but that does transform the act into leisure. No, leisure is different; it is contemplation of truth. Leisure is reading, writing, studying, drawing, painting, embroidering, playing music, traveling, hunting, fishing. The like of which are not servile works even though they may require considerable bodily exertion because they are not ordered toward utility but toward delight, contemplation, and wonder. They are the most human acts precisely because no other thing find joy in them. 

     And it is here that the Sunday obligation becomes the most radical institution left to us—not a day off, but a day set apart, a holy day, a weekly interruption in which man remembers that he is not a machine nor a mere animal, but a liturgical creature made for God Himself. A culture that abolishes leisure in the name of efficiency or idleness will not become more productive nor more restful; it will become less human. When leisure disappears, worship soon follows, and when worship vanishes, man forgets what he is. Sunday stubbornly stands against this forgetting. It declares (quietly, as God does) that man was made not for work, but to rest in God. Any civilization that cannot stop will, in the end, collapse under the weight of its own effort. Thus, the rebellion left to the modern man may be the simple courage to “don’t just do something, stand there;” “be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

¹ cf. Josef Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture.

² https://www.magnetaba.com/blog/average-screen-time-statistics