I grew up in an environment of books. Not only was my father a writer and editor, but he also owned a publishing house and a bookstore. Sometimes after school I would walk over to my Dad’s bookstore, four blocks away, where I loved spending time in the children’s section. I remember lying on the couch spending hours reading Anne of Green Gables and other books about interesting quirky people or animals. Sometimes I became so engrossed in the stories that they started to seem more real to me than the outside world. I didn’t have a lot of friends but the characters in books became my friends, and often the imaginary worlds in books started to seem more real to me than the actual world.
My mother also loved books. She homeschooled me and my brothers and was always deliberate to devote a large part of each day to reading aloud to us. I never thought of reading as “schoolwork,”– it was just something we did for joy.
But during my teenage years, my approach to books changed. I started to view books as objects to be leveraged for their usefulness. At some point, I wanted to be literary, and so I started reading books that I thought an educated person would read. I got fixated with having to finish every book, even if I wasn’t enjoying it, just so I could say I had read that title. Add to this the fact that I wasn’t a fast reader, but slowly subvocalized every line, and the result was frustration. I began beating up on myself that I couldn’t read faster. I felt burdened about how many books there were to read, and how long it would take me to get through them all. Reading turned from a joy into a chore.
Because I always had an interest in the Big Questions, when I was fifteen my father recommended I read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. That opened up a new world of books for me, and after Mere Christianity I moved onto other works of Christian apologetics and philosophy on the shelves of my father’s bookstore. But again, I approached books for their usefulness, hoping to get my questions answered, to figure out the world, and to try to shore up my security in the Christian faith. In short, I saw books as there to be operationalized.
There is certainly nothing wrong with reading books for their usefulness. I am who I am today because of the books I’ve read. But I lost some of the early joy I had in reading as an end in itself rather than a means. I suspect many can relate to my early tendency to approach reading as a “useful” activity rather than a form of leisure. In the contemporary world, we like things that work, and we have never recovered from the fixation with utility wrought in the cultural disruption of the industrial revolution. Consider that even when we revive ancient practices that might offer a corrective to the fixation with utility, we often merely leverage these practices for their instrumental value. For example, it is common to practice mindfulness for its health benefits, to listen to Mozart because it’s good for the brain, to hike in order to lose weight, etc. Even appreciating beautiful literature and art often fall into the orbit of a utilitarian mindset. As C. S. Lewis reflected in An Experiment in Criticism, “The many use art and the few receive it.”
Again, I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The last thing I intend is to deny is that reading is useful. We naturally learn from reading, and learning is certainly useful. Moreover, sometimes reading is arduous before it is a joy, which is why we struggle with texts from foreign languages even when the joy may be years down the road. Reading good books rather than bad books, like habits of virtue, is fundamentally about reordering our affection. But just as virtuous habits culminate in being able to delight in God—ultimately, the Beatific Vision—so good reading habits (including habits which may not be particularly fun for the student) should ultimately culminate in being able to approach the finest literature as a form of leisure. For me, to apprehend books at this more noble level, I had to re-learn the joy I had as a child when I read books for leisure.
But what do I mean by “leisure”?
What is Leisure?
Leisure is a modern obsession. An army of academics now work in the field of “Leisure Studies.” A subdiscipline within the social sciences, Leisure Studies looks at how individuals and communities respond to recreation, sports, tourism, and enjoyable events. My alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, now offers graduate degrees in leisure studies, while a peer reviewed journal, The Journal of Leisure Research, offers readers the latest scholarship on how people are having fun (along with methodologies and theoretical frameworks for modeling this). It is indeed a sign of the times that the concept of leisure has almost completely collapsed into mere amusement, while modern terms that most closely approximate the older concept of leisure (meditation, mindfulness) possess a self-referential quality quite at odds with the more classical Christian understanding. I’d like to explore the older classical Christian concept of leisure.
But before jumping into the definition of leisure, a little brush-clearing work is needed about the adjectival clause “classical Christian.” Classical and Christian are so often joined together (as in “classical Christian education,” or the “classical Christian worldview”) that we sometimes forget that these adjectives are not referencing the same thing. Moreover, when we conjoin these terms together, it creates an adjectival clause that can mean something different from what either “classical” or “Christian” mean individually.
“Classical,” though it has many meanings and can reference everything from a type of music to things that are traditional, technically refers to ancient Greece and Rome, or the period of classical antiquity. The fact that we can so easily conjoin ancient Greece and Rome, on the one hand, with Christianity, on the other, is the result of a long history of dialectic and synthesis that has by no means been straightforward or uncontested. The Church Father Tertullian famously declared, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” to posit an antithesis between Christianity and classical learning.
Though Tertullian may have overstated his case, he wasn’t completely wrong: much of the cultural legacy of pagan Greece and Rome had to be rejected by the church. Yet there was also much good in Greece and Rome that the Church Fathers appropriated, resulting in a rich classical-Christian synthesis. The Christian doctrine of leisure is an example of such a synthesis, drawing as it does from both the Hebrew Scriptures (Jerusalem) and Aristotle (Athens). Let’s look first at the Hebrew background to leisure, then the Greek.
Leisure in the Hebrew Scriptures
I used to think a lot about the Sabbath. Is Saturday still the Sabbath? Did the church switch the Sabbath to Sunday, or did the Lord’s Day actually replace the Sabbath? If the Lord’s Day did replace the Sabbath, then do the Sabbatical commandments of the Old Testament apply to Christians? And if they don’t apply, then is it okay to work on Sunday?
In asking these questions, I somehow missed an obvious point about the Sabbath. It wasn’t until I was researching Genesis 1-3 for my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation that it fully dawned on me that what Sabbath theology offers is not a set of prohibitions to be received legalistically, but a joyful framework of leisure that is countercultural to our age’s fixation with utility.
One of the striking features of the creation account that we often miss is that God’s activity was not purely functional or pragmatic. God, though the ultimate doer and producer, takes an entire day to rest from his work (Gen. 2:2–3). What was God doing during his rest? No doubt he was exercising aesthetic appreciation by reflecting on the goodness of creation. As we read in 1:31, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.”
The Genesis account teaches us two important truths about our Creator: (1) God values and engages in aesthetic appreciation; (2) God values and engages in contemplative leisure.
The significance of these two points are underscored by examining the type of world God made. As we survey creation, we see that God did not just make everything for its utility value; rather, He put in unnecessary extras that add beauty, wonder, and aesthetic richness to our experience. The reason we can experience this aesthetic richness, whether the majesty of a mountain vista or the gentle beauty of a flower petal, is because we are images of the God who surveyed the beauty of the world and perceived, “it is very good.”
Our first parents exercised their aesthetic senses to appreciate all the beautiful things God gave them in the Garden. No doubt they enjoyed the beautiful sunsets and vistas, delighted in the music of birds and water, and savored the pleasing aromas of flowers and herbs. Not only did Adam and Eve enjoy God’s creation, they also made their own works, engaging in what Tolkien called “sub-creation.” For example, Adam’s appreciation of Eve led him to create a work of art to describe his delight, namely the poem of Genesis 2:23.
Significantly, the devil was able to exploit Eve’s sense of aesthetic appreciation when tempting her to sin. The words of Genesis 3:6 (“the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes”) has obvious parallels to Genesis 1:31 when God saw that everything He had made was good. Eve’s temptation was to pursue this delightful and beautiful thing separate from the beauty of God and His commands. Eve let her imagination become corrupted when she supposed that something within the creation could provide nourishment (life) apart from the Creator. After the fall, human aesthetic senses became disordered, requiring education, training, and ascesis.
Just as we share with God the ability to appreciate beauty, we also share with Him the capacity for Sabbath leisure. God did not need to do anything productive when He rested on the seventh day, instead He simply took it all in, recognizing that what He made was good and beautiful. We are also invited to cease from work and just be in the presence of beauty, and to enjoy the majesty and awe of creation, in addition to appreciating the objects of sub-creation. Learning to take a Sabbatical turn and be quiet in the presence of beauty prepares our hearts for union with God, who is to be adored not primarily for what He can do for us, but simply for who He is.
There is an important connection between aesthetic appreciation and Sabbath, since it is often through learning to delight in beautiful things—from a good novel to the beauties of nature to the joys of art—that we can get off the treadmill of being mere consumers or producers, to heed the injunction God gave the psalmist to “be still, and know that I am God.” Even science and mathematics can be received in a leisurely way, when we delight in them as sources of wonder, rather than as simply preliminary to more deliverables.
Leisure in Classical Context
Now let’s switch to something that may at first seem unrelated to the Hebrew Scriptures, namely Aristotle’s theology of leisure. True freedom, the philosopher taught, is found in the pursuit of goods that are valuable as ends and not merely as means. The true end of human activity is the leisure in which to pursue eudaimonia (happiness, beatitude, blessedness). Here’s how the philosopher described this in his Nicomachean Ethics,
Happiness [eudaimonia] is not found in amusement, for it would be also absurd to maintain that the end of man is amusement and that men work and suffer all their life for the sake of amusement. For, in short, we choose everything for the sake of something else, except happiness, since happiness is the end of a man. So to be serious and work hard for the sake of amusement appears foolish and very childish, but to amuse oneself for the sake of serious work seems, as Anacharsis put it, to be right; for amusement is like relaxation, and we need relaxation since we cannot keep on working hard continuously. Thus amusement is not the end, for it is chosen for the sake of serious activity.
Aristotle’s point is that it’s okay to sometimes pursue amusement and relaxation, because both will help us work better; however, we shouldn’t take either amusement, relaxation or work as the final telos of human life. For Aristotle, the only appropriate end is leisure in which to pursue eudaimonia. As Joseph Owens explained in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy,
What is immediately striking in Aristotle’s conception, then, is that leisure opens out on a panorama more positive and more self-sufficient than relaxation or recreation or entertainment. Only after the pleasures of recreation have been enjoyed and have accomplished their purpose does the full role of leisure even enter upon the scene… Both the drudgery and the relaxation function rather as means for something further. Neither is pursued just for its own sake. Each is in its own way meant to bring about the leisure in which higher human activity may be undertaken.
Aristotle’s concern to avoid the reduction of leisure to mere instrumentality was rooted in his understanding of freedom. A man is free, Aristotle taught, when he enjoys the leisure to study wisely, forestalling epistemic vices like prejudice, haste, ignorance, sophistry, etc. What is true of the individual is also true of the polis as a whole: a community is free when it enjoys the type of virtuous self-government that forestalls tyranny or anarchy. When all we are concerned about is providing for our animal needs, we function as slaves to whomever will feed us. This is not a recipe for a free people. Yet equally, he argued, when we are addicted to amusements and relaxation, we are also unfree, for amusement and relaxation are also not appropriate ends for human life. In Aristotle’s reading of the geopolitics of his day, the militaristic city state of Sparta ruined itself through lack of leisure, as they subordinated all of life to military utility.
Jerusalem Meets Athens
So far in this article, I’ve explored leisure from the perspective of Jerusalem and Athens. Now let’s see how both these streams come together in Christianity, leading to a classical Christian vision of the good life.
Aristotle had been less clear about what goods are ends in themselves, for while he thought that philosophical reflection led to beatitude, historians are not agreed just what he believed was the higher object of human intellection. It was left for Christian philosophers to clarify this, and they did so by drawing on the theology of Sabbath.
Christian philosophers from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to Josef Pieper have pointed out that the ultimate form of leisure is when we seek the kingdom of God through prayer, virtue, and the sacramental life, for it is by such activities that we follow Mary in seeking the one thing needful (Luke 10:41-42). Yes we need to work, even as God worked during the six days of creation, and it is a sin not to work (2 Thess. 3:10). Yet the Lord’s Day and the plethora of Christian festivals and feasts offer us a chance to take a Sabbatical turn and reset, to remind us that we were designed for something higher than work.
In the Christian understanding, we reach a point where both amusement and work, while necessary, cannot satisfy the unquiet heart because they are not the ultimate telos toward which our souls are oriented. Our ultimate telos is the beatific vision of God. If that sounds too Catholic for you, then let me quote from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Although that may sound like an airy-fairy description of the hereafter, consider that there are many ways to enjoy the Lord. Because God is the plentitude of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, we can enjoy Him via the good and beautiful things of this world. I am reminded of a line in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, where the Olympic runner Eric Liddell declares, “God made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.” For Liddell, running was a type of leisure and not something he merely leveraged as an instrument of utility. Other people may find themselves drawing close to God through different activities that are humanizing, whether painting, ballet, bird-watching, making crafts, playing chess, writing or memorizing poetry, offering or enjoying hospitality, etc. Christian philosophers tell us that such activities approach true leisure when they are enjoyed as ends and not merely as means. Such activities can be spiritual to the degree that they participate in the ultimate Goodness and Beauty of God Himself.
Things that we enjoy as ends in themselves and not merely as means constitute basic human goods. A basic human good is something that derives its value from itself and which forms a constituent aspect of human flourishing. The most obvious example of a basic human good is virtue: virtue is its own reward, not something that derives its value as a means to other ends. While virtue is the highest human good, Christianity recognizes that there are lesser goods that are constituents of human flourishing, such as health, creativity, attentiveness, sensitivity, etc., in addition to some of the practices mentioned in the last paragraph (singing, hiking, bird-watching, etc.) A well-ordered reason can perceive that these conditions and activities are not mere proxies for the satisfaction of desire but are intrinsically beneficial given the type of creatures we are.
While basic human goods and associated activities are truly good in themselves (meaning they are not merely instruments to other ends) they are not the final good: only God is the final good. That is why even good activities may need to sometimes be sacrificed in order to reach the higher good of God Himself, as indeed Eric Liddell discovered.
When pursued properly, these leisure activities cultivate in us a sense of holy discontentment that refuses to be satisfied with anything short of God Himself. That is why the most beautiful poetry, music, literature, and scenery, will always leave us slightly unsatisfied, awakening deep yearnings that evoke longings for the joys of heaven. Through prayerful leisure, we ultimately anticipate the new creation, when the work of Genesis 1-2 will reach its triumphant culmination (Heb. 4:1-7)
Leisure Reading, Classical Christian Style
And that brings us back to the question of reading books.
In her 2023 book, Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice, Jessica Hooten Wilson describes one of her class sessions, which she began by writing the following in large letters across the whiteboard.
GOD IS USELESS
Wilson was being intentionally provocative and got the response she expected. Her Christian college students were angry and dismayed. One student exclaimed, “God may not be useful to you, but he is useful to me. I pray to him every day.”
Wilson answered, “That is called idolatry.” She continued by pointing out, “If you are using God, then you are treating him like an object. You are the subject. You are reigning over him and making him useful to your own purposes.”
In reflecting on this incident, Wilson remarked:
What I had challenged in my students was not their belief in God but their idol of use. They prized utility so much that they had even—unintentionally—conceived of God in terms of his usefulness to them. The reality is that God is useless. We humans cannot use God for any other thing than to be enjoyed. God is the end of all things. He is only to be enjoyed.
Wilson draws on the theology of St. Augustine, who made distinctions between (a) things which are to be enjoyed, (b) things which are to be used, (c) and things which are to be both enjoyed and used. Some things are only to be used, like tools. By contrast, God alone is only to be enjoyed, not used, since he is the ultimate source of beatitude (happiness). Many other things, including art and other people, are to be both used and enjoyed.
As you may have guessed, Wilson’s larger point is about reading. Reading is a thing to be used and enjoyed, and when we use literature for enjoyment, we are indirectly enjoying God, the source of everything good, true, and beautiful. Yet so often we approach books only for their usefulness. She continues:
We misuse literature when we only use it or when we use it for an end other than the enjoyment of God…
We read a manual on car mechanics so we can fix a car. That kind of reading is solely useful. But we should not read Virgil’s Aeneid in order that we may check a box on a great books list. Rather, a book such as the Aeneid is to be used—for pleasure and edification temporarily—and ultimately enjoyed in how it points us to God.
I think Wilson is right, but this is a hard lesson for Americans. Whereas many cultures around the world have a strong tradition of leisure, the American stress on productivity and pragmatism makes it difficult to surrender to the indirection of art; consequently, we want art and literature to give us a return on our investment, to do something for us.
For me, leisure is something I had to re-learn as I recovered the joy of reading that I initially had as a child before I tried to become a “serious” reader. Now, whenever I teach, that is what I try to cultivate in my students. Insofar as education is fundamentally about the retraining of our desires, a good teacher will always aim to produce students who can delight in texts simply because they are beautiful regardless of utility value. A good teacher will strive to cultivate students who enjoy Goodness, Truth, and Beauty as a form of leisure.
Further Reading