In the movie Pinocchio (1940), we see the wooden boy arriving on Pleasure Island. There he is free from any obligations or regulations. He can do whatever his heart desires. It feels like Paradise. And then he starts turning into a donkey like other boys on the island. This is what too much amusement does for boys. It turns them into slaves of their unconstrained desires who are more than ready to take advantage of that situation.
The amusement on Pleasure Island is not really free. Its price is personal liberty and the future. Whoever wants to achieve something must not act like this. Yet we do. We waste so much time on TikTok, paying for it with our time and brain capabilities. Our attention span shortens, and our long memory, which is essential for deep thinking, shrinks. We forget that killing time is not true rest.
The ancient Greeks called this kind of time paidia (not to be confused with paideia, which means enculturation or upbringing). Paidia is irresponsible amusement, i.e., recreation and entertainment, non-serious and spontaneous activity. There is a place for it in life. Everybody needs to recuperate. Additionally, small children play games to learn about life, though in this case, we could ask whether it is pure entertainment with no educational end in sight. However, paidia must eventually evolve into paideia, a more serious and structured learning.
The Greeks also spoke about scholé (the root of the word “school”). For them, it was true free time, or leisure. It was the time when they could lay aside all labor necessary to support biological life in order to engage in things of higher importance such as the contemplation of eternal truths and the perfect structure of the universe.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “Happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.”1 In Politics he added, “All of life can be divided into work and leisure, war and peace…we should choose war for the sake of peace, work for the sake of leisure, necessary and useful things for the sake of the noble.”2 Thus, we work to have leisure. Labor has value as far as it allows us to enjoy leisure.
Here, we can see how we have confused the means with the end. We say “leisure” (scholé) but mean “amusement” (paidia). Aristotle would not be pleased with us. By turning all leisure into amusement, we reduce our lives to a continuous strain of sensory sensations, and thus our worth is less than that of a slave, who at least labors so that his master can contemplate more important principles and affairs. What we need is less TikTok and more books.
However, the Aristotelian idea of leisure is not good enough as life’s end and meaning. It is enough to read any of the major works by James B. Jordan such as Through New Eyes or Primeval Saints to see that we do not labor just to find time to think. Following the model of the creation week, Jordan presents the six-fold pattern of human life as a way of grateful transformation of Earth from glory to glory. We take hold of something. We give thanks and thus dedicate all our work to God. We break and restructure. We give new names. We distribute. We celebrate.
Thus, while work leads to rest in both paradigms, there is a subtle difference between the two. In Jordan’s paradigm, work is not just a biological necessity, and rest is not an escape into the mind. Work is rather a glorious transformation of the world, and rest is a communal celebration of that transformation.
None of these steps can exist without the others. It is all or nothing. True, Cain skipped the second step of giving thanks, but we know what the outcome of it was. What is important here is that the last step, the celebration, is an outcome and a fruit of all the previous steps. We can celebrate only in the fruit of work. This celebration includes rest, but it is more than that. Besides, even the work proper (the third step) is never simple labor, work which must be done lest we die of starvation or hypothermia. It is always transformative. When done with gratefulness and in obedience to God, it reveals God’s glory. When done with resentment and rebellion, it brings judgment.
Therefore, the Aristotelian split between work (means) and contemplation (end) seems to be unnecessary. It at least implies that simple work is only a means to another end. Jordan’s interpretation of the work ethic, on the other hand, presents work as a part of glorifying God and even participating in his work.
Another point of criticism of the Aristotelian scholé is that it is elitist and often solitary, especially its contemplative part. Only the rich can enjoy it. And they do not need others’ presence to do it. It is “I” and the cosmos, “I” and the divine. It does not build a broad community; at best, it creates snobbish clubs for intellectuals. But as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy concluded, it is noteworthy that, the original scholé was not without benefits for broader society (e.g., we all benefit from Pythagoras’ theorem). It gave some people the opportunity to think without being bothered by thoughts of food shortages or war. When the pressure of an emergency is absent, one has time to think and contemplate. “Playing and thinking take place in leisure time,” he observes, and adds that “playing space and thinking space are the theatres of freedom.”3
Thus, Rosenstock-Huessy suggests a correction of the Aristotelian paradigm of work and thought when he says that “The dualism that divides human activities is the dualism between play and struggle. The difference between theory and practice is a fallacy. Thought is struggle as much as any other doing.”4
Therefore, thinking does not necessarily belong to the “leisure” category, as it often is “work” or struggle. Thinking is a part of the six-day labor that earns the Sabbath. We think and work in order to rest and celebrate.
The division between theory and practice is artificial. It suggests that thinking is always leisure, and labor is a hard reality. Yet, thinking is often a hard struggle, and work can be fun. Thinking is not an escape from the harsh reality of life, but is a struggle with reality. Rosenstock-Huessy also speaks to this topic in his lecture titled “Man Must Teach.”.5 On the one hand, he elevates teaching the “impractical” subjects, which we would call liberal arts, over teaching practical skills, e.g., engineering, because technological change happens rapidly these days and, thus, requires continuous re-learning, yet the liberal arts provide something more enduring and important for life: resilience that helps face the struggles and tragedies of life. On the other hand, he opposes the idea that school must be fun and make children happy, because this would make them weak and unresilient; they would not be ready to face the struggles of life. “If a child is happy, it cannot grow…Growth has pains; it has the pains of uncertainty.”
Rosenstock-Huessy also complained that the modern understanding of leisure no longer resembles the ancient scholé. It is more like paidia, amusement. Leisure has become “relaxation by doing things which need not be done.”6 Leisure is the “surplus of individual time” when we can do whatever we want, and what we do is irrelevant to the rest of our lives. Here we can already see Rosenstock-Huessy’s two main problems with modern leisure. The first is that it is individualistic; the second is that it is more detached from life than the ancient scholé was.
Ultimately, he concludes that modern leisure is actually a way to escape the Cross of Reality which pulls us into four different directions: the past, the future, the inner world, and the outer world: “The leisure of modern man is spent in a kind of constant dutiful shift from backward to forward to inward to outward entertainment; like a man on his sickbed, many souls roll from one direction to the other since they do not understand the rhythm and flee the center of their lives” (The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun).7 The Cross of Reality has four arms pointing in four directions: backward, forward, inward, and outward. Yet because staying at the center of the Cross is excruciating, we escape the center by moving in one direction: playing with utopias, collecting antiques, listening to music, or traveling. We lack the proper rhythm of life that takes us in all four directions, even though not at the same time.
What we lack, according to Rosenstock-Huessy, is not more leisure time but the return to Holiday time which establishes the rhythm of life. We need to celebrate more. The difference between leisure and a holiday is that one is individualistic and detached from life, whereas the other is communal and celebrates the fruit of life. “Leisure is, indeed, a ‘too much’ or a surplus of individual time, while holidays are rooted in a tragedy of the whole community. On holidays, a community triumphs over tragedy; a man at leisure idles away his time.”8
The joint celebration of any victory binds the community together and gives it a common sense of destiny. “When the soldiers return, they may desire rest and leisure as individuals. But the community needs for its own health a holiday. On this holiday, the tragedy of losses in battles is not forgotten, as when we are trying to take our minds off something disagreeable. The power of a holiday consists in the ascendancy over tragedy. No holiday without pain remembered and suffering sanctified. From this bravery, a higher certainty of our true calling is acquired.”9
Thus, a holiday creates a community and strengthens it. It bestows meaning and destiny. It also helps us find the proper rhythm of life to endure the Cross of Reality. When we celebrate together, we rejoice in a victory over the past struggle; we become ready to anticipate the future; we leave our individual homes and workshops to come together and to “be idle together.” Of course, the most important holidays are the Christian holidays that link our present moment to the deep past and the ultimate future. They also bind us as individuals to the rest of the Church, both militant and triumphant.
This is the second pattern God gave to his people. God established not only the pattern of work but also completed it with a basic pattern of human history: six days of work and one day of celebration. The Bible mentions this pattern eleven times, including twice in the New Testament (Heb 4:4; 2 Pet 3:8). It must be important then. Yet, the Sabbath rest was more than rest. It was like the last element in the six-fold pattern of work—the enjoyment of the fruit of work, a celebration. God did not have to take a rest after a week of work, but he wanted to establish a pattern for us to follow. He also established certain times and seasons to both celebrate his acts and to anticipate the fullness of the Kingdom.
In the end, we stand before a choice. We can spend our lives on Pleasure Island in constant paidia, idling away our time and potential, amusing ourselves to death, and turning into donkeys. Or, once a week, we can take a day of rest to celebrate together all the big and small victories and get ready for more to come. And we need to remember that the Greek scholé cannot be perceived as the pinnacle of life achievements. Scholé, just like paidia,can easily become an escape from the center of the Cross of Reality. We would do better to embrace the God-ordained pattern of daily work, weekly celebration, and annual festivals. It is a pattern of work leading to a banquet.
Bogumil Jarmulak received his PhD from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.
NOTES
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), bk 10, ch 7. ↩︎
- Aristotle, Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1981), bk 7, ch 14.
↩︎ - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, In the Cross of Reality: The Hegemony of Spaces, ed. Wayne Cristaudo and Francis Huessy, trans. Jürgen Lawrenz (Milton Park: Routledge, 2017), vol. 1, part 2. ↩︎
- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Man Must Teach,” in Time Bettering Days and Other Essays (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2025). ↩︎
- Rosenstock-Huessy, “Man Must Teach,” in Time Bettering Days and Other Essays (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2025). ↩︎
- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 199–200. ↩︎
- Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, 201. ↩︎
- Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, 201. ↩︎
- Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, 214. ↩︎