Holiness through Work: Commemorating the Encyclical Laborem Exercens

By Martin Schlag

To mark the 40th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical on human work, published in 1981, a group of globally-recognized scholars presents the critical aspects of this document and its purpose. These original essays revisit John Paul II's approach to work in post-modern society and reconnect the dignity of the working person to a pursuit of holiness. These authors convey that only when it is truly Christian can humanism accomplish the lofty ideals it indicates.
This book is a timely contribution to the field of scholarship that focuses on Catholic Social Thought and is ideally suited for graduate studies and the reader interested in more serious questions in Christian theology. 

Giulio Maspero, "The Bible and the Fathers of the Church on Work"
Patricia Ranft, "Work Theology in the High Middle Ages"
Angela Franks, "John Paul II's Metaphysics of Labor"
Deborah Savage, "Confronting a Technocratic Future: Women's Work and the Church's Social Vision"
Martin Schlag, "Contemplation at Work: A Theological Conversation Between John Paul II and Josemaría Escrivá"
Richard Turnbull, "Laborem Exercens: A Protestant Appreciation"
Michael Naughton, "Good Work: Insights from the Subjective Dimension of Work"
Christopher Michaelson, "Subjects and Objects in Meaningful Work"
Javier Ignacio Pinto Garay and Alvaro Pezoa Bissieres, "The Worker and the Transistor: The Dignity of Work and Business Ethics in Global Corporate Practices"
Gonzalo Flores-Castro Lingán, "The Real Work: Making the Encyclical Laborem Exercens Operational"
Geoffrey C. Friesen, "Laborem Exercens and the Subjective Dimension of Work in Economics and Finance" 

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781587313219

Book preview

Holiness through Work: Commemorating the Encyclical Laborem Exercens. Introduction.

Martin Schlag

The Inuit have a series of different words for ice. Our language must make do with one word. We notice a similar lack of nuance when it comes to addressing the varied reality of work. The Oxford English Dictionary describes work as an action or activity involving physical or mental effort and undertaken to achieve a result, especially as a means of making one’s living or earning money. It is also labor, one’s regular occupation or employment. Work has to do with exerting oneself for a definite purpose, especially to produce something or to earn a living. In contrast to play or diversion, which regenerates us from our efforts, it is usually associated with toil.¹ But for some, it is so integral to life that it is a cause for great joy and can even seem effortless.

Work thus designates a wide span of human activities, from the harsh struggle for survival to artistic creativity, from uplifting intellectual work to backbreaking drudgery. Work is a polysemic word, i.e., a word that possesses multiple meanings, senses, and connotations. It appears in many contexts and is relevant for many aspects of our lives. Work makes up most of our days. For this reason alone, it is inseparable from our individual biographies and narratives. Like the roots and branches of a tree, work penetrates the soil and air in which we grow and thrive. It is constitutive of the human person. It is in work that our character is formed and forged, where we develop our ideals and put them into practice, where we slowly discover our purpose in life. From a personalistic perspective, like that of Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II, the word work implies yet another wide range of topics: meaning, values, purpose, narrative, virtues, ethics, society, business, and not least faith.

Utopian thinkers like Karl Marx and even non-utopian economists like John Maynard Keynes anticipate a future without work. Would such a future be desirable? A world without exploitation of workers, without slavery and degradation; a world with economic equity and inclusion, with safety for all laborers, and respect for their priceless contributions to society; a world in which the right to work and the rights of workers in work are recognized and protected. This would certainly be a world worth fighting for. But this need not be a world without work. Such a world would be a nightmare, and against God’s explicit plan for his creation. God created the world and all it contains but left it unfinished. He created clay but not bricks, grain but not bread.² He wants us to continue the work of creation, and that is how he placed us in this world—as workers.³

As Giulio Maspero explains in his chapter, Christian faith inherited an attitude of respect and appreciation for work, also manual work, from Judaism. This attitude is expressed in the Bible and the Talmud. The early Christian teachers, especially Augustine, had to enculturate this mindset into the Hellenistic environment of their time, which generally considered manual labor as demeaning, unfit for free men. While Christian faith could not and cannot accept such a prejudice, it also calls on political and economic leaders, employers, employees, and all men and women to strive for institutions of work that foster virtues and thus true freedom. This was partially recognized by the early monastic tradition of the first Christian millennium, in which work was esteemed mainly as a cure against idleness. All kinds of temptation beset the monk, and the Christian in general, in moments of boredom and idleness. Work keeps the temptations away, or at least reduces them.

However, work is much more than just an ascetic cure: it shapes the world according to God’s plan and will. Therefore, work is irreplaceable and integral to a Christian’s witness to the world. We are judged in the eyes of our fellow citizens by how we as Christians join in the common effort of building a better, happier, and healthier world for all. This is part of our testimony as believers. However, there is a further dimension. Secular, inner-worldly work contributes to the coming of the Kingdom of God, and thus has an eschatological dimension. In her chapter, Patricia Ranft develops these ideas and shows how the medieval religious revival in Europe cherished work. This is in opposition to the prevailing scholarly conviction, which depicts the Middle Ages as a time in which there was hardly any theological reflection on work and ordinary life. Christianity supposedly had to wait for the Protestant reformers for that to happen.⁴ Rather, Ranft’s chapter shows how much work was esteemed in the Middle Ages. In fact, the Protestant Reformers were able to tap into older, preexisting Christian traditions when they pointed to ordinary work and professional activity as a path for the full realization of the Christian’s calling to holiness. Richard Turnbull presents some of their teachings in his chapter in this volume.

Cutting a complicated and long history extremely short, Catholic theologians, thinkers, and pastors—as diverse as Francis de Sales, Thomas Merton, Jacques Maritain, and Josemaría Escrivá—refocused the Catholic tradition on ordinary work. By rediscovering the universal call to holiness of all Christians, this led up to the Second Vatican Council’s program of Christian humanism and its renewed call for cultural transformation from inside the world. Pope John Paul II was firmly committed to this cause.

On September 14, 1981, the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, he published his encyclical Laborem Exercens. It is written by a Pope who had already experienced two forms of totalitarianism, one of which was a regnant communist regime that extolled theoretical materialism. He arrived in the West only to experience the dehumanizing effects of practical materialism. In opposition to both forms of inhuman materialism, he proposed Christian humanism, the counterprogram of redeemed humanity. As a philosopher, John Paul II takes up the strands of intellectual discourse that lead us from the Bible, the Church fathers, the medieval reception and renewal of patristic theology, into the Reformation, and on to modern thought on work, especially Hegel and Marx. This monumental encyclical deserves a reflection 40 years after its publication.

In her chapter, Angela Franks shows how the notion work in John Paul II’s teaching fits within a larger metaphysical and aesthetic personalistic commitment, summarized in the key phrase: Action expresses the person. Deborah Savage puts Laborem Exercens in context with other writings of John Paul II, Centesimus Annus and Mulieris Dignitatem in particular. Her chapter will be of interest also to those who, with Pope Francis, are concerned about the technocratic paradigm that is so deeply entrenched in modernity. She reflects on the specific calling of women in work, society, and culture. Martin Schlag concentrates on the encyclical’s final section on spirituality. He brings John Paul II into conversation with Josemaría Escrivá, showing how their teachings have different emphases and thus complement each other. And for a panoramic vision of Laborem Exercens and its impact on a personal scholarly biography, one should open Michael Naughton’s chapter. It gyrates around the notion of good work and its institutional implications in business. Naughton’s chapter ends with a case study and concludes the first part of the book, forming a bridge to its second, more practical part.

The aim of our book is to illustrate the lasting relevance and fertility of Laborem Exercens for intellectual life. In different ways, the authors in part two of the book show how the encyclical inspired them in their own field of business expertise. For Christopher Michaelson, a business ethicist, the concepts of the objective and subjective dimensions of work are important. The way Laborem Exercens distinguishes between the two dimensions of work aligns with his own scholarship and that of many other ethicists who study meaningful work. Javier Ignacio Pinto Garay and Alvaro Pezoa Bissieres reflect on the dignity of work and business ethics in global corporate practices. They start out asking what place Catholic social teaching can have in business ethics. As they argue in a framework of virtue ethics, they employ the principles of Catholic social teaching as bedrock for ethical reflection. Their chapter focuses on technology. They argue that Laborem Exercens’ principles on good technology can be guidelines in a world of increasing surveillance and new forms of Taylorism. In his chapter, Gonzalo Flores-Castro undertakes the real work of making Laborem Exercens operational. John Paul II leaves the concrete realization of his vision in the hands of the subject of work: the worker. Flores proposes the theory of action developed by Pérez López (1934–1996) as a way to bring the principles closer to real, everyday work. Finally, as a professor of finance, Geoffrey C. Friesen highlights the changes to our financial logic when the subjective dimension of work is given its proper place in economic and financial models.

All authors in this book seem to agree on the importance of the distinction between the subjective and objective dimensions of work. Here we can probably find the most important, and perhaps most lasting, contribution of Laborem Exercens to intellectual history. We sincerely hope that our work as authors has made a little contribution of its own to further research and reflections by others. As editor of this volume, my gratitude goes to all authors who were willing to write their chapters, frequently in competition with other pressing chores and tasks. I thank St. Augustine Press and its Director, Catherine Godfrey, for accepting the book in its collection and for quick and unbureaucratic procedures. I gratefully acknowledge Frank Scarchilli’s patient work of editing. I wish all readers insight and joy.

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1 See Oxford English Dictionary, accessed on October 8, 2021, https://www.oed.com/. I have summarized the meaning of work as noun and as verb and edited the wording.

2 See Dan Bricklin, Natural-Born Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review (September 2001): 3–8.

3 See Gen 2:15.

4 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211–33; classically expressed in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1905 in German, multiple editions.

The Bible and the Fathers of the Church on Work

Giulio Maspero

1. Introduction: An Anniversary

The encyclical Laborem Exercens, published forty years ago, begins by referring to work as an essential element of Christian humanism: Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.¹

In fact, according to the Bible, God created the world through His work and He created the human being to work. This implies that the very covenant between the Creator and the only creature created in His image and likeness has at its core work itself. In the New Testament this revelation is reaffirmed with unimaginable force as Jesus links His own activity to the truth that His Father always works.² So our Lord had a specific profession, characterized by tools that are precisely those with which the Incarnate Word was crucified.

The Fathers of the Church had to rethink the classical conception of work in the light of this revelation and introduced a new relational vision of work with profound social consequences, such as he condemnation of slavery and the care of the weak. This chapter seeks to illustrate the essential steps along this path, highlighting the ontological novelty of the Christian conception of work, which overcomes every possible ambiguity about it, founding human activity and its dignity in that relational dimension infused by the triune God in reality through the act of creation. In LE, John Paul II speaks in a way that takes relation not only into consideration but realizes its central importance for human work.³ Work is embedded in society, thus in relationships between persons, who are much more than mere factors of production. First and foremost, however, work relates the human person to God, the Creator.

2. Work not Fight: The Biblical Novelty

To grasp the novelty and relevance of the Biblical and Patristic teachings on work, it is necessary to take a metaphysical perspective. It is not a question of entering into technical and excessively speculative details, but of taking as a starting point the difficulty of reconciling the one and the many that characterizes human thought in the search for the first cause of everything and the meaning of life. The very core of the issue is that this cause should be one, while reality is marked by multiplicity and by conflicts. The material world is shaped by clashes and struggles, illustrated in narrative form by myths. It is sufficient to think of the Babylonian and Greek examples, where a first couple of gods engenders and gets in conflict with its own offspring. For example, Uranus and Gaia, personifications of heaven and earth, are the first divinities, and one of their sons, Cronus, castrates the father and starts eating his own sons to avoid ending up like him, but Zeus, born by Cronus and Rhea, escapes his destiny and defeats his father. In Babylonia the narrative is analogous, as everything also begins with a couple whose children give rise to a conflict. Again the origin of the cosmos is from a dysfunctional family through a sort of mafia war. On a philosophical level this translates into the confrontation between Parmenides and Plato, where the former claims that being is one, while the latter affirms its multiplicity though analogy and dialectics, defining his stance as a sort of parricide against Parmenides himself.⁴

The Biblical picture is completely different. In the Genesis account,⁵ in fact, the one God is the origin of everything, as He in the beginning creates (bārā’) out of nothing a relational pair consisting of heaven and earth.⁶ The very Jewish verb points to the action of cutting not simply at a material level, but as distinction within the very created reality. The difference with respect to the previous cases is apparent: it seems that the biblical narrative could go back a step further beyond the dyad towards the unitary origin that was in the beginning and is the source of everything. Matter thus has a spiritual origin, as it flows from the spirit of God (rûḥa ‘ĕlōhîm) and cannot be opposed to it.⁷ The biblical text does not offer a chronological description or an explanation in the line of modern science, but presents the ultimate causes of why we are as we are. So the narrative has a liturgical dimension expressed by the rhythm and pattern in the succession of days. God vertically brings into being something that was not there before and this something is always structured as a relational couple characterized by numerical or vital fecundity: this happens with light and darkness,⁸ with day and night,⁹ with the waters below and the waters above,¹⁰ with the sea and the mainland,¹¹ with the sun and the moon¹² up to the male and female human being.¹³ The very terminology expresses a sort of reciprocity between the two elements brought into being, as if one were at the heart of the other, but precisely through their distinction.

Why is this important for the biblical understanding of work? The central point is that this relational texture that constitutes created reality does not originate from a conflict, but from the work of the One, who freely brought it into being. This multiplicity is the result of the work of the One and expresses His inner life. God creates by working, in fact, as it is said in Gn 2:2: on the seventh day He completed His work and this completion consisted in resting, where both actions have a liturgical significance. The first in Greek indicates a relational dimension that recalls both the plural that emerged from the heart of the Creator when He called man into being according to Gn 1:26, and the human being that so became a partner of God through His blessing that has the form of a mission, as we will see below. The second action is in Hebrew wayyišəbōṯ, where the conjunction (w = and) is essential to grasp that the two verbs constitute an endiad, according to a tendency typical of biblical language. The Hebrew verb is linked to the Sabbath revealing in this way that rest is not a mere cessation of doing, but the relational fulfillment of work in contemplation. Labor is not only about producing, but more deeply about enjoying the relationship with the fruit of one’s work, taking care of it.

This is profoundly different from classical philosophical interpretations, as both in the Platonic perspective of the idea and in the Aristotelian doctrine of the form identity and otherness are opposed in an irreducible and dialectical way. On the contrary, in Gn 1:26 the one God shifts to the plural before creating the human being in His image and likeness, expressing in the latter’s relationality His inner triune Life, as the New Testament will show. This is the point of arrival of a crescendo that reveals more and more the ontological depth of God’s work in creating, accomplished through His own word, which places a relational ontological structure in being. In the sequence, clearly organized in a liturgical sense, each new act of God corresponds to the declaration of the goodness of the relational couple so created, up to the qualitative leap constituted by man and woman, in the light of which the Creator declares that all creation is now not just good, but very good.¹⁴

Thus the origin of the world is not in the conflict inherent in a initial dyad that produces dialectics, but in the One God, from whose interiority through the act of working flows a fabric of relationships that constitute reality in its depth. It could be said that the God of the Bible works precisely because He is One and He works from within Himself, communicating to creatures, through His work, the capacity to be in mutual relationship and to be in relationship with Him. This is shown by the speaking capacity of the human being, who is called to the dialogue with the Creator and sent to take care of creation through a blessing in the form of a mission,¹⁵ as the the Hebrew text uses məla’ḵət, a term that recalls angel and, therefore, mission, radically different from the Greek translation ta erga in the Septuagint. Here the Greek spirit fails to express in full what the sacred text is communicating: it is not a matter of working in order to then be able to devote oneself without disturbance to the theoretical sphere that recognizes the intelligible as the deepest ontological root of the real and, for this reason, seeks to go beyond the visible and the material, as the Platonic myth of the cave suggests.¹⁶ The wonder that gave rise to philosophical activity in the face of the multiplicity of the cosmic world (ta physika) is betrayed by the theoretical outcome of Greek metaphysics itself, as María Zambrano has keenly observed,¹⁷ for the dialectical opposition of the one and the many. The Aristotelian God is one but does not work, just as It has no word or relationship, because It is perfect and does not need anything. Its only activity is the theoretical contemplation. So, in this framework, the multiplicity of the world is in some sense the result of the dialectics with this First Principle. In contrast, the Jewish Sabbath is not opposed to the first six days of creation, but is its dynamic fulfillment.

What seems fundamental to highlight is that, according to Genesis, work is constitutive of the human being on two counts. We have seen how it refers back to the image and likeness of God. At the same time, it is precisely the mission and the dynamics that flow from creation that place the human being in a constitutive relationship with the earth. In Gn 2:5–6, at the beginning of the second account of creation, which is more ancient and anthropological than the more liturgical and refined first one in Gn 1, after work has made its appearance in relation to God, as seen in Gn 2:2, there is the extraordinary recurrence of work itself, now in relation to the human being who however, in this second narrative, has not yet been created.¹⁸ Beyond historical and philological considerations, it is evident that the text tries to show that without the partnership between God and the human being the world cannot be itself: the earth is described as a desert, without grass, because the Creator had not made it rain and the human being did not work the land (‘āḏām ‘ayin la’ăḇōḏ ‘eṯ-hā’ăḏāmâ). This last sentence is extremely significant, because the one who, according to Gn 2:7, will be molded by God from the dust of the ground, is in some way presupposed to the perfection of the earth itself through the ability to work, which derives from having been created in the image and likeness of God. This relational correspondence between the human being and the earth is also present at the terminological level in Hebrew, because man is ‘āḏām, while earth is ‘ăḏāmâ, a term composed of exactly the same letters joined to the feminine sign, which does not exist in the case of man. And the verb to work (‘ăḇōḏ) is found right between the two terms placed in constitutive relation by the Creator. The construction is analogous to how in Gn 2:23, at the moment of the creation of the woman from the rib of the man, this says that she will be called woman, i.e., ‘iššâ, because from the man, i.e., ‘îš, had been taken away. Without the reference to the Hebrew, this translation would remain unintelligible. Instead, like the relationship between Adam and the earth, here too the original reveals the relational identity in the feminine sign added to the first term. So, work is at the center of the relationship between the human being and the world.

In conclusion, God creates by working because He is one, and from within Himself He infuses created reality with a relational identity, so that the human being works precisely because he or she is the image of this God. Therefore, from the biblical perspective, human work too is born from within, from (wo)man’s relational identity, and is at the service of the relational fabric that constitutes the world. Thus, paradoxically, the human being is de-fined by a relationship with the infinite that characterizes his or her immanence, for the creation in the image of God. And the Genesis narrative explains why this vertical relationship is always translated also horizontally in the relationship with the other, both cosmic and personal. Human action, therefore, according to the biblical perspective, even if it is external, is never extrinsic, but is always at the same time for communion with God and for communion with others. Adoration and action are thus linked in the metaphysical depth of the human being’s ultimate origin, preventing any dialectical opposition between inside and outside, between the One and the many.¹⁹ The rain that irrigates the earth passes through the heart of man, of every man, through his capacity to let himself be generated and through the relational dimension that constitutes him. So work is understood, from the biblical point of view, as being married to the world, as making love with reality.

3. The Exile of Work

But dialectics are present in the world and the image of work presented in the first two chapters of Genesis clashes with the fatigue and burden that led Aristotle to assert that the citizen should not work, because work, especially material work, belongs to the dimension of means and not to that of ends. Thus, according to the Greek ideal, work is only for slaves, while the freedom of the polis is freedom also from work.²⁰ What does the Bible have to say about this? Is the picture it presents really idyllic and unrealistic? Here the narrative in Genesis seems to reach one of its peaks, because its etiological perspective also embraces the experience, or rather the evidence, of evil. Precisely because of the ontological-relational depth of the first principle according to the biblical description, for the human being, who is created in God’s image, it is possible to address the Creator in order to say no to the gift that constitutes her. Gn 3:1–7 describes the temptation of the serpent, who makes a false statement as the premise of its reasoning, namely that God had forbidden the human being to eat of every tree in the garden. The metaphysical connection between good and truth emerges here in narrative form. The woman responds to the false premise by trying to correct it, through the assertion that God has forbidden eating only the fruit of the tree in the center of the garden, the mere contact of which would have caused her and Adam to die. Note that the grammar of the dialogue indicates that the temptation is directed at the couple, thus that it embraces their relationship, as this is revealed by the Creator as a constitutive element of being. At this point the lie reveals its violent face because the serpent, at the moment in which it denies God’s affirmation, reinforces the verb to die, with a doubling typical of the Semitic language. Scott Hahn reads the text as a threat to the life of the original couple by the serpent: Adam was called to sacrifice his own human life to defend Eve, standing between her and the serpent, dying a simple death to protect against the death-death that concerns the relationship with God, who is Life.²¹ According to the tempter, the Creator would have imposed this extrinsic law to prevent the human being from becoming like Him, when in fact Adam and Eve have already been created in God’s image and likeness. The gulf between the ontological and gnoseological dimensions is immediately evident, because the knowledge of good and evil is presented by the serpent as gain, when, in the perspective of the first two chapters of Genesis, evil is only the absence of good, the negation of relationship. To take from the tree of life is to deny one’s filiation, to renounce being children, that means to be generated. It is not a question of violating an extrinsic law, but of rejecting the founding and gratuitous relation through which the human being is constituted. Thus Adam and Eve, beginning to judge apart from the source, think finite, i.e., in a finite horizon. This is why their infinite desire comes into tension with creaturely finitude, a tension which is the origin of all dialectics, because one cannot be himself or herself without reference to a dimension beyond, something or someone else that cannot be conquered but only received as a