Men Without Rests

The Machine is relentless and as you are assimilated into it you will be unable to rest

I was reminded recently during a period of ill health where I was unable to sleep ( I had Covid and every time I get it my heart rate goes up and I can’t sleep properly) of how important it is to rest. The combination of being completely exhausted and yet unable to sleep is particularly hellish, and it made me think about rest in a spiritual sense and how the inability to truly rest is actually central to our current ‘meta-crisis’.

Obviously in the simple physical sense, it is obvious that sleep and relaxation refresh us and keep us healthy. But what actually does it mean to rest? As most Christians are aware, rest is central to God’s creation and His commandments. God did His work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh, and he wants us to follow his example:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God”

At La Salette on September 19 1846, Our Lady appeared weeping to two shepherd children, Melanie and Maximin. She gave them a message in which the breaking of the commandment to rest on the Sabbath is central:

“I have given you six days to work. The seventh I have reserved for myself yet no one will give it to me. This is what causes the weight of my Son's arm to be so heavy.”

Our Lady’s message explicitly points to a punishment of the Father that hangs over humanity if they ignore the third commandment.

There is no doubt that in Europe, the Catholic Middle Ages were marked by many feast days and Holy Days alongside all the Sabbaths. In fact, medieval man probably had much more leisure time than moderns.

We are all aware of the concept of the Protestant work ethic, and the evidence backs it up: Northern European nations that became Protestant industrialised faster and became more economically successful compared to their southern European Catholic neighbours.

In other words, the places which embraced the Machine earlier were given worldly power at the expense of rest.

But now this disease of the Machine, the inability to ever truly rest, or even experience true leisure, has metastasised. It is in every country and every family home. It is in the schools, those places whose very name comes from the word ‘scholae’, meaning leisure. Because, without true leisure, deep learning is impossible, which is why as a culture we are becoming dumber.

the Ouroboros - the serpent eating its tail

The image of the serpent eating its tail shows us the destination we follow when we ignore the sabbath, when six days of work become seven. The serpent eating its tail represents the forces of evolution without grace, the attempt to build an antichrist world without God, based only on humanity. Why? Because in Genesis we learn that the serpent is “the most artful of all the beasts of the field”. From this we can learn two things. Firstly that the serpent represents that spirit of intelligence which is turned away from God - the field represents the horizontal dimension rather than the vertical dimension of grace. This is the same serpent that in the book of the Apocalypse sweeps down a third of the stars from the heavens with its tail. It seeks to close the open circle of creation, or in another way, to turn the spiral of creation into a circle. The spiral or the open circle represent the soul and the world open to God’s will. That is why the sabbath day is there - to punctuate the circle and allow the heavenly influences to remediate and enliven it.

But the serpent seeks to close that circle up and thus attacks the Sabbath day, tempting people to ignore it. It is easily done now. We are constantly connected to everything, never really switching off. Our leisure time has become impoverished, if it exists at all. We have become human-machine hybrids, never able to leave ourselves open to grace, thinking we can do everything ourselves.

In Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper makes the case that we can trace this satanic world of ‘total work’ represented by what many have called The Machine, back to two different conceptions of knowledge. In the older conception of knowledge, summarised by the Scholastic tradition, discursive knowledge did involve work, but at a higher level there was always a contemplative aspect to knowledge. Pieper gives the example of the difference between observation and contemplation. When we contemplate a Rose we are passive, we recieve it and allow it to affect us. When we start to observe it, we are entering in to an active state of knowledge, noting characteristics. The two types of knowledge could be called ratio and intellectus.

Beginning with Kant, we get a total dominance of the idea that the only way to know anything is with the discursive, ratio type of knowledge. Contemplation is nothing. The Enlightenment Project disseminates this understanding of knowledge - our education systems are based on it - and we are consequently at the risk of our contemplative powers atrophying, and thus, our ability to really have leisure.