Wyszynski was a Polish cardinal. I see on Amazon that he wrote another book called A Freedom Within: Prison Notes. Wikipedia has a bit of biographical information. Apparently he was a mentor for Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II.
- There's a review of the book here.
- An article about the Cardinal at Crisis Magazine.
- Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical called Laborem Exercens, On Human Work.
- There's a book by Gilbert Meilander on Working: ITs Meaning and Its Limits which I would be interested in, but I have too much to read already and it is relatively expensive and not on Kindle.
The stated aim of the All You Who Labor is to "introduce the Catholic approach to the role of work in human life". In this way it is kind of a counterpoint to Pieper's thoughts on leisure. Looks like I wrote about it here and got a hat tip here.
He wants to explain how work intersects not just with personal life but with social, economic and religious life. The reason we want to understand this is to
"achieve a real integration of work (which is a part of our life) into the fullness of that life, so that work is no longer something cut off from the rest but is something that forms a harmonious whole with it."Now I am not in a typical situation with regard to this aim. I do not work outside the home: I homeschool my children and manage the house and so on. So my work in one way does not seem cut off from the rest of life, but rather the opposite. I am immersed in life, all the time, though I can pretend otherwise easier now than when I had babies and toddlers.
Still, I need to know more about this integration, because very often I feel like my "duties of state" are quite detached from my interest in academic subjects. Cleaning the toilet or helping a delayed teenager with his schoolwork brings me down to daily life sharply. The Christian Church, as Wyszynski will soon point out, sanctified servile/manual tasks and integrated them into a whole human life, where the Greeks had rather despised the arts of the pedagogue, the household worker, the artisan.
Wyszynski says that some, who glorify total work, perhaps communists and early Calvinists come to mind, think the Catholic idea of work is inadequate. Work IS the man, in Communist countries, as Pieper points out. To some Protestant traditions, work is the door to prosperity and a sign of virtue in itself.
Wyszynski brings up the parable of the laborers in the vineyards as a sort of archetype for his ideas on work.
The question holds a note of reproach.
"How is it that you are standing here and have done nothing all day?"
"Because no one has hired us."There is a real and legitimate complaint here -- the pain of the unemployed and involuntarily idle.
"Away with you to the vineyard like the rest"The householder solves the problem by sending them to work, even at the 11th hour of the day.
Even those who have no need to work, those who are independently wealthy, have a responsibility to work. In Paul's words:
"He who does not work, neither let him eat."
Wyszynski brings up another note in the reproach "you have done nothing."
The world scorns the "Opus Dei", the work of God done in contemplative monasteries. Work to the world is only something economically productive. Sometimes, even intellectual work is somewhat scorned, unless it purports to be useful for something. Otherwise Pieper would not have had to write a defense of philosophy, and Cardinal Newman would not have had to lecture on the idea of the university, as educating in the liberal arts rather than training the useful worker.
Reading Circle Books looks good. I am going to bookmark it for further browsing.
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