In the book of Genesis, it is written that God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. It is also said that he made a garden named Eden out of ‘every tree that was pleasant to the sight’ and, within the garden, man and woman in his own image. For our purposes we might gather from this that, for the writers of the Bible, two things mattered. First, that when he created the world, God paid special attention to its wonder and beauty, that this was something innate to it. Second, that in order to cast his divine eye upon the world, God gave himself a day of rest whence he ‘saw that it was good’. The original Hebrew word in Genesis for rest: ‘shabbat’ – the origin of the word sabbath – means to cease or desist. So, rather than resting from work, perhaps we might imagine that God paused the unending business of creation in order to take pleasure and delight in it.

On first glance this might seem a slightly pedantic consideration, but it helps us to ask: what is our leisure time actually for? It is an important question because our understanding of leisure has become so atrophied. For the ancient Greeks, leisure was not simply a time of rest and recuperation, a time when we are not at work, but rather a time when the highest aspirations of humanity might be fully realised. It is from the ancient Greek word for leisure – ‘skholê’ – that we derive the modern word ‘school’, which suggests that, for the ancient Greeks, the pursuit and love of wisdom was inextricably bound up with leisureliness. Mankind, writes Plato in The Laws, is a ‘plaything of the gods’ and most god-like and, therefore, most fully human, when at play. For Plato, this meant ritual, divine worship and the practice of art: ‘sacrificing, singing, dancing’. Moreover, as Aristotle writes in his Politics, ‘leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure’. The Greek understanding of leisure was shared by Europe’s religious orders in the Middle Ages, whose devotion to the contemplative life flowed from it. The liberal arts they practised were liberal precisely because the knowledge acquired was freed from the demands of everyday utility.

Though definitions change, can we really speak of leisure as something lost? After all, we in the West have an abundance of leisure time at our disposal. The 19th century, in this respect, lingers long in the cultural memory. The novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell resonate with the cries of workers at the mercy of pitiless mill- and factory-owners, and it’s true that the vast majority of Victorians were compelled to work considerably longer hours than we do. In the factories of England, the working day tended to be 12 hours long, with Sunday a weekly day off and as few as five and a half days’ holiday a year, including Easter and Christmas. The work of social reformers, from the Chartists onwards, campaigned to shorten the working week. Between 1830 and 1880 there was roughly a 20 per cent reduction in working hours. Britons won more leisure time throughout the 20th century. Legislation in 1998 limited the working week to 48 hours. Today, the average Briton can expect to work around 36.4 hours a week.

We would be forgiven for thinking, therefore, that in the relatively prosperous, comfortable 21st century, we have far more leisure time than our pre-industrial forebears, but that is not strictly true. In his Condition of the Working Classes in England, Friedrich Engels – no nostalgic for merrie England – writes of the spinning and weaving of raw materials that took place in a working home before the Industrial Revolution. He describes weaver families who could ‘get on fairly well with their wages’, who had the freedom to work as much as they pleased, and as much leisure as they wished to take to cultivate their plot of land. These were patterns of work that had changed little since medieval times. The Victorian economist James Rogers estimated that the average medieval workday was no more than eight hours, with the 19th-century worker ‘simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago’. At harvest and other busy periods, when work required doing, the working day might stretch from dawn until dusk, but during slack periods, which encompassed most of the year, this was not adhered to.

The medieval worker also enjoyed a considerable number of feast days. Traditional holidays, such as Easter and Christmas, along with saints’ days, were spent churchgoing and merrymaking. All in all, it is estimated that the medieval worker spent a third of the year at leisure. And it is believed that our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed considerably more leisure still. In his classic 1972 study, Stone Age Economics, the American cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins transformed the popular understanding of hunter-gatherers when he described them as the ‘original affluent society’. Hunter-gatherers, he concludes, ‘have few possessions, but they are not poor’. What they lack in modern material comforts, they make up for in their free time. In his study Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, South African anthropologist James Suzman estimates that the Jo/’hoansi, a tribe who lived in the Kalahari Desert until the middle of the last century, spent 15 hours a week hunting and gathering. Leisure time could be spent eating and relaxing, but also singing, worshipping, and making art. In short, in the creation of their culture.

That leisure should be the wellspring of culture might sound odd at first, but it is here that the 1948 book Leisure: The Basis of Culture by the German Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper is instructive. Pieper – a populariser of the writings of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and a professor of philosophical anthropology at the University of Münster – wrote the book amid the ruins of war and contends that if Europe is to be rebuilt, the foundations of its culture must be thoroughly examined. That calls for a ‘defence of leisure’. Following from Aquinas, Pieper argues that leisure is neither strenuous effort nor pure relaxation. Rather it is an attitude of receptive contemplation, the source, according to the ancient Greeks, of our intellectual and spiritual knowledge. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus called this ‘listening to the essence of things’. Not all, of course, agreed. Pieper gives the example of Antisthenes the Cynic, a contemporary of Plato, who had no sense of the divine, only enjoyed poetry if it expressed moral truths, and wished to exterminate the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite. Immanuel Kant, meanwhile, criticised intellectual contemplation precisely ‘because it costs nothing and is effortless’. For Kant, philosophy ought to be a ‘herculean labour’.

For Pieper, these thinkers represent the archetype of the modern ‘worker’. The workaday world, whether it is the production of food or the building of homes, is essential to our survival and few would wish to dispense with such comforts. But Pieper believed that modern people place too great a value on work, or rather work in and of itself. Not only the activity we spend our lives doing, but its sum meaning and purpose. As the sociologist Max Weber writes on the modern idea of work: ‘One does not work to live; one lives to work.’ This utilitarian attitude is not only held to be injurious to the humanities – disciplines that pursue knowledge that cannot strictly be considered ‘useful’ – but to society more broadly. In such circumstances, leisure begins to appear as something ‘fortuitous and strange, without rhyme or reason and, morally speaking, unseemly’ and ‘another word for laziness, idleness and sloth’. Pieper was writing at a time when totalitarian societies valorised the indomitable worker. But the archetype persists today in a less obvious and therefore more pernicious form with the utilitarian, workaday world penetrating into every aspect of our lives. University degrees are valued on the basis of vacuous metrics such as ‘lifetime predicted earnings’. Intellectuals have become ‘knowledge workers’ and culture, the ‘creative industries’. Free time is increasingly spent consuming content online, which is often produced by an ‘influencer’: a person who makes a living turning otherwise leisurely activities into profit.

The result is a general drift toward what Pieper refers to as acedia, a kind of listlessness or what we might call ‘burn-out’. In the Middle Ages, Pieper writes, idleness and the inability to enjoy one’s leisure were closely connected. To be idle was not to be workshy, but to be un-leisurely, to refuse to be what God wants one to be and, therefore, what one is. Pieper quotes the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who, in Sickness Unto Death, calls this the ‘despairing refusal to be oneself’. To despair is to be ignorant of one’s spiritual nature or to arrange one’s life in such a way that makes this realisation impossible. The result is spiritual death, something actively encouraged by society. ‘A self’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having.’ The irony here is that capitalist societies are often said to be individualistic. We are instructed to be ‘self-empowered’, to find ‘self-fulfilment’, to cultivate ‘self-love’. Yet these capitalist values neglect the self’s reliance on that which is beyond the self. For Kierkegaard, the opposite of despair is faith. To have faith is to love, and to love is to step beyond one’s own ego and to become aware of the relationships and the higher power upon which the self depends. Bereft of the cultivation of this spiritual self, a person is ‘conscious of belonging in all to an abstraction, just as a serf belongs to an estate’. This abstraction spiritually impoverishes us by emptying things of their significance and ‘finally, money will be the only thing people will desire, which is moreover only an abstraction’.

Kierkegaard is relevant here because it is in true leisure that the spiritual self might be rescued. For Pieper, the ‘soul of leisure’ is the festival and the most ‘festive festival it is possible to celebrate is divine worship’. It is leisure par excellence because it is an opportunity to leave the concerns of the workaday world behind and affirm the world, like God, who ‘saw that it was good’. In our society, however, festivals have become unmoored from their religious origins. Organised worship is on the decline, and many grow up without a connection to a religious faith. Immersion, therefore, in divine worship – this ‘fountainhead of leisure’ – is not straightforward. Nevertheless, one solution perhaps lies in The Philosophical Act, Pieper’s companion essay to Leisure: The Basis of Culture and a defence of the contemplative tradition in philosophy. Philosophy, Pieper writes, helps us step out of the utilitarian, workaday world because it begins in wonder and ‘pierces the dome that encloses’ us in it, the dome that separates us from experience of the transcendent. Music does this. So, too, does the appreciation of art and nature. Moreover, the ‘existential shocks’ of love and death can help awaken us to a deeper reality. This is really a matter of attention. When we ‘attend’ to something, we are devoting our energies to that thing. As the philosopher Simone Weil writes, ‘extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious’. Also, that: ‘absolutely unmixed attention is prayer’. This attitude cannot be achieved by flexing our mental muscles but rather in an attitude of receptive contemplation. ‘We have to cure our faults by attention’, she writes, ‘and not by will.’

Well, one might be tempted to say, this is all well and good for a philosopher to argue. But what about those of us who must strive for our daily bread? However, Pieper’s faith led him to believe, as it did for Kierkegaard and Weil, that this capacity – the capacity to develop the spiritual self – is one that is innate to each of us. As it is written in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’