Before the wilderness, before the deaths of the firstborn, before the horrible plagues, the Book of Exodus tells us that Moses went to Pharaoh with an ostensibly innocent request: that his people, the Israelites, be permitted to pause their tedious labours and go into the desert to hold a three-day festival in honour of their god, Yahweh. Pharaoh refuses; in fact, he demands his overseers make the Israelites work even harder, ‘for they be idle; therefore they cry, saying, let us go and sacrifice to our God’. Perhaps he did this because he sensed an ulterior motive. After all, as Egypt’s sacred king, he presided over innumerable feasts in honour of gods and goddesses, the rhythms of nature, and the mysteries of birth and death.

No doubt he knew that people do not live to work, but rather to enjoy its fruit: the festival. It is a time when they affirm the meaningfulness of the cosmos and their place within it, when they are liberated from the profane world of work and, therefore, become fully human, even holy. Not only this. Perhaps – if he consulted his priests and oracles – he would learn that the feast foreshadows the age when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. In other words, the final redemption of the world. No wonder, then, that Pharaoh was reluctant to grant his labourers a jamboree in the desert.

As the story goes, the Israelites were liberated from Egypt, an event commemorated by the Jewish festival of ‘Passover’. Indeed, it is small wonder the Israelites made any progress toward the Promised Land at all given the number of feast days initiated by Yahweh, including the Sabbath, the weekly holy day when, according to Abraham Heschel, the ‘profanity of clattering commerce is laid aside’ and ‘all that is divine in the world is brought into unity with God’. In fact, the existence of weekends and holidays is owed to this weekly festival, the ‘holy day’ being synonymous with ‘feast’, whose Latin root also means ‘joyous’. Yet today is a particularly un-festive age. Instead, a utilitarian, workaday world – via modern technological devices – has penetrated every part of life.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who in his youth travelled to Egypt to sit at the feet of its priests, compared life itself to a festival in which the philosopher – the ‘lover of wisdom’ – devotes his or herself to contemplation of its beauty. Heidegger surely had this in mind when he called philosophy the ‘feast of thinking’. No wonder that, according to Socrates, in an ideal state, no fewer than 365 festivals would be celebrated a year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Plato’s dialogues tend to be set around festive occasions. The Republic, for instance, begins with Socrates sauntering down to Piraeus to offer his prayers to the goddess Artemis. And the Socratic method of leisurely walks with friends, of accosting strangers with questions, of long discussions around the banquet table, would be unthinkable were it not for the attitude of openness and play afforded by the feast. Festivity demands a sacrifice. Not only the votive offering, but time otherwise spent buying, selling and accumulating. Time, in other words, is made sacred.

According to Plato, the muses – goddesses of the arts – were given to humanity as ‘festival companions’. Art is impossible without festivity. According to the German Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper, the arts fashion the festival into ‘physical form’ and make it ‘perceptible to the senses’. The arts, he continues, are a ‘contribution, the adornment and medium of the festival, but not its substance’. Dance, for instance, is ritualised movement, and song, many scholars believe, came from the anguished cries of women mourners during funeral rites. Theatre, moreover, emerged, according to the classical scholar Walter Burkert, from the rhythmic ‘procession which leads the goat to sacrifice’ in Dionysian festive rites. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the experience of festivity and tragedy are so similar.

In Christ’s parables, the festival serves as a symbol for the immanence of the kingdom of God. More than this, Christ is the ‘true vine’ and the ‘bread of life’ – in other words, a moveable feast. Whether turning water into wine at the wedding, feeding the multitudes in the wilderness, or banqueting with the downtrodden and despised, all Christ’s gestures have a festive quality. Each is like a ritual. It is no coincidence that, according to the synoptic gospels, the Crucifixion occurs during Passover (in John’s Gospel the Crucifixion and the ritual sacrifice of the paschal lambs take place simultaneously). Christ’s suffering and death is the sacrifice that makes festivity possible, while his resurrection, as in Greek tragedy, is the experience of cathartic joy.

Thereafter, the feast rooted itself in Western culture. Church father John of Chrysostom echoes Socrates when he says the ‘Christian ought to be in a state of continual festival’. In the middle ages perhaps a fifth of the year was given over to feast days. The ribald, revelrous, irreverent popular carnival kept the festive spirit alive. Men dressed as women, women as men; clothes were worn backwards; fools were made king for the day. Though their purpose was ostensibly to let off steam, folk festivals could also be a threat to social order. The revolutionary rhetoric of the Levellers during the English Civil War, for instance, echoes the carnivalesque spirit of inversion.

An angst-ridden, narcissistic, ‘self-starter’, the modern subject is too overworked and attention deficit to re-enter the feast. No wonder. Even when ostensibly at leisure, we are never spared the noisome buzz of applications. Pop psychology instructs us to ‘set boundaries’ and practise ‘self-love’. Traditional festivals, such as Christmas and Easter, have become opportunities to boost consumer spending. Saints’ days have become bank holidays. Vacations are opportunities to recharge for more work. Antique cities and ancient sites – once witnesses to festivals – are today haunted by that most un-festive of creatures: the influencer. Summer music festivals are increasingly mass consumerist spectacles. ‘The trick is not to arrange a festival’, says Nietzsche, ‘but to find people who can actually enjoy one.’

Yet the festival spirit is as rooted in the human psyche as art, and there will surely come a time when it returns. The German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin mourns the loss of the gods, while also anticipating their return. ‘Where danger lies’, the poet writes, ‘there grows the saving power.’ The more we are deprived of the divine presence, in other words, the more we yearn for its return. Might this saving power be the feast itself? The festival, according to Hölderlin, is the ‘bridal feast’, a time when ‘Spirit again prevails’ and gods and mortals meet and break bread together. Perhaps there will come a time when, so over-burdened with profane work, we demand our own feast in the desert. That would surely be the final festival in the history of the world.