The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture hosted Notre Dame philosopher Therese Cory, director of the Jacques Maritain Center and member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, for a lecture on Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture. The event, which was part of the Center's "Book that Changed My Life" lecture series for Sorin Fellows, took place on February 3, 2025, and filled the Center’s library to capacity.

Professor Cory’s research focuses on medieval theories of mind, cognition, and personhood, particularly in Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries. Throughout her talk, she explained Pieper’s position and applied it to relevant aspects of culture today before personally narrating how the idea changed her life, concluduing with a critique informed by Catholic social teaching.

According to Cory, Pieper criticized his contemporary post–World War II society as being a "leisureless culture of total work," in which everything is valued instrumentally. Pieper contrasts this world of “total work” with culture described by Aristotle, who wrote that “we work in order to be at leisure.” The Greek word for “work” translates literally as “not-at-leisure,” Cory explained, whereas many today might think of leisure as “not work.” This orientation leads to a culture that is skeptical of contemplation or the liberal arts; Cory pointed out that the question most associated with saying that one is pursuing a degree in philosophy is, “What are you going to do with that?”

Professor Cory was careful to emphasize Pieper’s distinction between leisure and acedia, or a pause in activity for the purpose of regaining strength (to get back to work). Cory compared this to the “endless scrolling” or “inability to do anything but vegetate,” calling these a “numbing of existence that the world of total work imposes on our free time.” Leisure, on the other hand, is “an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet,” a “form of that stillness that is the necessary precondition for accepting reality” and “the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion in the real.”

Commenting on the difficulty of explaining this concept to an audience most familiar with acedia-punctuated total work, Cory compared it to being in the “flow” state of a sport or participating in a musical performance. According to Cory, Pieper argues that these events have three features. First, it occurs during non-activity, when one is not striving toward anything. Second, it is when one is considering things in a celebratory spirit. Lastly, it occurs “perpendicular to the world of total work.”

Cory related that she was first exposed to Pieper before her first semester of college. “As a college student, I would say this concept really gave me a framework around which to organize and make sense of my excitement about these liberal arts classes and conceptualize what I was doing in college in the first place…. This education opens up to you a portal to this humanizing moment. It's a celebratory union with reality and an attunement to being.” Pieper also changed the way that Cory viewed faith and worship. “Leisure consists,” according to Pieper, “in festival. But then leisure will derive its innermost possibility and justification from the very source from which festival and celebration derive theirs. And this is worship.”

Cory explained that this framework helped her understand the communal aspect of both leisure and worship. “[Pieper is] specifically writing to Christians, saying if you can't be at one with the world as the expression of God's glory, you're missing out on the very heart of what makes reality celebration worthy in the first place.”

Pieper overlooks some important aspects of the work/leisure distinction, according to Cory. “In a society that values true leisure,” she claimed, “work would not be so spiritually impoverished. All through the book, he treats work as something that's merely instrumental. It's a kind of drudgery that's imposed on you that you only do because you're trying to get something else. But if we look at Catholic social teaching, that's not really what we see.” Here she quoted Pope St. John Paul II: “Work thus belongs to the vocation of every person; indeed, man expresses and fulfils himself by working.”

Nevertheless, Cory re-emphasized the importance of Pieper’s thought. “I think Pieper is more relevant than ever. He continues to offer us a different vision that we can still work toward. Not a vision in which our lives are divided into this polarity of total work and escapism, but something different.”

This article was contributed by dCEC Sorin Fellow Will Grannis.

Watch a recording of Professor Cory's presentation here: