Work

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WORK

WORK . Once, at the dawn of creation, in the Golden Age, when earth and sky were conjoined (or when there was only sky), when only children, or the first human pair, inhabited the world, there was no "work." Only God, or the gods, worked their divine eternal play, the uncompelled sport of inexhaustible creativity. Only the primordial smith, the primal maker, seeded or molded the earth as archetypal sower or first craftsman. The fruits of the earth were available to all.

The world range of the myth indicates the universality of the theme. In ancient narratives from the Vedic, Greek, and Judeo-Christian traditions, from Africa, from North and South America, the subsequent fall from this paradisiacal state is widely associated on the one hand with some false move or a human choice based on some petty, selfish desire and on the other with the plunge into the condition humaine —nakedness, the loss of immortality, the withdrawal of the sky, the opening of Pandora's box of woes, the cycle of birth and death, and the sentence to hard labor for life.

The tale is compelling on several counts. Most people experience lack of ease in their endeavors—as Marsilio Ficino notes in a letter on the work of the mind (Epistolae 2.1), they seem to be rolling the stone of Sisyphus up the steep slopes of the mountain—and wish to find rest. Equally it can be argued that on some level everyone, even the unemployed, the idle rich, and the thief, is working at something and longs to find fulfillment in that work. Indeed, the history of labor, from Adam and Eve to the arts (or, by extension, to the most advanced technology), is literally the history of humankind.

At the same time, myth provides the notion of a deeper level of universality: The sentence to work symbolizes humanity's physicality in the world in the sense its separation from the divine, the cosmic, the natural. From this breach follows all suffering and toil. Significantly, in some versions of the story the point is made that in fact some form of work was originally designated for human beings. The Book of Genesis, for instance, indicates that Adam was first placed in the garden to work (or till) and keep it (2:15; cf. 2:5); only after the Fall is there talk of toil or suffering (ʿitstsavon) and the sweat of the brow. Similarly, according to a common African theme God originally meant the world to be a tilled garden, with no bloodshed, work, or sorrow. Depicting a reversed sequence of the human encounter with toil and ease, ancient Chinese myth relates that the primal figure Gun labored in vain to tame the great flood; only his son Yu, by going with the flow of things, was able to complete the task and make the earth suitable for cultivation. A distinct line is drawn between the first human participation in divine work—the easy yoke of conformance to the cosmic order—and the labor under which humans burden. In the words of the Hebrew scriptures, this is the heathen world of the "work of men's hands" (Dt. 4:28, 2 Kgs. 19:18, Is. 2:8), the cosmos bereft of hierophany. It is a treadmill on which humans are bound to do it all themselves, including the manufacture of their own clay gods.

Physical Work

Removed from sacred context, human activity is in itself simply neutral bodily movement. Whether the task is slopping the pigs or pushing papers around in a corporate office, work may be experienced as exhausting or, if the natural and efficient operation of the body is discovered, it may be felt as easy, enjoyable, even rewarding, at least up to the point when muscle fatigue or mental torpor takes over. But work unrelated to any higher meaning threatens to inspire the "work ethic" that so fascinated Max Weber: Labor itself becomes the end of life, at best valorized as the worship of accomplishment, success, or physical prowess, at worst crystallized into a nightmare of the most menial physical chores, undertaken in a tortured attempt to keep one's own body (and perhaps the body of one's immediate family) alive "between a sterile earth and an uncontrollable sky" (Agee, 1960, p. 325).

By contrast, esoteric traditions in both primal myth and organized mystical discipline assign human activity to a hierarchy of levels among which physical human bodies constitute only the most readily discernible plane. Transcending that plane is the world of the mind, which has its own work and rest; beyond that, the realm of the inner self, or spiritual being. Within this context, religious work is the actualization of principle through action, to be realized on all three levels.

Physical work may be taken as a starting point of experience, since one has to begin where one is: in the physical world. But bodily work serves as a metaphor for work on some other level, as in the New Testament parables about laborers, or in this passage by the Palestinian tanna Ṭarfon: "The day is short, and the work is great, and the laborers are sluggish, and the reward is much, and the Master is urgent" (Avot 2.20, cited in Sayings of the Fathers, New York, 1945, p. 43). The performance of physical work may even be experienced as metaphor, as when sweeping the floor is taken as a spiritual task and becomes a means of revelation (cleansing myself, or the face of God).

Religiously viewed, physical work serves outwardly to maintain the world, in the sense of renewing its structure (maintaining the order of the cosmos) or in the simple sense of paying creation back for the life than one has received as a gift. Both work itself, as a reflection of the primal structuring of the world, and the cycles of rest that punctuate it are ways of acknowledging the creative source as supreme. The injunction to serve the earth directly, to earn one's daily bread literally, is an expression of this inexorable law of just returns. It is honored by the apostle Paul ("If any would not work, neither should he eat"; 2 Thes. 3:10), the Chan master Hyakujo ("No work, no food"; in Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, New York, 1957, p. 70), and Gandhi in his invocation of the Bhagavadgītā 3.12 ("He who eats without offering the sacrifice eats stolen food"). Since the world itself is based on sacrifice (the supreme deity's creation of everything from nothing, or from his own substance), "this body, therefore, has been given us, only in order that we may serve all Creation with it" (Gandhi, 1960, p. 12). This fullhearted acceptance of the human condition as a call to labor in the sweat of one's face may be the supreme act of obeisance (the Ṣūfī servant of God prostrate in the dust of the desert), or it may be an act of total obedience in penance for the original sin of disobedience, as Simone Weil proposed (Weil, 1952).

In another view, physical work expresses the primary function of the human being among all creatures: Humans are enjoined to subdue the earth and thus to reassert the hierarchical order of creation. At the same time, work subdues the earth of the human body, as anyone who has engaged in extended physical exertion will testify. Not only Western monastics but the Eastern Fathers as well called for severe labor (along with weeping) as ascetic practice. The early Shakers (for whom the terms work and worship were as synonymous as they were for the Benedictines) called their frenzied exercises laboring and communally shook off their physicality to the tune of such songs as The Zealous Laborer ("Oh, how I long to be released / from every feeling of the beast"). Yet consciously applied physical work is more than simple mortification of the flesh. It can be a strengthening, cleansing, a temporary bypass of the usual, interfering complex of mental associations, comparable to any other form of meditation.

Mental Work

In an essay that serves to define work at the mental level, Simone Weil reflected that the purpose of academic study is ultimately to "help form … the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer" (Weil, 1973, p. 108). From the view of esoteric tradition, the function of mental work is to direct activity to the level of spirit (or the harmonious universe, or the gods). This is accomplished, first, by practicing a condition of attention at rest in which physical or intellectual activity can proceed naturally, and second, by deliberately dedicating the activity to the sacred realm. The outward work may be offered for the welfare of all (the bodhisattva's vow) or to the god or goddess in charge of the specific field of endeavor; or its fruits may be sacrificed to the supreme self. By this direction of attention or intention, outward work of whatever kind is acknowledged to be sacred or construed as living prayer in the sense of the Christian monastics' laborare est orare or what the Tibetan monk Chögyam Trungpa has called "meditation in action." Such mental work serves the heart of orthodox spiritual praxis, which decrees all activity to be valorized at every moment by dint of its relationship to the divine and all work to have for its goal the realization of one's natural being. This is the alchemical opus of transformation to a higher state.

Spiritual Work

Preparation for the spiritual event of self-realization is traditionally the only real work there is. It demands the most stringent of efforts, calling as it does for the elimination of such obstacles as egocentrism and attachment to results and the abandonment of compulsive human activity (the attempt to make things go as one would like them to). In the Ṣūfī classic Manṭiq al-ṭayr (The conference of the birds) Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār warns that on the path to God "a hundred difficulties will assail you.… You will have to make great efforts.… The Spiritual Way reveals itself only in the degree to which the traveller has overcome his faults and weaknesses, his sleep and his inertia, and each will approach nearer to his aim according to his effort" (trans. Nott, New York, 1954, pp. 98, 107).

Yet it is in keeping with the mystical paradox that whenever this spiritual effort is encountered consciously, the outward effort is negated. When the simple working of the laws of nature are perceived through attention, experienced as my own nature, and allowed to act unimpeded by personal interference, work on any level becomes "not doing," "nonaction," "inaction." In the words of Zhuangzu, "The mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It expects nothing. It reflects but does not hold. Therefore, the perfect man can act without effort" (trans. Watson). Similarly, the Dao de jing refers repeatedly to the sage who works without doing; the Bhagavadgita states that "the knower of truth, seated in the Self, thinks 'I do nothing at all, though seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, going, sleeping, breathing, speaking, letting go, grasping, opening and closing the eyes' "(5.8f).

Nondoing is an entirely pragmatic matter, as witnessed even by the dry psychological records of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow experience" reports, descriptions of moments in which subjects engaged fullheartedly in activity have experienced a release from habitual limitations and the work is seen to "flow by itself." "The secret of power," wrote Emerson, "is delight in one's work.… Place yourself in the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort compelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment." The arts have been classically sacralized in this sense, of course. The spirit of the Shaker craftsmen no less than that of medieval scribes fostered an atmosphere of meditative stillness in which the direction of the work would present itself effortlessly in the moment of the creative act. Similarly, Simone Weil's statement that "attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object" has the ring of an instruction in Zen art. In a frequently translated passage from Zhuangzu, Prince Wenhui learns the art of life from his cook, who explains his observation of the Dao in carving up an ox: There are natural spaces through which the blade simply passes, and the carcass falls apart of itself.

Surely this is the message of Jesus' invitation "Come unto me, ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Mt. 11:28). If the Dao can arise in the interstices between a cleaver blade and the joint of the bullock, why not in the space between an iron and a shirtsleeve, or between an editor's blue pencil and the manuscript page? In that space, work itself literally constitutes rest, earth and sky are conjoined, and the sentence of human work resolves back into its source, becomes what it has always been in reality: God's work, the play of his creation.

Bibliography

The richness of the subject is hardly matched by the number of works that directly address it at any length. Dennis Clark's Work and the Human Spirit (New York, 1967) offers a very general sociocultural discussion from the Christian view. Etymological considerations are well served by Klaus R. Grinda's study Arbeit und Mühe: Untersuchungen zur Bedeutungsge-schichte altenglischer Wörter (Munich, 1975), which demonstrates that words in English meaning "work" and those meaning "effort, labor, suffering" stem from entirely separate semantic fields. Readers who wish to address the theme of sacred and profane meanings of work may be moved by James Agee's intense, poetic vision of physical toil at a level utterly bereft of sacrality; see the section "Work" in Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; Boston, 1960), pp. 319–325.

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958; New York, 1976) presents his classic interpretation of the development of the "work ethic" of modern capitalism through the influence of ascetic Protestant doctrine. Gandhi's plea for widespread commitment to "bread labor" as a service to creation is offered in a small collection of his published statements and newspaper essays, Bread Labour: The Gospel of Work (Ahmedabad, 1960). For a document of the Catholic view of work, see the encyclical Laborem exercens from the pen of John Paul II, published as On Human Work (Washington, D.C., 1981). Much of the discussion is devoted to social-humane issues, but see pages 9–15 and the section "Elements for a Spirituality of Work" on pages 53–60.

Simone Weil's The Need for Roots (1952; New York, 1971) presents her vision of physical labor as simultaneously the most torturous "subjection to matter" and the most transcendent human activity. Her wonderful essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," in Waiting for God (1951; New York, 1973), pp. 105–116, offers profound insights regarding attention in work at any level. The same volume includes a brief discussion of physical work on page 170.

Finally, two books explore in depth the theme of craft as a way of self-knowledge: Carla Needleman's The Work of Craft (New York, 1979) and D. M. Dooling's A Way of Working: The Spiritual Dimension of Craft (New York, 1979), a collection of essays by various hands.