Why Must Man Work?

Last year, in the office of the Detroit-based Guadalupe Workers, I was talking to an abortion-minded woman, trying to redirect her thoughts about the appointment she had for the following week. She kept mentioning the necessity of being a “productive” person, saying that as long as she was encumbered by several children, and soon a newborn child, she would never be “productive.” Eventually, I launched into my standard speech about how the value of human life is not connected to human productivity, pointing out that since productivity is different for each individual, and the valued objects of production vary from era to era, human value consequently varies from person to person and age to age. Her boyfriend, nodding his head vigorously, said, “I get you, man.” She, though, appeared a little lost, as though she had just encountered something completely new and unexpected. As is true to some extent for all of us, a mechanistic mode of thought had infected not only her own sense of self-worth but her sense of all human value.

Hers is not the only case of what I call value despair. I encounter it many times each week. It manifests in a form of depression, in a mother’s sense that she can’t contribute anything to society, that therefore she’s worthless, and her child, too, is worthless. So off she goes to the abortion clinic.

You wouldn’t think the dry stuff in economics textbooks is connected to the personal tragedies I hear every week. Yet these mothers have somehow absorbed the notion that life is about output, and the more significant the output, the more significant the life. They have heard clichés about “making something of yourself”; they have heard that with a lot of hard work, they can “be somebody.” Or maybe they have simply driven past The Home Depot, where “doers get more done.” It is a vain effort, certainly, to search the historical record to try to identify any specific thing as the cause for this widespread belief. However, we may point to particular influences on the output mode of thought that now infects so many lost souls.

The young lady’s anxiety about not being a productive person shadows 18th-century English economist Thomas Malthus’s emphasis on production and survival. The extent to which Malthus stressed the importance of human production is obvious in his comments about “nonproductive” human endeavor. The lacemaker “will have added nothing to the gross produce of the land,” he wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), but has consumed a “portion of this gross produce” and has merely “left a bit of lace in return.” Work, in Malthus’s mind, is merely a means to get food; therefore, any work that doesn’t contribute to the societal food supply is worthless. A person’s work “does not perfect him,” Malthus said of the commoner. “Rather, it is an unpleasant necessity as the only way to obtain the means of life.”

A little over a hundred years later, Henry Ford introduced his assembly-line mode of production, in which “every extra motion, every trivial waste of time on the part of any workman must be eliminated” (Ford Times, Oct. 1912). In Ford’s scheme, the person as person is unimportant to the work; he is merely a tool of the factory.

Who knows whether Malthus or Ford bears the blame for the depersonalization we witness and experience today. Nevertheless, we do witness and experience it, all the way from the depressed mothers and displaced fathers who visit our little Detroit office to the sad state of liberal arts and humanities programs in mainstream educational institutions. As education writer Ben Felder summarizes, “The decline in liberal arts enrollment has forced many colleges to eliminate courses and, in some cases, entire majors” (PBS News, Nov. 30, 2018). Why? No mystery. These courses aren’t “useful” — any more than is lacemaking in Malthus’s scheme.

Back in my little counseling room, I ask another despairing pregnant mother, this one 17 years old, a simple question: Is the human person valuable because of what he is or because of what he does? She pauses, then tentatively answers, “For what he does?” Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Henry. Your message has been absorbed. As a matter of fact, just about every westside Detroit mom who comes to our office shows immediate signs of a certain existential depression: I have no bank account. I have no stuff. I am good for nothing. They make me think I should start running seminars on personalism.

Whereas Malthus and Ford emphasized man’s doing, personalism emphasizes man’s being. According to personalist philosophy, the individual’s meaning is not sourced in his connection to time and his temporal output but in his connection to others: the person (a specific term personalist philosophy contrasts with individual) is one “who is relational to his very core, oriented to the most profound solidarity with others,” write Thomas R. Rourke and Rosita A. Chazaretta Rourke (A Theory of Personalism, 2005). He is a part of a culture, a community, and he has a real history. The individual, on the other hand, being a temporary historical phenomenon, is an abstraction of a person, having abandoned his relational self. Personalism argues that a man’s personhood cannot be violated for the sake of the collective good; to the contrary, the common good serves man because, in keeping with personalism’s emphasis on his relational nature, as goes the person, so goes the world.

The ramifications of all this were clarified by the latest, greatest personalist, Pope St. John Paul II. “The Church is convinced that work is a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth,” he wrote in his encyclical Laborem Exercens (1981). With this simple statement, John Paul clarified that work is not an externally imposed necessity but an aspect and good of man’s nature. Indeed, the Genesis account suggests this, specifically when God commands man to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it,” and when He “took the man and put him in the garden to till it and keep it.” From the beginning of his existence, man is told to work — almost as though the command to work is part of his creation process. Work, in fact, is one of the elements of man’s nature that makes him most God-like, because to work is to create, to do what God does, to bring something out of nothing. This is first and foremost how we know God, as the One who spoke His Word into the void, bringing forth all the complex harmonies of the cosmos.

Faster than the speed of light, the cosmos continues to expand, looking for something. Man, with his gifts of intellect, body, and will, likewise expands, looking for something. All things seek their source; all things want to go home. For man, to go back to the source, to go back to God, means to become like God — and, as already proposed, in his creating (not in his laboring) man is most like God. The problem here, however, is the problem in all things: The cosmos has become disconnected from its source, while man has become disconnected from his final and most perfect love. At some point, he turned his eyes toward time and mistook its movement for life, when it was not Life.

“Why you talkin’ to me?” says the woman moving down the sidewalk toward the abortion clinic. “You ain’t makin’ no money doin’ this. And don’t talk to me about help. I don’t need no help. I got money.” Then, forming her fingers into a pistol shape, she concludes, “F— this baby. I’m killing this baby.”

To find again the face of God, or to become most like God, man somehow must restore his God-like capacity, his working. This working, though, is not at all what Malthus and Ford and all modernists describe, which is merely the externally imposed cycle of efforts — efforts that constantly must be renewed. That is the proper definition of labor, which inevitably aims for ends that begin to disintegrate the very moment they are completed. John Paul, however, reminds us of something different, a true characteristic of our prelapsarian nature, not an externally imposed necessity. In the Genesis account, man is the only one who responds in love to the creative act of God with his own work, his own gift. Because work is God’s gift to man and is meant to be a way he is drawn into God’s life, by its nature work is good.

After the Fall — or that moment when man turned his eyes from God to stare at time’s undulations — man’s efforts fell victim to the law of entropy, a gradual decline into disorder. We might conclude, then, that the labor imposed on us after the Fall, in distinction to true creative work, is our only option. Indeed, since we are temporal beings, and all our efforts are subject to the law of entropy, our production is destined to disintegrate. On a certain level, our efforts cannot claim a status higher than that of labor, and while personalism might restore a true vision of human dignity, specifically the dignity of work, in the natural realm this vision no longer can be fulfilled. We must turn, ultimately, to the teachings of the Gospel of John to find a path for the restoration of the dignity of work. For, if the translations be correct, Jesus consistently used the word work, and He used it in a promising way, specifically distinguishing it from labor.

To retrace our steps, here’s the chronology: Originally, work is given to man as the most God-like aspect of his nature, understanding that work is a good in itself, a creative act reflecting God’s most perfect creative act. With the Fall, or man’s separation from the divine, time itself suffers that separation; it becomes a process of movement, but movement that is only movement, having no reference to an ultimate destination or purpose. Malthus, Ford, Marx, and all the modern world are concerned with production; they want us to produce — but to what end? Why are we surviving? Where are we going? It appears we are not too far from the Aztecs, who offered blood to the Sun God to keep the cosmos revolving. Our particular offering, though, is ourselves, given to time’s push and flow. According to our contributions, our value is judged. Productivity has a higher value than the person.

Yet, as we have seen, Genesis suggests that man’s being in and of itself is his working. As we are made in the image of God, whose being is perpetually creative, our capacity, too, is to be ever creative, ever at work. We cripple ourselves, however, when we think that our work has to be external to ourselves, or that it has to be something worthy of graphs and statistics. On the contrary, our creating is fundamentally intrinsic — not merely external — to our nature by virtue of our nature’s relationality. Consequently, that which is the first object of our making is not stuff but — like God — life itself, which, in human terms, means friendship, justice, generosity, love, peace, and children. Our working is for the sake of life, which itself flows from human relation. When we severed our direct relationship with God, we severed the connection with our own relational source. And as we injured our relational selves, we injured our ability to do true work, to create.

This explains why, as found in the Gospel of John, Jesus directly relates work with the consumption of His flesh. To do work, which proceeds from relation, man must be in close communion with Him who is Relation: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.” These words are a climax to Christ’s discourse on work, woven through the entirety of that Gospel. It begins when Jesus heals the man by the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath. When the Jews challenge Him, Jesus responds, “My father is working still, and I am working.” As the references are to God, and the verbs in present progressive, there is no doubt that the work meant here is the ever-active, ongoing work of creation.

The Gospel proceeds to the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fish — after which, because they have received a good, free meal, the people go to Capernaum in pursuit of Jesus. When they find Him, He tells them not to “labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life.” Labor, then, very pointedly is associated with time and disintegration. In their response to Jesus, the verb switches from labor to work because in the context of divinity, only the creative process of work is appropriate to the discussion. “What must we do,” they ask Him, “to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answers, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” They ask Him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see, and believe you? What work do you perform?” As the dialogue rolls along, Jesus gradually reveals His work as the gift of Himself: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”

Boiling it down, we come to this startling conclusion: the perfect work is the Eucharist.

Startling though it might be, it helps us understand what Jesus tells the Apostles on the night of His arrest: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.” We know, from John 6, that believing in Jesus means accepting Him as food; therefore, grafting ourselves onto Him through the Eucharist means we graft ourselves onto His creative power. Our efforts are lifted from the linear process of time and its destructive course. We are rescued from labor.

True work, therefore, is any human activity that has been united to the work of the Father through its connection to the lifegiving work of the Mass. This true work escapes the law of entropy and becomes a true source of life because it is linked to the continuing creative work of God the Father. True work brings satisfaction, not because of any subsequent material profit or accomplishments but because it brings man to where he was made to be: face to face with his Love.

Let’s descend again to the gray streets of Detroit. The woman considering an abortion is not likely to believe suddenly in the Eucharist. The Gospel of John, however, like Genesis, clarifies the connection between relationality and work. Accordingly, while she may not, at least in the immediate future, put herself on the adoration schedule, to whatever extent possible she must rediscover her own value, not in what she does but in who she is. From living out her own God-like nature, her work will flow. Although there is not space here to flesh out the details, a practical way for reconnecting the woman with her relational nature might include, for example, the removal of any contraceptive implants, which inherently objectify the woman and facilitate temporary, fragile relationships.

In the company of a woman who has just gotten out of her car, I walk toward the door of the Guadalupe Workers office. She explains the nature of her visit: “Yeah, you know the young lady that works here? She told me the Pill can cause an abortion, so I stopped taking it. And here I am, to get my ultrasound!” And then she laughs.

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