On languor
In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder, looking back through the dismal mists of World War II and a ruinous series of years to reflect upon the great first summer of his friendship with Sebastian Flyte, supplies us with one of the book’s more mysteriously elegiac moments.
The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth—all save this—come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light our precious knowledge must be rearranged. These things are a part of life itself; but languor—the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse—that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near Heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.
This “relaxation of yet unwearied sinews,” Waugh suggests, is part of the irrecoverable essence of youth, a kind of fullness of being which becomes inaccessible later in life and which may yet be restored to us in some fashion in the Beatific Vision.
Time, in Waugh’s novel, is the great problem. His theme, like St. Augustine’s, is memory, and the question of the text is one of how to allow time and our experience of it to be redeemed—how to allow our faculties of memory and anticipation to be baptized, as time is drawn up into the eternity of God through the person of Jesus Christ.
This, perhaps, is precisely the glory of the Lord’s Day, a day which, at the outset of the week, allows for the languorous relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, affording us a kind of share in the great divine relaxation of Father and Son in the Spirit. In the Lord’s Day, we encounter the full virtue of rest, of leisure, which gathers up play and contemplation, which lets the sun stand still in the sky and the pulse of God’s rhythms in the world beat within the self-regarding mind which, through the life of the Resurrection, draws ever nearer the life of God. The Lord’s Day, that is, affords—or ought to—access to precisely that languor which Waugh’s Charles Ryder supposed to have vanished with youth. For Christ reminds us that we must become like little children if we are to enter his kingdom, and indeed, the very title of the novel Brideshead Revisited recalls the possibility of being made virginal once again in God’s grace, in drawing near again to the wellspring of our being, in being born again.
But Ryder does seem to be on to something. If the languid is characterized by a kind of doubled relaxation, then it presupposes our being, well, relaxed. And often it seems the case that such relaxation is solely the province of youth. Charles Ryder, of course, having suffered the early death of his mother, the dissolution of his marriage, estrangement from his children, a departure from his artistic career, and now the psychological ravages of a world war which seems forever just on the verge of sending him into peril, has known especially grim years. But most adults have undergone similar challenges, and even if the roads of their lives have run relatively smooth, the world is often a great theater of anxiety, a realm of sleepless nights and sicknesses and restless vigils, a place of debt and mortal illness and revolutions, a place, in short, of sin.
The road of human life is meant to run beyond this anxious realm into one of perfect peace, through the Cross and into the Resurrection. Indeed, as Origen remarks, the true Christian “is always in the Lord's Day, and is always celebrating Sunday.” That is, to be converted is to begin to know something of heavenly life while still within time, which has itself been brought into eternity through Christ. And to live in the Lord’s Day is in some sense to enter into that wellspring of languorous joy which evades Charles Ryder. But if the Lord’s Day is such a fountain of youth, it is perhaps doubly surprising that, in an age which so fears growing old and dying, observance of this great weekly Easter should have so far declined. As Robert Louis Wilken observed in his essay “Church as Culture” just over twenty years ago, Sunday has effectively been evacuated of meaning. It looks, in most places, just like any other day of the week.
Why should this be? Why should an age of heretofore unknown leisure be so restless? Why should we be so many pharaohs to ourselves, burdening our hearts with ever greater quotas of earthly labor, denying ourselves the straw of heavenly sustenance?
One answer, along with a possible solution, may lie in the contemporary culture of the weekend and the way that culture is ruled by the sin of sloth. Indeed, sloth, though seeming to be a languid sort of sin, can perhaps be placed precisely counter to the kind of heavenly languor Waugh so beautifully portrays.
In fact, authors from Evelyn Waugh to Karl Barth have called sloth the besetting sin of the modern age. And this may begin to make more sense when we turn to St. Thomas, who tells us that sloth is not simply laziness or lassitude or torpor bur rather “sorrow for spiritual good” and who remarks that “Sloth is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. For this precept, in so far as it is a moral precept, implicitly commands the mind to rest in God: and sorrow of the mind about the Divine good is contrary thereto.”
True rest is rest in God. It is no mere pastime or distraction or hobby or inactivity but rather an experience of a kind of ultra-activity, the sort of contemplative activity which Aristotle calls the end of human life and the heart of human happiness.
It’s rest of this kind that seems so often denied us today, when the religious character of Sunday has frequently been replaced with the ethos of the weekend, a period of mere respite from work instead of engagement with God, a time to shop and watch sports and run errands, a time for the fleshpots of Egypt rather than the brazen slopes of Sinai. We are painting it, as is our wont, a little black. And indeed, for John Paul II, the “social and cultural phenomenon” of the weekend “is by no means without its positive aspects if, while respecting true values, it can contribute to people’s development and to the advancement of the life of society as a whole.” Nonetheless, as he goes on to insist, “when Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes merely part of a ‘weekend,’ it can happen that people stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see ‘the heavens.’ Hence, though ready to celebrate, they are really incapable of doing so.”
This description seems useful to our present discussion. For while our age has produced endless opportunities for celebration, it nonetheless fails to celebrate in meaningful ways. The condition for relaxation which would then allow for the languorous re-relaxation Charles Ryder elegizes seems to elude us, despite the fact of our having great reserves of supposedly free time.
Why is this? Again, the answer may lie on the way that this culture of the weekend tends to be lived out under the influence of sloth or acedia. For while the weekend provides an opportunity for engagement with God of the deepest kind, such engagement with God becomes, for a society enmeshed in sloth, hateful. Again, sloth is not mere laziness. But rather, in its deepest sense, it is a sorrow over the happiness God desires for us. Thus the weekend, with its opportunities for encounter with Christ, becomes an existential abyss which we seek to fill with errands, shopping, laundry, cleaning, and ceaseless entertainments.
We have throughout our discussion been considering time. And it’s something about our way of being in time upon which sloth tends to prey. For time, St. Augustine says in his Confessions, is nothing other than a distension of the mind, a being drawn apart between the past and the present. Surely we all know the great challenge this presents. Stung by hurtful words, we linger in the past. Frighted by deadlines and due dates, we look apprehensively to the future. And we find it so hard to rest in the present. This, Augustine says, is the problem. For if we find it so hard to be present—that is, present to the God who is always attending to us—then how can we hope to enjoy Heaven, which will be nothing but such presence?
Acedia, or sloth, seeks to trap us within a horizon of anxiety and so to drive us out of the present—and God’s presence. Under the influence of modern technology and the economies that drive it, life has become steadily more a progress from birth to school to work to retirement to death so that, working toward these horizontal goals, we become little attuned to the transcendent possibilities of life.
But the languor Charles Ryder offers us, or, only somewhat differently, the leisure of holiness, can serve as an antidote.
Consider, briefly, three aspects of this languor—and true leisure—which are also reflections in some sense of the divine life and so can invite us into life in the resurrection.
The first is a sense of timelessness. Ryder ruminates on the Sun’s standing still for those languorous days at Brideshead. And when we enter into true leisure, we often notice that time seems to cease to exist. We become so gathered up into the present that the present becomes all. And this is something of the life of God, for whom all time is now.
Likewise, this languor is marked by its gratuity. True leisure is always in some sense wasteful. It seeks no end outside itself but rather engages in the good of the present out of a sense of existential and ontological largesse. We find it in prayer, in play, in time spent with the beloved. For while we can point to quantifiable ways such activities benefit us, we don’t undertake them for those reasons. We don’t play with our children because we want them to get 36s on the ACT. We don’t spend time with our spouses because we want our dopamine levels to be regulated. And we don’t turn to God in prayer because we want to make money. We do all these things as a kind of waste, a kind of lavishing of the self upon another for sheer love. When we engage in this—and the liturgy provides a supreme opportunity for doing so—we share somehow in the life of God who shares our world out of his lavishness.
Finally, true leisure allows for that mind’s regard of itself which is, in the Augustinian sense, requisite to the soul’s regard for the God who dwells in the inmost depths of our being. And it is also a share in something like the divine life which Aristotle attributes to the unmoved mover. This contemplation of self in other and other in self is something approaching the end to which we are called, the Beatific Vision to which Charles Ryder ascribes some element perhaps of the great languor of youth.
But where does Sunday come into this? And how can true celebration of Sunday transform our weekend ethos and allow for true leisure?
Here we might do well to turn to the example of the apostolic age, particularly that of St. Paul in Acts of the Apostles. There we see Paul establishing what seems a particularly fitting pattern of activity for the Christian in the weekend age. That is, Paul usually spends Saturday in synagogue, doing the work of the sabbath in studying Scripture. Then, on Sunday, he celebrates the Eucharist. Those of us who are off on Saturdays and Sundays can follow precisely this model, orienting all of our time to eternity by making Sunday the focal point of our activity and Saturday a day of preparation therefor.
Such preparation reorients us to a fruitful engagement with time, rather than to sloth’s degradation of time and its inclination to mere time killing. In particular, deep study of Scripture engages us with eternity by delivering to us all of time, from the beginning to the end, and reminding us of God’s activity throughout the entire arc of history. This reminder allows for that baptism of memory and anticipation which can usher in an awareness of time as always pointing to eternity, of every moment as a moment of encounter with the Father who sees us in the eternal now of his being.
Thus prepared, we can all the more richly enter into Eucharistic oneness with Christ, the one who holds the secret of time and of eternity.
In coming to the end of this meditation on leisure, we have of course used the word activity a great deal. And this is as it should be. For all virtue is activity. And leisure, properly understood, is that relaxation into the activity for which God has most fundamentally made us, the activity of sharing the gaze which is from eternity directed upon us, the gaze of the God who makes, and sees his making good, and invites his creation to rest with him in the unwearying love that moves the sun and other stars.
