Dorothy L. Sayers

In nothing has the church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion.

But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church (W Publishing Group, 2004) 131–132.

Miroslav Volf

If the purpose of human life is either reflection (as in much of philosophical tradition) or worship (as in much of Christian tradition), then work can have only instrumental value. One works in order to keep alive, and one lives in order to think or worship. But if work is a fundamental dimension of human existence, then work cannot have only an instrumental value. If God’s purpose for human beings is not only for them to ensure that certain states of affairs come about (the cultivation and preservation of the Garden of Eden) but that these states of affairs are created through human work (tilling and keeping), then work cannot be only a means to life whose purpose exists fully in something outside work, but must be considered an aspect of the purpose of life itself. If I am created to work, then I must treat work as something I am created to do and hence (at least partly) treat it as an end in itself.

Therefore, a person cannot live a fully human existence if she refuses to work. This is not the same as saying that she is not fully human if she does not work! For then the aged and ill who can no longer work, and small children who cannot yet work, would not be fully human. Because humanity is exclusively a gift from God, a person can be fully human without working, but because God gave him humanity partly in order to work, he cannot live as fully human without working. It is, therefore, contrary to the purpose of human life to reduce work to a mere means of subsistence. One should not turn a fundamental aspect of life into a mere means of life. Just as the whole of human life is an end in itself – without, of course, ceasing to be a means to glorify God and benefit the creation – so also must work, as a fundamental dimension of human life, be an end in itself.

Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Wipf and Stock, 2001) 197. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Leo Tolstoy

Another inevitable condition of happiness is work: first, the intellectual labor that one is free to choose and loves; secondly, the exercise of physical power that brings a good appetite and tranquil and profound sleep. Here, again, the greater the imagined prosperity that falls to the lot of men according to the doctrine of the world, the more such men are deprived of this condition of happiness. All the prosperous people of the world, the men of dignity and wealth, are as completely deprived of the advantages of work as if they were shut up in solitary confinement. They struggle unsuccessfully with the diseases caused by the need of physical exercise, and with the ennui which pursues them – unsuccessfully, because labor is a pleasure only when it is necessary, and they have need of nothing; or they undertake work that is odious to them, like the bankers, solicitors, administrators, and government officials, and their wives, who plan receptions and routs and devise toilettes for themselves and their children. (I say odious, because I never yet met any person of this class who was contented with his work or took as much satisfaction in it as the porter feels in shoveling away the snow from before their doorsteps.) All these favorites of fortune are either deprived of work or are obliged to work at what they do not like, after the manner of criminals condemned to hard labor.

Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe, trans. Huntington Smith (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1885), 187.

Francis of Assisi

Let the brothers in whatever places they may be among others to serve or to work, not be chamberlains, nor cellarers, nor overseers in the houses of those whom they serve, and let them not accept any employment which might cause scandal, or be injurious to their soul, but let them be inferior and subject to all who are in the same house.

And let the brothers who know how to work labor and exercise themselves in that art they may understand, if it be not contrary to the salvation of their soul, and they can exercise it becomingly. For the prophet says: “For thou shalt eat the labors of thy hands; blessed art thou, and it shall be well with thee”; and the apostle: “If any man will not work, neither let him eat.” And let every man abide in the art or employment wherein he was called. And for their labor they may receive all necessary things, except money. And if they be in want, let them seek for alms like other brothers. And they may have the tools and implements necessary for their work. Let all the brothers apply themselves with diligence to good works, for it is written: “Be always busy in some good work, that the devil may find thee occupied”; and again: “Idleness is an enemy to the soul.” Therefore the servants of God ought always to continue in prayer or in some other good work.

The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi, newly translated into English with an Introduction and Notes by Father Paschal Robinson (The Dolphin Press, 1906).