The divine plan in nature calls for human completion, as divine grace in man calls for human co-operation. Work then is the redemption of nature as Christ is the redemption of man, and civilization is the product of both redemptive acts, the completion of the circle by which nature serves man and man serves God.
History reveals two major distortions of labor: the ancient error which considered it as ignoble, and the modern error which makes it first a commodity as did Capitalism, and then State property as does Communism. Confining ourselves to our times, we might summarize the development as follows: Capitalism regarded man as a “hand”; the Capitalist spoke of having five hundred “hands” in his factory. This “hand” was a “commodity” to be bargained for in view of profit. Communism, later on, out-capitalizes Capitalism by regarding man as a “stomach” or as a living machine not to be bargained with, for he has no bargaining power, but to be fed by the State and not for the sake of profit, but for greater production. The common fundamental error of both is that man exists for work.
The Catholic position is just the contrary: man exists not for work, but work exists for man. Neither profit nor production is the end of man, for if they were, man would be subservient to profit as he is under Capitalism, and subservient to production as he is under Communism. That brings us back again to our starting point: the crisis of our day is the crisis of liberty. Shall man be freed, or shall he continue to be less than profit and production? Our Lord said that one man was worth more than all the world. This means that the right of a single man to a decent, comfortable, normal existence is primary to a twenty-five hundred percent return on an industrial investment, or to the daily output of two hundred and fifty thousand tractors for Soviet farms. This saying is hard, but down deep in our hearts we know it to be true. What have we been doing for decades but using man for production? Because we concentrated on production as our goal, instead of on man, we soon reached our goal when we produced more than we needed. We used man to produce, and now we throw him out on the street because he has produced too much. We taxed people in order to pay for limitation of production and thus made men contribute from their wages to their own impoverishment. If we made production exist for man, instead of man for production, we would not be starving in the midst of plenty. Even the present tendency to birth control the fecundity of the earth or to toss huge quantities of grain into the sea, for the sake of an economic price, when we still have bread lines, is a form of the same fallacy—namely, man exists for the economic not the economic for man.
The Catholic position is that working is to some extent like eating—it is a means to an end, and that end is freedom to develop oneself as a child of God and an heir of the Kingdom of Heaven. As we do not live to eat, so neither do we live to work—we work to live, not only physically as the cows and camels, but spiritually as persons endowed with an intellect and a will who seek the perfection of their personalities in Him for whom they were made.
Work is a condition of developing our personality, because through work man establishes relations with (1) God; (2) his neighbor; and (3) nature. Work is a means to the salvation of our souls, the betterment of society, and the advancement of civilization.
1. First of all, work unites us to God, not only by its ascetic character, it imposes discipline on man by subjugation of his lower passions to order and reason. But more than that, through the intention of the worker the material universe is brought back again to God. St. Paul tells us: “All are yours; you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. All are yours”—the rivers, the seas, the birds and beasts, the gold and steel, the earth and the fullness thereof. All belong to man, but as such they are not to be turned to his selfish ends, but to be used as means to lift both him and them to God through Christ. The universe is thus a kind of scaffolding up through which man climbs to the Kingdom of Heaven; it is also a kind of sacrament—a material thing used as a channel of spiritual sanctification. Flowers and trees, metal and machines are dumb and inarticulate. Flowers have no other voice than their perfume, and trees no other speech than the whispering of their leaves. Their mute gaspings need a mind and a voice to lift them out of their materiality and give them utterance before the throne of God.
The man who labors does this; when he goes down into the bowels of the earth and says to the gold: “Praise ye the Lord” and hammers it into a chalice to contain the redemptive wine of Calvary, he has united himself to God in one of the noblest of human prayers. The worker in the automobile factory who adds only a screw to an engine, can, if he uses his will, make that act a prayer. If in his own mind, he says: “Propter te Domine,” he has made a piece of steel a prayer, and his act will be far richer for his salvation than the carrying of a sick man for miles in the name of science. The Catholic philosophy of life is that not all the best prayers are said on our knees; some of them are said not at work, but by works. And just as the flower of a garden can take an added value when plucked out of love for our mother, so a street cleaned by a worker can take an added value when done out of love for God. The kind of work we do has nothing to do with its value; its value comes from the One in whose Name it is given. A drink of cold water in His Name receives reward a hundredfold. The professor at his desk, the scientist in his laboratory, are not nobler men if they work for a salary and human glory than the boot-black or the delivery boy who do their appointed tasks not just to live, but to live for God.
There are millions of Catholics in the world today who are doing these very things, though no one except probably their confessor knows anything about it; such as typists who in their souls breathe the divine Name of Jesus every time they put a sheet of paper into their typewriter; iron molders who mark with their thumbs on their great ladles the sign of the cross; night watchmen who make their rounds saying their rosary; nuns and nurses and doctors in hospitals who open sick doors to face in each sick bed in human disguise the suffering and bleeding Christ; policemen and firemen who begin their daily rounds of duties by climbing Calvary, offering its mystical renewal in the Mass as a consecration of their whole day to Christ; mothers feeding, nourishing, and watching over their children as future citizens of the Church and members of the family of the Blessed Trinity; and athletes offering an aspiration to the Blessed Mother before their race. So the litany of historical cases might go on, but of them the rest of the world is ignorant, because it has forgotten that work is not an end but first and foremost a means to the salvation of one’s soul and the glory of God.
2. Labor is not only the bond uniting man to God; it is also the bond uniting man to man; a kind of school of social service, a base of human solidarity, a testimonial to the insufficiency of man without his neighbor. Work has its social roots in the impotency of man to satisfy his needs alone and without the help of others. In working with others, man ratifies his social dependence and performs an act of natural charity, because he helps create utility for others and thus adds to the happiness of his fellow man. The Catholic view, it will be noted, here adds that labor must always be used, not to dissociate ourselves from our neighbor, but to unite us to him.
Communism is wrong in saying that labor is the basis of class antagonism, or that capital and labor must forever be enemies. This is just as stupid as saying that husband and wife have different functions in life, therefore, they should always be at one another’s throats. The labor of the laborer and the labor of the capitalist are bonds uniting them in a common enterprise for the sake of a common end. Capital cannot do without labor and labor cannot do without capital any more than an iron molder can mold without iron. As Pius XI put it:
Universal experience teaches us that no nation has ever yet risen from want and poverty to a better and loftier station without the unremitting toil of all its citizens, both employers and employed. But it is no less self-evident that these ceaseless labors would have remained ineffective, indeed could never have been attempted, had not God, the Creator of all things, in His goodness bestowed in the first instance the wealth and resources of nature, its treasures and its powers. For what else is work but the application of one’s forces of soul and body to these gifts of nature for the development of one’s powers by their means? Now, the natural law, or rather, God’s will manifested by it, demands that right order be observed in the application of natural resources to human needs; and this order consists in everything having its proper owner. Hence it follows that unless a man apply his labor to his own property, an alliance must be formed between his toil and his neighbor’s property, for each is helpless without the other. This was what Leo XIII had in mind when he wrote: “Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.” It is therefore entirely false to ascribe the results of their combined efforts to either party alone; and it is flagrantly unjust that either should deny the efficacy of the other and seize all the profits. (Quadragesimo Anno)
The greater the material advancement of any country, the more profound should be its spirit of neighborliness. Good roads, telegraph, radio, railways, automobiles, airplanes, ships, are to be conceived as so many new links binding man to his fellow man. The neighbor is no longer down the road; he is within the sound of the human voice, maybe at the other end of the world. Machinery then is not to be decried as materialistic, for it is not of its essence to be that, for that which brings us closer to our fellow man is born of the same stuff as that which brings us to God; namely, toil.
3. Finally, work unites us with nature. It does this by enabling us to prolong the creative work of God and to make each of us in the language of St. Paul “adjutor Dei.” God, the supreme Artist, has communicated artistic causality to man, so that he can now make things to his image and likeness, as God made him to His Image and likeness. God who had the Power to make something out of nothing, gives to man the power to make something out of something. Instead of filling the world with ready-made things, God chose to give man the power of designing and tailoring them. He did this through the twofold gift of raw material and intelligence. The marriage of both is, in the improper sense of the term our “creation.” Work, looked at from this point of view is just as personal as the act of living. The union of man and nature becomes a fecund union, and from them is generated civilization. Hence the nobler the thoughts and ideas which man impresses on matter, the loftier is civilization. Workers who use their brains to devise chemical gases for the extinction of their fellow man, are not producing civilization, but chaos. Hence the great importance of the way we think in relation to civilization. It is absolutely false to say it makes no difference what you believe or think, but only how you act, because we act on our beliefs. Nature too responds to our beliefs. The way we utilize nature is an indication of our thinking and our sense of values. Is a civilization better because it has more bathtubs than another civilization which has fewer bathtubs but more saints? Where our treasure is, there is our heart also. From the Catholic point of view, that civilization is best in which man co-operates with nature as the handiwork of God, as his soul co-operates with grace as the gift of God. The divine plan in nature calls for human completion, as divine grace in man calls for human co-operation. Work then is the redemption of nature as Christ is the redemption of man, and civilization is the product of both redemptive acts, the completion of the circle by which nature serves man and man serves God.
This essay is taken from Freedom Under God. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
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The featured image, “The Blacksmith’s Forge” (1900), by Johann Hamza, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
