There is a notion, or at least a mood, which afflicts Americans of every spot and stripe: because a thing is necessary, it is boring. Real Life is Really Lived within the creative, the free, and the chosen, and the necessities of breathing, sleeping, eating, and working are servants to these nobler masters.
This notion is a bad notion, fit only for prohibition within the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Notions, and devised entirely by those who have enough of a distance from the necessities to curse them when they come; an aristocratic vice parrotted by the poor who are habituated to think that they really ought to have been aristocrats. Nevertheless, I met a man who believed in this arrangement with such a passion that he reduced his meals to smoothies, purchased in cans, which purported to deliver the nutrients necessary to deliver the human being from the slavishness of cooking, washing up and, presumably, chewing. What lofty heights of contemplation or pleasure he achieved as a result, I do not know. He was a bit pale at the time. More commonly, this curse against Bear who lauded the “bare necessities” comes in the form of a complaint that Real Life is just around the corner, an Eden one would have, if one didn’t have to spend so much time working, procuring food for children, sleeping, or convincing one’s landlord of an incoming rent payment. Knowing this about us, our Friends At Corporate have spent the last century targeting us for the purchase of machines that promise to reduce the time spent on the necessities so that we can get to—something. Jet skiing, I think. Spending Time With Family. Sex, if at all possible.
In truth, we would not know what to do with Real Life if we were given it on a plate with an index card that read “Eat Me.” This is the worst-kept secret about The Average American, that he complains about working while secretly enjoying nothing so much as being at work because, for all its humdrummery, it saves him from facing existence as simply given, awaiting his keeping and tilling. Work, reduced to a “job,” provides him with clear, achievable goals, allowing him to live out the feeling of meaning and purpose within the strict limitations of his usually useless but probably profitable task. True, this reduces adult life to a board game, the object of which is to cold-call companies and convince them to purchase security software; the prize of which is a modestly increased access to the purchase of consumer goods, like those armchairs that massage your legs. But the only thing worse than unfulfilling work would be fulfilling work, for such work could only be orientated, not towards the fulfillment of merely a part, but of the whole man, and there is nothing so terrifying as the question of what the whole man ought to do with the whole world.
Now, what the whole man ought to do with the whole world is to make it holy and himself besides, but if we told him that, he might quit his job, or worse, his Amazon account. So it is best to pose the question wistfully, as if the thing hadn’t been answered already; as if it were a curious matter, up for some debate, but ultimately decided upon by the individual—and while the individual is working on it, wouldn’t he be so kind as to consider that it probably has something to do with having sex, and that having extremely white teeth can only serve him in this regard, and would he take fourteen seconds to hear about Invisi-strips, the Miracle Solution For Bleaching Moldy Dentures?
Any moron with a Baltimore Catechism (and there are always more than you’d think) can tell you the meaning of life. The problem is not the profundity of the question, but that very few people like the answer—that we exist to know, love and serve God. Were they to begin to like it, they would become resilient to the advertisement of other, possible meanings of life, negatively affecting their status as contributors to our gross domestic product. And so—they do not. Of all the various inventions of modernity, this one stands out as its most impressive: It has ordered man to despise the necessities of life as preventing him from Really Living, while encouraging him to grind away at those selfsame necessities to avoid discovering what Really Living really means. The resulting worker is perfect in the service of profit, insofar as he will work hard as a substitute for a meaningful existence but will not work with such a passion as to exit the service of profit, attaining a terrifyingly meaningful existence by, say, becoming a monk, owning the means of his production, tending his labor towards subsistence, or otherwise resting in an objective and all-encompassing vocation that completes his life and seals it from the necessity of further shopping.
But the necessities of life need not be, at best, distraction from despair, nor, at worst, prophylactics against Really Living. To think in this manner is really just a complicated way of cursing God. For that which is necessary to do in order to live can be equally expressed as the objective manner in which man was created to live.
I mean this rather simply: When God made Adam, he did not place him on a rock in space, nor plant him in the Sahara to see what castles he would build from the sand. Rather, he placed him in a garden. A garden is a piece of earth that is worked, arranged, and made fruitful according to some design. When God arranged the fruit trees and the hedgerows of Eden, he also made a truth evident about its resident: that he always works with what is given. He does not create from nothing, but gardens within a garden, taking up the spade of God.
This is as true of Adam’s nature as it is of Adam’s garden. He was given what his wayward, modern sons are still given: a “self” which he does not create, but which comes with features already arranged; a particular, intellectual body, ready to be dealt with like so many raised beds. To be a human being is to occupy a garden—a strange one, undoubtedly, but not a waste. To be born is to move into a residence already marked with the intentions of an architect and a builder whom one has never met, but who appears to love you. It is a horrid thing, if you would rather have created yourself; it is a lovely thing, if you can learn, before dying, to be happy that you did not.
But if it is true that we receive ourselves as a gift, then the necessities by which the gift is maintained can never be thought of as just the necessities, primordially orientated towards being hopped over for something else. Rather, the necessities are our point of contact with our nature; with the fact that we come arranged as rather definite gardens; with the creative gift of God.
We say that they are “the things necessary to do in order to live.” Within a world of sin, death, and scarcity, it is easy to imagine the necessities as fundamentally arrayed against oncoming death; to say, as a soldier batting off so many attempts on his life: “I must work, I must sleep, I must eat, I must drink, I must breathe, I must heal, I must stay warm.” And while this is true, “in the beginning it was not so.”
Adam ate, drank, slept, and breathed, but to describe these things as keeping annihilation at bay would be rather like describing a two-year-old as waging war against scarcity when he drinks a glass of chocolate milk. It is true, in a material sense, that Adam’s tilling and the toddler’s slurping maintain bodily homeostasis against possible dissolution, but it is not true in every sense. For both protoplast and preschooler, life has not yet been rendered into a scarce commodity. Life is assured, and in both cases by the love of a Father: “For man’s body was indissoluble not by reason of any intrinsic vigor of immortality, but by reason of a supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it remained itself subject to God.” [1]
But this means that the living of life, the maintenance of the body and soul in unified being, the quotidian and the must-do’s—these cannot be most fundamentally described as being for the attainment of higher goods, maintaining the life against the threat of death for long enough for the person to jet ski. Rather, they are most fundamentally a garden experience, a Eucharistic act by which the person enjoys what has been arranged, walks about on its footpaths, and inspects its trees. Put prosaically, the necessities of breathing, sleeping, eating, drinking, and working must all have a particular meaning that would hold true even if we were assured that we would never die.
The Christian, who believes in the resurrection of the body, cannot blithely subscribe to a material reduction of life’s necessities, at least not without rocketing off to theological ones. For while it is true, in the limited, material sense described above, that “our heart beats so that our organism does not die,” the Christian does not believe that we die, beyond an awkwardness at the end. It is necessary, if he is to remain reasonable, that he has some explanation for his heartbeat which includes, but is not limited to the prevention of death. To describe the necessities of the body purely as activities of preservation would be to make the rather childish mistake of imagining the human person as something like a goat, or perhaps a slug, for whom death is a natural end.
This means that the human person is fundamentally mysterious. Every one of his limbs; every twitch of his muscles; every requirement of his being is, first and foremost, a mode of receiving himself from God. Why God gave man to himself in precisely this manner is an adventure for contemplation, one smothered by the unreasonable, self-grounding presumption of the idolized natural sciences, which seem to believe that because one can describe the usefulness of a thing for avoiding biological death, one has satisfactorily circumscribed and exhausted the whole damn phenomenon. It does not. Scientists are wrong, and they are wrong in the worst possible way: appearing to be right because of just how wrong they are, having, without justification, shrunk the world into its material manifestations and then claiming material answers to be the only correct ones.
Rather, man is a mystery. This is no abstraction, as if “mystery” meant “that of which I have nothing else to say.” Real results are possible: The Fathers of the Church are virtually unanimous in arguing that the reason man walks on two legs is to signify his unique position as governing that which is beneath him through reason, and lifting the world up to God. The “necessity” of human skeletal structure and its subsequent posture is seen, first and foremost, as a sacramental reminder of this unique status, this particular vocation of the human person to serve as the king and priest of creation. It is not that the Fathers would have been averse to a death-haunted description, say that having two legs allowed the evolving human organism to reach higher into the fruit tree or to more effectively kick other primates in the nose. Rather, the allegorical sense of the body is prior to the historical; its theological significance is made foundational to subsequent interpretations; a description is given which applies equally in Eden, the eschaton, and the everyday: man signifies his priestly vocation through the placement of his femurs, a fact which reveals his subsequent kicking and climbing as necessarily theological activities, that is, activities which are loyal to or stray from the original meaning of his upright posture as an orientation towards God.
This, I would argue, is the radical, political act of which theology is capable, in that such a description of reality does not presume that death, scarcity and violence are fundamental realities, falsely coronating answers of utility arrayed against such scarcity as The Answers. Rather, such a description of reality presumes that peace is fundamental, and demands an answer for why things are the way they are within this peace. The Christian thinker, if he is anything, is a gadfly against the presumption of death and violence, demanding “the peace that the world does not give,” and asking: Why does man eat? And don’t tell me because he will die if he doesn’t. Why does he dream? And don’t tell me, it’s to help him process his memories. Why does he dress, bathe, sing, and yawn when other people yawn? An entire poetics of the commonplace unfolds before him, made all the more poetic because it is true, and the necessities of life are restored to their proper plenitude as the lived mystery of the original gift of creation.
Footnote
[1] ST.I.Q97.A1.C