Monday, July 13, 2009

Contrasting View of Labor

Dreher points to a couple of remarks from B-16 to the construction crew which worked on his apartments at the Vatican.

In the Greek world, intellectual work alone was considered worthy of a free man. Manual work was left to slaves.

The biblical religion is quite different. Here, the Creator - who according to a beautiful image, made man with his own hands - appears exactly as the example of a man who works with his hands, and in so doing works with his brain and his heart. Man imitates the Creator so that this world given to him by the Creator may be an inhabitable world.

This is apparent in the biblical narrative from the very start. But in the end, the nobility and grandeur of this work strongly emerges from the fact that Jesus was a "tecton", an "artisan", a "worker"

We could (coughcough) constrast these remarks to the fervor of the Doyle administration for chasing R&D/Ph.D.-"job" opportunities.

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