Chapter 6

The Layman at Work

The phenomenology of work

It might seem that in speaking of work as service in the preceding chapter, I have revealed its Christian dimension, and in a book as sketchy as this one, no more need or even should be said. It is true that you serve others in working, and it is also true that willingness to serve is Christian and can make a task a joy. But all this is independent of what you are actually doing at your job, so long as you do it in a social context.

Actually, what the economic dimension of work does is make it possible for the Christian (or anyone, for that matter) to choose his work. That is, the fact that you get paid for a service means that you can do as a service the work your interior dispositions call you to, and then use the services of others (purchased with the compensation) to free you from the task of making your own clothes, chopping wood to heat the house, growing food, and so on.

Of course, this supposes that the particular work which is a person's "own" and is fulfilling to himself is also something the results of which others are willing to pay for--and enough so that a person can be freed from doing something else in order to get the necessities of life. This happy situation is the ideal, but does not always occur. It is, however, more common in our society than it was even in my childhood; then it was taken for granted that you got a job because it paid enough for you to live the way you wanted, though what you did on the job itself was drudgery; now, it is assumed that work can be and even ought to be fulfilling to the worker.

But what are you doing in the act itself of working, whether you are working for someone else, working as an entrepreneur for "the public," or just working on a project that is your hobby? This is what this chapter is about; how to take the Christian attitude to the work itself. Whether you have some raw material that you are changing, whether you are speaking to others, whether you are simply doing something that is observed by others, in all cases you are doing something that makes some part of the world different from what it had been before you did your work. Thus, work produces a transformation of the world in some respect.

Let us explore this, since it has some interesting implications for the Christian.

Suppose a person takes some wood and tries to make a chair out of it. The first thing to note is that there is nothing in the wood itself that directs it to being a chair, let alone this particular kind of chair; the form it takes as a chair is something that can exist in wood, but does not exist at the moment. Nor is this form "potentially" in the wood in the sense that the tree's mature form is potentially in the young tree, which is headed in the direction of being the mature tree, nor even in the sense in which the form of the mature tree is potentially in the seed, which will stay a seed until water disturbs it, but which, once disturbed will grow into this kind of tree and no other.

No, the wood can be "forced," as it were, to take the form of the chair, but it has no innate tendency to do so. The form, then, that it will take is in the mind of the carpenter, and nowhere else. Hence, when it exists as a chair, it speaks, not only of its nature as wood, but about the mind of the person who made it. It has something of himself in it.

So the first thing to notice about work is that it is a finite sort of creation. It differs from divine creation in that it imposes a form upon already existing material, and the material must be capable of existing in that form (you can't make a chair out of salad oil), and that once the object is "created," it exists on its own without any active intervention from the creator (because the material preexisted the creative activity and was independent of it). God's creation is absolute; everything about any finite being is accounted for by his creative activity; there is no "preexistent" material that simply gets transformed and no finite act can continue without God's active cooperation. But work is creation nevertheless in the sense that there is something about the object that is inexplicable except for the activity of the one who worked on it.

To put this aspect of work in a context where its Christian dimension can be seen, let us look at the created universe from the point of view of God's activity on it.

I assume, first of all, that the universe has in fact evolved to the condition it is now in; the evidence in favor of this is overwhelming, and there is very little to indicate anything else. This was noticed, by the way, as long ago as by St. Augustine, who had no trouble with it, though the evidence he had was nowhere near as compelling as it is today.

God creates the universe, then, so that at first it exists in a condition that has the basic potential of being in the condition it is in today, though it is incapable by itself of being at this final stage (since in some respects--that of life and consciousness and thinking--this final stage is beyond the capability of physico-chemical reality. See my Living Bodies for the evidence). This "initial" universe is inherently unstable and has what we might call the active power to transform itself into the next stage--but only into that one stage. If one description of the earliest stage of evolution is true, the initial universe was an explosive mass of material, which immediately blew up and spewed extremely high-energy radiation into space. This stage then had the active potential to become another stage. In this case, the radiation could interact with itself and form electrons and protons and so on, which could then form hydrogen atoms.

God in his creative activity is helping the world transform itself, and at each stage, he in one sense "lets" it act according to the laws of its own nature. But as evolution progresses, there are certain things that the developed material could become, but not by itself, because the result would be essentially beyond its capacity. That is, physical bodies can, if they have a certain chemical composition, be organized at that super-high self-maintaining energy level we call "life;" but they can't organize themselves at this level, precisely because, from the point of view of the physics and chemistry of the system, this level is unstable, and to be alive, the body has to be stable at this level.

At this point, when the material is capable of supporting a higher form of organization, God intervenes, and "lifts" it beyond its active capability to the stage it is passively, as it were, capable of supporting. He lifts matter beyond itself. In this sense, creation as evolution indicates that God "cooperates" with the reality he created in that he causes it to act in accordance with its own laws, and only "lifts" it above itself by manipulating the chance element in those laws, not violating any of them.

So, in evolution, God is, as it were, working on the material he created, transforming it into forms that it does not have within it, but which it is capable of supporting. Only a superficial view of evolution would conclude that it takes place "by itself."

But once human beings appear in the course of evolution, then the world that they touch takes a new evolutionary turn. God now cooperates with them as they put the stamp of their own spirit on the material universe; and so he is now working on the universe again, but with and through the human beings who no longer adapt themselves to their environment, but adapt the environment to themselves. When human beings work on the world, God is working on the world for the second time, and if work is creative activity, God is, so to speak, creating the world for a third time.

But a human being can put the stamp of God's Holy Spirit onto the world he works on by taking over God's attitude toward it. The obvious cases of this kind of transformation are things like the medieval cathedrals, which are the work of humans (interestingly, anonymous humans--who they are as individuals did not matter to them), but humans inspired by the love of God, who wanted stone to speak of the glory of God. Chartres makes no sense except as the world worshiping the God who created it--created it as stone, created it as being able to be formed by humans, and created it as being able to be formed by divinely inspired humans for the sake of the divine inspiration of other humans.

And it is this third level of creativity which is the Christian dimension of work. The Christian, by taking over God's attitude to what he is doing, transforms whatever he is working on in a divine kind of way.

The second thing to note here is that the goal of the worker exists in his own mind before it exists in the object; and that it exists in his own mind in such a way that it explains, not only what is happening to the object, but what he himself is doing. Thus, it is simultaneously a goal for the object and for the person acting on the object.

But a goal for a person is achieved by means of a choice, which is a spiritual, and therefore eternal, act. Hence, the person's goal for the object is in some sense an eternal goal, which does not disappear when he dies, but carries over into his eternal life, as one of the goals of his life, which must be realized if he is to be fully himself.

Let us consider what this means. When a worker works on something, the "goal" is that the object worked on exist as the person conceives it to exist. That is, when a carpenter makes a chair out of wood, his goal is not something either in his mind or in himself at all: it is for the wood to be a chair. Hence, the goal within him is realized by something outside of him, existing independently of him. And this goal makes no sense as simply a modification of himself; if the chair doesn't actually exist, the carpenter is unfulfilled as a carpenter; he has failed to achieve his goal, however much he might imagine the chair, or imagine himself as having made a chair.

This means that the worker's choices make the purposes of his life expand beyond himself into the material world; if the purposes of his life remain within himself, he is a dreamer, not a worker.

But a choice--any choice--is an eternal act, that, once made, never leaves a person and can never be erased, short of the redemptive miracle we talked about in the chapter on Christian love when referring to the erasure of our sins. Hence, if a choice has a goal outside the person, it follows that that choice carries over to eternity and becomes part of the personT's eternal life; and if it is not fulfilled, the result would be eternal frustration--which is another name for hell.

It follows from this that every person who is ultimately saved will have all the goals of his life fulfilled; not only the goals that are internal, but those which involve things outside himself, because these are goals of the person's life and explain his actions. Thus, the world will be the way the person who worked on it chose it to be, whether he achieved these goals during his life or not.

Presumably, however, we must recognize the restriction on these goals which also applies to the internal goals, and which in that case defines the moral obligation: Goals which involve a contradiction of the nature cannot be achieved. That is, if you want to be a different sex, you cannot achieve this goal, and so to attempt to make yourself into a different sex is immoral and doomed to eternal frustration. (The "sex change" operation simply allows you to pretend that you are a different sex afterward, since you still have the same genes, which determine all sorts of different parts of your body besides the sex organs.)

Similarly, one can argue, if you set up a goal for your son, say, which would imply that he must achieve your goal instead of his own (and thus contradict his own freedom) then you have set up a self-contradictory goal for him, and this goal will not be achieved (as a goal of yours; if he happens to choose the same goal, he will be what you wanted, but only by accident). This presumably would be the same with any goal you would have for anything in the material universe; if the goal contradicts in some way its nature, it can't be achieved and leads to frustration.

I would guess also that it doesn't necessarily follow that goals you set up for things where what happens to them is a pure means toward your own benefit are really "goals for the world outside you"; and hence the fulfillment of these goals is not part of your eternal reality, but rather what would fulfill you is simply the increase in your reality for which these were the means. That is, if you build a chair, not because you care about the chair in any sense "for itself," but simply because you want to be able to sit down (or make money, or whatever), then what you will eternally achieve (even supposing there to be no immoral intention here) is the act of sitting down or whatever you wanted the money for. That is, for you, the chair's existence is irrelevant; it has no part in your spiritual life, but is simply a vehicle for something else which is important to you. This "something else" then will be what you will have eternally as your fulfillment, not the existence of the chair. What do you care about there being a real chair as long as you have what it will do for you?

But not everyone makes a chair simply for the sake of some further purpose, which is then the "real" purpose or goal. There are some furniture makers who care about chairs, and look on them in such a way that what they want is for the chair to exist, and be a good chair; we would say that they look on the chair as a kind of "work of art," and it is the real goal of their work, and the compensation for making and selling it is secondary to the existence of the chair itself.

In this case, the worker has subordinated his own interior reality to the reality of the thing he is working on, or has performed an act of love for the object worked on. And when this happens, the beloved object then becomes as an independent reality a part of the lover's eternal existence, and must exist as conceived or the lover is eternally frustrated.

Thus, it is possible to love, not only persons, but inanimate things also. And when we love them, we do the same as when we love persons. Loving a person means considering the other person as more important than our own fulfillment, so that the other person's happiness as distinct becomes the goal of our actions. Loving a material object is the same sort of thing. It means submitting to its reality and wanting it to exist in its own right, not simply as a means, but as an end of our activity. In that case, its existence as independent is a part of our happiness.

Thus, the creative worker (as opposed to the person whose work is just a means for his own money, advancement, or whatever) is a lover, and the result of his work has an eternal dimension, because it as real is part of the worker's eternal reality.