Dear editors,
Man is cursed to labor. In the third chapter of Genesis, man is exiled from Paradise to work “in the sweat of thy face … till thou return unto the ground.” Work, being not his own glorification but his eternal humbling and humiliation, is the miserable lot of man, his earthly torment. “What hath man,” asks the writer of Ecclesiastes, “of all his labor, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows and his travail grief.” “Yea,” saith the Spirit of Revelation, “blessed are the dead who die in the Lord … for they rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.” For those who “sow in tears,” there is a reward for good work: a life without it.
Philosopher of religion Ludwig Feuerbach was yet another unfortunate Adam. Banished from academia for his treatise against immortality, he put forth another idea in 1841 that only worsened his unpopularity: religion is wish fulfillment. We place in Heaven that which we lack and cannot get on Earth. “To feel God,” Feuerbach assures, “is to feel oneself free.” Of course, the Bible says as much, but to the orthodox doctor of divinity, this is a galling claim. Why would God free us from the life that He has ordained (and from which social orthodoxies benefit)? Feuerbach knew better. Work breeds misery, misery demands consolation, and consolation invents a God, who at last redeems us from the unhappiness that endless labor engenders. “Religion is the dream of the human mind,” Feuerbach asserts, for in it, “man frees himself from the limits of life.” (Liberated from work, he lived the rest of his days on his wife’s share in a porcelain factory in rural Bavaria.)
Feuerbach, in demystifying our existential misery, passes over one crucial implication: religion, however illusioned, remains needful for human civilization’s flourishing. Its promise of extra-worldly relief is eternal not for supernatural reasons, but because it will be eternally necessary. The vicious cycle of human life, if it should keep turning, contains both labor and leisure, and it turns more efficiently if our idleness is deposited elsewhere to gather interest. Religion promises green pastures, full tables, shelter and succor elsewhere, because we need them here. An earthly life of good work cannot sufficiently reward us, for it is absent from its better reflection in Heaven.
When we project our desires onto the Heavens, we leave our labors below on Earth. Through religion, we can conceive of a world free of work with all of its rewards. That, to weary humanity, is a worthwhile recompense—may we all, through our labor, hope to attain it.
Ad astra-ly,
Brady Santoro
Image: Jean-François Millet, Des glaneuses, oil on canvas, 1857 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).