The Nobility of Hard Work
AM Psalm 56, 57, [58] • PM Psalm 64, 65
Ecclus. 38:24-34 • Rev. 14:1-13 • Luke 12:49-59
Do you ever fantasize about being born at a different time and place than you were? I do. In my reveries, I was born in London sometime around 1830, and I lived a rich, full life until 1910 or so. I would have had the wherewithal to travel onto the continent frequently. In this dream world, I would have read the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot as contemporary fiction. I would have heard about Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle as a young man, but later I would have hung on every word in the controversies about science and religion that Darwin’s work sparked in essays by Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley. I would have seen J. M. W. Turner’s transition from realist to expressionist painter. And, oh, the glorious music I would have heard emerging from the organs of Paris, works by Boellman, Franck, Mulet, Saint-Saens, and Widor.
One topic with which I would have resonated was what I call “the nobility of work” issue. Its prominent advocate was the social reformer John Ruskin, whose book The Stones of Venice (1853) inveighed against overwrought, over-ornamented Victorian designs with their attendant, mass-produced household tchotchkes. In a chapter titled “The Nature of the Gothic,” Ruskin lauds the solitary handicrafts of medieval workers, whose efforts not only yielded pieces that were elegant in their simplicity but also ennobled the souls of the workers themselves. Taken with Ruskin’s philosophy, the artist William Morris, the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the architect Phillip Webb founded the Arts and Crafts movement, dedicated in large measure to promoting the morality, the nobility, of labor and work.
I don’t know whether Ruskin and Morris knew the apocryphal text Ecclesiasticus, but today’s reading manifests some affinities with their movement. The author of Ecclesiasticus praises the labor of the plowman, the potter, the blacksmith. These workers “keep stable the fabric of the world, and their prayer is in the practice of their trade.” One aspect of the Ecclesiasticus passage, however, runs counter to Ruskin’s and Morris’ principles. The author suggests that these craft workers cannot become “wise,” cannot offer us counsel, cannot “expound discipline or judgement,” and “are not found using proverbs. Ruskin and Morris, I believe, would argue that these are the very type of people to whom we should turn for guidance and wisdom.
I wonder whether one of the root causes of a dysfunctional society is the tendency to accept judgment and counsel from folks who’ve never done an honest lick of hard work in their lives, who produce nothing but “deals,” and who ultimately have no basis for any “wisdom” they might try to dispense.
Written by David Jolliffe
At St. Paul’s, David sings in the choir and helps to coordinate the Morning Reflections project.