After the workers finished renovating the papal apartments, Pope Benedict thanked them with a short, off-the-cuff address on the value of manual labor. Excerpt:
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".
Now, so close to the celebration of Christmas, is the time to say "thank you" for all of this, for your work, which encourages me - just as you have given everything - to give on my part, at this late stage in my life, everything that I can give.
The Catholic theologian friend who sent it to me remarked:
Things really take off in the final paragraphs, but one can see the gratitude of a man who, while self-admittedly incompetent in sports and matters mechanical (is the Pope a metrosexual himself?!), knows from his rural Bavarian upbringing the meaning of work and the dignity of workers.
True dat. A beautiful talk. Can you imagine being a carpenter who was praised in that way by the Successor of Peter?
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The contempt for the banausic pursuits in classical Greece stemmed from the deprivation of that leisure which alone provided for the intellectually stimulating hobbies of political chit-chat in the agora. Classical Athens was a hotbed of talking heads. Whether slave or freeman, a citizen could not concern himself with the banality of manual labor.
Benedict makes the interesting juxtaposition of the Hellenic and Biblical estimations of manual labor. That manual labor is not an impediment to philosophic or theologic excellence is amply attested in the tent-maker Paul and the lens-grinder Spinoza.
That Benedict can so movingly draw out the human element from such a simple moment of expressing gratitude (and extemporaneously as well), testifies to his profound humanity, his humaneness. All the more admirable in a man who undoubtedly counts, as did Bacon, as did Cicero, among his dearest friends those books which found a new home in the renovated apartment.
As the edifice of Peter has rotted from within, let us hope that this "late stage in his life" is but a prelude to many more years of his own restorative work for the Church.
Another interesting angle on this pontiff: his love for classical music.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E4DE1331F932A35756C0A9639C8B63
I believe that what his majesty the Pope calls "Greek world" was coined by several city-states and had different views regarding "labour and trade":
When the Pope speaks of the "Greek world" I think he is referring primarily to the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean that resulted from Alexander's conquests, not the city states of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.
It was the Hellenistic civilization that encountered first Judaism and then Christianity. And it's through that civilization (as appropriated by the Romans and later transformed by Christianity) that Greek thought has come down to us.
Arguably, the greatest respect for manual labor is to be found in the Jewish tradition, which tells us that "the father who does not teach his son a trade is teaching him to be a thief."
When I was kid I was told that work was imposed on humankind to expiate the original sin commited by the forefathers in Paradise (Genesis 3:19). Work seen as a burden and punishment since Adam was fired from Garden of Eden, that "was" the biblical tradition, and I promise to be much younger than the Pope...
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