Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 78

MODERN AGE

understanding of leisure, together with the
Platonic-Aristotelian and medieval-Catholic
study of the liberal arts, ever exists in the
presence of joy-and not just joy in the
abstract but the joy of touching an eternal,
transcendent truth that can be both studied
and known. There is something metaphysical and supernatural that lies outside of our
self and our world, and that something can
be apprehended only by those who prepare
their hearts and minds to seek after what
both Plato and Aquinas called the beatific
vision. To enjoy and to immerse oneself in
aesthetic beauty, to contemplate the greater
patterns of human history, to meditate
upon the timeless questions that define us
as human beings, is not only to live that life
that Aristotle defined as the happiest but to
proceed, if slowly and tentatively, up Plato's
rising path toward those eternal, changeless
Forms that Augustine located in the mind
of God.
In working out his definition, Pieper makes
frequent reference to the Greek and medieval philosophers, and he is right to do so.
And yet, strangely, he makes no reference to
a group of poets who discerned in the overrationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment the same dangers as Pieper observed
in the twentieth-century totalitarian work
states of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I
speak of the British Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, who
boldly sought to reclaim the importance of
imagination and intuition and to revive a
more subjective, holistic view of nature that
would allow intercourse between the mind
of man, the physical universe around us, and
the spirit that interpenetrates both.
Although Pieper makes no mention of the
Romantics, Wordsworth's brief lyrical poem
"Expostulation and Reply" offers a remarkably succinct gloss on Pieper's work-versusleisure thesis. Indeed, the debate that lies
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SUMMER 2014

at the core of the Wordsworth poem reads
like a dramatization of the distinction Pieper
makes between ratio ("the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching,
abstracting, refining, and concluding") and
intellectus ("the ability of 'simply looking'
[simplex intuitus], to which the truth presents
itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye").
"Expostulation and Reply," which first
appeared in the collection that Wordsworth
wrote in collaboration with Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), allows us to eavesdrop on
a friendly dialogue between the Romantic William Wordsworth and his more
Enlightenment-minded friend Matthew.
Though the poem ultimately champions
William's less systematic, leisure-loving
view, it is structured, ironically, like a formal
debate.
Rather than begin with an introduction
of the debaters and their topic, Wordsworth
plunges in head first, allowing Matthew
three stanzas to present his case:
"Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?
"Where are your books?-that light
bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! Up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
"You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!"

What initiates the debate between the
two friends is Matthew's consternation at
the seemingly lackadaisical attitude of William. From Matthew's perspective, William's
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