By Saint John Paul II
Through work, man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continuous advancement of science and technology and, above all, to ceaselessly raising the cultural and moral level of the society in which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family.
And work means every activity of man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means every human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself.
Man is made to be in the visible universe the image and likeness of God himself, and is placed in it to subdue the earth. From the beginning, therefore, he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity to sustain their life cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, occupying at the same time, through work, his existence on earth.
Thus, work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person who operates within a community of persons. And this mark determines its interior characteristics; in a certain sense it constitutes its very nature. . . .
The Church is convinced that work is a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth. She is confirmed in this conviction by considering the entire heritage of the many sciences devoted to man: anthropology, paleontology, history, sociology, psychology and so on; all of them seem to bear witness to this reality in an irrefutable way.
But the source of the Church’s conviction is above all the revealed word of God, and therefore what is a conviction of the intellect is also a conviction of faith. The reason is that the Church—and it is worth affirming this at this point—believes in man: she thinks of man and addresses him not only in the light of historical experience, not only with the help of the many methods of scientific knowledge, but above all in the light of the revealed word of the living God.
In relating to man, she seeks to express the eternal designs and the transcendent destiny that the living God, the Creator and Redeemer, has linked with him.
The Church finds in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis the source of her conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth. An analysis of these texts makes us aware that they express—sometimes in an archaic way of manifesting thought—the fundamental truths about man, in the context of the mystery of creation itself.
These truths are decisive for man from the very beginning, and at the same time they trace the main lines of his earthly existence, both in the state of original justice and also after the rupture, caused by sin, of the original covenant of the Creator with creation in man.
When man, who had been created «in the image of God. . . .male and female,» hears the words: «Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,» although these words do not refer directly and explicitly to work, they undoubtedly indicate it indirectly as an activity that man is to carry out in the world.
Indeed, they show its deepest essence. Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth. In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe.
Work understood as a «transitive» activity, that is, an activity that begins in the human subject and is directed toward an external object, presupposes a specific dominion of man over «the earth,» and in turn confirms and develops this dominion. It is clear that the term «the earth» of which the biblical text speaks must be understood first of all as that fragment of the visible universe that man inhabits.
By extension, however, it can be understood as the totality of the visible world insofar as it enters into the sphere of man’s influence and of his effort to satisfy his needs. The expression «subdue the earth» has an immense scope. It means all the resources that the earth (and indirectly the visible world) contains and that, through the conscious activity of man, can be discovered and used for his purposes.
Although periods of «acceleration» are sometimes spoken of in the economic life and civilization of humanity or of individual nations, linking these periods to the progress of science and technology and especially to discoveries decisive for social and economic life, at the same time it can be said that none of these phenomena of «acceleration» exceeds the essential content of what was said in that most ancient of biblical texts.
As man, through his work, becomes more and more master of the earth, and as he confirms his dominion over the visible world, again through his work, he nevertheless remains in every case and at every phase of this process within the original order of the Creator. And this order remains necessarily and indissolubly linked to the fact that man was created, as male and female, «in the image of God.»
This process is, at the same time, universal: it embraces all human beings, every generation, every phase of economic and cultural development, and at the same time is a process that takes place within each human being, in every conscious human subject. Each individual is at the same time embraced by it. Each individual, in his own measure and in an incalculable number of ways, takes part in the gigantic process through which man «subdues the earth» through his work. . . .
To continue our analysis of work, an analysis linked to the word of the Bible that tells man that he is to subdue the earth, we must concentrate our attention on work in the subjective sense, much more than we did on the objective meaning, barely touching upon the vast range of problems known intimately and in detail by scholars in various fields and also, according to their specializations, by those who work. If the words of the Book of Genesis to which we refer in this analysis of ours speak of work in the objective sense in an indirect way, they also speak only indirectly of the subject of work; but what they say is very eloquent and full of great meaning.
Man is to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as «the image of God» he is a person, that is, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency toward self-realization.
As a person, man is therefore the subject of work. As a person he works, performs various actions belonging to the process of work; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the vocation of being a person that corresponds to him by reason of his very humanity. The principal truths concerning this subject were recently recalled by the Second Vatican Council in the Constitution Gaudium et Spes, especially in the First Chapter, dedicated to the vocation of man.
And thus this «dominion» of which the biblical text here meditated speaks does not refer only to the objective dimension of work, but at the same time introduces us to the understanding of its subjective dimension. Understood as a process through which man and the human race subdue the earth, work corresponds to this basic biblical concept only when throughout the process man manifests and confirms himself as one who «dominates.»
This dominion, in a certain sense, refers to the subjective dimension even more than to the objective: this dimension conditions the very ethical nature of work. In fact there is no doubt that human work has its own ethical value, which clearly and directly remains linked to the fact that he who carries it out is a person, a conscious and free subject, that is, a subject who decides about himself.
This truth, which in a certain sense constitutes the fundamental and perennial heart of Christian teaching on human work, has had and continues to have a primary significance for the formulation of the important social problems that characterize entire epochs.
And thus these words, placed at the beginning of the Bible, never cease to be relevant. They embrace equally the past ages of civilization and economy, as well as the totality of present-day reality and the future phases of development, which perhaps are already to some extent beginning to take shape, although for the most part they are still almost unknown to man and hidden from him.
«Adapted from the encyclical Laborem exercens«
About the author
Saint Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, Poland, was elected to the papacy on October 16, 1978. Pope Francis elevated him to sainthood on April 27, 2014.