All play is an attempt to approximate to the Creator, who performs his work with the divine seriousness which its meaning and purpose demand, and yet with the spontaneity and effortless skill of the great artist he is, creating because he wills to create and not because he must.

Man, according to Plotinus, is a “living plaything,” though he is more than a mere token which can be moved or thrown away in play as an unpredictable mood may dictate. He is prefigured in the Logos, the object of a divine artist’s joy, and so, as we have already seen—and as Plato tells us, the best thing about him is that he himself should be a player—one who, in all the multiplicity of activities that proceed out of the nature of his created being, imitates, as far as in him lies, the quality of God’s own creative power by his lightness of touch, by his regard for beauty, by his wisdom and by the sober seriousness of his endeavor. This eager lightness of touch is never mere frivolity, for frivolity is always the sign of a secret despair; whereas he who plays this game of God is secure in the knowledge that he proceeds unceasingly from God’s own creating and protecting hand. The man who plays after this fashion is one who is in earnest about life, because he knows two things and holds them both together: he knows that his life has meaning and that his existence in creation is not the product of necessity.

Now these two pieces of knowledge reveal two aspects of our earthly life of which the man who truly plays will never cease to be keenly aware. The first is that existence is a joyful thing, because it is secure in God; the second, that it is also a tragic thing, because freedom must always involve peril. It is, as Plato says in the Philebus, a mixture of joy and sorrow, a comedy and a tragedy in one;¹ for there is no play that has not something profoundly serious at the bottom of it, and even when children play, they come, with all the compulsion of characters in a myth, under the spell of absolute obligation and under the shadow of the possibility that the game may be lost.

From this dialectical tension, which cannot be resolved as long as we are spirits clothed in matter, there arises one characteristic of man at play which I select for discussion from a whole host of others: he who plays after this fashion is the “grave-merry” man, once again in that untranslatable Greek phrase, the ἀνὴρ σπουδογέλοιος. I am trying to make plain that such a man is really always two men in one: he is a man with an easy gaiety of spirit, one might almost say a man of spiritual elegance, a man who feels himself to be living in invincible security; but he is also a man of tragedy, a man of laughter and tears, a man, indeed, of gentle irony, for he sees through the tragically ridiculous masks of the game of life and has taken the measure of the cramping boundaries of our earthly existence.

And so, only one who can fuse these two contradictory elements into a spiritual unity is indeed a man who truly plays. If he is only the first of these two things, we must write him down as a frivolous person who has, precisely, played himself out. If he is only the second, then we must account him as one who cannot conquer despair. It is the synthesis of the two things that makes the Homo ludens, the “grave-merry” man, the man with a gentle sense of humor who laughs despite his tears, and finds in all earthly mirth a sediment of insufficiency. This grave-merriness—the wonderful word “humor” has been worn so threadbare, has indeed been so grossly misused—is something suspended between heaven and earth. “Humor cannot be thought of save in a temporal setting,” writes Theodor Haecker in his Tag- und Nachtbücher; “yet it is also one of those things that are unthinkable without eternity,”² and he wrote this in the midst of the horror of the German débâcle when the only acknowledged value was the grimy, unrelieved earnestness of a devilish utilitarianism.

My meaning now will be reasonably plain. I see the real inwardness of this great synthesis of which I speak in a kind of Mozartian suspension between laughter and tears, between merriment and patience, a state of the soul in which the early Fathers of the Church wrote some of their loveliest pages, speaking of this our earthly life as a “divine children’s game.”

The man who truly plays is, therefore, first of all, a man in whom seriousness and gaiety are mingled; and, indeed, at the bottom of all play there lies a tremendous secret. We had some intimation of it, surely, when we were considering the creative play of God. All play—just as much as every task which we set ourselves to master with real earnestness of purpose—is an attempt to approximate to the Creator, who performs his work with the divine seriousness which its meaning and purpose demand, and yet with the spontaneity and effortless skill of the great artist he is, creating because he wills to create and not because he must.

Plotinus had an inkling of this when he wrote that all things, including play, strive towards θεωρία, towards the vision of God in which we are made like him. Plotinus actually begins this treatise with something of the grace and elegance of a good player playing a game: “Making play to begin with before taking up the subject seriously, we affirm: All things strive towards theoria, the vision of God. Does that mean that this treatise of mine is itself nothing but a kind of game? For, after all, things that play, play only because of their urge to attain to the vision of God, whether they are the seriousness of the grown man, or the play of the child.”³

Now, why is this so? Is it not because mere seriousness does not get down to the roots of things, and because a spirit of fun, of irony and of humor often digs deeper and seems to get more easily—because more playfully—down to the truth? Surely Xenophon had caught sight of at least a part of this truth when he begins his Symposium thus: “I hold the view that the works of good and lovable men are worthy of memory, not only when they have been carried out in a serious vein (μετὰ σπουδῆς) but also when this has been done in a spirit of play (ἐν ταῖς παιδιαῖς).”⁴ Plato in the Laws voices a similar sentiment when he says that the truly temperate man (τελέως σώφρων ἀνήρ) must prove himself to be such in his play as much as in his serious work.⁵ This happy mingling of the light-hearted and the serious is a flower that grows only midway betwixt heaven and earth—in the man who loves this bright and colorful world and yet can smile at it, who knows in his heart that it has proceeded from God but also knows its limits. Within those limits, and because of them, things knock into each other, thus producing comedy—but also tragedy. These may annoy us; we can react angrily or we can accept them with calm good humor. They can disconcert us and still, at the same time, delight us in our vision directed always towards the Logos in his “co-fashioning” action, for it is in him that everything has its source and it is towards the vision of him that all our play ultimately tends. Without the divine drop of oil we call humor the great world machine would soon grind to a standstill.

This essay is taken from Man at Play. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

Imaginative Conservative readers may use the code IMCON15 to receive 15% off any order of not-already discounted books from Cluny Media.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is “The Chess Players” (c. 1475), by Liberale da Verona, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.