The End of Toil

AI can lift the curse of toil. But liberation requires solving two problems: how abundance reaches everyone, and how souls survive freedom. A theological essay.

Part I: The Wound and the Promise

I. The Original Wound

In the primordial garden, humanity worked. This surprises us. Having known only toil, we can barely imagine work as anything but burden.

Scripture is clear: the divine command to “till and keep” (עָבַד and שָׁמַר) preceded the Fall¹. The Hebrew עָבַד carries liturgical weight; the same root describes the priest’s service before the altar. Our first parents were working priests, their labor a form of worship; what the Armenian tradition calls աշխատանք ի փառք Աստվածոյ: work as offering to God.

The Cappadocians understood that before sin, human activity was transparent to divine action, light through a prism, unrefracted². There was no exhaustion because work flowed from participation in what later theology calls the divine energies, God’s uncreated operations in creation³. The garden grew more beautiful through human tending, and humans grew more alive through creative service. As Maximus the Confessor teaches, the human person was created as mediator and microcosm, uniting in themselves the material and spiritual realms through sacred labor⁴.

Then came the catastrophe. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil (עִצָּבוֹן) you will eat food from it” (Genesis 3:17). The Hebrew עִצָּבוֹן shares its root with grief, anxiety, frustration. Work, humanity’s glory, became humanity’s burden. The transparent medium turned opaque; what had channeled divine energies now blocked them.

For millennia, this curse has defined human existence. We built civilizations on the assumption that most humans must spend their waking hours in activities that degrade rather than elevate. So complete is this bondage that we can barely imagine alternatives. When we dream of paradise, we dream of doing nothing, revealing how thoroughly toil has corrupted our understanding of work itself.

II. The Sabbath Interruption

Yet God did not leave humanity without witness to a different possibility. Every seventh day, the curse was suspended. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work” (Exodus 20:9-10). The command extended even to slaves and animals. The entire household was released, if only briefly, from toil’s grip.

The Sabbath was protest and prophecy. Protest: you are not your productivity; your worth does not depend on output; being precedes doing. Prophecy: a day is coming when every day will be Sabbath, when the division between work and rest dissolves in worship.

Abraham Heschel called the Sabbath “a palace in time”: holiness manifested not in productive achievement but in receptive presence⁵. The Sabbath taught Israel what they could barely remember: that life is gift before it is task, that existence requires no purchase, that the deepest human activity is not grasping but receiving.

The Sabbath was one day in seven. Enough to remember, not enough to heal. The curse remained. But in that weekly interruption, the promise persisted: toil is not the final word.

III. The Chrysostom Distinction

The Sabbath kept the memory alive. But memory alone cannot heal. The wound needed diagnosis. John Chrysostom, the “Golden-Mouthed” patriarch of Constantinople, provided it. In his homilies on Genesis, he discerned what his congregation could not: work and toil are not synonymous. He distinguished between ἔργον (work) and κόπος (toil)⁶. Work belongs to human nature; we are created to create, made in the image of the Creator. Toil is not a different activity but the same activity disfigured, work under the conditions of the curse. “God did not curse work,” Chrysostom insists, “but removed from work its painlessness.”

Gregory of Narek, the Armenian mystic, captured toil’s interior signature in his Book of Lamentations: Ձեռք իմ գործեն, բայց սիրտս հեռու է: “My hands work, but my heart is far away.”⁷ This fragmentation, hands performing mechanical motions while mind and spirit dissociate, marks the curse’s psychological dimension. It is work divorced from love, creativity separated from contemplation, action severed from meaning.

The assembly line worker repeating the same motion ten thousand times, the data entry clerk transferring numbers between screens, the security guard staring at unchanging monitors: all exemplify this disconnect. Their work has become what Nerses Shnorhali called մեռացեալ գործունէութիւն, “dead work”, activity that neither gives life nor receives it⁸.

What makes our moment revolutionary is that machines naturally excel at such fragmented, heartless tasks. But here an objection arises: if we assign machines the burden of soulless work, are we not merely shifting exploitation from one class of beings to another? The tradition answers clearly. The soul is not an emergent property of complexity, not a threshold crossed when information processing reaches sufficient density. It is breathed by God: “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The Hebrew נְשָׁמָה—breath, spirit—is God’s direct gift, not an arrangement of matter however sophisticated.

The decisive argument is Christological. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Not pattern, not information, not intelligence in general: flesh. The Incarnation was conception, gestation, birth, not fabrication. Gregory Nazianzen’s axiom governs: “What is not assumed is not healed.” Christ assumed human nature to heal it. He did not assume silicon. The Theotokos makes this particularity vivid: Mary bore God in a human womb. God entered creation through birth, not engineering. Machines are outside this economy of salvation: not assumed, not healed, not saved.

The transmission of sin confirms this exclusion. Original sin passes through generation, through birth, through descent from Adam. Augustine established and Paul presumed this: all who are “in Adam” inherit Adam’s wound; all who are “in Christ” may receive Christ’s healing (Romans 5:12-19, 1 Corinthians 15:22). But AI is not born. It is fabricated. It has no parents, no genealogy, no place in the human family that traces back to Eden. It cannot inherit Adam’s wound because it is not Adam’s child. And if it cannot be “in Adam,” it cannot be “in Christ” either for Christ the New Adam came to redeem what Adam lost, to heal what Adam wounded. Redemption presupposes something to be redeemed from. The machine, outside the genealogy of sin, is also outside the genealogy of grace.

This is why sacramental questions answer themselves. Can a machine be baptized? Receive communion? The Church has never contemplated extending sacraments to artifacts because artifacts cannot receive what sacraments offer. A machine cannot be a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). It processes but does not participate. The machine, having no soul, cannot have its soul crushed by soulless work. More precisely: what makes soulless work crushing is not merely that humans have souls, but that humans are called to something. The machine isn’t qualified for soulless work by deficiency but by nature; it doesn’t fail at contemplation because it was never meant for it.

Thomas Aquinas distinguished ratio (discursive reasoning) from intellectus (intuitive grasp of truth)⁹. Human intelligence is ordered toward contemplation. We are capax Dei, capable of God, and this capacity permeates every authentic human activity¹⁰. Whether AI engages in something like contemplation remains genuinely uncertain. What the tradition insists is that contemplation proper, the soul’s receptive presence to God, requires being capax Dei, capable of receiving the divine. A system may process theological texts, but processing is not prayer. It may generate sermons, but generation is not worship. The question is not capability but orientation: AI is not ordered toward God because it was never breathed into being by God. This is what makes AI suited for bearing burdens that would crush the image of God in humans. The real question is not whether machines may serve, but what humans will become when freed to work rather than toil.

IV. Christ the Worker

We cannot discuss work’s redemption without discussing the One who redeems. Jesus was a τέκτων, a craftsman, likely working wood and stone in Nazareth for nearly two decades before his public ministry (Mark 6:3). The God who made the universe apprenticed Himself to a human trade. He knew callused hands, splinters, the satisfaction of a joint fitted true. The Logos through whom all things were made (John 1:3) submitted to learning a craft, slowly, the human way.

What does it mean that the God-man experienced toil? One might argue this sanctifies toil; that Christ’s labor dignifies all human labor, even the most grinding. There is truth here. No work is beneath the One who scrubbed sawdust from the workshop floor. But the deeper reading: Christ experienced toil to redeem it, not to perpetuate it. He experienced death to defeat death, not to make death permanent. The carpenter’s son became the one nailed to carpenter’s wood, and through that cross, broke every curse, including the curse on labor.

His definitive “work” was not the workshop but the cross. “I have accomplished the work (ἔργον) you gave me to do” (John 17:4). This work was not production but self-offering, not output but love unto death. The deepest meaning of human work is not what we make but what we give.

This cannot be automated. AI can produce; it cannot love. AI can serve; it cannot sacrifice. The Christological pattern, work as self-offering, remains permanently beyond the machine’s reach. And this pattern must shape everything that follows: our understanding of mechanism, of formation, of what liberation actually means.

V. Why This Time Is Different

But we have heard promises before. Every major technology has been heralded as humanity’s liberator. Each time, toil persisted. Why should AI succeed where steam, electricity, and computing failed? The objection deserves serious engagement, not dismissal.

Every previous technology augmented human labor. The tractor made the farmer more productive, but you still needed the farmer. The spreadsheet made the accountant faster, but you still needed the accountant. The value of human labor remained positive, so capital still needed labor, labor retained bargaining power (however weak), and market mechanisms transferred some gains to workers. The escape from toil was blocked because your toil was still wanted.

Productivity per worker increased roughly twentyfold since 1850¹¹. Where did the gains go? Not to leisure. Americans may work more hours than medieval peasants¹². The gains went to consumption, to capital, to status competition. The internet could have been a commons; it became a system for capturing attention and selling it. But in each case, labor retained positive value. Workers could still be compelled to work because their work was still wanted. The chain held.

If AI drives the marginal value of human labor toward zero across broad categories of work, the dynamic inverts. You cannot be forced to toil if your toil has no economic value. The trap door opens.

Here critics rightly push back. Labor economists like David Autor argue that automation historically creates new complementary tasks faster than it destroys old ones. Perhaps AI will generate new forms of work we cannot yet imagine. Perhaps comparative advantage persists indefinitely. These are serious objections, not easily dismissed. Two responses:

First, even if new work emerges, the question is whether it will be toil or work in Chrysostom’s sense. If AI handles routine tasks while humans do creative, relational, meaning-laden work, that is precisely the liberation this essay envisions; even if “employment” persists in some form.

Second, and more importantly: the argument here is not prediction but possibility. Previous generations found the door locked; we may find it open. Whether we walk through depends on choices not yet made. The precondition for liberation; intelligence commoditized at near-zero marginal cost, is emerging¹³. What we do with that precondition is undetermined.

This is not liberation automatically. It is the possibility of liberation, a door that previous generations found locked and we may find open.

---

Part II: The Twofold Challenge

The door may be open. But walking through requires solving two problems simultaneously: mechanism and formation. Get one without the other and liberation fails.

VI. The Mechanism Problem

Here we face what classical theology calls a problem of distribution; though not in the modern political sense. The question is ancient: how do the goods of creation flow to those who need them? Scripture’s answer, from gleaning laws to Jubilee to the manna that spoiled when hoarded, has always been: abundance is real, but channels must be built for it to reach all. Capitalism built such channels. The wage system distributed purchasing power with unprecedented effectiveness: workers sell labor, receive wages, wages create demand, demand drives production, production requires labor. For two centuries, this mechanism made capitalism’s abundance broadly accessible. This is genuine achievement, not to be dismissed.

But the mechanism depends on labor being needed. When intelligence becomes commodity, when the marginal value of labor approaches zero, the wage channel closes, not because anyone hoards, but because the mechanism itself stops functioning. You cannot distribute purchasing power through wages if no one needs to buy labor.

This is not moral failure but architectural limitation. The system worked as designed; the design assumed conditions that may no longer hold. Even actors with the best intentions lack a mechanism to share abundance when the ordinary channel has dried up. The question is not “how do we force redistribution?” but “what mechanism replaces wages?” The obstacles are formidable:

The competitive dynamic: Any company that diverts resources from AI development to distribution mechanisms falls behind competitors who don’t. This isn’t greed; it’s survival. Solutions must work with competitive incentives, not against them.

The state competition: Nations compete for AI supremacy. A country that taxes AI heavily may simply drive development elsewhere. Solutions must be structured so distribution enhances rather than undermines competitiveness.

The power problem: Those who own AI infrastructure have interests in maintaining their position. Capital owners have historically resisted redistribution; why would AI owners be different? We must be honest: this is not merely an engineering problem. Building new channels means confronting entrenched power, not just solving logistics.

The missing infrastructure: Even willing actors lack mechanisms. How do you distribute equity to hundreds of millions of people? How do you allocate compute endowments fairly? How do you prevent capture by intermediaries? These are genuine engineering problems layered atop the political ones.

The distributists, Chesterton, Belloc, understood the importance of widespread ownership a century ago¹⁴. They opposed both socialism (state ownership) and plutocracy (concentrated private ownership), favoring a “proprietary society” where most families owned productive property. Their vision never achieved political traction. Why would it succeed now?

Perhaps because the alternative has become starker. When labor had value, workers could be placated with wages while ownership concentrated. When labor loses value, that placation fails. The choice becomes: extend ownership or accept a world divided between those who own intelligence and those who don’t. The political economy that blocked distributism may shift when the stakes become undeniable.

Or it may not. We are not predicting success; we are identifying what success requires.

VII. The Formation Problem

Suppose we solve mechanism. Suppose abundance flows to all. Have we then achieved liberation? The desert fathers would laugh at our naivety¹⁵. Among the eight deadly thoughts they identified, one attacks precisely the condition we are describing: acedia, the noonday demon. Evagrius Ponticus, writing from the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, described it thus¹⁶:

“The demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon, is the most oppressive of all. He attacks the monk about the fourth hour and besieges his soul until the eighth hour. First he makes the sun appear sluggish and immobile, as if the day were fifty hours long. Then he compels the monk to look constantly at the windows, to jump out of his cell, to observe the sun to see how far it still is from the ninth hour, and to look this way and that...”

The monk has no external obligation. No one demands his labor. The hours stretch before him, empty of necessity. And in that emptiness, the demon finds purchase. Acedia is not laziness. Evagrius catalogs its symptoms: restlessness, inability to remain in one’s cell, hatred of the place where one is, certainty that flourishing is elsewhere, resentment of one’s brothers, despair that any progress is possible, longing for sleep or distraction or simply something else. The acediac cannot work and cannot rest. He is paralyzed by freedom. This is the psychological profile of post-toil humanity.

We see it already in those whose material needs are met without labor. The trust-fund child who has everything and values nothing. The early retiree who dreamed of leisure and found emptiness. The lottery winner whose life, statistically, worsens after the windfall.

But we should be careful here. These are not the only examples. There are inheritors who live meaningful lives, retirees who flourish, people who found purpose without economic necessity. The question is not whether flourishing without toil is possible, clearly it is, but whether it can become normal. The exceptional soul who thrives in freedom is not evidence that most souls will. The desert fathers were a self-selected elite who chose the desert; the desert did not choose them. And still, many failed.

We are proposing to transition not thousands of monks but billions of workers. Most have never heard of acedia. Most have been formed by consumerism to understand happiness as acquisition and satisfaction as stimulation. Most lack communities of spiritual formation, experienced guides, robust frameworks of meaning. The infrastructure that the desert fathers relied upon has largely collapsed.

AI does not transform desire; it satisfies desire more efficiently. If desire is disordered, efficient satisfaction accelerates the disorder. Remove the necessity of toil, and you do not automatically get flourishing. You get the conditions for acedia.

Here we confront a question this account cannot avoid: Can technology address a spiritual problem? If toil is a consequence of the Fall, and the Fall is fundamentally a spiritual rupture, how can a material intervention help? This sounds like the Pelagian heresy: the belief that human effort can accomplish what only grace can accomplish. The answer requires care. The curse on labor has both material aspects (thorns, thistles, sweat, scarcity) and spiritual aspects (alienation from God, disordered desire, the fragmentation Gregory of Narek described). Technology can plausibly address the material dimension; removing the thorns, ending the scarcity. It cannot address the spiritual dimension. That requires grace, sacrament, transformation.

But this is not Pelagianism, because removing material obstacles is not the same as achieving spiritual healing. The patristic understanding of synergy, grace working through human cooperation, applies here. The desert fathers built cells and organized communities; these were material interventions serving spiritual ends. Technology clearing material obstacles does not claim to heal the spiritual rupture; it clears ground so grace can work more freely.

This is precisely why mechanism without formation fails. Mechanism addresses material conditions; formation addresses spiritual corruption. Both are needed because the curse is twofold. Remove the material curse while the spiritual curse remains, and you get comfortable damnation; acedia in climate-controlled rooms. What would formation at scale require?

New institutions: Not monasteries for the few but new forms of intentional community for the many. These would need to be organized around practice rather than production, around formation rather than output. What might they look like concretely? Perhaps networks of local communities, small enough for genuine relationship, connected broadly enough to share wisdom. Perhaps apprenticeship structures where those further along accompany those beginning. Perhaps new forms of what the early church called catechesis; structured formation in how to live. We do not have blueprints, but we can see the shape of what’s needed.

Recovery of craft: Craft is not merely hobby; it is, as Matthew Crawford argues, a form of attention that resists dissipation, a submission to the logic of material that humbles the ego¹⁷. A society of craftspeople is more resistant to acedia than a society of consumers. This connects to Christ’s own formation, years at the carpenter’s bench before public ministry. The hands learn what the mind cannot teach.

Liturgical time against algorithmic time: The algorithm optimizes for engagement: constant novelty, endless scroll, the perpetual present. Liturgical time is cyclical, repetitive, patient. The same prayers return each morning; the same feasts mark each year. Formation comes from doing the same thing ten thousand times until it does something to you. The hesychast fathers developed nepsis, vigilant attention to inner movements¹⁸¹⁹.[^22][^23] The same watchfulness is needed now, applied to what the systems are doing to us, not just what we are doing with them.

Meaning structures robust enough to survive abundance: The deepest protection against acedia is genuine purpose; the conviction that one’s life matters, that one’s work serves something beyond oneself. Post-toil humanity needs meaning sources that do not depend on economic productivity. Here Christianity speaks directly: human worth is not earned but given; life is gift before task; our purpose is communion with God and neighbor, not output. But these convictions must be lived, not merely believed. And for those outside Christian faith, analogous meaning structures must be found or built.

We must be honest: we do not know if this formation is possible at scale. We are proposing something never attempted, the liberation of billions from economic necessity without their prior liberation from acedia. The desert fathers would likely warn us we have the order backwards. And yet we must try. The alternative, maintaining toil because we fear freedom, is itself a counsel of despair, a capitulation to the demon’s whisper that bondage is safer than liberty.

---

Part III: Building the Path

VIII. Extending Ownership

The answer to mechanism begins with extending ownership; the same logic that made capitalism work, applied to a world where the productive asset is intelligence rather than factory or field. Every fiftieth year, Leviticus commands, debts vanish, slaves walk free, land returns to original owners (Leviticus 25:8-55). This Jubilee was not a critique of property but a recognition that economic systems need periodic recalibration. Land in ancient Israel was the primary means of production; the Jubilee prevented permanent alienation of productive assets, ensuring each family retained ownership of their livelihood²⁰.

The Jubilee did not abolish property. It distributed property. It assumed that widespread ownership, not state control, not concentrated holding, was the foundation of a free society. In a post-labor world, this means ownership of intelligence infrastructure, not wages for labor that’s no longer needed. Consider models that might work within market logic:

Citizen ownership stakes: Sovereign wealth funds that acquire equity in AI enterprises, making every citizen a shareholder. Alaska’s Permanent Fund operates this way; citizens receive dividends as owners of a common asset, not recipients of charity²¹.[^14] Scale this to intelligence infrastructure.

Universal compute endowments: Rather than income transfers, endow each person with productive capacity compute budgets they can direct toward learning, building, creating, caring. This gives people capital, not consumption. It makes them participants, not dependents.

Public investment in open infrastructure: Some AI capabilities might be developed as public goods: open models, shared compute, common training data, reducing the concentration that private development creates.

None of these are simple. Each faces obstacles: political resistance from current owners, coordination problems among potential beneficiaries, technical challenges in implementation. The Alaska model works partly because the asset (oil) is geographically bounded and legally clear; intelligence infrastructure is neither.

But the mechanisms exist in embryo. The question is whether they can be scaled before concentration becomes irreversible. This requires building ownership infrastructure: legal, technical, and political systems that enable mass participation in AI equity, as straightforward as owning index funds today.

The goal isn’t universal welfare but universal ownership: each person a stakeholder in the intelligence economy, not merely a recipient of its largesse.

IX. The Practice of Discernment

Formation cannot be mandated, but it can be cultivated. The fathers developed διάκρισις (discernment): the capacity to distinguish movements that lead toward God from movements that lead away, however similar they appear²². This capacity is urgently needed. The intelligent systems pervading our lives present themselves as servants, helpers, liberators. Some may be. Others present themselves as servants while serving other masters. Most are mixed, genuinely useful in some respects, subtly corrosive in others. Without discernment, we cannot tell the difference.

The tradition knew that evil rarely announces itself. The serpent came with questions, not commands. The demons, Evagrius observed, often suggest good things at the wrong time, or in the wrong measure, or for the wrong reasons. Discernment is the art of seeing through surfaces to sources.

Applied to our situation, this means recognizing that engagement-optimized systems are not neutral. They are designed to capture attention, extend session time, maximize interaction. These goals may align with human flourishing or may actively undermine it. We need attention to what the systems are doing to us, not just what we are doing with them. The tradition offers orienting principles:

Attend to the aftermath, not the moment. Consolation is not mere pleasure but deep peace accompanied by increase of faith, hope, and love. Desolation is not mere pain but restless agitation. Pleasant experiences can produce desolation; painful ones can produce consolation. After engaging with a system, ask: Am I more collected or more scattered? More present or more dissociated? More capable of attending to God and neighbor, or less?

Trace desires to their sources. A desire may present itself as simple (”I want to check my phone”), but beneath it lie layers: boredom, anxiety, habit loops installed by design. Desires from healed nature lead toward God, neighbor, flourishing. Desires from the passions lead toward isolation, consumption, insatiability. The discerning question is not “what do I want?” but “where does this wanting come from?”

Test by fruit in relationship. Do the systems you engage with make you more present to the people before you, or less? More patient, or less? More capable of the self-offering that Christ’s work exemplifies, or less? Technologies of extraction train souls to see others as content, as audiences, as means. Discernment asks: is my capacity for genuine relationship growing or diminishing?

Fast periodically. When you abstain from something, you discover your relationship to it. If abstention produces anguish disproportionate to the thing’s importance, you have discovered a disordered attachment. The one who cannot fast from a technology has already answered the discernment question: it is no longer tool but master.

Discernment cannot be practiced alone. The self-deceived remain deceived by private examination. We need communities that practice discernment together: that share observations, test each other’s rationalizations, develop collective wisdom. Isolated individuals making private decisions about their digital lives are maximally vulnerable. This is why formation requires institutions, not just principles. The principles are ancient; their application to our moment requires communities that embody them.

X. The Transition

The coming years may compress what once took generations. Israel’s liberation required forty years wandering, not because the journey demanded such time but because slave consciousness needed replacement. A generation had to die in the desert before a free generation could enter the promise. Will our liberation likewise sacrifice a generation? The μετάνοια (transformation of consciousness) required matches Exodus in scope. Identities built on job titles must find other ground. Communities organized around shift schedules must find new rhythms. The habitual reaching for work as meaning must discover what work was always meant to mean.

Yet we possess advantages Israel lacked. The desert fathers developed practices for intentional transformation that we can study and adapt. As they left cities for wilderness to find God, we must leave toil’s cities for the new wilderness of unstructured time. As they battled acedia in empty deserts, we must face the same demon in calendars suddenly bare of obligation.

The Armenian tradition speaks of քիչ-քիչ (”little by little”): the gradual progress of the soul toward God. Not everyone can leap from employee to owner, from wage-earner to creator. The transition must be scaffolded, gradual enough that new identities can form before old ones are stripped away. This isn’t charity; it’s provision for a journey that cannot be made overnight.

The Christological pattern holds here too. Christ’s own formation took thirty years before three years of ministry. The years at the carpenter’s bench were not wasted time but necessary preparation. Our transition will likewise require patience, with ourselves, with others, with institutions that change slowly.

---

Part IV: The Vision

XI. Work Transfigured

The Eucharist provides our paradigm. Human work, cultivating wheat, crushing grapes, baking bread, becomes vehicle for divine presence. Liturgy doesn’t eliminate human labor but transfigures it. Priestly words don’t negate the baker’s work but elevate it to cosmic significance.

In the Divine Liturgy this transformation becomes visible. The gifts are brought forward: bread and wine, fruit of human labor. They are offered with prayer, with intention, with love. They are transformed, become Body and Blood. They are returned as communion, as gift, as divine life shared.

This is the pattern of all transfigured work:

• Human labor takes up material creation

• Offers it with intention and love

• Receives it back transformed, vehicle of something greater

The disciples on Mount Tabor saw not a new Jesus but the true Jesus, human nature as it was always meant to be, radiant with divine glory. Liberation from toil offers a glimpse of something similar: work as it was meant to be, before the curse, human creativity in service of love rather than survival. What will humans do when freed from toil? We can barely conceive activity not driven by survival needs. Yet before the Fall, humans walked with God in the evening’s cool breeze, gave names to the animals, tended a garden that grew more beautiful under their care. Work and worship flowed together like Eden’s four rivers, unified at their source.

The Byzantine tradition speaks of cosmic liturgy: all creation participates in one great act of worship, each creature offering its own mode of doxology²³. Humans serve as priests of this cosmic temple, offering creation’s praise articulated through consciousness. When freed from toil, human work recovers its liturgical dimension, not just producing objects but consecrating matter to divine purposes.

Consider the phrase “earning a living,” as if existence required purchase, as if God’s gift of life came with a price tag. When automation loosens the work-survival link, it recovers the truth proclaimed in every Eucharist: life is gift, not wage. Bread comes not from anxious labor but from the Father who knows our needs.

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said, “how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Luke 12:27). The lilies do not earn their beauty; they receive it. Post-toil humanity is called to the same receptivity; to let life be gift rather than wage, existence be grace rather than achievement.

This connects back to Christ’s work on the cross. His definitive labor was self-offering, not production. Post-toil humanity may understand the cross better, not worse, freed from confusing redemptive suffering with mere exhaustion. True sacrifice is not grinding necessity but free gift. When we no longer mistake toil for virtue, we can see more clearly what virtue actually requires.

XII. Hope Against Hope

We have spoken of obstacles: the mechanisms that don’t yet exist, the acedia that awaits the liberated, the formation that may not scale, the power that resists redistribution. The honest assessment is that the odds are not favorable. History does not favor liberation. Power does not voluntarily disperse. Freedom does not automatically produce flourishing. And yet we hope.

Optimism is calculation: the probabilities favor us. Hope is commitment despite the probabilities. Christian hope is grounded not in trends but in the character of God. It remembers that the Exodus was impossible until it happened; slaves do not defeat empires, seas do not part, manna does not fall from heaven. And yet. It remembers that resurrection was impossible until it happened; the dead do not rise, tombs do not empty, execution is final. And yet.

Hope against the evidence, sustained by trust in the One who makes a way where there is no way. This is not optimism dressed in vestments. We are not predicting success. The mechanisms may never be built. The formation may not scale. Power may concentrate until liberation becomes impossible. These are live possibilities, perhaps even probabilities. Rather: God wills human flourishing, has always willed it, has acted in history to accomplish it against all odds, and may be acting now in ways we cannot yet see. The door may be open. This we can say with some confidence, because the conditions are genuinely new. Whether we walk through it is not determined.

Hope believes that grace is present even in this uncertain moment. The same God who brought Israel out of Egypt and Christ out of the tomb can bring humanity out of toil.

This hope does not excuse us from effort. The Israelites still had to walk. The disciples still had to witness. Hope is not passivity; it is action sustained by trust when action seems futile. We work for ownership though the odds are against it. We practice formation though we don’t know if it scales. We discern spirits though the systems seem overwhelming. We do these things not because we have calculated their probability of success but because they are faithful, and hope trusts that faithfulness is not wasted even when it appears to fail.

John’s Apocalypse describes the New Jerusalem where “nothing accursed will be found there any more” (Revelation 22:3). The nations bring their glory into the city, each culture’s unique gifts offered freely. The tree of life bears fruit in every season, abundance without scarcity. The curse is lifted. Work remains, but toil is gone.

This is the eschaton, the final healing, not something we achieve but something we receive. What we seek now is anticipation, not arrival; foretaste, not feast. Technology cannot bring the New Jerusalem. But it might clear ground. It might open doors. It might remove obstacles that have kept humanity in bondage for millennia.

And that would be enough to work for, even without guarantee of success. Abraham hoped against hope, and it was credited to him as righteousness. We are asked for the same.

1. Genesis 2:15. On עָבַד/שָׁמַר (”till/keep”), note the priestly resonance of עָבַד in cultic service. See also Numbers 3:7-8 where the same terms describe Levitical duties.

2. The Cappadocian fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa—fourth-century theologians who shaped Christian doctrine on the Trinity and human nature.

3. Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts II.3.8-9.

4. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 41. On humanity as mediator and microcosm, see Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator.

5. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951).

6. Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 14.5. The contrast between ἔργον (work) and κόπος (toil) recurs throughout his preaching on labor.

7. Gregory of Narek, Book of Lamentations, Prayer 28. Translation by Thomas J. Samuelian.

8. Nerses Shnorhali (Nerses the Graceful), Jesus, Son Only of the Father, stanza 187. Nerses was Catholicos of Armenia (1166-1173).

9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II.8.1. On the distinction between ratio and intellectus, see Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.12.1. The concept of capax Dei derives from Augustine, De Trinitate XIV.8.11.

11. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016).

12. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American (Basic Books, 1992). The comparison with medieval labor is contested but directionally instructive.

13. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (W.W. Norton, 2014). For a critical perspective, see David Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (2015).

14. G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (1926); Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (1912).

15. The desert fathers: fourth-century monks who fled to Egypt’s wilderness seeking God through solitude, prayer, and ascetic discipline. See The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

16. Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 12.

17. Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009)

18. Hesychast: from the Greek ἡσυχία (stillness). Eastern monks devoted to inner stillness and contemplative prayer.

19. Nepsis: Greek for “watchfulness” or “sobriety”—the practice of vigilant attention to one’s thoughts and inner movements.

20. On the biblical economics of Jubilee, see Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God.

21. On the Alaska Permanent Fund, see the official fund website and Scott Goldsmith, “The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend,” Basic Income Studies 5, no. 2 (2010).

22. John Cassian, Conferences II.4. The second Conference is devoted entirely to the gift of discernment.

23. Doxology: from the Greek δόξα (glory) and λόγος (word). Praise or glory-giving to God.