A functionary is trained to complete and valued for completing a particular set of utilitarian activities.

The ancients maintained that there was a legitimate place for non-utilitarian modes of human activity, in other words, liberal arts. The knowledge of the functionary is not the only knowledge; there is also "the knowledge of a gentleman".

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A functionary is trained. Training is defined as being concerned with some one side or aspect of man, with regard to some special subject. Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. 

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Education concerns the whole man, man capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things. This implies nothing against training and nothing against the official. Of course specialized and professional work is normal, the normal way in which men play their part in the world; "work" is the normal, the working day is the ordinary day. But the question is : whether the world, defined as the world of work, is exhaustively defined; can man develop to the full as a functionary and a "worker" and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence? 

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The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without a breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man-and that means that he should not be wholly absorbed in the clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function; the point is also that he should retain the faculty of grasping the world as a whole and realizing his full potentialities as an entity meant to reach Wholeness.

- Josef Pieper

Leisure: The Basis of Culture