On Josef Pieper

I. Introduction

The original of this Paper was presented at the 2019 Meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society.[1] Its title was “The Political Philosophy of Josef Pieper.” After proposing the title, and then studying Pieper’s work in some detail, I decided I should have put a question mark at the end of the title rather than a period. Pieper was a philosopher, which, given his own definition of the term, meant that he was concerned with the totality of being, of which politics is, of course, a part. But he was not a “political philosopher” per se. His concern was not with political forms, but with culture. He often referred to the “great tradition of Western culture.” And his significance as a thinker lies not so much in originality as in his faithful embodiment of that “great tradition,” his concern over its loss in modernity, and his work in the service of its recovery. His thoughts on politics are usually enmeshed in what he has to say about culture. So the title of this Paper is now simply “On Josef Pieper,” and it ranges over his thoughts not only on politics, but more so on philosophy and theology, and the relationship between the two.

What was the “great tradition of Western culture” about which Pieper so often spoke? He maintained that at its core, it consisted of the synthesis of philosophy and theology achieved by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century:

“In this synthesis of a theologically founded worldliness and a theology open to the world, a synthesis Thomas forged with the full energies of his inner being, a culmination was reached. Here was the structure toward which the whole intellectual effort of Christian thinking about the world . . . had been aiming and toward which this whole era of Christendom was directed: . . . the conjunction of reason with faith.”[2]

Pieper continued along the same lines: “[T]he person who for the first time clearly enunciated” “the principle which expresses the essence of the Christian West” was Aquinas.[3] For Pieper, the thought of Aquinas remains “something exemplary, a paradigm and model, a standard which ‘really ought’ to be met.”[4]

But Pieper also acknowledged that the “intellectual structure” erected by Thomas was “not only very highly differentiated; it was also fearfully imperiled and fragile. It had no sooner been erected than it was beset by the forces of disintegration.”[5] The “worldliness” of Aristotle, upon which Aquinas so heavily drew, “was naturally linked with the peril of compete secularization.”[6] And so those forces, which Pieper traced in his book on Scholasticism,[7] led, Pieper claimed, to the modern world, with its chasm between God and world, the subject of Pieper’s great lament.

The theme of Scholasticism was how thinkers from Boethius through Aquinas joined faith to reason, and how thinkers after Aquinas, such as Siger of Brabant and William of Ockham, sundered that joinder, thereby marking the end of the medieval period and the beginning of modernity. In his project of recovery, Pieper referred, not nostalgically, to “the inexhaustible contemporaneity of the Middle Ages,” [8] which Scholasticism vividly brings to our attention.

In our world, so quick to label and be done with, it is dangerous to begin a meditation on a great thinker by tying him to another, even greater thinker. And so we wish to stress that while Aquinas was his “mentor,” so to speak, Pieper rejected all “ism”s, including, perhaps especially, “Thomism,” which, Pieper flatly said, “cannot really exist.”[9] Pieper was just as familiar with Plato and Aristotle, with Sartre and Heidegger, as he was with Scholasticism. Indeed, Father Schall said that “Almost every book of Josef Pieper is, in some sense, a commentary on Plato.”[10] That is one reason Pieper is so congenial to Voegelinians. Moreover, as with Aquinas, and, from a different perspective, Voegelin, Pieper’s thought reflects the fundamental accord between Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian revelation.

One more thing about Pieper’s background, which colors all his thought. He was a Roman Catholic, and not in name only. For example, in agreeing with Meister Eckhart that “people should not think so much about what they ought to do; they should think about what they ought to be,” he said that “The answer to the question about the Christian exemplar for man . . . can be expressed exhaustively in a single word: Christ.”[11]

II. Pieper and Political Philosophy

Having briefly introduced Pieper, we return to the subject of political philosophy. While much, if not all, of what Pieper wrote is relevant to the larger implications of political order, and while I want to devote most of this study to Pieper on other subjects, let me mention a few of his works which bear more on politics than others.

(1)       The Virtues as the Bases of Political Order

Well in advance of Alasdair MacIntyre, Pieper, reacting against very crabbed readings of Aquinas and the rules-based morality embraced by the Catholic Church, worked to recover virtue ethics by writing wonderfully fresh treatises on each of the four cardinal[12] and the three theological virtues.[13] Pieper agreed with Aristotle that political science must begin with ethics, and that ethics is primarily about the virtues.

(2)       Leisure and Totalitarianism

Leisure: The Basis of Culture,[14] probably Pieper’s best known book, was written out of a concern with the totalitarian tendency in all modern societies to elevate work over leisure, to reverse Aristotle’s maxim that we work in order to have leisure, rather than having leisure in order to work.[15] In Leisure, Pieper begged modernity to recover the most important human activity, which is the “passive activity” of contemplation, the activity in which we allow being to disclose itself to us, rather than trying to impose our will upon it. In the totalitarian state—and here Pieper’s focus on the political appears—the heart of what is human is not only lost, but prohibited in positive law. Being cannot disclose itself when we are trying to manipulate it.

(3)       Politics and Language

Pieper’s short work, “The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power,” provides a marvelously concise description of sophists, both in Plato’s dialogues and in modernity, as those who corrupt language for purposes of power.[16]

Aristotle, like Plato, recognized the central importance of language in politics, beginning his philosophical analysis of politics by noting that we are political animals by nature because we alone of all the animals have the faculty of language, by which we can declare what is right and wrong, just and unjust.[17] When language is corrupted for purposes of power, as in our world, both political and personal disorder follow.

“The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power” may be a little known part of Pieper’s work, but it is so compelling and contemporary that I include, below, a longer discussion of some of its major points.

Pieper stated his intention at the beginning of the essay as wanting to treat the relationship between “the abuse of language” and “the abuse of power” by

“. . . treat[ing] the position and arguments of Plato as an exemplar from which, I believe, we can learn something about ourselves and our own situation here and now. Considerable evidence exists that Plato regarded his Sophist contemporaries as a threat to the intellectual and social life of his time and that he explicitly called attention to this threat, which, moreover, exists in every society and in every age. Thus whatever, in the following discussion, appears to represent a mere description and interpretation of past history, also applies to contemporary events. Conversely, whatever may sound like nothing more than a critical appraisal of contemporary life, should at the same time be interpreted as an allusion to an eternal temptation which, throughout the course of history, man has always been, and always will be, called upon to resist.”[18]

Pieper stressed the importance of language, of the “word”: “It is above all in the word that human existence comes to pass. And thus if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed. . . . the fate of society and the fate of the word are inseparable.”[19]

Pieper continued:

“By its very nature—in other words always—the human word achieves two things, which in turn suggests the existence of two ways in which the word can be corrupted. Its first achievement is the fact that reality becomes manifest through the word. One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name in order, of course, to make it known to someone else. And here we perceive the second achievement of the word: its character as communication. The word is the sign of a thing as well as a sign for someone else—namely for that person to whom one wants to reveal reality. Although it is possible for us to distinguish between these two aspects of the word and of language, neither exists in isolation. We never find one without the other. Even a person who, in calling a certain fact by name, appears to have nothing in mind but the object itself, is (naturally) at the same time addressing a partner: For anyone who speaks has a desire to communicate. But what could one person “communicate” to another [to communicate is to “make common” or share] except something which really is what he says it is? Of course people are capable of lying. But can a lie, strictly speaking, constitute communication, given the fact that the person who is lied to only appears to share in a reality?”

“Thus clearly the two potential forms of the corruption of the word are: the corruption of the link between the word and reality, and the corruption of the word as communication. And Socrates in fact charges the Sophist “rhetoricians” with engaging in both these types of corruption. The same indictment, the same accusation reappears over and over in the dialogues of Plato.”[20]

Pieper said that “. . . once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place. . . . The Sophist: a fabricator of a fictitious reality. This definition was formulated by Plato toward the end of his life. It represents his final answer to the question with which he had been wrestling all his life: What was it that was really so bad about the Sophists? His definition represents a truly disheartening notion: the notion of man living his life surrounded by illusory realities whose fictitious character is threatening to become wholly undetectable!”[21] Pieper “find[s] this nightmare vision of Plato’s disconcertingly timely,” mentioning the modern entertainment industry and the modern media.[22]

In his conclusion, Pieper noted that Plato opposed to the Sophists the good which they “compromised and threatened,” and that Plato expressed certain elements of [Plato’s ultimate view of the meaning of intellectual or rational existence as a whole] in three concise propositions.

Proposition One: “The good of man,” and a meaningful human existence, consists, as far as possible, in seeing things as they are, and in living and acting in accordance with the truth thus apprehended. Proposition Two: Thus man’s chief nourishment is truth. This does not apply only to the man of knowledge, the philosopher, the scientist. Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth. Society too lives on the public availability, the public manifestation of truth. The more the depth and breadth of the real world is revealed and made accessible, the richer existence becomes. Proposition Three: The natural habitat of truth is human conversation. Truth is enacted in dialogue, in discussion, in discourse: in other words, in language and the word. Thus the order of existence, including societal existence, is essentially based on the order of language, and is shaped by whether or not language is “in order.”[23]

Pieper looked especially to the academy as “a ‘zone of truth’ [that] is deliberately set aside in the midst of society” where truth may flourish:

“We have all seen dramatic proof of what it can mean to a nation to possess such a sanctuary—or not to possess it. . . . [man] is a being whose existence unfolds primarily on an intellectual plane, and thus suffers even more when he is not allowed to speak and communicate, i.e., to express publicly, what, in his own best judgment, is the true nature of things. . . . “

. . . “‘academic’ means, in effect, “antisophistical,” and thus to be academic means, at the same time, to resist everything which impugns or destroys the absolute candor of the word in its expression of the bond with reality and in its character as communication. . . .”

“. . . the academic community represents a political reality of the utmost importance. For our institution of higher learning should, as a model and norm, realize the foundation on which all political life is based: the untrammelled human communication with regard for the reality, the reality of the world and of ourselves.”[24]

Pieper’s brief essay calls to mind Solzhenitsyn’s quotation of the Russian proverb, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world,”[25] and, even more importantly, the beginning of St. John’s Gospel.

(4)       Pieper and Utopianism

Pieper did write separately on politics in the narrower sense in a short book entitled Rules of the Game in Social Relationships.[26] Pieper wrote Rules because he was struck by the naivety of a single “utopian” sentence written in 1976 by Max Frisch, someone Pieper admired, “above all for his realistic mistrust of any kind of ideology.”[27] Frisch was writing on the hope for peace after Hiroshima, and, at the time, the general idea was that peace could not be achieved through military or diplomatic strategies. Instead, said Frisch, “peace could only be ‘achieved through the restructuring of society into a community.’”[28] Pieper referred to this as a “terrifying oversimplification,” a “utopian” speculation, and said, “In my opinion, a utopia . . . has no value from the outset, if it is clearly in contradiction with reality.”[29] In Rules, Pieper went on to draw very careful distinctions between three types of human associations, which he called “community,” “society,” and “organization,” with the purpose of demonstrating that conflating them, as Frisch proposed, caried potentially dangerous consequences.

Pieper’s “anti-utopianism” is also manifest in his larger work, to which we now turn.

III. Philosophy and Theology, Reason and Revelation, in Pieper

I want to focus now on the one thing that struck me most forcefully in reading Pieper, which is the intimate closeness of philosophy and theology, of reason and faith, in his thought, and how he achieved this closeness. Inasmuch as a thinker’s political philosophy is a function of his overall philosophy, which will often be a function of his theology—think, for example, of Eric Voegelin–the subject to be considered is not too far removed from our consideration above of Pieper’s political thought.

While Pieper was a student of Aquinas, who achieved the synthesis of philosophy and theology in Western thought, and while Pieper’s synthesis is obviously profoundly influenced by Aquinas, Pieper arrived at his synthesis in his own way, principally through his understanding of what it means to philosophize. We might say that Pieper presents us with a contemporary synthesis, although one jarring to contemporary ears. Now Pieper does draw a fundamental distinction between what a real philosopher does and what a real theologian does, although it is on the very basis of that distinction that his synthesis is made possible.

The task of the philosopher, he said, is the consideration of the totality of being. To philosophize is to “consider[] the whole of the universe and the whole of existence.”[30] The philosopher may not disregard any aspect of being.

The task of the theologian is more limited, but more important, namely, the study of what Pieper called “sacred tradition,” by which he meant revelation in the broadest sense, whether it takes the form of the Platonic Myths, the Bible, or some other form. “Theology,” said Pieper, “is not something primary, but something secondary. The primary thing, which is presupposed by theology, is a body of traditional pronouncements which are believed to have been revealed, not to have come into being through human interpretation of reality, but, as Plato puts it, to ‘have come down from a divine source.’ Now theology is the human endeavor to interpret this body of tradition out of itself, by ordering it and weighing it.”[31]

In another work, emphasizing the need to keep theology “current,” Pieper said that theology is

“. . . exactly . . . the translation, which has to be revised over and over again under continually changing circumstances, of the ‘original texts’ of the tradita into a form that can be understood by the present historical moment. . . . A theology . . . which does not concern itself before anything else with the task of preserving through the ages the divine revelation that has been proclaimed to mankind alive and identical, which perhaps instead of this is occupied with reflecting and interpreting in a relevant way the religious impulse of the age (or what are taken for religious impulses)—if possible using biblical concepts and terminology—such a theology does not deserve the name ‘theology.’”[32]

These are the conceptual distinctions Pieper drew between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, and they are clear on their surface. What is it then that brings philosophy and theology so closely together throughout the vast range of Pieper’s work? I want to suggest three things, which may briefly be described as follows:

First, precisely because for Pieper philosophy considers all that there is, it must consider revelation, together with the work theologians perform in connection with revelation, and because revelation is the word of God, philosophy must consider it in a special way. Pieper maintained that philosophy presupposes revelation, and does not exist without it.

Second, reason, the instrument used by the philosopher, consists, Pieper maintained, not just in ratio, discursive thought, which requires labor to achieve its results, but also in intellectus, intuitive thought, which does not require labor but passivity, openness to the possibility of the receipt of wisdom via gift, openness to the disclosure of being by being. The conclusions the philosopher reaches through intellectus are not dissimilar to the messages conveyed in revelation.

Third, in Pieper’s philosophical anthropology, man is characterized as status viator, a created being who stands between being and nothingness, with an orientation to being, whose most appropriate response to his situation is the virtue of hope, a concept that is used by Pieper much as mextaxy is used by Eric Voegelin. The theme of man as hopeful, but severely limited, appears not only in Pieper’s anthropology and ontology, but in his epistemology and ethics as well, reflecting the inherent limits on human knowledge in both the theoretical and practical spheres. Recognizing those limits in humility, Pieper’s philosopher will recognize the limits of reason, and so be more open to what has been revealed.

The remainder of the Paper will consider those points in that order.

(1) Philosophy and “Sacred Tradition”

First, and principally, philosophy and theology come together for Pieper because, as a philosopher, he is charged with taking into account all that is, and that of course includes sacred tradition.

Pieper never claimed to be “more than” a philosopher. Indeed, he denied having the competence of a theologian. However, since the purpose of philosophy is to consider the totality of being, and since sacred tradition is not only a part of being, but, according to Pieper, the most important part, the philosopher must consider theology even if the philosopher does not consider himself to be a theologian. It would be a violation of the philosopher’s calling to disregard revelation. However, on Pieper’s understanding, the philosopher may not just take sacred tradition into account as another piece of information about reality. Rather, because of what sacred tradition is, the philosopher must, in an existential sense, first take sacred tradition into himself.

By “tradition,” Pieper did not mean what someone like Edmund Burke meant by it, that is, a practice sanctioned by prudent human invention and continued long practice. “Tradition” in Pieper’s usage is of sacred origin.

“I do not accept the traditum ‘because it is traditional,’” said Pieper, “but because I am convinced that it is true and valid. Whether this is correct, I cannot verify by means of experience or rational argument. . . . Otherwise, I would not need to hear the message from someone else; I would already know it myself. Taken all together, this means that accepting and receiving tradition has the structure of belief. It is belief. . . .”[33]

It is belief in the original source of revelation, the gods or God, and then in those who handed down its content–in, as Plato often put it, the “ancients.”[34] Who were the “ancients”? They remain anonymous in Plato. They are not like the characters in the dialogues, who appear and have names. In the Philebus, Socrates said: “A gift from the gods was brought down by a certain (unknown) Prometheus in bright gleam of fire and the ancients . . . better than we and dwelling closer to the gods, handed down . . . this saying to us.”[35] This is, of course, how revelation is thought of also in the Judeo-Christian dispensation, although we could name, for example, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As with Plato’s “ancients,” all of them “are thought of,” as Pieper says, “as the first recipients and transmitters of a theios logos, a divine speech, a word of God.”[36]

Moderns can only be shocked at how far Pieper goes here. A philosopher, he said, must consider sacred tradition not just “from the outside,” but from the “inside,” that is, he must enter into it personally, on an existential level. “For me,” said Pieper, “philosophizing is reflecting on the whole of what meets us in experience from every possible aspect in its fundamental significance.”[37] The philosopher will thus notice, among other things, that there is such a thing as sacred tradition. What weight should he give it? How should he deal with it? Pieper answered:

We ought to admit that [the philosopher] will not succeed in dealing with it at all—unless he stands as a person in a tradition and participates in it as a believing hearer. But is this not the same thing as saying that tradition really does not concern me “as” a practitioner of philosophy? No, it is not at all the same thing! Rather it means the following. After and insofar as I as a person am actually participating in a tradition, or, to put it another way, insofar as I actually accept the tradita of sacred tradition as truth for whatever reasons (but of course not uncritically or arbitrarily), then and only then do I have the capacity to practice philosophy seriously, i.e., to reflect on my subject under any possible consideration, if I include the information that has been explicitly handed down within the discussions. This is just as true for a Greek of the time of Socrates as for a contemporary Christian.[38]

Pieper could not be clearer, nor could his understanding of philosophy be more at odds with that of many modern, merely “academic” “philosophers.” While the philosopher considers more than the theologian, the philosopher, in so far as he can validly claim to philosophize at all, must stand within, that is, actually believe in the sacred tradition handed down and interpreted by the theologian. The philosopher, that is, must have not only knowledge, the knowledge he gains by his study of the totality of being, but also faith, the faith that he gains by entering into the sacred tradition, the most important part of being that he studies.

It may be helpful here to think of the contrast between Pieper and, for example, Leo Strauss, who saw reason and faith as at fundamental odds with one another. The philosopher, for Strauss, is a student of nature who recognizes no authority other than his reason and the truths he can arrive at through its exclusive use, whereas the man of faith, for Strauss, is required to subordinate his reason to what he must regard as a higher authority. Pieper is much closer to Eric Voegelin, although Pieper, in the Catholic tradition, still at least attempted to draw a conceptual distinction between the subject matters of philosophy and theology, while Voegelin perhaps did not.[39] Neither were Strauss or Voegelin identified with any particular religious denomination. Whether that elevated their scholarship, as they would have claimed, is a question we must leave unanswered.[40]

How then, it must be asked, does Pieper deal with the fact that there is not just one sacred tradition in human history? When he says that the necessity for a true philosopher to “actually accept the tradita of sacred tradition as truth” is “just as true for a Greek of the time of Socrates as for a contemporary Christian,” how does he deal with the fact that the Greek sacred tradition at the time of Socrates and the contemporary Christian sacred tradition are two different sacred traditions? He does so by recognizing what Voegelin called the “equivalence of symbols,”[41] without being aware of that work or using that term. That is, for Pieper, while the outer structures, the “shells” of sacred traditions, may vary, their messages are the same. Here Pieper especially focuses on the similarity of the messages conveyed by the Greek sacred tradition at the time of Socrates, what Pieper calls the “Platonic Myths” “in the strict sense,” and Judeo-Christian revelation, although he would maintain that at least many of the same messages are in the stories that found any society.

For example, Pieper characterized the “message” of the Platonic Myths as follows:

“It says that the world has arisen out of the ungrudging kindness of a creator; that God holds the beginning, middle, and end of all things in his hands; that spirit is Lord and rules over the whole of the world; that mankind has lost its original perfection through guilt and punishment; that on the other side of death an absolutely just court awaits us all; that the soul is immortal—and so forth. Aristotle, too, who is so much soberer and more critical, says in frank agreement in the Metaphysics: ‘It has been handed down through the early ones and very ancient ones . . . that the divine surrounds all nature in a circle.’”[42]

Thus, “look[ing] back on the corpus of myths recounted in Plato’s work,” Pieper said that “one is . . . struck by the unexpected accord between [the Platonic myths] and the teachings and stories which Christianity also has always cherished and revered as true. What is astounding, above all, is that the conception of the beginning of the world and the final perfection of man is almost identical.”[43] Pieper compared Socrates’s statement that he did not know the myths “of himself but from what he has heard,” with the parallel saying in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (10:17), “Faith comes from hearing,” and noted that the relevant Greek expression for “what has been heard” in Plato and Paul is the same.[44]

The myths in Plato that Pieper regarded as “mythical in the strict sense” are “the story told in the Timaeus about the creation of the world; the report hidden in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium about man in his original state and about his fall; above all, the eschatological myths placed at the end of the Gorgias, the Republic, and Phaedo about the other world, about judgment, and about the fate of the dead.”[45] Pieper maintained, against so many modern interpreters of Plato, that “Plato held that the meaning contained in the myths is inviolable truth,”[46] and said that both “the statements that Christians believe and the myths recounted by Plato . . . have in common that their subject is not intellectual content but a story played out between the realm of the gods and the realm of men,”[47] that is, in what Voegelin referred to as the metaxy.

And so in Plato, as in Augustine, Aquinas, and Pieper, philosophy is never far from theology, rational argument is never far from revelation. Aristotle too is included by Pieper in this grouping: “The most exciting conclusion of the incomparable book on Aristotle by Werner Jaeger is that . . . ‘even behind his metaphysics there already stands the credo ut intelligam [“I believe in order to understand”].’”[48] Moreover, Pieper maintained that while the Greeks gave us reason, even more fundamentally, they also had faith:

“. . . the usual idea of an extremely precise separation of concept from mythical truth is in need of correction. Certainly Plato saw the inclusion of the sacred tradition of myth as an element of philosophizing, perhaps even as the most crucial act of the philosopher. Both in Gorgias and in the Republic the eschatological myth is used as the last decisive argument after purely rational utterance has reached its own limit. For Plato there is no question about myth’s claim to truth.”[49] 

To the modern ear, attuned as it is to rationalism, the proposition that the true philosopher must, as Pieper put it, “actually accept the tradita of sacred tradition as truth,”[50] sounds absurd. But Pieper, whose ear was not attuned to the modern, but to the ancient and the medieval, said:

“It was precisely the great founders of Western philosophizing who confronted explicitly rational argumentation with the mythological tradition. And if the reader who is born much later still tastes the salt of the existential in the platonic Symposium, the reason is that Plato in the discussion of the question about the essence of Eros opens the floor not only to biology, psychology, and sociology, but also to those who interpret the myth of mankind’s original perfection and fall: you can understand nothing of what Eros is and means, he seems to say, if you do not include in your reflections this primitive experience of mankind; if you do not recognize that all erotic desire is in the final analysis nothing else than hunting for mankind’s healthy original form.”[51]

Pieper further illustrated this relationship between philosophy and theology by a close examination of Plato’s Gorgias. Most of the dialogue—the exchanges between Socrates and his various interlocutors—is conducted on the level of rational argumentation. But the climax of the arguments, Socrates’s last word to his ultimate antagonist, Callicles, does not involve a rational argument at all. Rather, it involves an appeal to revelation, specifically, the Myth of the Judgment after Death. Socrates does not advance the Myth as a rational argument, but as a story of divine origin, handed down from those to whom the gods first revealed it. The remarkable thing, said Pieper, is that Socrates regarded the story as true. Socrates told Callicles, “You will, of course, take this to be a story; but I take it to be truth.”[52] It is the message contained in the story, rather than the exact “shell” of the story itself, that matters to Socrates. Indeed, as Pieper says, Socrates “considers [this message] so valid that he orders his entire life in accordance with it.”[53]

Indeed Pieper, a Roman Catholic, would agree with Voegelin that “salvation” is not an exclusively Christian concept. “Since, however,” said Pieper, “[Socrates] refuses to treat the myths as ‘just stories’; since, on the contrary, he unflinchingly accepts and honors what is meant by them as truth, the tradita of the divine guarantee of human salvation are for him so unforgettably present that he can dare to base his existence on them.”[54] And in the Republic, Pieper is struck by Plato’s use of the word “save,” as when Plato tells us that the Myth of the Judgment of the Dead “can save us . . . if we believe it.”[55]

The thought of Pieper, as a Roman Catholic, just as Plato’s, was ultimately ordered by stories of divine origin, handed down from those to whom God first revealed them. Indeed we might say that all of Pieper’s thought began exactly where the Hebrew Bible begins, with the proposition that God created the world out of nothing; that He found it to be good, and, after His creation of man, very good; that man, greatly disappointing God, fell through sin; and that man therefore requires a healing, a salvation, that is not in his own power to achieve. After all, one of Pieper’s recurring and best known philosophical themes, his treatment of the virtue of hope, depends on the truth of the propositions that everything, including man, is created out of nothing, that as a creature he is a contingent, not a necessary, being, and that therefore the virtue most proper to him is hope, the virtue that trusts in the Creator, the virtue of one in status viatoris, in-between being and nothingness, presumption and despair.

There is a word Pieper used to describe the relationship between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, that strikes me as almost perfect. That word is “contrapuntal”:

“We are dealing . . . with bringing what is known and believed into a contrapuntal relationship of such a nature that, on the one hand, the independence of both remains clearly preserved, while on the other hand, on the basis of reciprocal corroboration, challenge, and perhaps even disturbance there arises a new and richer harmony, which is much more than the mere addition of the basic elements.”

“The existential impetus, authenticity, depth, and (so to speak) stoutheartedness of the act of philosophizing is dependent on whether or not this contrapuntal relationship to the sacred tradition is realized or not. . . . All of Western philosophy maintains its vitality by nourishing itself on the conversation—perhaps I really ought to have said, the debate—with the sacred tradition of Christendom that precedes it. . . .” [56]

The “contrapuntal relationship” is fragile. Pieper was acutely aware that well before his time, indeed not long after Aquinas, it had begun to break down. Thus his concern with recovering the roots of Western culture in genuine classical and medieval thought, a concern he shared not only with fellow Roman Catholic twentieth century thinkers influenced strongly by Aquinas, like Gilson, Maritain, Simon, de Lubac, and McInerny, but with Strauss and Voegelin as well. Pieper said that “the most characteristic thing about” “contemporary European philosophy” “is precisely the process of the increasingly coherent elimination of the tradita from the circle of philosophical discussion. We find here too–perhaps we should say, here most of all—confirmation of the diagnosis that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote down about 1890: ‘What is under the most profound attack today is the instinct and will of tradition. All institutions which owe their origin to this instinct are opposed to the taste of the modern intellect.’”[57]

Pieper, quoting Goethe, continued: “At any rate . . . for some considerable time now philosophers have violently and on principle been ‘aspiring to the secular.’”[58] Pieper objected that this “‘ends up ruining’ the goal and purpose of philosophy. This is true not just of philosophy but of mankind’s entire intellectual and spiritual way of life.”[59]

How did it happen, Pieper asked, that sacred tradition was excluded from the practice of philosophizing? This can occur, he said, in two ways. “The first is by the destruction of [the] content [of sacred tradition] and its replacement by a kind of anti-tradition,” as an example of which Pieper cited Jean-Paul Sartre, “who bases his philosophy explicitly on the dogma of the nonexistence of God.”[60] “There is, however,” Pieper continued,

“. . . another, even more effective way of silencing the tradita in the field of philosophy: by denying not the content, but rather the formal structure of the contrapuntal ordering itself. According to the program of “Scientific Philosophy,” for instance, philosophers are supposed simply to stop reflecting on the whole of world and reality from any possible aspect. Instead, they are supposed to limit themselves, like physicists, to the questions of their academic specialty, and then to solve them with verifiable results. . . . At any rate, philosophy—still called by this name—turns unavoidably into a business that can only be pursued by specialists and is in fact of no interest to anybody else. The place that belongs to philosophy and the philosophizer in the whole of existence remains empty.”[61]

Pieper said that “there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say ‘necessary’ because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.”[62] And he concluded his book on sacred tradition with a cogent political observation, saying that none of the alternatives advanced by modern liberalism as a basis for human unity will work. “Rather,” he said, “real unity among human beings has its roots in nothing else but the common possession of tradition in the strict sense—I mean, our sharing in common the sacred tradition that goes back to God’s words.”[63] This represents, of course, a fundamental critique of the political order in which we live.

In Pieper’s own philosophy, it is not just that revelation is in the background, it is that he often resolves the philosophical problems he sets for himself by means of revelation, maintaining that they can be resolved in no other way.

To cite but three examples:

First, in The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History,[64] Pieper, faced with the modern philosophies of history, raised the difficult questions of whether history will have an end, and, if so, what it will be, and found the answers in the Apocalypse of St. John, which prophesied that the end time would be marked by the appearance of the Antichrist, after which history itself would find its consummation in the Kingdom of God.

Second, in a later, similar work entitled Hope and History,[65] Pieper raised the question of whether we can hope in history itself, and concluded that all philosophies of history which promise that things will get much better, if not perfect, in time, ignore the fact that each of us must die. Our hope, therefore, cannot be in history, but only in the promise of life after death.

Third, in Pieper’s Death and Immortality,[66] Pieper raised the question of why every person must die, and found the answer in the familiar Biblical verses at Genesis 2:15-17: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’” That is, Pieper followed sacred tradition in concluding that death is condign punishment for man’s original sin, the sin with which we are all infected.

While Pieper’s conclusions in these works are based on revelation, all three follow out all of the implications of the questions Pieper posed in careful, philosophical detail. As Father Schall characterized Pieper’s methodology, “After distinguishing this thing from that, seeking clarity on what belongs where, Josef Pieper always puts things back together, especially the most important things.”[67] Pieper recognized that the practice of philosophy involved the careful drawing of distinctions.

Because they illustrate Pieper’s use of revelation in philosophy, we consider The End of Time, Hope and History, and Death and Immortality in more detail below.

“The End of Time” and “Hope and History”

As noted, in The End of Time, Pieper grappled with the questions of whether history will have an end, and, if so, what it will be. He found derisory both the modern notion of progress, with its veneer of optimism, and the reaction it often breeds in pessimism when, as is inevitably the case, the hoped-for progress is not achieved. How is it even possible, he asked, to find an answer to questions such as the ones he posed? Philosophy is inadequate. A turn to revelation is required. “A philosophy of history which refuses to refer back to theology,” said Pieper, “ceases to be philosophy and starts to become pseudo-philosophy—but in a much more radical sense than is the case with the rest of philosophy.”[68]

Karl Lowith and Eric Voegelin made the same point: modern philosophies of history are parasitic on the theology of history, immanentizing the latter’s symbols. Pieper, rejecting philosophies of history that posit the end of history as some sort of earthly perfection, and making the turn to revelation, found the answers to his questions in the Apocalypse of St John, which prophesied that at the end of history the Antichrist will appear, “a figure exercising political power over the whole of mankind; as a world ruler.”[69] Pieper maintained that the notion of the Dominion of the Antichrist “is the notion of the end-situation within history grounded in Christian-Western tradition,” and that, while it is “terrifying,” “If a notion of the end of history is thought at all, then for the Christian no other is possible.”[70] However, Pieper was quick to add, “The Christian historical conception of the end of time includes the view that Antichrist will be defeated,” that humankind will have an “extra-temporal consummation [in] the ‘City of God.’”[71]

Hope and History begins with this statement: “In the last decade of the eighteenth century, this is, the decade of the French Revolution, [Kant] both raised and attempted to answer the question of whether the human race is constantly progressing toward the better.”[72] Kant thought it probably was. Since then, said Pieper, Hiroshima, and much else, happened, suggesting that not only is constant progress not a given, but that continual decline cannot be ruled out. Given that modern man’s hope is so often tied to the concept of historical progress, and that such hope is inevitably disappointed, Pieper raised anew one of Kant’s four fundamental philosophical questions, “What may I hope?”[73] And Pieper distinguished “hopes,” which may be for many and various things, from “fundamental hope,” which is for the one thing the loss of which would render a person “purely and simply ‘without hope.’”[74] Can “fundamental hope” be satisfied within history? Pieper suggested an answer by saying that “it is not worth talking seriously of hope if there is no hope for martyrs.”[75]

Pieper, like Voegelin, found that it is theologians who have the most insight into the nature of history. “Strangely enough,” he said, “it is not empirically minded historians but rather theologians who insist most uncompromisingly that cognizance of the true face of the historical process, of events that take place before our own eyes, is not possible for us.”[76] It is not possible because history “‘plays itself out as a mystery.’”[77] “[I]nasmuch . . . as theology points the vision of the person immediately caught up in concrete historical events beyond the realm of the empirical, it thereby gives him the opportunity of understanding, in that situation, that he does not know what, here and now, is truly happening. . . . precisely in relation to the strand of the ‘historical’ in the strict sense, the future resists any kind of advance calculation or speculation.”[78]

Against a theologically-informed view of history, Pieper compared the views of history of a moderate idealistic progressive, Immanuel Kant, an evolutionist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and a Marxist, Ernst Bloch, and, while he found their views wanting, he considered them with his customary respect and careful attention. Having considered them, however, Pieper noticed that “in all these expectations about the future . . . mention is hardly even once made of death,” and pointed to “the simple fact that we, those who hope, will die before the golden age will have dawned.”[79]

This “radically profound question,” the question of death, returned Pieper from the theme of history to the theme of hope.[80] “How do things stand regarding our hopes,” asked Pieper, “if we nevertheless must die? Hope is directed toward salvation, but ‘salvation is nothing if it does not deliver us from death.’”[81] And Pieper also pointed to the fact that, whatever may happen in the future to mankind in terms of historical progress, or to the species in evolution, or to the class in Marxism, “it is solely the personal individual whose fate is to die. But this very fact also provides the basis for that totally unbreakable relationship that binds death and hope to one another.”[82] That is, hope is not the possession of mankind as a collectivity, the human species, or a social class. “Strictly considered,” said Pieper, “hope, no differently from death, exists only as the act of a person.”[83] And so Pieper denounced all “philosophies of history” that predict, in one way or another, the future betterment of things. “How can one speak of hope,” he asked plaintively, “when what is hoped for is conceived in such a way that it could not at all be granted to the very being that is solely capable of hoping, namely, the individual, the particular person?”[84] And so Pieper came to his conclusion: “In any event, if there is no hope about the ‘hereafter’ . . . i.e., hope that can be realized on the other side of death, then there is no hope at all.”[85]

Arguing that no one can actually purport to know how history will end, Pieper ended Hope and History, as he had ended The End of Time, with reference to the Apocalypse of St. John. The “disturbing message” in the formulations of the apocalypse “from present-day theology, both Protestant and Catholic,” said Pieper, “above all . . . makes it impossible for us to conceive the end of earthly human history in such a way as to entail that a perhaps difficult and struggle-filled, but still constantly advancing, process of ascent will come to a harmonious and triumphant conclusion in it.”[86] “And yet,” Pieper continued,

“. . . this is not the last word of apocalyptic prophecy. Its last word, and its decisive report, all else notwithstanding, is the following: a blessed end, infinitely surpassing all expectations; triumph over evil; the conquest of death; drinking from the fountain of life; resurrection; drying of all tears; the dwelling of God among men; a New Heaven and a New Earth.”

“What all this would appear to imply about hope, however, is that it has an invulnerability sufficient to place it beyond any possibility of being affected, or even crippled, by preparedness for an intra-historically catastrophic end—whether that end be called dying, defeat of the good, martyrdom, or world domination by evil.”[87]   

In conclusion, Pieper returned to the question with which he began Hope and History, “Is it really part of the nature of human hope that it can never find satisfaction and fulfillment in the realm of history?”[88] And Pieper, summing up his study, said:

“Basically, this last question has already been answered. If earthly existence itself is pervasively structured toward what is ‘not yet in being,’ and if a man, as a viator, is truly on the way to” something right up to the moment of death, then this hope, which is identical with our very being itself, either is plainly absurd or finds its ultimate fulfillment on the other side of death, after” the here-and-now. In a word, the object of existential hope bursts the bounds of ‘this’ world.”[89]

And can we specify the object of “fundamental hope,” the one, ultimate object for which all men yearn?  It is, said Pieper, in agreement with Marcel, non-specifiable:

“Thus it is characteristic of those who truly hope that they remain open to the possibility of a fulfillment that surpasses every preconceivable human notion. And they will apply the energy of their hearts not so much to militant implementation of predefined plans and goals or eschatological images of order (through which human solidarity has already been often enough marched into the ground) as to the everyday accomplishment, in each given situation, of what is wise, good, and just. Precisely that is probably the true, and most human, form of historical activity. This supposition has nothing to do with timid, petit bourgeois aversion to the radical thrust of great political decisions, and certainly nothing to do with any kind of lack of trust in the historical future. It may well, however, have something to do with mistrust of any delimiting specification of the object of human hope. The reason for that mistrust . . . comes to this: all attempts to construct a ready-made image of the future of historical man are burdened by the grave discrepancy that ‘it is not humanity that is the goal of the Incarnation.’”[90]

“Death and Immortality”

While philosophy considers the whole of existence, Pieper said in Death and Immortality that “there are subjects which must be called ‘philosophical’ in a stronger sense—because it is in their very nature to compel us to consider the whole of existence. Among these specifically philosophical subjects that of ‘death’ holds an incomparable place.”[91] Pieper began Death and Immortality with the question, “What actually happens, viewed fundamentally and in terms of the whole, when a human being dies?”[92] Pieper said that he

“. . . hope[s] to conduct this investigation . . . with the utmost impartiality I can muster. By “impartiality” I mean above all the resolute determination to consider everything, or at any rate not to thrust aside any of the information about death that is available to us, whether this information is offered by physiology and pathology, by the experience of doctors, priests and prison chaplains, or by the legitimate ‘sacred tradition.’”

This inclusion of the believed truth, and the attempt to include it in a meaningful relationship to what we know critically, is an undertaking by nature as problematical as it is indispensable. It always leads—and we cannot expect it to be otherwise—to an enormous complicating of our thinking. It is always more difficult for the believer to philosophize than for one who does not bind himself to the canon of a suprahuman truth. But this time, in consideration of our subject, “death,” we must prepare ourselves for such acute tensions in our intellectual structure that we may well be brought close to the border of contradiction.[93]

While Death and Immortality is filled with insights into its subject, the Chapter in which Pieper relied to the greatest extent on sacred tradition raised the question of whether death is, as the Chapter is entitled, “A Natural Event or a Punishment?”[94] In other words, Pieper was asking the seemingly unanswerable question, why do we, and all those we love, have to die? “If we mean to treat of fundamental existential matters,” said Pieper, “we cannot shirk the task of considering the implicit meanings of. . . ‘mythical’ tales.”[95] And, as noted, Pieper’s answer relied on the familiar Biblical verses at Genesis 2:15-17.

Pieper acknowledged that this thought is very difficult to bear, especially to the modern mind, and cited Nietzsche’s criticism that “‘In antiquity misfortune really still existed, pure, innocent misfortune; with Christianity everything became punishment’—even death.”[96] In response, however, Pieper noted that the idea that we suffer death as just punishment for an ancient sin of our race appears not only in Christianity:

“The concept of death as an act of atonement can, for example, be found in the famous saying, preserved only as a fragment, of the Milesian philosopher Anaximander, two hundred years before Plato: “The source from which existing things come to be is that into which they pass by necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, according to the assessment of time.” Plato, too, has Aristophanes in his speech in the Symposium explain the whole wretchedness of history as a punishment, the consequence of culpability in prehistoric times—in other words, of a fault not committed by present man himself, but whose consequences he must nevertheless bear.”[97] 

Ironically, Pieper also found the same concept in the young Marx, where the term “alienation” “is used in a well-nigh mythological sense . . . to mean the loss of man’s harmony with his true being, which loss moreover is to be attributed to a transgression.”[98]

Pieper distinguished punishment for the sake of atonement, the sense in which he meant the term, from the idea of punishment “for the sake of reform, prevention or deterrence.”[99] By “‘punishment in the strict sense of the word’” Pieper meant something that is at once both “something bad which is at the same time just; an evil and nevertheless a good; far less of an evil, in fact, than a good.”[100] “[I]t is inherent in the concept of punishment that it makes up for the fault, that it ‘makes good again,’ and therefore that it is meaningful and even good.”[101] Indeed, Pieper went so far as to ask, “Do we not all have the same secret knowledge that whatever happens to us is never entirely unjust?”[102]

Pieper maintained that “a ‘purely’ philosophical science of man which pits itself against the pre-philosophical ‘sacred’ tradition” cannot resolve the type of basic question he raised; however, he was quick to add, he was “tempted to call that ‘purely’ philosophical approach unphilosophical” precisely because it ignores sacred tradition.[103] He continued: “For that very reason I have brought in for consideration the ‘theological’ view which states that human death has the nature of a punishment—a view which appears not only in Christian, but also in non-Christian sacred tradition.”[104]

Pieper then turned to face an objection to his thesis, which was that it must necessarily imply “that in fact man himself is nothing but the result of a great cosmic misfortune[.]”[105] What good then, is existence? This objection suggested recourse to Gnosticism. And again Pieper relied on sacred tradition to answer this objection. “The reason for my position,” he said,

“. . . my refusal to accept the thesis of man’s life as an improper state, is precisely that we are trying to sustain the idea of the universe as Creation. Inherent in this idea are two others: First, that everything that is good, and that it is good to be—and this for no other reason than because everything real, in that it has entered into existence, is desired and affirmed by the Creator. We love things because they are; but they are good because God loves them. Secondly, inherent in the concept of Creation is the idea that the creatura, that is to say, a being receiving its own existence entirely from outside, can never by itself effect a fundamental change in its own state of being and its own existential goodness–not even given the premise of freedom and the possibility of misusing this freedom to oppose the divine purpose.”[106]

Pieper then confronted the question directly of whether he was engaged in theology rather than philosophy, a question that apparently vexed him:

“This question has often been flung at me and I am deeply concerned to make it plain that the answer is, “No.” No, we are not engaging in theology; or at any rate not when, in attacking the problem of death in a philosophical way, which is to say under every conceivable aspect, we consider what we believe about the theme of death and include the theological interpretation of that belief in our considerations—doing so, moreover, frankly and expressly, with our cards on the table. No one who engages in philosophy with existential seriousness can omit this branch of thought, no matter whether in concreto he is considering the creeds of atheism (as with Jean-Paul Sartre) or of Hinduism . . . or Christianity. Of course it matters very much what the creed and the religion offer in their defense. But still this play of what a man knows against what he believes must be performed with critical keenness; otherwise we would no longer be considering the subject at hand under every conceivable aspect, which is the same as saying we would no longer be philosophizing. . . .”

“Thus, while not averting our eyes from what can be and is experienced in the phenomenon of death, we also pay heed to what the sacred tradition has to say concerning this same phenomenon. We add these data to what we ourselves have seen, and consider both—interested above all in whether and how what we have learned by “hearing” coincides with what we have learned by direct observation, whether both converge towards a single answer. Yet we know all the while that there is no reaching that answer or reducing it to handy formula.”[107]

Nor did Pieper think that the idea conveyed in sacred tradition is something that lies outside human experience: “The statement that death has been imposed as punishment and hence must be seen in relation to a primordial transgression, to an ancient sin—this theological statement, too, obviously does not lie entirely outside our experience.”[108] After all, we experience both sin and guilt.

How do we receive the good, Pieper asked, that is involved in the punishment of death? “The only honest and clean way not to sweep the scandal of death under the rug,” said Pieper, “and on the other hand not to fall into a state of revolt against Creation consists in coming to see death as punishment, and submitting to that; once more, not death as an ‘idea’ and general phenomenon, but our own death and the death of those we love.”[109] More specifically, Pieper said that we must first “see our own culpability, in which the primal sin is continued and corroborated, and without which there never would have been punishment at all.”[110] It is difficult, but necessary, for modern man to look deeply within himself and confess his fallenness. Then we must acknowledge that the authority who imposes the punishment is God, to whom we are subordinate.[111]

Pieper concluded his meditation on death as punishment:

“And if, then, the necessity for men to die is really something that can and must be called punishment in the strict sense of the word, perfectly related to and in keeping with the previous fault, imposed on the basis of the most legitimate power imaginable—then in attempting to find the proper existential response to it, man can do nothing more meaningful and nothing more healing and saving—in the most literal sense of the word—than think of the badness of death in conjunction with the still greater badness of the previous fault, and freely submit to the punishment, without attempting to mitigate the thing with this or that misrepresentation.”[112]

Pieper turned from death as punishment to the subject of the act of death itself. We all must wonder what it will be like to die. But since no merely human person “performing” that act has returned to tell us about it, what is there to be said? Here Pieper combined his insight as a philosopher with a principal saying from the Gospels to convey a meditation on the act of dying that is one of the most powerful and moving passages in all of Pieper’s work:

“Man’s final disposition, his last will and testament as it were, with which he simultaneously concludes and completes his earthly existence, is a religious act of loving devotion in which the individual, explicitly accepting death as his destiny, offers up himself, and the life now slipping from him, to God. Naturally that is no philosophical answer. It is the answer of Christian theology—although, incidentally, there is far more to it than that. But to the philosophically minded person who accords it some thought, this answer is convincing, as I have said, because it coincides with the experience of lived existence. For what this experience unswervingly suggests as the hidden structure of all life lived in a truly meaningful way is something the individual—even if he affirms this structural law—is never compelled to take with absolute seriousness, and indeed can never do so throughout his lifetime: namely, that one possesses only what one lets go of, and that one loses what one tries to hold. What is required of man in the moment of death, for the first and only time, is to realize this very thing. It is required, but at that moment he is also enabled to do so; he is expected literally, not just “by intention,” not just “in good will,” not just symbolically and rhetorically, but in reality to lose his life in order to gain it.”[113]

At the very conclusion of Death and Immortality, having referred to the “countless names” devised by “the sacred tradition of mankind” to denote the after-life—such as “Perfect Joy, Eternal Life, Great Banquet, Crown, Wreath, Peace, Light, Salvation–and so forth,” Pieper said:

“Thus we have now at last touched, and perhaps somewhat overstepped, the boundary which is set for the philosophical inquirer. Really to reach this boundary—therein lies, I think, the true meaning and distinctive opportunity of philosophy. The great philosophers have always seen in philosophy a challenge to penetrate beyond philosophizing. If this challenge presents itself to us more sharply than usual in the present case, this only indicates once more that death is a philosophical subject in a special sense, as we said at the outset.”

“To those remarks with which we began, let us add, by way of dose, the stern reminder of Soren Kierkegaard: ‘Honor to learning, and honor to one who can treat the learned question of immortality in a learned way. But the question of immortality is no learned question. It is a question of the inner existence, a question which the individual must confront by looking into own soul.’”[114]

The “contrapuntal” relationship between philosophy and theology is manifested in the three works considered above. “The whole burden of [Death and Immortality], and not this book alone, has from the start been aimed at refuting and correcting [the] view” that there is a “fundamental incompatibility of any philosophical anthropology, and philosophy in general, with Christian Theology and the New Testament.”[115]

At the end of this discussion of Pieper’s conception of the relationship of philosophy and “sacred tradition,” we are still left with the question of whether Pieper has not eliminated, or at least fundamentally obscured, the fundamental distinction that most, including Pieper, would agree must exist between philosophy and theology. Notwithstanding Pieper’s explicit denials, did he finally collapse philosophy into theology, thereby turning the philosopher into a theologian? Pieper’s case is strong with, for example, thinkers like Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas. But what about other thinkers whom Pieper himself would recognize as real philosophers, modern thinkers, such as, for example, Kant and Heidegger?

Alas, we do not have time to explore this larger question here, but can only acknowledge its existence, acknowledging at the same time Pieper’s main point that philosophy and theology, however their relationship is conceived, need one another to survive and thrive. As that very sensitive non-philosopher, T. S. Eliot, put it in introducing one of Pieper’s works: “The root cause of the vagaries of modern philosophy—and perhaps, though I was unconscious of it, the reason for my dissatisfaction with philosophy as a profession—I now believe to lie in the divorce of philosophy from theology.”[116] In addition to the great poet, a great modern Pope has also confronted this question, concluding that philosophy and theology are both necessary, that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. . . .”[117]

(2) “Ratio” and “Intellectus”

The second way in which Pieper joined philosophy and theology—a perhaps more “traditional,” yet still not a modern, way–was through his concept of “reason,” the instrument used to philosophize. Pieper gave “reason” its full, pre-Enlightenment range of meaning, as including not just ratio, or discursive reason, but intellectus, or intuitive reason, and he urged that while ratio involves effort, intellectus involves receptivity, and therefore is the more important aspect of reason. The recognition of intellectus, and its importance, tends to open the philosopher to theology, given that both intellectus and theology are concerned with truths received without human effort. What is required for the receipt of these truths, and what may be difficult to achieve, is an attitude of existential openness. Through intuitive reason, as through revelation, we receive gifts. As Aquinas put it, grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.[118] We believe in order to understand. Belief precedes philosophy.

Pieper bemoaned the fact that “Kant, for example, held knowledge to be exclusively ‘discursive’: that is to say, the opposite of intuitive. . . . Working on that basis, Kant was bound to reach the view that knowing and philosophizing . . . must be regraded and understood as work.”[119] As the title of Leisure: The Basis of Culture indicates, Pieper opposed philosophy, which culminates in contemplation, to “work.” “The philosophers of antiquity,” said Pieper,

“thought otherwise [than Kant] on this matter—though of course their view is very far from offering grounds of justification for those who take the easy path. The Greeks–Aristotle no less than Plato–as well as the great medieval thinkers, held that not only physical, sensuous perception, but equally man’s spiritual and intellectual knowledge, included an element of pure, receptive contemplation, or as Heraclitus says, of ‘listening to the essence of things.’”

“The Middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The faculty of mind, man’s knowledge, is both these things in one, according to antiquity and the Middle Ages, simultaneously ratio and intellectus; and the process of knowing is the action of the two together. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives that which it sees.”[120]

The “philosophers of antiquity (which here and elsewhere always means the philosophers of Greece and the Middle Ages)” regarded the ratio as the “distinctively human element in man; the intellectus they regarded as being already beyond the sphere allotted to man.”[121] Pieper quoted Aquinas: “‘Although the knowledge which is most characteristic of the human soul occurs in the mode of ratio, nevertheless there is in it a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings, of whom it is therefore said that they possess the faculty of spiritual vision.’”[122] While the use of the ratio does “require real hard work,” “The simple vision of the intellectus, however, contemplation, is not work.”[123] Contemplation is the activity proper to leisure.[124]

We are reminded of Aristotle’s “immortalizing” passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, Chapter 7, in commenting on which Aquinas said:

“. . . this is not on the human level but above man. Indeed it is not on the human level considering man’s composite nature, but it is most properly human considering what is principal in man—a thing found most perfectly in superior substances but imperfectly and by participation, as it were, in man. Nevertheless this small part is greater than all the other parts in man. Thus it is clear that the person who gives himself to the contemplation of truth is the happiest a man can be in this life.”[125]

We are also reminded of the Parable of the mustard seed from the Gospels: “‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.’” (Matthew 13:31-32.)

We find something quite similar to intellectus in Voegelin’s treatment of “reason,” which also rejects the Enlightenment constriction of that term to ratio. Thus Voegelin’s statement that “the psyche [is] the sensorium of transcendence,”[126] his use of nous to denote the highest part of reason, and his use of metaxy to signify the fundamental human condition.[127] Indeed, for Voegelin the concept of “natural reason” itself is an oxymoron.

Many of Pieper’s essays on the nature of philosophy, with his emphasis on intellectus, are found in Pieper’s For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy, of which we can only mention a few here.[128]

For example, in his essay, “Philosophical Education and Intellectual Labor,”[129] Pieper took Kant to task for characterizing philosophizing as “work.” According to Pieper, Kant restricted philosophy to discursive thought, just as he restricted ethics to duty, and tended to blur the ancient distinction between the liberal arts and the servile arts.

In “What Does It Mean to Philosophize? Four Lectures,”[130] Pieper maintained that “Philosophizing is an act in which the world of work is transcended.”[131] “Philosophizing,” Pieper said, “is the purest form of theoria, of speculari, of a purely receptive gazing at reality, in which the things alone provide the measure and the soul only receives this measure.”[132] Philosophizing “is unalloyed with anything practical, with any desire for change.”[133] The presupposition of philosophy is a regard for the world as in some way venerable, because created.[134]

The origin of philosophy is wonder. “Wonder,” said Pieper, sounding like Voegelin, “has two aspects: a negative and a positive one.”[135] The negative one is that the person in wonder does not know; the positive one is that he is moved to set off on the search.[136]

“Theology,” said Pieper, echoing Plato,

“. . . ;always already; precedes philosophy—and this not simply in the sense of a chronological sequence but rather in the sense of partaking in a relation of logical order. It is a pregiven interpretation of reality, referring to the world as a whole, which gives rise to philosophical questions; philosophy is thus linked to theology in an essential way. There is no philosophizing that does not receive its impulse and impetus from a preexisting interpretation of the meaning of the world as a whole. The ideal image of a ‘wisdom such as God possesses,’ from which the movement of philosophical thinking in its loving search time and again derives its motive and direction, becomes, independently of experience, visible in the theological realm.“[137]

In “A Plea for Philosophy,” Pieper clarified his statement that philosophy considers all that is by noting that “The totality of the real, however, toward which this concern is directed, is not identical with that sum which is obtained by addition and which contains each thing and all things; rather, what is meant is the totum, the articulated fabric of the world, in which there is a hierarchy, organized according to greater and lesser plenitude of being, and above all a highest that is simultaneously the deepest ground and origin for every individual thing and for the whole.”[138]

While Voegelin took the concept of metaxy from Plato, Pieper also found it in Aristotle, who, Pieper said, discovered “that, contrary to Parmenides’ view, there is a third thing between being and nonbeing, namely, that which is oriented toward actualization, that which awaits its accentuation, the potential (dynamis).”[139]

Pieper’s concept of intellectus is at the heart of many of his other works as well, including Leisure: The Basis of Culture, and several other short works, such as “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case Against Secular Humanism;[140] In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity;[141] Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation;[142] and Happiness and Contemplation.[143]   

(3) Pieper’s Philosophical Anthropology

Third and finally, the closeness between philosophy and theology in Pieper’s work is a function of his philosophical anthropology. This is grounded in, paradoxically, on the one hand, a recognition of the severe limits placed on man’s ability to know, both in the practical and the theoretical spheres, by virtue of his created nature, and, on the other hand, a recognition of man’s yearning for the essential and the eternal. Such a philosophical anthropology implies the need for a certain humility, and this humility issues in a readiness to consider the limits on human reason and a consequent openness to the possibility of divine revelation, that is, in the attitude of hope. Pieper’s philosophical anthropology can best be approached by considering his work on the virtue of hope.

We have been created, Pieper said, relying on both lived experience and revelation, out of nothing. We do not possess the fullness of being. As contingent beings, we are in status viatoris, that is, we are “on the way,” on the way to the status comprehensoris, the Beatific Vision. “The state of being on the way,” said Pieper, “refers . . . to the innermost structure of created nature. It is the inherent ‘not yet’ of the finite being.”[144]

As we have seen before, this “not yet” “includes both a negative and a positive element: the absence of fulfillment and the orientation toward fulfillment.”[145] On the negative side “is the proximity to nothingness that is the very nature of created things.”[146] On the positive side is “the creature’s natural orientation toward fulfillment,” which “is revealed, above all, in man’s ability to establish, by his own effort, a kind of justifiable ‘claim’ to the happy outcome of his pilgrimage.”[147] And while “The ‘way’ of man leads to death as its end,” death is not “its meaning.”[148] Rather, “The meaning of the status viatoris is the status comprehensoris.”[149]

For Pieper, as for Voegelin, man is thus “between the shores of being and nothingness,” but “having an existential orientation toward being.”[150] Pieper concluded:

“For the individual who experiences, in the status viatoris, his essential creatureliness, the ‘not-yet-existing-being’ of his own existence, there is only one appropriate answer to such an experience. This answer must not be despair—for the meaning of the creature’s existence is not nothingness but being, that is, fulfillment. Nor must the answer be the comfortable certainty of possession [the sin of presumption]—for the ‘becoming-ness’ of the creature still borders dangerously on nothingness. Both—despair and the certainty of possession—are in conflict with the truth of reality. The only answer that corresponds to man’s actual existential situation is hope. The virtue of hope is preeminently the virtue of the status viatoris; it is the proper virtue of the ‘not yet.’”

In the virtue of hope more than in any other, man understands and affirms that he is a creature, that he has been created by God.”[151]

Like all virtues, hope is a median, in the case of hope the median between presumption and despair, both of which vices “are in conflict with the truth of reality.”[152]

“Hope” is itself a unifying concept in Pieper’s work because it is at the center of not just his philosophical anthropology, but his ontology, his epistemology, and his ethics. Indeed, “hope” is central to Pieper’s concept of philosophy generally.

For example, as to what man can know, Pieper said that “Knowledge of the essence and the totality of things is man’s prerogative [but only] within the ‘promise of hope.’”[153] “This means,” he continued, “any cognitive effort will indeed always be a positive advance, but only like a step on a longer journey, and will in principle not be destined for frustration; still, it will always and ever anew remain preliminary, incomplete, proclaiming ‘not yet.’. . . the ‘limit’ of knowledge is never attained, neither in objective fullness nor in subjective satisfaction.”[154] Because man is “not only not pure spirit [but] finite spirit—consequently, the essence of things and the totality of things are given to him, not with the finality of perfect comprehension, but ‘in hope.’”[155] Indeed, said Pieper, “the act of philosophizing itself” “has the structure of hope.”[156]

As for ethics, while man must always act, he always acts with imperfect knowledge, and that is why the virtue of prudence stands at the head of the moral virtues.[157] The domain of prudence is “the domain of all those contingent things to be pondered and decided in each case and in view of each specific situation.”[158] The temptation is to deny the necessity for prudence by “fashion[ing] for oneself some sort of moral enclave to escape some of life’s particular demands,” such as “through authoritarian prescription of ‘ideals’ and ‘models’ or else through casuistical directives. But in no other manner are the noble purposes of life achieved and man’s ethical call fulfilled than by struggling, in each specific case, for the appropriate answer to a reality whose ultimate extent we cannot measure once and for all and whose inner nature is marked by unlimited, changing diversity.”[159]

Only by acting in accordance with the virtue of prudence, Pieper continued,

“can man realize his own destiny, a destiny not of his own invention, a destiny, moreover, whose final features he may not even behold beforehand. Nobody is able to anticipate his personal destiny and set it up as his ‘ideal’: man is positioned too much in the midst of a world that constantly deals out surprises beyond all presumed knowledge; man is living too much face to face with the absolute of it all, so that his own inner boundlessness constitutes but the counterpart to an unfathomable world.”[160]

Conclusion

Reading Pieper is a bit like reading a Roman Catholic Eric Voegelin. If Voegelin is something of a philosophical propaedeutic to that faith, Pieper is closer to a completion.

Reading Pieper is also a joy. As is often remarked, his prose is concise and clear, and free of the jargon that infects so much of modern philosophy.

There are very few things as important in philosophy, including political philosophy, as getting the relationship between philosophy and theology right. Reason and revelation are, after all, what Pieper would regard as the two ordering forces of the “great tradition of Western culture,” and their radical separation in modernity represents a continuing crisis.

While Pieper’s work covers a broad range of subjects, of which we have been able to give detailed attention to only some, we hope to have at least shed some light on the close relationship between philosophy and theology in Pieper’s work generally, and the nature of that relationship, by which Pieper hoped to bring, like Eric Voegelin also, some healing to our crisis.

References

Benedict XVI. Saved in Hope (Spe Salvi). Encyclical Letter. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008.

Pieper, Josef. “The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power.” In Problems of Modern Faith: Essays and Addresses, 231-256. Translated by Jan van Heurck. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1985.

——. Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power. Translated by Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.

——. A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart. Translated by Paul C. Duggan. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.

——. The Christian Idea of Man. Translated by Dan Farrelly. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011.

——. The Concept of Sin. Translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001.

——. Death and Immortality. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.

——. “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case against Secular Humanism. Translated by Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995.

——. Don’t Worry About Socrates: Three Plays for Television. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2018.

——. The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954. (A more recent edition was published in 1999 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco.)

——. Faith Hope Love. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997.

——. For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy. Edited by Berthold Wald. Translated by Roger Wasserman. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006.

——. The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980.

——. Guide to Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Random House, 1964.

——. Happiness and Contemplation. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1966.

——. Hope and History: Five Salzburg Lectures. Translated by Dr. David Kipp. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994.

——. The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas: A Breviary of Philosophy From the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Drostan Maclaren, O.P. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002.

——. In Defense of Philosophy: Classical Wisdom Stands up to Modern Challenges. Translated by Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.

——. In Search of the Sacred: Contributions to an Answer. Translated by Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.

——. Josef Pieper: An Anthology. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.

——. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: Random House, 1963.

——. Living the Truth: The Truth of All Things and Reality and the Good. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.

——. No One Could Have Known: An Autobiography; The Early Years, 1904-1945. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979, Kindle.

——. Not Yet the Twilight: An Autobiography 1945-1964. Translated by Dan and Una Farrelly. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2017.

——. On Hope. Translated by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986.

——. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. Translated by Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990.

——. The Platonic Myths. Translated by Dan Farrelly. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011.

——. Problems of Modern Faith: Essays and Addresses. Translated by Jan van Heurck. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1985.

——. Rules of the Game in Social Relationships. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2018.

——. Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.

——. The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays. Translated by John Murray, S.J., and Daniel O’Connor. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999.

——. Tradition as Challenge: Essays and Speeches. Translated by Dan Farrelly. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015.

——. Tradition: Concept and Claim. Translated by E. Christian Kopff. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010.

——. “The Truth of All Things: An Inquiry into the Anthropology of the High Middle Ages.” Translated by Lothar Krauth. In Living the Truth: The Truth of All Things and Reality and the Good, 9-105. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.

——. In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999.

Schumacher, Bernard N. A Philosophy of Hope: Josef Pieper and the Contemporary Debate on Hope. Translated by D. C. Schindler. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Notes

[1] American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 2019; 35^th International Meeting of The Eric Voegelin Society, 2019; Panel on “The Art of Measurement in Politics”; Washington, D.C.; August 31, 2019.

[2] Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Random House, 1964), 117. or another work of Pieper on Aquinas, see Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays, trans. John Murray, S.J., and Daniel O’Connor (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).

[3] Ibid., 118.

[4] Ibid., 117.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 48.

[7] Josef Pieper, Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964).

[8] Ibid., 111.

[9] “The enthroning of any system of thought is bound to have some undesirable results. . . . I should like to forestall any misunderstanding of what I am saying here. I do not regard the special, unusual distinction conferred upon Thomas Aquinas by ecclesiastical authority as a mere chance product of certain conservative and unyielding tendencies. Nor do I consider it primarily a disciplinary measure intended to establish or preserve ‘intellectual unity.’ The Viennese theologian Albert Mitterer, for example, states that ‘Thomism’ is ‘prescribed by the Church.’ I think such phraseology extremely unfortunate, and misleading as well (as if the Church’s decision were a kind of police ordinance issued solely for reasons of expediency and susceptible to abrogation or alteration). Rather, I am convinced that the pre-eminent position assigned to St. Thomas, which may now and then strike people as strange, is meaningful and necessary in terms of the subject matter itself, inherently so. . . . the very special status accorded to St. Thomas . . . cannot very well mean anything other but this: that in his works he succeeded in stating the whole of truth in a unique, exemplary fashion. . . . What is great in the great appears to consist precisely in those qualities which rule them out as representatives of a ‘movement.’ And this is also true of Thomas. His greatness, and incidentally his timeliness, consists precisely in the fact that a real ‘ism’ cannot properly be attached to him; that, therefore, ‘Thomism’ cannot really exist.” Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, 24-26.

See also Pieper’s essay on “The Timeliness of Thomism” in Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas, 73-110. There Pieper says that “the designation ‘Thomism’ . . . is . . . so inappropriate []Because it leads us to think almost automatically of a specific school of thought elaborated in polemical theses and countertheses, and particularly of a traditionally perpetuated teaching system of propositions.” Ibid., 81. Pieper goes on to draw parallels between the thought of Aquinas and the existentialism of his own time, under the name of which Pieper “[had] to admit that . . . the most vital and genuine philosophical thinking is being carried on today.” Ibid., 86.      

[10] James V. Schall, Introduction to The Platonic Myths, by Josef Pieper (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011), ix. For a work of Pieper on Plato’s philosophy as its subject see an essay by Pieper entitled “On the Platonic Idea of Philosophy” in Josef Pieper, For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy, trans. Roger Wasserman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 157-172.

[11] Josef Pieper, The Christian Idea of Man, trans. Dan Farrelly (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011), 4-5.

Pieper’s treatment of “Church matters” can be found in certain Chapters of Josef Pieper, Problems of Modern Faith: Essays and Addresses, trans. Jan van Heurck (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1985), such as “The Sacred and ‘Desacrilization’”; “Not Words but Reality: The Sacrament of the Bread”; “What Is a Priest? An Urgent Effort at Clarification”; and “What Is a Church? Preliminary Reflections in the Theme of the ‘Sacred Building.’” In these essays, the “sacramental” character of Pieper’s thought, always present in his works, comes to the forefront.

[12] Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).

[13] Josef Pieper, Faith Hope Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997).

[14] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Random House, 1963).

[15] We have leisure in order to be able to engage in the highest of human activities, namely, contemplation, our end as human beings, for it is through the activity of contemplation that we may contact the transcendent divine ground of all being, namely, God.

In the Preface to Leisure, Pieper said: “Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship. . . . the cultus, now as in the past, is the primary source of man’s freedom, independence and immunity within society. Suppress that last sphere of freedom, and freedom itself, and all our liberties, will in the end vanish into thin air. Culture, in the sense in which it is used above, is the quintessence of all the natural goods of the world and of those gifts and qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his needs and wants.” Ibid., 17.

[16] Josef Pieper, “The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power,” in Problems of Modern Faith: Essays and Addresses, 231-256. Also available in a different translation as Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992).

[17] “The reason why man is a being meant for political association, in a higher degree than bees or other gregarious animals can ever associate, is evident. Nature, according to our theory, makes nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals is furnished with the faculty of language. The mere making of sounds serves to indicate pleasure and pain, and is thus a faculty that belongs to animals in general: their nature enables them to attain the point at which they have perceptions of pleasure and pain, and can signify those perceptions to one another. But language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it therefore serves to declare what is just and what is unjust. It is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with the rest of the animal world, that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and of other similar qualities; and it is association in [a common perception of] these things which makes a family and a polis.” Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 5-6.

For a wonderful contemporary account of language, and of the human person as “the agent of truth” through the faculty of syntax, see Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

See also, William Brennan, Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1995), on how the meanings of words are changed to define certain persons out of the human race, thereby permitting their destruction.

[18] Pieper, “The Abuse of Language,” 231.

[19] Ibid., 237 and 250.

[20] Ibid., 237-238.

[21] Ibid., 251.

[22] Ibid., 251-252.

[23] Ibid., 252-253. This sounds so much like the phenomenological approach taken by Sokolowski in Phenomenology of the Human Person.

[24] Ibid., 254-256. How things have changed since Pieper wrote this!

Pieper also discusses the importance of language in Josef Pieper, “What Does It Mean to Say ‘God Speaks?’: Preliminary Reflections to a Theological Debate” in Problems of Modern Faith: Essays and Addresses, 117-148.

[25] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “One Word of Truth . . .,” The Nobel Speech on Literature, 1970 (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), 27.

[26] Josef Pieper, Rules of the Game in Social Relationships (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2018).

[27] Ibid., 1.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., 2.

[30] Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000) 1.

[31] Josef Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), 30.

Pieper explored the concept of “traditional pronouncements which are believed . . . to ‘have come down from a divine source’” in “What Does It Mean to Say ‘God Speaks?’: Preliminary Reflections to a Theological Debate.”

[32] Josef Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, trans. E. Christian Kopff (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 45 and 47.

For concise “definitions” of “revelation,” “holy tradition,” “faith,” and “theology,” see Josef Pieper, For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy, trans. Roger Wasserman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 149.

[33] Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, 17-18.

[34] Ibid., 27.

[35] Ibid., 27, quoting Philebus 16c5-9.

[36] Ibid., 29.

[37] Ibid., 62.

[38] Ibid., 63.

[39] Michael Morrissey has argued that Voegelin was as much theologian as political scientist or political philosopher, going so far as to say that Voegelin in effect dissolved the distinction between philosophy and theology:

The basic contention of this study is that Voegelin’s monumental work, especially his later writings, is as germane to theology as it is to philosophy and political science. . . . Indeed, of no other contemporary thinker could one say as unhesitatingly that the distinction between philosophy and theology, for all practical and theoretical purposes, virtually disappears. I believe Voegelin’s entire philosophical enterprise is actually a veiled reconstruction of theology that I think theologians have by and large yet to recognize. In the name of philosophy Voegelin has reproached and renewed, rebuked and rebuilt, theology. . . . by successfully annexing faith and reason, reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, Athens and Jerusalem, in a critical theory of consciousness, he has reconstructed the authentic foundations of theology. . . .

Michael P. Morrissey, Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 5-6.

[40] Incidentally, I did not find any reference to either Strauss or Voegelin in the works of Pieper I consulted, and I would be interested in knowing if Pieper was familiar with the work of either.

[41] See Eric Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” Ch. 5 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12–Published Essays, 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

[42] Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, 33.

[43] Josef Pieper, The Platonic Myths, tr. Dan Farrelly (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011), 39.

[44] Ibid., 17.

[45] Ibid., 16.

[46] Ibid., 41.

[47] Ibid., 62.

[48] Pieper, The End of Time, 54.

[49] Pieper, The Platonic Myths, 54-55.

[50] Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, 63.

[51] Ibid., 63.

[52] Gorgias 523a1.

[53] Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, 17.

[54] Ibid., 53.

[55] Ibid., 47, quoting Republic 621c1.

[56] Ibid., 63-64.

[57] Ibid., 65.

[58] Ibid., 66.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Ibid.

[61] Ibid., 66-67.

[62] Ibid., 35.

[63] Ibid., 68.

[64] Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History.

[65] Josef Pieper, Hope and History: Five Salzburg Lectures, trans. Dr. David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).

[66] Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).

[67] James V. Schall, Introduction to The Platonic Myths, by Josef Pieper, ix.

[68] Pieper, The End of Time, 25.

[69] Ibid., 120.

[70] Ibid., 134.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Pieper, Hope and History, 13.

[73] Ibid., 18.

[74] Ibid., 26.

[75] Ibid., 35.

[76] Ibid., 44.

[77] Ibid., quoting Heinrich Schlier, Die Zeit der Kirche (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1956), 265.

[78] Ibid., 47.

[79] Ibid., 84-85.

[80] Ibid., 86.

[81] Ibid., quoting Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Gifford Lectures 1949-1950, II. Faith and Reality (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), p. 180.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid., 86-87.

[84] Ibid., 87.

[85] Ibid., 89.

[86] Ibid., 106.

[87] Ibid., 106-107.

[88] Ibid., 107.

[89] Ibid.

[90] Ibid., 112-113; the quote if from Konrad Weiß.

[91] Pieper, Death and Immortality, 1.

[92] Ibid.

[93] Ibid., 3-4.

[94] Ibid., Chapter IV.

[95] Ibid., 39.

[96] Ibid., 43.

[97] Ibid., 43-44.

[98] Ibid., 51-52.

[99] Ibid., 44.

[100] Ibid., 45-46.

[101] Ibid., 68.

[102] Ibid., 47.

[103] Ibid., 50.

[104] Ibid.

[105] Ibid., 51.

[106] Ibid., 52-53.

[107] Ibid., 55-57.

[108] Ibid., 57.

[109] Ibid., 65-66

[110] Ibid., 70.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Ibid., 71.

[113] Ibid., 92.

[114] Ibid., 118.

[115] Ibid., 101.

[116] T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Joseph Pieper, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Random House, 1963), 13.

[117] Pope John Paul II, On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1998), 3.

[118] Summa Theologica I, Q.1, Art. 8, ad. 2.

[119] Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 25.

[120] Ibid., 26-27.

[121] Ibid., 27.

[122] Ibid., quoting Quaestiones disputate de veritate.

[123] Ibid., 28.

[124] Ratio (Latin) = logos (Greek). Intellectus (Latin) = nous (Greek).

[125] St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” trans. C. I. Litzinger, O.P. (Notre Dame, Indiana: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), 629-630.

[126] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1969), 75; Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” Ch. 6 in Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 95.

[127] See, for example, Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience.”

[128] Josef Pieper, For the Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy, trans. Roger Wasserman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

[129] Ibid., 13-26.

[130] Ibid., 27-80.

[131] Ibid., 29.

[132] Ibid., 39.

[133] Ibid.

[134] Ibid.

[135] Ibid., 60.

[136] Ibid. Voegelin: “In the Platonic-Aristotelian experience, the questioning unrest caries the assuaging answer within itself inasmuch as man is moved to his search of the ground by the divine ground of which he is in search. . . . The consciousness of questioning unrest in a state of ignorance becomes luminous to itself as a movement in the psyche toward the ground that is present in the psyche as its mover.” Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” 95-96.

[137] Ibid., 70-71.

[138] Ibid., 133.

[139] Ibid., 135-136.

[140] Josef Pieper, “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case against Secular Humanism, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).

[141] Josef Pieper, In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).

[142] Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990).

[143] Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1966).

[144] Josef Pieper, Faith Hope Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 93.

In addition to the Chapter on “Hope” in this volume, see also Pieper’s essay entitled “Creatureliness and Human Nature” in Pieper, For the Love of Wisdom, 173-184.

The part of Faith Hope Love on hope also appears as Josef Pieper, On Hope, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986.)

[145] Ibid.

[146] Ibid.

[147] Ibid.

[148] Ibid., 94.

[149] Ibid.

[150] Ibid., 96-97.

[151] Ibid., 98.

[152] Ibid.

[153] Josef Pieper, “The Truth of All Things: An Inquiry into the Anthropology of the High Middle Ages,” in Living the Truth: The Truth of All Things and Reality and the Good, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 93.

[154] Ibid., 93-94.

[155] Pieper, For the Love of Wisdom, 50.

[156] Ibid., 132.

See also Pieper’s discussion of “Hope as the Structure of Creaturely Knowledge” in Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays, trans. John Murray, S.J., and Daniel O’Connor (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), 68-71.

[157] Pieper, “The Truth of All Things,” 96-98.

[158] Ibid., 97.

[159] Ibid., 97-98.

[160] Ibid., 98.

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