By DONALD DeMARCO
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was born in the Westphalian village of Elte, a town so isolated that no train was available to take any of its citizens to any other part of Westphalia. In order to reach the nearest train station, one had to cross a river in a small ferryboat. Josef’s father had the distinction of being the only teacher in the village’s only school. Yet from Nazareth-like beginnings can come extraordinary accomplishments.
Josef attended school at the Gymnasium Paulinum in Münster, one of the oldest German schools, having served the cause of education for more than 1,100 years. There, a priest teacher directed him to read the works of St. Thomas Aquinas “with a sort of violent, ironical, and humorous intensity,” as Pieper would later recall. He was 18 at the time, but had found his master and his life’s guide.
“St. Thomas is still my hero,” wrote Pieper in the early 1950s. “I think his work is inexhaustible and his affirmative way of looking at the reality of the whole creation seems to me a necessary correction modern Christianity cannot do without.”
In 1931, he wrote a few booklets on Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and had planned to devote his career to the social sciences. However, it soon became impossible, with the emergence of National Socialism in Germany, for a Christian, let alone a Catholic author, to speak in public on social issues.
Pieper returned to his work in philosophy, applying the thought of Aquinas to the world in which he lived. And he did this with unusual clarity.
“No one has written more wisely on the relation between thinking and doing than Pieper, yet there are no obstacles of erudition between the reader and the presentation,” wrote philosopher Ralph McInerny.
He earned T.S. Eliot’s highest praise: “His [Pieper’s] sentences are admirably constructed, his ideas expressed with the maximum clarity. But his mind is submissive to what he believes to be the great, the main, tradition of European thought….He restores to their position in philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: insight and wisdom.”
Pieper is most noted for his many books on virtue. In fact, he is commonly known as the “Philosopher of Virtue.” Virtue for Pieper, following Aristotle and Aquinas, is perfective of the person. But the person is real and has an identifiable and intelligible nature. Wherever this nature is denied, totalitarianism gains a foothold. For, if there is no human nature, then there can be no crimes against it.
Pieper, therefore, denounced the Nazi position that human rights and human dignity are based not on a common human nature, but on ethnicity. Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous declaration, “Il n’y a pas de nature humaine” (There is no such thing as a human nature), perfectly exemplifies this unsupportable and unrealistic notion that human beings do not possess a common nature, that humanity is not universal. Thus, one can say with historian Jon Vickery that Pieper “may in fact be the man who said no to the spirit of his age.”
According to Pieper, man’s true humanness is what constitutes his goodness. And this humanness is “reason perfected in the cognition of truth.” When truth is denied or neglected, the goodness of the human being is lost. “Whoever rejects truth, whether natural or supernatural, is really ‘wicked’ and beyond conversion,” Pieper states in The Four Cardinal Virtues. Reason is understood as “regard for and openness to reality,” and “acceptance of reality.” Reason, reality, truth, nature, humanity, and goodness are all ordered to each other.
The authentic or complete person cannot do without any of these factors. “Surrender to sensuality,” he writes, “paralyzes the powers of the moral person.”
In his time, virtue was missing, especially the virtue of courage. Pieper lived a long life and recognized clearly the impediments to virtue that assailed people living at the end of the 20th century.
“The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age — unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.”
If Pieper had lived well into the 21st century, how would he characterize the spirit of the present times and what remedies would he have proposed? He had observed that Modern Man “often calls lies and cowardice prudent, truthfulness and courageous sacrifice imprudent.”
Perhaps he would not be utterly surprised to find that abortion is now commonly regarded as merely a choice and that the aborting woman is simply being prudent. Nor would he be astonished to note that it is imprudent to point out that abortion is an instance of domestic violence that kills a member of the human family.
With these observations in mind, he would insist on the importance of truth, whereas, during the rise of Nazism, he insisted on the importance of courage.
Pieper’s contribution to truth is indeed timely. In a broader sense, however, truth is always timely because it is eternal. Those truths are particularly timely when they are rejected.
What kind of person does Pieper have in mind who will work to reintroduce those truths that society lacks? Toward the end of his book, The Silence of St. Thomas, he remarks that “the truth will be more profoundly known as truth, the more vigorously its timeliness comes to light; it also means that a man experiencing his own time with a richer intensity of heart and fuller spiritual awareness has a better chance of experiencing the illuminating force of truth.”
Josef Pieper offers us a model of a virtuous man who, while understanding the timelessness of truth, also understands how truth has a special timeliness at moments in history when certain truths are rejected or ignored. The true teacher, for Pieper, knows how, through “a constantly inquiring meditation, to discover and point out wherein lies the relevance of truth to his own time.”
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