There is the reality of creation and the perversion of our
perception of reality. There is, in plain words, God's world and
man's corrupt nature, which St. John the Apostle calls the
"gratification of the eyes, and the empty pomp of living." These
are theological considerations; the whole question of good and evil
today is, as they say, relative or ambiguous, and modern philosophy
has followed suit: an immense structure without a keystone.
Therefore Professor Pieper's meditations on not only the idea of
virtue, but also on what he takes to be its almost existential
necessity, seem both roundly anachronistic and oddly tantalizing,
even though, or especially because, he places the discussion within
the weighty halls of Thomistic tradition. He himself is aware of
the poignancy involved: "The interpreter, in these latter days,
invokes this tradition in the hope of seeming less ridiculous as he
boldly drafts a moral standard for humanity, which he, in his own
daily life is utterly unable to meet." So the fallible man, with
infallible scholarship, incidentally, reviews the four cardinal
virtues- Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance- showing how each
interconnect and balance the other, what sub-values they define or
include, and how they illuminate human action, character, "truth."
Perhaps these religiously committed essays are too full of heady
pieties. The discussion, however, is historically broad (Platonism
to Heidegger), and the parallels drawn are often surprisingly
sharp, e.g., Pieper equates the Scripture's "He who loves his life
will lose it," with the ego-defense problem of psychiatry, and so
forth. (Kirkus Reviews)
In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper delivers a stimulating
quartet of essays on the four cardinal virtues. He demonstrates the
unsound overvaluation of moderation that has made contemporary
morality a hollow convention and points out the true significance
of the Christian virtues.
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