In this elegantly written (and produced) work, Josef Pieper introduces the reader to an understanding that leisure is nothing less than "an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world." Beginning with the Greeks, and through a series of philosophic, religious, and historical examples, Pieper demonstrates that "Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture." Of the frenetic contemporary clamor for things, entertainment, and distraction, Pieper observes, "in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture -- and ourselves." For, to Pieper, slavery is a state of mind and soul into which entire peoples descend when mental, moral, spiritual, and political independence is corrupted by a preoccupation with material well-being. Long unavailable, this reprint of the original edition of 1952 includes an introduction by T. S. Eliot.

One of the great philosophers of the 20th Century, Josef Pieper, gives a penetrating introduction and guide to the life and works of perhaps the greatest philosopher ever, St. Thomas Aquinas. Pieper provides a biography of Aquinas, an overview of the 13th century he lived in, and a wonderful synthesis of his vast writings. Pieper shows how Aquinas reconciled the pragmatic thought of Aristotle with the Church, proving that realistic knowledge need not preclude belief in the spiritual realities of religion. According to Pieper, the marriage of faith and reason proposed by Aquinas in his great synthesis of a "theologically founded worldliness" was not merely one solution among many, but the great principle expressing the essence of the Christian West. Pieper reveals his extraordinary command of original sources and excellent secondary materials as he illuminates the thought of the great intellectual Doctor of the Church.

Plato's famous dialogue, the Phaedrus, was variously subtitled in antiquity: "On Beauty", "On Love", "On the Psyche". It is also concerned with the art of rhetoric, of thought and communication.

Pieper, noted for the grace and clarity of his style, gives an illuminating and stimulating interpretation of the dialogue. Leaving the more recondite scholarly preoccupations aside, he concentrates on the content, bringing the actual situation in the dialogue -- Athens and its intellectuals engaged in spirited debate -- alive. Equally alive is the discussion of ideas, which are brought to bear on contemporary experience and made to prove the perennial validity of Socratic wisdom, and its power to excite the mind. The main thesis -- that in poetry and in love man is "beside himself", that is, divinely inspired -- is discussed with reference to modern poets, novelists, and modern psychology.

No better guide over the thousand-year period called the Middle Ages could be found than Josef Pieper. In this amazing tour de monde medievale, he moves easily back and forth between the figures and the doctrines that made medieval philosophy unique in Western thought. After reflecting on the invidious implications of the phrase 'Middle Ages,' Pieper turns to the fascinating personality of Boethius whose contribution to prison literature, The Consolation of Philosophy, is second only to the Bible in the number of manuscript copies. The Neo-Platonic figures - Dionysius and Eriugena - are the occasion for a discussion of negative theology. The treatment of Anselm of Canterbury's proof of God's existence involves later voices, e.g., Kant. Like other historians, Pieper is enamored of the twelfth century, which is regularly eclipsed by accounts of the thirteenth century. Pieper does justice to both. His account of the rivalry between Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux is masterful, nor does he fail to give John of Salisbury the space he deserves. The account is broken by the gradual replacement of the synthesis of faith and reason that had been achieved in the early Middle Ages by a new one that made use of Aristotle. Pieper gives a thorough and lively account of the struggle between Aristotelians and anti-Aristotelians, and the famous condemnations that put the effort of Saint Thomas Aquinas at risk. But the Summa theologiae is regarded by Pieper as the unique achievement of the period. If the early centuries, the medieval period, can be seen as moving toward the thirteenth and Thomas's unique achievement, subsequent centuries saw the decline of scholasticism and the appearance of harbingers of modern philosophy. The book closes with Pieper's thoughts on the permanent philosophical and theological significance of scholasticism and the Middle Ages. Once again, wearing his learning lightly, writing with a clarity that delights, Josef Pieper has taken the field from stuffier and more extended accounts.

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.

In ordinary conversation, including among the "educated", the word "sin" rarely gets mentioned except when one is trying to be coy or facetious. As Thomas Mann once said, "sin" is nowadays "an amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh".

But this small work will interpret sin in its true -- that is, serious -- meaning. What will emerge from its analysis is the discovery that the concept of sin can still serve to unlock the mystery of existence, at least for a thinking that wants to press down to the very foundations.

Needless to say, such an effort will require a kind of "mining energy" of an archeologist of ideas who knows how to recover what was once known (or at least suspected) from time immemorial but has now been forgotten. But Josef Pieper does more than bring to bear on this issue his famous powers of excavation; he also makes meaningful the concept of sin to the ways of thinking and speaking of our time.

Readers of his work already know Pieper as an extraordinarily fitting master in this art of making "the wisdom of the ages" a living reality today. And in this work he brings Plato, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas into a living dialogue with T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, even with Jean-Paul Sartre. As he shows in this powerful work, none of these writers leaves any doubt that the fact of sin is central: It is the willful denial of one's own life-ground, a denial that alone rightly bears the name of "sin". Paradoxically, this reality is both willed and yet also pre-given, that is, both adventitious and yet somehow innate to our existence -- a paradox which, next to the mystery of existence itself, is the most impenetrable mystery of all.

This title, which at first sight seems curious, shows Pieper's philosophical work as rooted in the basics. He takes his inspiration from Plato - and his Socrates - and Thomas Aquinas. With them, he is interested in philosophy as pure theory, the theoretical being precisely the non-practical. The philosophizer wants to know what all existence is fundamentally about, what "reality" "really" means. With Plato, Pieper eschews the use of language to convince an audience of anything which is not the truth. If Plato was opposed to the sophists - amongst them the politicians -, Pieper is likewise opposed to discourse that leads to the "use" of philosophy to bolster a totalitarian regime or any political or economic system. A fundamental issue for Pieper is "createdness." He sees this as the fundamental truth of our being - all being - and the fundamental virtue we can practise is the striving to live according to our perception of real truth in any given situation. The strength and attraction of Pieper's writing is its direct and intuitive character which is independent of abstract systematization. He advocates staying in touch with the "real" as we experience it deep within ourselves. Openness to the totality of being - in no matter what context being reveals itself - and the affirmation of all that is founded in this totality are central pillars of all his thinking. Given the "simplicity" of this stance, it is no surprise that much of it is communicated - and successfully - through his gift for illustration by anecdote. Like Plato, this philosopher is a story-teller and, like him, very readable.

This title, which at first sight seems curious, shows Pieper's philosophical work as rooted in the basics. He takes his inspiration from Plato - and his Socrates - and Thomas Aquinas. With them, he is interested in philosophy as pure theory, the theoretical being precisely the non-practical. The philosophizer wants to know what all existence is fundamentally about, what "reality" "really" means. With Plato, Pieper eschews the use of language to convince an audience of anything which is not the truth. If Plato was opposed to the sophists - amongst them the politicians -, Pieper is likewise opposed to discourse that leads to the "use" of philosophy to bolster a totalitarian regime or any political or economic system. A fundamental issue for Pieper is "createdness." He sees this as the fundamental truth of our being - all being - and the fundamental virtue we can practise is the striving to live according to our perception of real truth in any given situation. The strength and attraction of Pieper's writing is its direct and intuitive character which is independent of abstract systematization. He advocates staying in touch with the "real" as we experience it deep within ourselves. Openness to the totality of being - in no matter what context being reveals itself - and the affirmation of all that is founded in this totality are central pillars of all his thinking. Given the "simplicity" of this stance, it is no surprise that much of it is communicated - and successfully - through his gift for illustration by anecdote. Like Plato, this philosopher is a story-teller and, like him, very readable.

This volume, the original version of which was published in 1988, brings to a close the autobiographical writings of a modern Christian philosopher who lived through the two World Wars and the ecclesiastical upheaval in the Catholic Church in the context of the Second Vatican Council. What stamps this philosopher throughout the course of his life - with all its social and political uncertainties - is his constant dedication to truth and his manifest unswerving integrity. Themes with which the reader of his previous works would be well acquainted recur in this volume. The dedicated Catholic philosopher, who preferred his independence as a trainer of teachers to the less independent role of a professor in a Catholic university, was quite prepared to criticize developments in the Church which resulted from Vatican II. In his defense of the sacred, which he deemed threatened by popularizing trends in the Church, he criticized what he saw as the watered down language in modern German translations of Church liturgical texts; the growing preference for secular garb; and the compromising developments which saw the sacramental signs - surrounding baptism, for instance - being reduced to such an extent that they no longer had the power to signify their sacred meaning even to a well-intentioned congregation. A great lover of the philosophy of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas - among many others -, Pieper highlighted the need for living a life of truth. He did not consider truth to be merely something abstract but as something to be lived existentially. While he could explain his philosophy in clear rational terms, something which especially stood to him in his post-war lectures to eager students who were hungry for intellectual guidance and leadership, the great interest of his philosophy was, possibly, his preoccupation with mystery - that which impinges on our inner lives but frustrates all our attempts to account for it in purely rational terms. As a philosopher - one might say a Christian philosopher - Pieper seems to have observed the traditional boundaries drawn between philosophy and theology. His generation was exposed to the modernist debates in the Church. It would have been deemed heretical to say that the Divine could be grasped by our purely human thought processes - access to the Divine being only possible through faith and grace. Pieper was no heretic. But he was also not altogether conservative. In fact, his philosophy, closely allied to existentialism - despite his care, for instance, to distance himself from the negative existentialism of Sartre - focused on the individual's inner existential grasp of the most profound reality. Truth is to be found within us, even if it remains a mystery. What lies beyond death is, for the individual, the ultimate mystery.

1 Vorlesungen iiber die Geschichte der Phi osophie. Erster Band. Hrsg. Joh. Hoffmeister. Leipzig 1940. S.101. Confessiones 11, 14. 3 Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1875/79. Gesammelte Werke. Musarion-Ausgabe (Miin chen 1922 ff.), Bd. 9, S. 480. 4 Kurt Eisner, Feste der Festlosen. Dresden 1906. S. 10. S Gerhard Nebel, Die Kultischen Olympien. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung vom 20.8. 1960. 8 Martin P. Nilsson, Griechische Feste von religioser Bedeutung, mit AusschluB der atti schen. Leipzig 1906. S. III und S. 160. 7 Richard Alewyn, Karl Salzle, Das groBe Welttheater. Die Epoche der hofischen Feste in Dokument und Deutung. Rowohlts Deutsche Enzyklopadie. Hamburg 1959. S. 16. 8 J. Pinsk, Die sakramentale Welt. 2. Auf ., Freiburg i. Br. 1941. S. 163. 9 Alewyn-Salzle, Welttheater S. 13. 10 Karl Kerenyi, Yom Wesen des Festes. Paideuma, Bd. I. Leipzig 1938-40. S. 73. - ders., Die antike Religion. Amsterdam 1940. S. 67. 11 Dictionnaire des Antiquites Grecques et Romaines. Ed. Ch. Daremberg und E. Saglio. Paris 1896. Artikel "Feriae." Bd.lI, S. 1044. 12 Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Romer. 2. Aufl., Miinchen 1912. S.432. 13 Theorie de la Fete. Nouvelle Revue Fran aise, Bd. 53 (1939). - Spater aufgenommen in L'homme et Ie sacre. 3. Auf ., Paris 1950. S. 128; 165 f. 14 Phaidros 276 b 5. 16 Phi osophie der Weltgeschichte. Samtliche Werke. Jubilaumsausgabe. Hrsg. H. Glo- ner. Stuttgart 1927-1940. Bd. 11, S. 318. 18 Adolf Ellegard Jensen, Mythos und Kult bei Naturvolkern. Wiesbaden 1951. S.77."

"The ultimate of human happiness is to be found in contemplation".

In offering this proposition of Thomas Aquinas to our thought, Josef Pieper uses traditional wisdom in order to throw light on present-day reality and present-day psychological problems. What, in fact, does one pursue in pursuing happiness? What, in the consensus of the wisdom of the early Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, of the New Testament, of Augustine and Aquinas, is that condition of perfect bliss toward which all life and effort tend by nature?

In this profound and illuminating inquiry, Pieper considers the nature of contemplation, and the meaning and goal of life.

In this stimulating and still-timely study, Josef Pieper takes up a theme of paramount importance to his thinking -- that festivals belong by rights among the great topics of philosophical discussion.

As he develops his theory of festivity, the modern age comes under close and painful scrutiny. It is obvious that we no longer know what festivity is, namely, the celebration of existence under various symbols.

Pieper exposes the pseudo-festivals, in their harmless and their sinister forms: traditional feasts contaminated by commercialism; artificial holidays created in the interest of merchandisers; holidays by coercion, decreed by dictators the world over; festivals as military demonstrations; holidays empty of significance. And lastly we are given the apocalyptic vision of a nihilistic world which would seek its release not in festivities but in destruction.

Formulated with Pieper's customary clarity and elegance, enhanced by brilliantly chosen quotations, this is an illuminating contribution to the understanding of traditional and contemporary experience.

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.