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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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."

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!