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.

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.

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.

"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.

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!

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

Pieper collects his contributions to radio programs and to a number of journals and periodicals. The book also includes a selection of notes and comments. The contributions fall into two main groups: the period which encompasses the immediate pre-war period as well as the war period itself, and the post-war period up to 1953.The reader becomes witness, first, to Pieper's problems with the National Socialist regime and, second, to his problems with the ensuing challenges to religious life as it is exposed to increasing secularization. As with his later works, Pieper draws on traditional wisdom which, for him, dates back to Plato and Aristotle, and in these contributions we also see his early preoccupation with the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas. The normal boundaries between philosophy and theology are here not clearly drawn. Pieper is preoccupied with the mystery of our world and its importance as a source of symbols signifying deeper levels of reality. He sees the sacraments as achieving their fundamental effect from divine intervention, but he also highlights the need for careful observance of the rituals, so that their meaning is not obscured. Proper execution of the sacrament should enable the faithful to enjoy the existential fruits of their participation in the ritual. This work manifests the organic cohesion of Pieper's thinking, and it reflects his profound awareness of the role to be played not so much by the professional (academic) philosopher as by the existential Philosophizer.

Pieper collects his contributions to radio programs and to a number of journals and periodicals. The book also includes a selection of notes and comments. The contributions fall into two main groups: the period which encompasses the immediate pre-war period as well as the war period itself, and the post-war period up to 1953.The reader becomes witness, first, to Pieper's problems with the National Socialist regime and, second, to his problems with the ensuing challenges to religious life as it is exposed to increasing secularization. As with his later works, Pieper draws on traditional wisdom which, for him, dates back to Plato and Aristotle, and in these contributions we also see his early preoccupation with the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas. The normal boundaries between philosophy and theology are here not clearly drawn. Pieper is preoccupied with the mystery of our world and its importance as a source of symbols signifying deeper levels of reality. He sees the sacraments as achieving their fundamental effect from divine intervention, but he also highlights the need for careful observance of the rituals, so that their meaning is not obscured. Proper execution of the sacrament should enable the faithful to enjoy the existential fruits of their participation in the ritual. This work manifests the organic cohesion of Pieper's thinking, and it reflects his profound awareness of the role to be played not so much by the professional (academic) philosopher as by the existential Philosophizer.