A cosmopolitan hermit: modernity and tradition in the philosophy of Josef Pieper

9. Josef Pieper on the Truth of All Things and the World’s True Face

228 9 Josef Pieper on the Truth of All Things and the World’s True Face Matthew Cuddeback The Truth of All Things is one of the defining works of Josef Pieper ’s corpus.1 In his autobiography Pieper describes the origins of this work: The subject of the “truth of things” had continued to ferment within me all this time [during World War II]. Above all, it gradually became clear to me that the old saying omne ens est verum is by no means a merely abstract doctrine of scholastic metaphysics but an utterly real and relevant statement about the nature of man.2 So relevant for his age did Pieper deem omne ens est verum that there is hardly a major work of his in which he does not mention o 1. Josef Pieper, The Truth of All Things: An Inquiry into the Anthropology of the High Middle Ages. Guido Rodheudt (Die Anwesenheit des Verborgenen: Zugänge zur Philosophie Josef Piepers) says that this work and its subject are a key to Pieper’s work. See also Pieper’s more compact treatment of truth in “Wahrheit der Dinge— ein verschollener Begriff.” 2. Josef Pieper, No One Could Have Known, 163 [171]. The Truth of All Things 229 the subject. The passage from his autobiography indicates two leading features of his teaching. First, omne ens est verum, “every thing that is, is true,” is an “old saying” that has been handed down within the Western wisdom-tradition and is weighted with that tradition ’s authority. Second, omne ens est verum has unmatched power to “reveal and illumine” the nature of man and of reality.3 It means: God sees, and God creates by seeing things into being. Hence all things are knowable by the human mind. This teaching, says Pieper , makes a “decisive difference” for our view of the world. It gives the world “another face,”4 its true face. In this article I shall present Pieper’s teaching on “the truth of things,” and on a central point develop and support it. In section I, I shall examine omne ens est verum as an utterance handed-down within what Pieper calls “holy tradition.” In the remaining three sections I shall examine the way that omne ens est verum illumines reality. In section II, I shall describe three basic elements of Pieper’s teaching on truth in order of priority: God sees and makes all things by His ideas; the creature is shaped by God and so is knowable; the creature is shaped by God and so unfathomable. In section III, I shall develop and support Pieper’s assertion of the primacy of God’s seeing of creatures in His ideas, by examining Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae I, qq. 14–15, on the primacy of God’s speculative knowledge. Pieper uses these texts, but not to the full advantage of his own position. In section IV, I shall show that Pieper’s assertion of the “word-character” of created things is the full flower of his 3. He speaks of its “wirklichkeitsaufschließende Strahlungskraft” in The Truth of All Things, 11 [101]. I have modified the translation and I shall modify translations throughout. See ibidem, 20 [108]; “Wahrheit der Dinge—ein verschollener Begriff,” 383. 4. Josef Pieper, The Truth of All Things, 43 [130]. The phrases I am translating appear in their original context as follows: “Macht es nicht für das Weltbild eines Menschen einen entscheidenden Unterschied, ob einer den folgenden Satz des Thomas von Aquin mitvollzieht oder nicht: ‘Die Dinge sind mehr in Gott, als Gott in den Dingen ist’?” and, “Sondern die Welt der Dinge selbst hat für den Menschen ein ein anderes Gesicht, je nachdem, ob er diese Lehre [i.e. the truth of all things] bejaht oder nicht.” 230 Matthew Cuddeback teaching on truth, and something he intended as a word of hope for his troubled age.5 I As Kenneth Schmitz observes in this volume, tradition is the starting point, goal, and medium of Pieper’s thought. The opening pages of The Truth of All Things bear this out. Pieper presents omne ens est verum as a traditional Weltaussage, an utterance about the whole of things, that runs roots to Plato (truth “is the most noble of things”),6 Parmenides, Pythagoras, and deeper. The great teachers of the high Middle Ages, “in whom the whole Western tradition from the...