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

4. Josef Pieper’s Early Sociological Writings

88 4 Josef Pieper’s Early Sociological Writings Hermann Braun Translated by Matthew Cuddeback and Michael J. Miller The far-off voice allows us to grasp what now is, in the light of what is always or for the most part.1 For his entire life Josef Pieper was in search of the truth, guided by a far-off teacher. His thought did not follow fashion. Two early experiences left their mark on him. Hungry for a philosophical formation , he turned in his youth to Søren Kierkegaard, as did many of his generation. One of his teachers at the Gymnasium Paulinum nudged him in a different direction, explaining that the “black bread” of Thomas Aquinas is more nourishing than the Dane’s “pastries.” Pieper took the advice, and picked up the prologue to Aquinas’s commentary on the Gospel of John.2 A meeting with Romano Guardini gave him “bedeutende Fördero 1. Robert Spaemann, “Einleitung,” XVI: “Die Stimme aus der Ferne läßt uns das, was jetzt ist, begreifen im Lichte dessen, was immer und was meistens ist.” 2. Josef Pieper, No One Could Have Known. An Autobiography, 48f. [62f.]. Early Sociological Writings 89 nis durch ein einziges Wort” [“significant encouragement by a single word”], an allusion to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Pieper later described what Guardini told him in this meeting: All that ought to be is grounded in what is. The Good is what conforms to reality. Whoever wants to know and do the good must turn his gaze toward the objective world as it is, not toward his own thoughts, or to conscience , or to values, or self-determined ideals and models. He must disregard his own act and look to reality. These remarks are found in his dissertation on Aquinas.3 As a writer, Josef Pieper acquired a reputation for being faithful to the work of Thomas Aquinas. This faithfulness cannot be cast in the usual language for affinities of thought in intellectual history. Pieper was not “influenced” by his great teacher. He did not judge him, did not interpret him. He succeeded in doing what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel deemed most difficult, since it unites judgment and interpretation: He brought forth what was substantial and authentic in the work of the Angelic Doctor of the Church.4 The thought of Thomas Aquinas was so much Pieper’s own, that he moved in it with freedom and objectivity. Thus Josef Pieper brought Thomas Aquinas into modern-day discourse, for the benefit of those yearning for “the objectivity and thoroughness of a Mediterranean mind.”5 Thomas Stearns Eliot saw in his German friend a thinker who counteracts the corruption of philosophy by logical positivism, dispels philosophy’s inferiority complex with respect to mathematics 3. Josef Pieper, “   ‘Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges Wort.’ Romano Guardini zum 70. Geburtstag,” 659–60. See Josef Pieper, No One Could Have Known, 62f. [76f.]. Pieper’s dissertation, Die ontische Grundlage des Sittlichen nach Thomas von Aquin, was first published 1929 in Münster/Westfalen (Helios-Verlag). The text cited is taken from the revised edition, which first appeared 1931, under the title Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute, brought out by Pieper’s friend and publisher Jakob Hegner. 4. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, preface, 3 [11]. 5. Heinrich Böll, with reference to Pieper, “Thomas von Aquin,” in Fritz J. Raddatz, Zeit-Bibliothek der 100 Sachbücher, 40–45. 90 Hermann Braun and symbolic logic, and revives philosophy’s traditional relationship to theology: “He restores to their [rightful] position in philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: insight and wisdom.”6 Helmut Kuhn chose to entitle his appreciation of Pieper’s life work “The Wisdom of the Ancients in Our Time.” He describes Pieper as a kind of original and powerful thinker, as a Catholic who speaks as a philosopher and teaches us to do so, and who knows at the same time that every philosophical question finally “runs against an originally theological utterance.”7 Pieper did not belong to any particular Neo-Thomistic group. As a young man he was hunched over the two Summae and the Disputed Questions, not as a schoolboy caught in the taut net of transcendental logic, or bewitched by the depths of fundamental ontology, but as an artless student who sought a teacher and, having found him in Thomas, was never to...