Josef Pieper: Leisure the Basis of Culture. Alexander Dru translation. New York: New American Library, 1963.
Josef Pieper: Happiness and Contemplation. Richard and Clara Winston translation. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1958.
Josef Pieper: The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance. Richard and Clara Winston, Lawrence E. Lynch, and Daniel F. Coogan translations. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.
Charles de Gaulle to André Malraux:
“Stalin said only one serious thing to me, and I have quoted it to you before: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.’ Still, there is contemplation.'”
Malraux then confesses to his readers:
“He had quoted that remark earlier, and I understood it no more than I did on this day.”
André Malraux: Felled Oaks. Section I. Terence Kilmartin translation. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), p.43.
Malraux’s younger contemporary, Josef Pieper, could have explained it to him. As a Thomist, that is to say a Christian Aristotelian, the philosopher Pieper shared with de Gaulle, the man of political action, a classical understanding of the priority of contemplation to action, which Malraux, the man who sought to combine a life of the mind with a life of action, did not follow, despite his extraordinary efforts on behalf of high culture both as a writer and as de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture in the Fifth Republic.
For Pieper as for Thomas Aquinas, as for Aristotle, leisure comes first. It is “the basis of culture.” “Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship.” A cultus entails “the ritual of public sacrifice,” and sacrifice betokens human “freedom, independence, and immunity within society” because by sacrificing a person or a people willingly relinquishes bodily things, the things that political society rewards by preserving and punishes by taking away, up to and including bodies themselves. “Suppress that last sphere of freedom,” as tyrants often do, “and freedom itself, and all our liberties, will in the end vanish into thin air.” Culture “is the quintessence of all the natural goods of the world and of those gifts and qualities which while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his needs and wants.” The “innermost circle” of this “realm of freedom” is philosophy as “understood in the traditional sense of Pato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas,” not as practiced by Bacon, Descartes, or Nietzsche—Nietzsche being the philosopher Malraux read more closely than any other. And philosophy as understood in the older sense means more than logic; it “presupposes silence, a contemplative attention to things, in which man begins to see how worthy of veneration they really are.” Malraux’s book, The Voices of Silence, approaches this thought not through philosophy but through art. Pieper will argue that such an approach is distinctively modern, uncontemplative. [1]
Writing in 1947 amidst the ruins of a Europe wrecked by two catastrophic wars, Pieper acknowledges that some will say that now “is not the time to talk about leisure.” Europe needs action, not contemplation, they will insist; Europe needs to rebuild. But rebuild in what way? For what purposes? Surely, that requires thought, Pieper answers. Thought is the activity of leisure, which in classical Greek is skole, source of the English word, ‘school.’ School is leisure, not labor. Labor properly serves schooling, leisure, not the other way around. Pieper cites Aristotle, who teaches in his Nicomachean Ethics that “we are unleisurely in order to have leisure.” That is to say, the liberal arts, the arts that free men practice, are not the servile arts, the arts of labor. To define human beings as laborers is to revise the “whole conception of ‘man,'” the conception of the human being as the reasoning animal.
In postwar Europe, intellectual activity had been redefined as “intellectual work,” with thinking men accordingly redefined as “intellectual workers.” In previous centuries, intellectual activity “appeared to be a sphere in which one did not need to work” (as it continues to be viewed by many hard-working Americans, today). Among those who thought, the culture of philosophers “seemed furthest” of all “from the world of work.” “But nowadays,” and not only in regimes of modern tyranny, only a few of which had been overthrown in the last war, “the whole field of intellectual activity, not excepting the province of philosophical culture, has been overwhelmed by the modern ideal of work and is at the mercy of its totalitarian claims.” At that time, the German nationalist ideologue Ernst Jünger called seeing an “act of aggression,” anticipating Foucault and an academic army of followers. But to the classical philosophers, to contemplate, to see with ‘the mind’s eye,’ “means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision,” allowing “the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for any effort or strain on our part to possess them.” Knowledge is noēsis, intuition. For moderns earlier than Jünger, knowledge is a matter of effort; Kant, for example, argues that “knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing demonstrating”—hard work, if not yet aggression. And yet before Kant, did not Bacon describe the knowledge gleaned from scientific experiment as the process of torturing nature in order to compel her to reveal her secrets? Aggression, indeed. Like T. S. Eliot, who contributed a graceful introduction to the English translation, Pieper prefers the tune of the flute to the pounding beat of the modern brass band. [2]
Following while elaborating on the philosophers of Greek and Latin antiquity, the philosophers of Christendom “drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus,” between logical thought leading to a conclusion and intuition, “that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye.” Whereas ratio takes effort, intellectus is pure receptivity; “the process of knowing is the action of the two together,” logical thinking followed by ‘I got it.’ Logic is the distinctively human characteristic, whereas intuition is “angelic,” as angels are beings who know by intellectual vision alone, with no need for the “real hard work” of reasoning. To ignore the capacity that human beings share with angels, however, is to claim that intellection is nothing but work, that there are “intellectual workers,” as the Communists of Pieper’s time (and not only of his time) liked to say, in their attempt to change the world by unifying theory and practice. They are not alone. Kant is the one who calls philosophizing “Herculean labor,” and he borrowed the notion from Anisthenes the Cynic, who made Hercules “the human ideal.” Philosophizing takes on a certain grimness; Anisthenes had no patience for the erotic longing implied by the word ‘philosophy,’ love of wisdom’: “I would like to exterminate Aphrodite,” he grumped. Aquinas took the more relaxed view, writing “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.” And this goes for moral conduct as well as for intellection, Pieper remarks, as “the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love,” adding that “in the same way, the essence of knowledge does not consist in the effort for which it calls, but in grasping existing things and in unveiling reality.” (Even “grasping” may be too much, too close to Machiavelli, who tells his Prince to know not by sight or by hearing but by touch.) “The effort is not the cause; it is the condition.”
If regimes treat philosophizing as another form of work, then they will turn it into another form of ‘social service.’ It will be prized, if it is prized, for its utility. Colleges and universities will become centers for the illiberal or servile arts. And, since philosophy entails reasoning, the distinctively human capacity, then philosophy conceived as work means that human beings themselves will be prized only insofar as they serve ‘society’ as molded by the regime. Ideology replaces philosophy, goes under the name of philosophy. The attitude of Goethe then seems an outrage: “I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true.” Social and political good might well come of that, “but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result.” And perhaps not even necessarily: some of the other thinkers who supposed they had recognized what is good and true seem to have spurred malign results.
The vice of acedia, despised by Christians, associated sloth not with inertia but with restlessness, “the incapacity to enjoy leisure.” The man in acedia’s grasp “renounces the claim implicit in his human dignity”; “he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is.” In “the old sense of the word,” idleness actually “renders leisure impossible,” as “leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself,” when he is not bored, but partakes of “a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude,” exhibiting “the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” The leisured man opens his mind to nature and to the God who created nature, and who “sends his good gifts and his blessings in sleep,” the God who rested content after His sixth day of creation. Whereas work orders itself by time—by the time of day, the turning of the seasons, by the clock—leisurely intuition dwells in “the eternal now.” “The power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of the workaday world and reach out to superhuman life-giving existential forces hat refresh and renew us before turn back to our daily work.” In the Nicomachean Ethics, “Aristotle says of leisure, ‘A man will live thus, not to the extent that he is a man, but to the extent that a divine principle dwells within him” (NE 1177b). Aristotle continues: “If the intellect is something divine as compared with a human being, the life that is in accord with the intellect,” the philosophic life, “is divine as compared with a human life.” Or, more modestly, “what is appropriate by nature to each being is best and most pleasant for each, and so, for a human being, this is the life in accord with the intellect, if that most of all is a human being. Therefore this life is also the happiest.” (NE 1178).
Can leisure be reclaimed under the conditions of modern life? Some thinkers, including Malraux, upheld humanism as the antidote to the modern tyrannies. Pieper has his doubts, observing that Communists call their economic materialism humanistic, and the French existentialists have appropriated that term, as well, for their form of atheism, which in practice could lead to alliance with Communism. Even Malraux had his flirtation with Communism, in the late Twenties and throughout the Thirties, and de Gaulle once asked, “Malraux, do you know how not to work?” In contrast to the modern humanists, Aristotle wants the readers of the Politics—not the Metaphysics or even the Ethics—with “what kind of activity is man to occupy his leisure?” He continues, that while work or “occupation” is necessary in any regime, “being at leisure is more choiceworthy than occupation and more an end”; that being so, “what must be sought” in the political community “is the activity they should have in leisure.” Only in modern regimes could people speak of ‘the leisure industry’ and conceive of leisure as an opportunity for some different form of freneticism. This in turn leads to the notion of the ‘vacation,’ a term with the same root as vacuousness, a vacuousness far from the emptying of the soul of its surging passions in order to prepare it to receive the insight enabled by reasoning or by divine grace.
Pieper associates leisure not with vacation but with festival. “Celebration is the point at which the three elements of leisure come to a focus: relaxation, effortlessness, and superiority of ‘active leisure’ to all functions,” to all work. Traditionally but also crucially, festivals originate in “divine worship.” And so they should be: “We cannot conceive a more intense affirmation of the world than ‘praise of God,’ praise of the Creator of this very world.” That is, Pieper has recourse, in his argument for the link between leisure and God, to a form of the ontological proof, the argument that one must posit God because there must be one being than which no greater can be conceived. (He may ignore the parallel because Aquinas himself rejects the ontological proof.) Pieper duly notes the concoction of ersatz festivals by the Jacobins, with their “Brutus days,” and, quite predictably, ‘Labor Day’—a vacation day celebrating work! Against such things, he recalls the Sabbath Day of the Bible and the festivals held in temples, plots of land “transferred to the estate of the Gods” in pagan antiquity. In the older understanding, sections of both time and space could be “marked off” as “not used,” “withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.” “The act of worship creates a store of real wealth that cannot be consumed by the workaday world.” Such “celebration of divine worship, then, is the deepest of the springs by which leisure is fed and continues to be vital.”
This means that “the ultimate root of leisure is not susceptible to the human will.” It consists of contemplation of the whole, the contemplation of nature and of the divine. “Absolute affirmation of the universe cannot, strictly speaking, be based upon a voluntary resolve.” Although Pieper has little esteem for Thomas Carlyle and his valorization of work, he likely would agree with Carlyle’s famous riposte upon hearing Margaret Fuller’s grand statement, “I affirm the universe”: “Gad, she’d better.” Pieper would insist that not only the affirmation of the universe but the affirmation of its Creator must underlie leisure. Leisure requires sacrifice of material profit, sacrifice of the bodily, seen in its ultimate act, Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. “The Church has pointed to the meaning of the incarnation of the Logos in the self-same words: that we may be rapt into love of the invisible reality through the visibility of that first and ultimate sacrament: the Incarnation,” without which there could be no sacrifice of Christ’s body.
Being erotic, philosophy lends itself to hope, hope of consummation. Its shares this characteristic with religion, although Christian love is agapic more than it is erotic. Both loves can be debased—philosophy into sophistry and/or ideology, religion into magic and/or an entirely civil religion. Both of these debasements aim at mastering their objects, whether it is nature or the divine. They can be combined, as when the philosophers of modern science commend an ideology aimed at supporting a science intended to effect nothing more than the conquest of nature—a rational magic, as it were. And this could include an ideological political science, which will incline to erase the liberal arts from the academy. “This is not to say that there is no sort of connection between the fulfillment of the ‘common good’ and the philosophy taught in a country,” only that real philosophy “can never be “regulated from the point of view of the general good,” being a way of life aiming at wisdom that may not be conventional. “A real philosophy is grounded in belief, that man’s real wealth consists, not in satisfying his needs, not in becoming ‘the master and owner of nature,’ but in seeing what is and the whole of what is, in seeing things not as useful or useless, serviceable or not, but simply as being.” Philosophy aims at theoria, not at praxis, although it does presuppose two kinds of praxis, namely, the way of life of a philosopher and a way of life or regime of a political community that does not incline to spoil the philosopher’s way of life. The same might be said for the Christian way of life, making its way in one or another City of Man on the road to the City of God.
Christians are adjured not to be ‘worldly,’ as unspiritual. Pieper uses the word differently, defining a world as a range or field of relations. In that field, “the higher the order of a being, the more embracing and wider its power of establishing relations.” Plants and animals relate to one another and to all other beings as an “environment,” not as a world. Human beings differ from them because they are endowed with “spirit,” “the power and capacity to relate…to the totality of being.” Aristotle understands the human soul as “fundamentally everything that is,” by which he means that the soul “knowingly places itself in relation to the whole of being” not merely by consuming parts of it but by essaying to understand the whole as such. “Spirit is by nature the capacity to apprehend the world.” This means that “the more embracing the power with which to relate oneself to objective being, the more deeply that power needs to be anchored in the inner self of the subject so as to counterbalance the step it takes outside.” Spirit “relate[s] oneself to the whole of reality” while exhibiting “an unlimited capacity of living in oneself, the gift of self-reliance and independence,” the ‘self-sufficiency,’ to distinguish nature from convention, to ascend (as Plato’s Socrates would have it) from the cave illuminated by man-kindled light. “To have a world, to be related to the totality of existing things,” makes human beings persons, not merely things. In this sense, philosophers and Christians alike should seek the ‘world,’ if not the ‘worldly.’ In leisure, a man does exactly that.
Obviously, no human being can comprehend the whole by knowing the whole one object at a time. There are too many objects for that. Unlike animals, human beings can, however, find “the essence of things,” the much smaller number of species in the world and, through that abstraction (seen verbally in the common noun), apprehend what kind of thing the world is. Admittedly, man’s spirit is finite; he can hope to comprehend the totality, the world, without expecting to do so with Godlike comprehensiveness, both as a whole and in detail. What is more, unlike God, he must live in not only the world but in an environment, sustaining his body along with his spirit. A philosopher will turn this to philosophic account. Philosophizing “means to experience the fact that our immediate surroundings, prescribed as they are by the aims of life, not only and be, but must be broken in upon (not only once but ever and again), by the disturbing call of ‘the world,’ of the whole world and the everlasting and essential images of things mirrored by reality.” While to philosophize consists of “fixing our mind’s eye on the totality of being, ‘the world,'” it does so first by looking at something in particular—a tree, a wedding, a person, an opinion—with “implied reference to all that is.” If one man opines that his enemy’s act is unjust, the philosopher wonders, ‘What is justice?’ “The unique and original relation to being that Plato calls ‘theoria’ can only be realized in its pure state through the sense of wonder, in that purely receptive attitude to reality, undisturbed and unsullied by the interjection of the will.” Aquinas adds, Pieper writes, “that man’s first experience of wonder sets his feet on the ladder that leads up to the beatific vision.” By contrast, at least since Descartes modern philosophy has begun not with wonder but with doubt, thereby absenting itself from “faith and tradition.” Pieper remarks that Plato and Aristotle began their inquiries with, not simply against, religious traditions.
Philosophizing, Pieper wants to think about what wonder is. Wonder evidently betokens the absence of knowledge; Aquinas writes that “the cause of that at which we wonder is hidden from us.” God does not wonder “because the knowledge of God is perfect.” (God’s knowledge is perfect because He is both the first and the final cause of all things and all persons.) Further, wonder also brings a philosopher to the sure, if partial, Socratic knowledge: I know that I do not know. This “is not the ignorance of resignation” but a spur to search for the truth, “an active desire for knowledge.”
“Out of wonder, says Aristotle [in the Rhetoric] comes joy.” This is “the joy of the beginner,” seen in young Apollodorus in Plato’s Symposium, since the philosopher always begins his inquiries anew in “a perpetual ‘not yet.'” It is not exclusive to philosophy, since Jesus Himself “marveled” (Luke 8:9). He was indeed God, but He was also Man. In emphasizing this element of Christianity, Pieper, following Aquinas, gives no emphasis to Paul the Apostle’s scorn for those who are ever searching, never finding. Paul may be said to be writing not as a philosopher but as a guardian, “whose business it is to preserve, defend and clarify the meaning” of divinely revealed truths, not to wonder at them and inquire into them. “The philosopher who reflects upon the things of this world in the light of the revealed doctrine of the Logo, will attain to knowledge that would otherwise remain hidden from him, though the knowledge he gains will not be theological knowledge but demonstrable knowledge, philosophical knowledge of things in themselves.” By revealing God as Logos (not, for example, as Will, as Islam does), Christianity invites reasoning about itself, indeed reasoning about God. For this reason, the Thomist maintains, Christian philosophy is possible because Christianity leaves room for mystery and, therefore, for wonder. Christian revelation widens “the framework of philosophy,” inviting it to consider not only nature but nature’s Creator and his revealed Word. And while “it is quite true that our salvation does not require us to philosophize,” that indeed philosophizing won’t obtain salvation for us, philosophy does complete the nature of a human being by engaging “the natural bent of the human mind and spirit towards the whole.” A Christian philosopher will first make the truths of Christianity “his own, not by knowledge alone, but through ‘suffering’ and experiencing reality,” and then philosophizing on the meaning of life and the natural reasons and causes of the world.”
Pieper considers contemplation and the contemplative way of life in his subsequent book, Happiness and Contemplation. There, he argues that while man’s active life should consist in the exercise of the cardinal virtues, “man’s ultimate happiness consists in contemplation.” This statement “contains a whole philosophy of life, a basic conception of the nature of man and the meaning of human existence.” Pieper distinguishes makários from eudaimonia. Although eudaimonia “originally…referred to the guidance of man’s guardian spirit and hence to the supernatural source of happiness,” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics it means a good spirit, the condition of a human soul that has fulfilled the nature of a human being as such, happiness—the right purpose of a human life, the only end men strive for that can truly satisfy them. Makários refers to a fortunate, happily situated life, one blessed by the gods—as in the “Blessed Isles.” But in the Greek of the New Testament, makários echoes the Hebrew ashrē, meaning blessed by God—most famously, in Jesus’ Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” those who take no pride in their natural virtues, however assiduously cultivated, but pray, “Glory to God in all things.” Such men and women will find themselves well and joyfully situated indeed, living eternally in the true Blessed Isles, the Kingdom of God. Both of these words could also connote a vulgar meaning: eudaimonia meaning wealth, makários meaning sexual satisfaction.
Thus, the English word, “happiness,” encompasses all of these meanings, making it important to stipulate which one you mean when you say it, which might range from “the immortal richness of divine life and man’s art in it, as well as the petty satisfaction of a fleeting desire.” Indeed, “this ambiguity reflects the structure of the whole of Creation,” from supreme Holiness to the degradation of nature in sin. Pieper takes Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the human purpose: “As created good is a reflection of the uncreated good, so he attainment of a created good is a reflected beatitude.”
This suggests a hierarchy of goods, of happinesses. “Every fulfillment this side of Heaven” finally will not suffice, “cannot really satisfy us at all.” Fine wine is indeed satisfying, and really is a good thing, but once digested, once at best a pleasurable memory, the satisfaction has faded. With Greek Aristotle, with Roman Virgil as portrayed by Roman Catholic Dante, Pieper exclaims, “the ultimate satiation of man’s deepest thirst, takes place in contemplation!” This, he concedes, will seem odd to most readers. “How can the most intense craving of our nature be entirely satisfied by an act of the intellect? Would it not be more to the point to speak of love,” not of erotic but of agapic love, “of becoming one with the infinite, of drowning ourselves in an ocean of joy?” No, it would not. Pieper defends his claim, first by recalling what a human being is.
“Man craves by nature happiness and bliss.” That is, man, a human being “endowed with reason,” directs his will (insofar as he actually rules himself by reason) towards “his own happiness.” Happiness is “the ultimate goal of human life,” and while the rightly directed will aims at it, the will that does so responds to something that is not willed but given, a nature endowed to man (as the declarers of American independence put it, the laws of nature and of nature’s God. To Pieper, nature’s God is the God of the Bible, the Creator-God: “Only if we understand man as a created being to the very depths of his spiritual existence can we meaningfully conceive that the will has not the power to not want happiness.”
But does this not deny freedom of the will. It does, if the will is (mis)conceived as an expression of autonomy, a law freely imposing anything upon human action and human intention. Autonomy in its modern sense inclines to deny nature altogether. To this, Pieper replies that “the natural desire for happiness springs from the innermost core of man’s being” and therefore might be misunderstood or even perverted but not overridden; however, that natural desire “concerns man’s very own will, unrestricted by any external coercion” and therefore “is free.” That desire “points, right through the human heart, back to an ultimate origin which is not human.” As Aquinas writes, “The will strives in freedom for felicity, although it strives for it by necessity.” There is no point to ask, “Why do you want to be happy?” You do. What is more, to obtain it we cannot ‘autonomously’ make it; “we are not the forgers of our own felicity,” since “happiness is essentially a gift.” We may assert a right to pursue happiness but we won’t obtain it simply by pursuing it, since the ultimate happiness, what Pieper sometimes calls felicity, sometimes joy, is a gift from God, an act of His grace. [3] It was God who created human beings and it is God alone who can complete them, bring them to their natural telos by His grace. Not self-satisfaction but gratitude is the right human response.
Aristotle has no knowledge of the Bible, but he too understands that men do not have happiness at birth. They enter the world crying. “Man is not happy by virtue of his being. Rather, his whole existence is determined precisely by the nonpossession of ultimate gratification,” and the purpose of his life is to find it. Only God is “happy by His mere existence.” As Aquinas puts it, “God and happiness are the same.” “If God were not happy…we would not be able even to conceive the idea of a possible healing of the empirical wounds of Creation,” present in every human life from birth, an act of misery for child and mother alike. In view of that misery, in view of “evil in the world,” “confidence in the whole of being…finds its ultimate support in the absolute happiness of God.”
This means that happiness cannot be obtained by the self-sufficiency commended by the Stoics. Man cannot quench his thirst for happiness “by his own doing and being right.” Virtue is not really its own reward. True, a moral act confers satisfaction, but “man cannot live by such happiness,” which is good in itself but finally only a substitute for the real thing. Such pride or self-satisfaction “is too soon contented; it lags behind the true greatness of man,” which requires him to acknowledge his nature as a created being, dependent not upon himself alone but finally upon the grace of God. If, for the ancient philosophers, man’s happiness requires that he harmonize himself with his own nature as a part of nature as a whole, itself a harmony, the happiness offered by the Bible—blessedness, joy, felicity—requires that he harmonize himself with God, an act he can only complete by the grace of God and not by his own striving. This obviously means that salvation “equated with physical existence,” the sort of salvation offered by the ‘life guard’ at the beach, will not do. If physical salvation is honored by itself, then death is the king of terrors, which is “ultimately the hidden premise of the totalitarian debasement of man to a factor of production, of biologism in every form, of the tendency to make a religion out of psychotherapy,” of making Freud the new Moses. One cannot allay thirst simply by guaranteeing “the continued existence of the thirster.” The thirst will continue, having been ‘built into’ man in the first place: “If the whole world were given to him, he would have to say, and would say: It is too little.”
What we really seek is the “universal good,” God. Pieper warns against taking this as a statement of theology. Rather, it describes human nature as what it is: a finite spirit. “The finite spirit, although it is only a ‘fragment’ of being, by the very fact that it is spirit, is related to the whole of reality.” The whole of reality very much includes God as the Creator of all beings other than Himself. The finite spirit of man “is unquenchable and insatiable”—as Thomas Hobbes understands—but cannot be satisfied “unless it partakes of God”—as the materialist Hobbes does not understand. Hobbes might ask of the theist, “How can the Infinite (and the Infinite One!) be the ‘natural’ object of a finite force?”
Pieper replies by turning to the nature of the intellect. “Capacitas, mental grasp, may have two meanings.” It can mean “the capacity to receive something from outside into oneself”; it can also mean “the power of having something outside as an object.” To understand the capacity of the mind as taking what is outside ‘in,’ “then it is limited to the sphere of creation.” But if we also take it as aiming at something outside itself, then “it reaches beyond creation into the infinite.” This does not explain the human mind, but it does open it to a quest beyond appropriation, beyond the acquisitiveness commended by Hobbes and, behind him, by Machiavelli.
The ‘ancient’ philosophers unquestionably opened their minds to things outside themselves, distinguishing nature from human custom or convention. Pieper respects them for that, but the ancients leave him uneasy. “Anyone reading nowadays what the ancients wrote on happiness will occasionally sense a peculiar aloofness from the subject, the breath of a disturbing coolness which seems to issue from these texts.” This likely arises from the fact that they are philosophizing, not poeticizing. Still, there is something more: “the authors scarcely ever speak of the overwhelming gladness of the heart, nor of the kindling of the mind or the delight of the emotions,” of “overflowing, infinite joy.” This may be due to the finitude of the nature philosophers wonder at. Given the actual experience of joy and our desire “to have reason for joy”—namely, our partaking of it—what is the nature of that about which we are joyful? Admittedly, our joy “may be an erroneous response” to a person or thing or event that is no good cause for rejoicing; if so, however, we will want to know what genuinely good persons, things, or events there are, good being consonant with our nature as human beings; we will also want to know genuine evil when we see, remember, know it. “We want to know the truth at any cost, even if the truth should be frightful.” Joy is “the appeasement of desire in the good that has been made one’s own.” Pieper makes a distinction, here: “The ‘supreme good’ and its attainment—that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.”
As with drinking a glass of wine, “the process of becoming happy” consists not only of something “merely flow[ing] into us” but also in the activity of drinking and in “transforming it into our own substance.” This raises a problem regarding the Holy Spirit, who intends to give us joy by entering into the human soul. How can a finite, natural creature, even one endowed with reason, somehow incorporate an infinite Being. How can such a Being be “seized and ‘assimilated’ by us”? The answer is that the wine analogy doesn’t suffice at this point, not that the thing is impossible. The drinking metaphor illustrates the active character of what we are doing, but that is all it illustrates. We actively participate in God’s “infinite and uncreated richness” not so much by consuming it as by entering into it, by participating in it, rather as one enters into a great cathedral. It is not our cathedral, yet we see it with our own sense of sight.
Putting it systematically rather than metaphorically, Pieper observes that happiness means perfection in the sense that we have nothing left to wish for. Perfection means full realization, being real to “the uttermost degree.” Realization is achieved by action (as Aristotle maintains), but some realizations are humanly more complete than others; for example, that glass of wine will complete my desire for its taste and for the relaxation it produces, but reading and understanding Pieper must be more humanly satisfying because it involves reasoning, the distinctive capacity of my nature. Happiness “opens all the potentialities of man to fullest realization. Cognition is “true activity” for a human being, action undertaken by the soul itself, not by the body. It is what the philosophers call noēsis, “the universal fruit of insight.” This being so, the eternal life promised in the Gospels is not only a matter of time but of intensity, consisting of the contemplation of God by the human soul.
And so, in his central chapter, Pieper writes that “the fulfillment of existence takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality”; “the perfectly happy person…is one who sees.” Happiness is not an act of the will but an act of cognition. And “cognition is having,” possessing what we love. “Our whole reward is seeing,” Augustine tells us or, in Aquinas’s words, knowing is “the highest mode of having,” the most “thoroughgoing” mode, as Pieper has it. “It is assimilation in the quite exact sense that the objective world, in so far as it is known, is incorporated into the very being of the knower,” unlike the possession a physical thing by the hand’s grasp. (Even digestion and assimilation of a physical thing so grasped does not involve the distinctively human aspect of our nature.) “One’s existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room…. Happiness is attained in an act of cognition because there is no other perfect way in which we can truly obtain ‘the whole good,’ an all reality in general.” In the words of the Apostle John, “Eternal life is knowing thee.”
“Reality is the prize solely of the highest form of cognition, and that is: seeing, intuition, contemplation.” Pieper means cognition or knowing in the Biblical sense of “immediate togetherness, intimate presence.” And “contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness,” the “intuition of the beloved object,” intuition being “without doubt the perfect form of knowing,” reasoning or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction being propaedeutic to it. “Happy is he who sees what he loves.” Love is not happiness itself, but it is “the indispensable premise of happiness.” “Even the sorrow of the damned is the sorrow of separation from that which they still steadily love.”
How, then, to know God? Reasoning, logic will bring us such knowledge to some degree, but does not issue in happiness, full and intimate knowledge. Nor does faith, which “is by definition nonseeing” (we speak of ‘blind faith’). Only contemplation, the actual intuiting of God, can “quench man’s thirst more than anything else because it affords a direct perception of the presence of God.” God can be contemplated, intuited, because He “is present in the world” as “the acting basis of everything that exists.” In the world, such an intuition may last “no longer than the duration of a lightning flash,” yet non-Christians can experience intuition itself, even when God is not the intended object of their thought. “Everything holds and conceals at bottom a mark of its divine origin; that one who catches a glimpse of it ‘sees’ that this and all things are ‘good’ beyond all comprehension; and that, seeing this, he is happy. Here in sum is the whole doctrine of the contemplation of earthly creation,” as experienced by the philosophers. In this sense, “the cosmological wisdom of the early Greeks and the doctrine of the New Testament, thus Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas, agree that we partake of the perfection for whose sake we live by seeing.”
Far from being “flight from the real world” and its many evils, contemplation, in seeking the truth, in finding satisfaction in the truth, leads to an abhorrence of evil but to the happiness of knowing that it really does exist. One may hate a diagnosis of cancer but the actual learning of the truth, learning that the truth of what is wrong with you, what is causing your symptoms, is indeed a form of happiness. Does the repulsive evil of the Nazi concentration camps or of the Soviet Gulag make any intelligent person, any more or less fully human being, want not to know that they have existed, not to know what their existence tells us about ourselves? “Contemplation does not ignore the ‘historical Gethsemane,’ does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement.” “Fear with joy the Last Judgment,” wrote the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The Last Judgment is the final and best act of justice. Humanly speaking, justice is the aim of “communal life,” of life in the family and the political community. In that life we seek to practice justice. The virtue of practical life is “principally” found “in the practice of prudence.” If contemplation is the highest human activity, then justice should serve contemplation, seek (in Aquinas’s words) to place man “in a position to devote himself to contemplation of the truth” instead of interfering with contemplation by offering it a cup of hemlock. This suggests a hierarchy of thought, as practice “become[s] meaningless the moment it sees itself as an end in itself.” To maintain this hierarchy in practice will require the practice of the four “cardinal virtues,” the topic Pieper treats in The Four Cardinal Virtues.
Although the four virtues discussed by Socrates in Plato’s Republic—prudence or practical wisdom, justice, courage or fortitude, and moderation—struck some early Christians as suspiciously un-Biblical, Aquinas adopts and ‘baptizes’ them. (Jesus Himself tells the Apostles to be as prudent as foxes, as innocent as doves.) Following Judaic tradition in this respect, other Christians preferred to speak of divine commandments, duties imposed upon sinful souls by the watchful God, enacted only by virtue of His grace. Virtues struck them as human, all-too-human, too nearly attempts at self-sufficiency. Following Aquinas, who followed Aristotle to this extent, Pieper insists that “a doctrine of commandments or duties” risks “losing sight of the human person who ‘ought’ to do this or that,” whereas “the doctrine of virtue” concentrates attention on the human person so obligated.
Prudence is “the first of the cardinal virtues,” the one which ensures that justice isn’t entirely blind, that fortitude is not indignation without righteousness, that temperance is not hidebound. “None but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good in so far as he is prudent.” Stated metaphysically, this tracks the Christian understanding that “Being precedes Truth and that Truth precedes the Good,” even as, in the Trinity, “the Father begets the Eternal Word, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds out of the Father and the Word.” To put the matter in clarifying, somewhat down-to-earth reverse order, you can’t be a good person if you don’t know what’s true, and you can’t know what’s true if there’s nothing that can be known.
Pieper regrets that “people today can respond to this assertion of the pre-eminence of prudence only with incomprehension and uneasiness.” They think of Jesus’ fox in the Machiavellian way, as a cleverly predatorial beast; prudence in the modern sense is “akin to the idea of mere utility,” not nobility and assuredly not holy. What could prudence, so (mis)conceived, possibly have to do with justice, fortitude, or genuine temperance? “To the contemporary mind…the concept of the good rather exclude than includes prudence.” Indeed, Machiavelli’s concept of the good as the satisfaction of libido dominandi excludes classical and Christian concepts of the good, altogether. “Classical Christian ethics” rather “maintains that man can be prudent and good only simultaneously,” that “all virtue is necessarily prudent.” “Prudence is the cause of the other virtues’ being virtues at all.”
In his first book, La Discorde chez l’ennemi, De Gaulle criticized German military officers of the Great War for lacking la mesure. For the Thomist, prudence is indeed “the ‘measure‘ of justice, of fortitude, of temperance,” the human capacity to think, decide, and act within, in accordance with, the revealed and natural limits, the delineations of created Being that God, the uncreated Being, established—separating light from darkness, water from land. “Man’s perception of reality is a receptive transcript of the objective world of being; the artist’s works are transcripts of a living prototype already within his creative cognitions” and “the decree of prudence as the prototype and the pre-existing form of which all ethically good action is the transcript.” Good act issue from prudent decisions, conceived in prudent thought. The sins the Ten Commandments prohibit all oppose prudence, and one should not be surprised, since the supremely wise God revealed them. Imprudence is an explicit or a tacit rejection of truth, an act of defiance against reality. “He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is.”
The importance of situation, of circumstance, distinguishes Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics from many other ethical theories. “Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation” in which we act. The universal ethical principles that inform ethical decisions, the purposes or “ends” of such decisions, are supplied to us by synderesis, by “natural conscience.” Prudence supplies the means to the ends set before us by natural conscience. The combination of ends and means in “living unity” within the human mind constitutes “what we commonly call ‘conscience.'” Conscience so called issues in prudent deliberation, issuing in prudent decisions and actions, as distinguished from the theorizing of “moral science.” By contrast, imprudence leads either to hasty, unthoughtful decisions or to irresolution, the inability to decide at all.
Contemplation or theorizing does precede prudential thought because contemplation first perceives the realities prudence aligns with. “For the virtue of prudence is this: that the objective cognition of reality shall determine action; that the truth of real things shall become determinative.” Moreover, prudence requires that the person who rightly perceives reality remembers what he has learned, having incorporated his sense of reality into his soul as a permanent possession. Then again, the right perception of reality itself requires “a rectitude of the whole human being which purifies the most hidden roots of decision, of willing. This is docilitas, “the kind of open-mindedness which recognizes the true variety of things and situations to be experienced and does not cage itself in any presumption of deceptive knowledge,” the “ability to take advice” because a good soul really desires to understand, eschewing both ‘wishful thinking’ and the spirit of ‘denial.’ Such a soul will then exhibit solertia, the refusal to make hasty decisions, to “take random action” even when surprised—the “clear-sighted objectivity in unexpected circumstances.” Prudence perfected features providentia, foresight, “the capacity to estimate.” Such a soul acknowledges its own limitations, the limitations of the boy it rules, and the limitations imposed by circumstances, as there is always “uncertainty and risk” in any decision, any course of action. “The prudent man does not expect certainty where it cannot exist.” Some assurance of success may nonetheless derive from “the experience of life as it has been lived; from the alertness and healthiness of the instinctive capacity for evaluation from the daring and humble hope that the paths to man’s genuine goals cannot be closed to him; from rectitude of volition and of ultimate ‘intention’; from the grace of direct and mediated divine guidance.”
False prudence manifests itself in cunning, Machiavelli’s prized astutia, clever and vulpine pursuit of self-interest to the exclusion of the good of the whole human soul. Pieper finds in this the link between prudence and “the clear-eyed virtue of magnanimity,” greatness of soul, which Aristotle regards as the crown of the virtues. By contrast, “insidiousness, guile, craft, and concupiscence are the refuge of small-minded and small-souled persons,” whose souls aim at acquisition, acquisition not only of things but of the status the accumulation of things so often precedes. Because prudence relinquishes “all egoistic bias toward mere confirmation of the self,” it can inform justice, fortitude, and temperance, cultivate the moral virtues in the soul, enabling “knowledge of reality” to be transformed “into realization of the good.” “Prudence is the brightness of the resoluteness of that man who ‘acts truth’ (John 3:21), the man who follows reason—reason understood as comprising “all modes of perceiving reality,” and “above all the ‘reason'” that perceives “the realities of faith” in God in His goodness. Machiavelli famously demurs, tempting his ‘prince’ to imitate not God’s goodness but God’s making, God’s rule over all things created. Prudential action is not artistic making, much less Godlike creation out of nothing. Artistry requires technique, but “there is no ‘technique’ of the good,” only conformance or non-conformance with it. Prudence’s link to creation is not technical but loving, affirming the goodness of God’s loving creation by loving and wanting the good God saw in His creation.
God’s agapic love for man comports with man’s agapic love for neighbor. Aristotle’s teaching on friendship provides a preconception of such love. The advice the prudent man considers is preeminently the advice of a prudent friend, a friend whose moral virtues are informed by and support prudence. This is “the love which makes the friend’s problem his own, the friend’s ego his own,” treating him as a person and not as an object. “Such genuine and loving friendship friendship…is the sine qua non for genuine spiritual guidance”; “prudence is dependent upon volitional affirmation of the good as man’s goal.” Volitional affirmation of the good hardly guarantees prudential realization of it, but it does provide the precondition of prudential decision. Prudence itself does not attain the salvation of one’s soul, which man attains by God’s charity, God’s agape. Charity enjoys preeminence over prudence. Whereas “prudence is the mold of the moral virtues,” charity “molds even prudence itself” as “a gift ultimately beyond the power of man’s will or reason to bestow.” Here, one enters the realm not of the cardinal virtues but of the theological virtues: faith and hope, along with charity. This notwithstanding, one should never assume that the theological virtues somehow lift us into the clouds. “We would only remind our readers how intensely the great saints loved the ordinary and commonplace.” They thereby guarded themselves against the afflatus of self-deception, of “regarding their own hidden craving for the ‘extraordinary’ as a ‘counsel’ of the Holy Spirit of God.”
As with every virtue, justice is an idea, “the notion that each man must be given his due,” and a person’s habit, the habit of right willing, of willing that each man must be given his due. As a virtue, then, it is what “enables man to give each one what is his due.” The notion that each man must be so treated comes from the idea of right; “right comes before justice,” and right comes through creation. Aquinas writes, “creation itself is not an act of justice” because “creation is not anyone’s due.” Before creation, God was the only ‘anyone’ there was. And so, “God owes man nothing,” until He enters into a covenant with him. Similarly, there is “no obligation to do justice…unless it has its presupposition this idea of the due, the right, the suum.” Only human beings have been created by God in such a way as to have rights, “something that one man may demand of another as owing to him, and him only.” Some rights are inalienable, meaning that “the man who does not give a person what belongs to him, withholds it or deprives him of it, is really doing harm to himself” because “justice belongs to man’s true being,” rights have been endowed to man by his Creator. Human beings have natural rights, unlike other created beings. Modern tyrannies, Pieper remarks therefore deny that human beings have a nature, citing Communist fellow-traveler Jean-Paul Sartre as an apologist for such claims. To acknowledge the inherent, natural, rights of human beings is indispensable to human well-being, as “there is no other way to make the demands of justice effective as absolute bounds set [against] the will to power.” In “concrete terms” this means that “Man has inalienable rights because he is created a person by the act of God, that is, an act beyond all human discussion”; “as creatura, man has the absolute duty to give another his due.” Ominously, “it is no longer completely fantastic to think that a day may come when not the executioners alone will deny the inalienable right of man, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice.” Pieper’s Germany exemplified this, experiencing regimes of ‘totalitarian’ tyranny, ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’
Guided by prudence and agapic love, justice differs from them because it arises in souls directed ‘outward,’ regarding other souls, other men. A loved one is ‘one’s own’ in the most intimate way, and “because the loved one is not properly ‘someone else,’ there is no formal justice between those who love each other,” whereas “Justice says: That is another person, who is other than I, and who nevertheless has his own peculiar due.” Modern tyranny denies this, arrogate a right to liquidate others, exterminating them “merely on the basis of otherness.” Even if not loving, justice is personal, not abstract, “a debt owed by one person to another,” under the just gaze of a third Person, God and also under the gaze of one’s fellow human beings, including judges. Justice’s ‘outward,’ ‘external,’ ‘otherly’ orientation also distinguishes it from fortitude and temperance, virtues for which the individual soul is primary, the external act secondary. Because all external acts are “of social consequence,” justice is the most public, the most political virtue. “The whole field of the vita activa…is the field of justice.” This very much includes education, for “to teach untruth is not only wrong but unjust as well.” However, precisely due to its ‘externality,’ an unjust act might be committed by a just person. This means that “it may be quite possible and logical to reject a certain political objective as ‘objectively unjust’—and even to combat it with intensity— without at the same time bringing the moral integrity of one’s opponent into the discussion.” Considered as a virtue, justice is still an “inner disposition,” as are all the virtues. This unique feature of justice as a real virtue but one that most emphatically affects the well-being of others gives it a higher rank than fortitude and temperance. Moreover, while fortitude and temperance have to do primarily with the rule of the soul over the body, justice rules over the soul itself, collaborating with reason to give the soul its right order. “It is only through prudence and justice that man is simply and directly directed toward the good,” enabling him to realize the human good. Fortitude and temperance “create the “indispensable basis…for the realization of the good,” but they do not point it in the right direction, as only contemplation, its discoveries enacted through prudence and justice, can do. A Nazi or a Communist might act heroically; even the Antichrist might “appear in the guise of a great ascetic.” Therefore, “it is injustice,” the spirit that animates such persons, “which is natural man’s worst destroyer.”
Following Aristotle, Pieper identifies three kinds of justice: commutative or reciprocal justice; distributive justice; legal justice. All of them share the mark of “indebtedness,” something human beings owe to one another, although they differ “in character,” inasmuch as (for example) “the legal protection the state owes the individual is due to me, in principle, in quite a different fashion from that in which my neighbor owes me the return of a loan.” The three forms of justice also relate to the individual soul that is just and that is acting justly in “three different ways”: “the individual as associate of other individuals sustains commutative justice whereas the subject of legal justice is, to be sure, once again the individual, but now as the associate of the species, as it were, as a member of the community” as a whole; and because that social and political whole “cannot in any concrete sense make distributive justice a reality”—whatever ‘socialists’ say—it is “rather the individual man,” whether king, tyrant, head of state, civil servant, or even the individuals composing the ruling ‘many’ of a democracy—that is, the rulers in a given regime—who determine who gets what. Radical individualists deny the reality of society while collectivists deny the reality of the individual; in so doing, they make “the notion of justice” to cease “to be applicable in any sense whatsoever.”
Commutative or reciprocal justice may be seen in the distinction between a loan and a gift. If you loan me money, I will pay you back in equal coin or service because I am obligated to do so. “The partner’s equal rights are unreservedly realized only in the situation of commutative justice.” But if you give me money, I owe you nothing more than gratitude. Aquinas observes, with characteristic realism, that commutative justice exists “between those who are simply equal, but where there is no absolute equality between them” (and there seldom is), “neither is there absolute justice.” The loan is a good example, as one partner has, the other needs. To govern such imperfect equality, commutative justice flourishes in contracts, which “mark the limits of each party’s rights and…guarantees one party’s claim to a certain return as much as the other’s obligation to make that return.” “To each his own,” commutative justice proclaims; “what is yours is yours, and what is mine is mine.” And as “relations build on love” do not call for justice “in the strict sense,” so they call for no contracts. Commutative justice at best forms “the foundation which even the higher and richer forms of mutual agreement require,” a seen in marriage—in Christian principle, a solemnization of love, of making two persons ‘one flesh,’ while in social terms a contract, guarding persons and property.
Distributive justice requires not so much mutual consent among equals as “the exercise of power.” (This is a point that socialists often miss, or pretend to miss: in expropriating the expropriators, they make themselves into a new ruling class, a new set of oligarchs, contradicting the social equality, the ‘social justice,’ they claim to pursue.) In distributive justice, the unequal rank of giver (not only of material goods but of “offices and honors”) and receiver is inevitable. Other difficulties in realizing distributive justice are its imprecise character in comparison to commutative justice; if I buy an item at the Dollar Store, I owe the owner one dollar, but if I am responsible for distributing the tax revenues from the rich to the poor, how much do I owe the poor? Something (I’m not entitled to keep the money—all of it, anyway—to myself), but how much? There can be no exactly just determination. And speaking of taxation, there’s no such thing as a free lunch; my act of redistribution costs something to those from whom I am taking, and thus to the political society that ‘pays’ for it. My redistribution affects the common good, the purpose of the regime. “The harmonizing and integration of nearly all men’s functions occurs only in the political community,” and ‘the state,’ whatever its regime, represents the whole, exercising its sovereign powers at least ostensibly on behalf of the whole. “In his relationship with public authority, a suum belongs to a private person in a fashion quite different from that applying to his relations to another private person.” In the political relationship, inequality is a more acute problem because the state usually can coerce more effectively than an individual. “Is there any way to ender the individual’s inalienable rights secure? Is there any effective way to defend them?”
The dilemma comes from the fact that there is no final appeal ‘above’ the person or persons who wields the power of distributive justice, other than God, whose apostle, Paul, requires Christians to obey the powers God has ordained. While Aquinas identifies the purpose of power as the securing of justice, Pieper asks, “What if the guardian of justice nevertheless does not guard it?” and answers, Too bad: “Well, then, alas, there is the reign of injustice.” The ruler’s obligation to be just is unenforceable. This makes civic education crucial to the establishment of a just government. Pieper wants that education to foster “a sense of the greatness and dignity of governing and ruling” in “the mind of the public,” which includes future rulers, holding up “an incontrovertible ideal image of the requirements a man must meet if he is to exercise authority,” an image illustrating the virtues of prudence and justice, without which “there can be no fitness for the proper exercise of power. “He criticizes both “individualistic liberalism,” today called libertarianism, and “orthodox Marxism” for undermining this sense of the authority of government. Rulers who really do regard their authority as ordained by God, they will, Aquinas hopes, conceive of their reward as a reign in which he stood at and on God’s side, executing the obligation God placed upon him. This is “the very opposite of a totalitarian glorification of power.” In such a regime, “a rash, brash person motivated by emotion or craving for power, would eo ipso be excluded from running for office, as manifestly unfit to realize the justice of rulers,” namely, distributive justice. As to regimes, Pieper favors monarchy over democracy, since in a democracy “the limit is reached when it can no longer be expected of an individual that he place the bonum commune above his own particular interest.” Individual interest or ‘special interests’ of factions will prevail.
By the common good, Pieper means prosperity widely enjoyed and also support for those few men who engage in contemplation, achieving some “knowledge of the truth.” While it is true that neither Rousseau nor anyone else “can give a truly exhaustive account of what man himself ‘fundamentally’ is,” and that it is “just as impossible to give an exhaustive account of everything contained in man’s good,” and that, further, ‘totalitarian’ regimes claim to do exactly that, a regime might still restore “in the public mind the idea of justice as it formulated in traditional doctrine an contained in the old-fashioned Biblical formula, ‘respect for the person.'” This notwithstanding, respect for each person means respect for the endowments, the abilities and virtues, of each person; care must be taken not to push that condition so far as to ruin the sense of the underlying equality of human beings as human beings, allowing some to claim the rights of gods and to rule over the others as if they were beasts.
Hence “the world cannot be kept in order by justice alone.” Circumstances change, so that at no time will justice fully reign. Some debts cannot be repaid, not only the one every human being owes to God but those we owe to parents, to one’s country, and to good rulers. Good social relations also require something more than justice: liberality, affability, kindness—that is, “friendliness in our everyday associations.” “It is impossible to live together joyfully without it.”
Respecting the foundational moral virtues, fortitude and temperance, Pieper pulls back from joy, beginning with the observation that “all fortitude has reference to death,” as “every courageous action has at its deepest root the readiness to die.” And of course this goes for Christians, too: “The readiness for martyrdom”—but not the eagerness for martyrdom—being “the essential root of all Christian fortitude.” “The brave man suffers injury not for its own sake, but rather as a means to preserve or to acquire a deeper, more essential intactness,” and there is no deeper, more essential intactness than the life lived and, if necessary, sacrificed for the God who breathed life into clay.
“Fortitude therefore points to something prior” to itself, “deriving its measure from something else,” having “its place in a scale of meaning and value where it does not rank first.” As mentioned before, prudence and justice provide that scale: “Fortitude without prudence is not fortitude” but Achilles-like rampaging. “Genuine fortitude presupposes a correct evaluation of things, of the things that one risks as well as of those which one hopes to preserve or gain by the risk,” “inform[ing] fortitude through justice.” As Pericles told his fellow Athenians, “With others, only ignorance begets fortitude; and reflection begets hesitation,” but “our way,” our regime, inclines us “to dare most liberally where we have reflected best.” Pieper adds, “Without the ‘just cause’ there is no fortitude.” Thus, fortitude isn’t fearlessness, with its blindness to danger, perhaps “the result of a perversion of love.” “Fortitude presupposes a certain sense that man is afraid of evil; its essence lies not in knowing no fear, but in not allowing oneself to be forced into evil by fear, or to be kept by fear from the realization of good.” Fear God, tremble at nothing, the Book of Ecclesiastes advises.
Indeed, “endurance is more the essence of fortitude than attack.” Guided as it is by prudence and justice, fortitude shows itself more in steadiness than in spasmodic assault. It not only grasps but “cling[s] to the good.” Patience is its “necessary component.” “To be patient means to preserve cheerfulness and serenity of mind in spite of injurie that result from the realization of the good,” excluding “sadness and confusion of heart” and shining forth as “the radiant embodiment of ultimate integrity,” as did the soul of Thomas More. [4] To be sure, the man of fortitude will attack, if the circumstance calls for attack; Jesus drove the money-changers out of the temple with a whip. “The readiness to meet the supreme test by dying in patient endurance so that the good may be realized does not exclude the willingness to fight and to attack.” But it more often finds its opportunities in suffering—in the long illness, in talking with the recalcitrant child.
Aquinas identifies three “orders of fortitude.” He calls the lowest one “pre-moral” or “vital” fortitude, the capacity to withstand the bruises of ordinary life without succumbing with an overweening fear of injury, “a tense and overweening concern for security,” physical and emotional. Beyond this is the “moral order of natural ethics,” and still beyond that is the “supermoral” order to which God beckons us. The perfection of moral fortitude is political fortitude, civic courage and other manifestations of calm under the pressures of day-to-day life—political, because daily life passes within a political regime, with its requirements of justice. Between it and supernatural fortitude, he locates “purgatorial” fortitude, the courage of “the man intent on higher realization of the divine image in himself” as he “crosses the threshold of the properly mystical life.” What this fortitude purges is the “dark night of the soul,” wherein the Christian “relinquishes the hold of his anxiously grasping hand, totally abandoning himself to God’s absolute control.” Supernatural or “mystical” fortitude “is the unfolding of the gifts of the Holy Ghost,” a fortitude “exalted by grace,” when the Holy Spirit replaces the soul’s natural endurance.
“An education aiming at the development of physical courage (which ought not to be simply equated with ‘physical training’) belongs in a specific sense to the essential foundation of moral fortitude.” And moral-political fortitude similarly provides the foundation for supernatural or mystical fortitude, as “the same basic human attitude of abandonment of self is realize in both kinds of fortitude.” It is “the supernatural fortitude bestowed by grace,” a “gift of the Holy Spirit,” which “pervades and crowns al other ‘natural’ modes of Christian fortitude.” Still, the Christian living with that gift remains here on earth, and to live rightly here requires the fourth cardinal virtue, temperance.
Pieper prefers ‘temperance’ to ‘moderation’ in translating the Greek word, sophrosyne. He reserves ‘moderation’ for that element of temperance that rules anger. Temperance tout court means “to dispose various parts into one unified and ordered whole,” resulting in the “serenity of the spirit” felt when “man’s inner order” has been secured. He calls that inner order, that rightly ordered soul, a condition of “selfless self-preservation” and “selfless self-love.” Self-preserving, because the rightly ordered soul does not run toward catastrophe. Selfless, because the rightly-ordered soul eschews egoism and self-indulgence. A rightly-ordered soul isn’t easy to achieve and maintain because “the essential human self…is capable of throwing itself into disorder to the point of self-destruction” without any outward prompting or pressure. Against many philosophers, Pieper maintains that by nature, as created, human beings love God more than they love themselves (hence “selflessness”). But “since the first sin man has been not only capable of loving himself more than he loves God his Creator but, contrary to his own nature, inclined to do so.” This is what makes temperance a virtue—a strength that strives against evil—defending the soul “against all selfish perversion of the inner order, through which alone the moral person exists and lives effectively.”
Pieper identifies six modes whereby a man can realize the discipline of temperance: chastity, continence (i.e., self-control), humility, gentleness, and studiositas. These (so to speak) sub-virtues or components of temperance, along with their opposites (unchastity, incontinence, pride, uninhibited wrath, and curiositas) move from temperance regarding the bodily appetites, temperance regarding thumos, and temperance regarding the mind. That is, the lists ascends in accordance with Socrates’ account of the ‘parts’ of the soul.
Respecting chastity, Pieper considers the sexual powers as good, best fulfilled in marriage. Yet “for the very reason that sexual power is so noble and necessary a good”—God tells His people, Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth—it “needs the preserving and defending order of reason.” Chastity “realizes the order of reason in the province of sexuality,” while unchastity “is in its essence the transgression and violation of the rational order in the province of sexuality.” The order of reason “signifies that something is disposed in accordance with the truth of real things,” very much including God’s revealed Word. Unchastity corrupts prudence and interferes with contemplation, “paralyz[ing] the primordial powers of the moral person.” It “renders him incapable of seeing objective reality,” substituting the too-ardent wish for rational perception of facts; it is selfish and hence unknowing, closed off from the reality beyond its own desires; and it can no longer transform the knowledge of truth (what little it has) into reality, which is the exercise of prudence. Prolonged, unchastity becomes habitual; the unchaste man “is happy to have sinned,” Aquinas writes, “because sinning has become ‘natural’ for him.” What may have begun as “a gust of passion,” a sin from weakness, becomes “a basic attitude of one’s will,” a sin of malice. Chaste temperance, although not in itself constituting “the perfection of man,” which requires the presence of all the virtues, does establish “the indispensable prerequisite” for it, given the malign effects of unchaste intemperance.
For Christians, virginity can clear the way not only for the self-governance in accordance with the cardinal virtues but for a more devout worship of God. More than simple physical intactness, virginity “as a virtue” rather than a condition “is established…by the vow to refrain forever from sexual union and its attendant pleasure” for the sake of “mak[ing] him who practices it free for things divine.” It is “only because of this mystery of the union with Christ, only because it fosters a more undivided devotion to God,” that virginity is “superior to marriage.” In a political community, which obviously would wither and die without marital love and parental love for children, virginity cannot be ‘universalized’ (as Kant would say) but it does contribute to the community. While it is good to be fruitful and multiply, it is also good for a community to support a variety of people in a variety of roles. It will need warriors, for example, but warriors of prayer in addition to warriors of weaponry, physicians of the spirit in addition to physicians of the body.
Continence also requires the reasoned governance of the appetite for food. Here, the parallel to chastity is regular fasting, “a commandment of the natural law, quite specifically intended for the average Christian.” Fasting is “that inner order by virtue of which the turbulence of sensuality is kept in check and the spirit liberated so that it may soar into the zone of its appropriate fulfillment and satisfaction.” Fasting should always be done with “cheerfulness of heart,” and not with neglect of the faster’s “own welfare and the requirements of health.” Cheerful fasting denotes “selfless preservation of the self,” in contrast to the selfishness of the glutton.
There is a link between temperance regarding the body and temperance regarding anger, temperance regarding the mind. It is the sense of touch. Both Aristotle and Aquinas point to the “special rank among the senses” occupied by touch. The sense of touch distinguishes animals from all other physical things. Rocks shatter and plants wither, but feel nothing. Among animals, man’s sense of touch is much more acute. And, Aquinas contends, among human beings, “those who possess the better sense of touch have the better power of cognition.” This is because “the sense of touch is the basis of all other senses.” Those who feel acutely, physically, will have souls that feel with more acuity.
In the soul, thumos is the part that gets angry, the part that loves honor, preeminence, and detests shame as much as the bodily appetites love physical satisfaction. The man of thumos is ‘touchy.’ He quarrels at a straw when honor’s at the stake. “The virtue of temperance, insofar as it relates this natural urge to the order of reason, is called humility,” which amounts to “man’s estimation of himself according to truth.” Against many Christian critics of Aristotle, who dismiss magnanimity or greatness of soul as merely a grand manifestation of sinful pride, Pieper insists that humility and magnanimity are strongly linked. The magnanimous man, whom we meet in Book IV, chapter iii of the Nicomachean Ethics, knows himself. He does not demand honors beyond what are due him. He follows the order of reason. He assuredly does not vaunt himself into rivalry with God. Pride, however, does just that, denying “the creaturely nature of man.” In his humility, the magnanimous man, the philosopher Aristotle, and ordinary men share “candid acceptance of this one thing: that man and humanity are neither God nor ‘like God.'” Aquinas adds that humility exhibited by one man in his dealings with others respects “that which is of God in them,” the remnants of the good, natural human being God fashioned out of clay and breathed life into.
Being natural, anger itself is good, so long (again) as reason directs it—very much as Socrates would have reason ally with thumos in the soul against the ever-seductive appetites. (Pieper cites Gregory the Great, who had read his Plato: “Reason opposes evil the more effectively when anger ministers at her side.”) Anger can strengthen us to achieve difficult things, “ever ready to expose itself wherever” what Aquinas calls an “arduous good” might be attained. “Wrath is the strength to attack the repugnant.” Anger resists. A being made of soul and of body needs a specific kind of strength, of virtue, to spur “the will for just retribution” against wrong. Anger is good “if, in accordance with the order of reason, it is brought into service for the true goals of man; one who does good with passion is more praiseworthy than one who [Aquinas writes] ‘not entirely’ afire for the good.” Anger does not necessarily contradict gentleness, which “implies mastery of this power, not its weakening.” It is blind, unreasoned wrath, “the upsurge of…self-will,” that must be stifled. But the worst form of anger comes from the combination of “the intemperateness of lustfulness with the lazy inertia incapable of generating anger” at all. This is “the sign of complete and virtually hopeless degeneration,” and “whenever a caste, a people, or a whole civilization” falls into it, it is “ripe for its decline and fall.”
Rising finally to the mind, Pieper considers studiositas, temperance of the mind, and curiositas, mental intemperance, in the mind’s “natural striving for knowledge.” If, as Aristotle knows, “Man wants to know,” what could mental intemperance be? Magic, Aquinas answers, the attempt to penetrate into God’s providence with astrology and fortune-telling. “Immoderation in the striving for knowledge” betokens what he calls a “roaming unrest of spirit” whereby “man has lost his capacity for living with himself,” with his own natural capacities for knowing. God metes out His own supernatural knowledge through his revealed Word, but magic strives for the supernatural without God. In the life of a people, this “reaches the extremes of its destructive and eradicating power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness,” mesmerized by what’s aptly called ‘Hollywood magic,’ “surround[ing] itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows, the literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses.” Studiositas “primarily signifies that man should oppose this virtually inescapable seduction with all the force of selfless self-preservation” by closing “the inner room of his being against the intrusively boisterous pseudo-reality of empty shows and sounds,” what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.”
If intemperance is an “infantile disorder,” temperance “is the virtue of mature manliness.” It is at least a partial recovery of the “natural, primal fact, prior to all human decision, that man loves God more than himself.” It purifies the soul, giving it “that crystal-clear, morning-fresh freedom from self-consciousness, for that selfless acceptance of the world which man experiences when the shock of a profound sorrow carries him to the brink of existence or when he is touched by the shadow of death.” Aristotle sees this in the catharsis effected by viewing a tragedy by Aeschylus or Sophocles. And “even the Holy Spirit’s gift of fear purifies the soul by causing it to experience, through grace, the innermost peril of man” with a consequent “readiness to accept God’s purifying intervention, terrible and fatal though it might be.” In the words given to Prince Hamlet by a later tragedian, “The readiness is all.”
Note
- He might prefer, but not without substantial qualifications, Malraux’s answer to de Gaulle’s questioning exclamation, in their discussion of the meaning, the purpose, of human life: “What answer have the philosophers, produced, since they think!” (which the translator gives as “Since they began to think, what answer have the philosophers produced?): “Doesn’t the answer belong rather to religions?” Pieper affirms that it does, while defending the reasonable content of Christianity.
- As did de Gaulle: “Life is not work,” he told Malraux. “To work without stopping sends a man mad. Remember that. And to want to do so is a bad sign: those of your colleagues who could not stop working were by no means the best.”
- Hence C. S. Lewis’s title for his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.
- On Thomas More, see “Thomas More’s Long Farewell,” on this website, under the category, “Bible Notes,” and “‘Sir Thomas More’: The Play,” on this website under “Nations.”
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