Josef Pieper (1904–1997) was a Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher from Elte, Westphalia, Germany. He imbibed the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas but thought deeply about the rest of the Western tradition, ancient and modern (read a little more about him here). I have found his work a particularly helpful guide to thinking deeply and clearly about what it means to live rightly as a human being. His most famous work is Leisure: the Basis of Culture. If you want to get a sense of the breadth of his work, An Anthology, which he compiled at the end of his life, is a great place to start.
If you want to think about how to live well as a Christian in this time, Pieper’s works are full of wisdom. Pieper’s works are also concise. All of them are short volumes. The chapters are also short. You can usually read a chapter in one short sitting. They stir the heart and the mind and challenge us to be what God has called us to be. Here are 7 quotes that invite you to read Josef Pieper.
1. The key question of our time that our prosperity should make us ask: What is life for? “After we have accomplished, with an admirable amount of intelligence and hard work, all that is necessary, after we have provided for the basic needs of life, produced the essential foodstuff, protected the realm of life itself—after all this, what is the meaning of the life itself that we have made possible? How do we define a truly human life?” (Anthology, 111).
2. Prudence or wisdom is the pre-eminent virtue: “The pre-eminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is. . . . Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation, that is to the concrete realities which form the ‘environment’ of a concrete human action; and that we therefore take this concrete reality seriously, with clear-eyed objectivity” (The Four Cardinal Virtues, 10).
3. Excessive fault-finding is a form of injustice because it keeps societies from functioning: “Unwarranted criticism and opposition, blind abuse and fault-finding, are acts of injustice, violations of iustitia distributiva which alone enables states to exist and function in orderly fashion” (The Four Cardinal Virtues, 95).
4. Clarity on courage: “To be brave is not the same as to have no fear. Indeed, fortitude actually rules out a certain kind of fearlessness, namely the sort of fearlessness that is based upon a false appraisal and evaluation of reality” (The Four Cardinal Virtues, 126).
5. Leisure keeps us human and is the fulfillment of human life: “Leisure means an attitude of celebration” (Anthology, 140). “The essence of leisure is not to assure that we may function smoothly but rather to assure that we, embedded in our social function, are enabled to remain fully human” (ibid.).
6. On making friends: “Friends do not gaze at each other, and totally unlike erotic lovers they are not apt to talk about their friendship. Their gaze is fixed upon the things in which they take common interest. That is why, it has been said, people who simply wish for a ‘a friend’ will with fair certainty not find any. To find a friend you first have to be interested in something” (Anthology, 43).
7. The virtue of hope: “All hope says: it will be good, it will end well—with creation, with man, also with me” (Anthology, 24). “Never can the natural man say as triumphantly as the Christian, ‘Things will end well for me’” (A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, 50).