A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, by Josef Pieper
Introduction and Study Guide
Virtue. It is an utterly neglected subject in modern education and yet for thousands upon thousands of years it was the entirety of that to which the education of children was directed. Long before education became about “skill sets” or “vocational goals,” education was about the formation of a person’s character. Formerly young people were taught that it is far more important who you turn out to be than it is what you turn out to do. In fact, the person who learns to read well, write well, speak well, and altogether think well, is perfectly capable of doing almost anything as long as he also learns to govern himself well. In this way modern education has truly put the cart before the horse, only the contemporary cart doesn’t even have hay and the horses are starving to death.
Josef Pieper is an under-praised, and too-little-known, genius. A man of firm Christian conviction and uncommon mental prowess, Pieper wrote voluminously (yet somehow concisely) on a great many issues of importance to the life of the mind. He truly characterized what it means to be a philosopher in its most primal sense, he loved wisdom and he loved helping others find it alongside himself.
Pieper is perhaps best known for his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture in which he illuminates what should be obvious (save for the fact of our own blindness to the most obvious things), namely, that the things which are the most precious and important to human life and meaning are those things which have no use. In other words, they are ends in themselves and are not means to some other end. One does not purchase a painting he loves so as to serve pizza upon it. A beloved painting hangs upon a wall to be appreciated for its own beauty, it is not for anything else, it has no use. Such beautiful things, like paintings, like stories, like orchestral pieces, etc., are products of leisure, excess time in which a person may pursue those things which are not strictly necessary for life’s continuation. It is these unnecessary things which make life worth living. They are not drudgery, rather, they are sources of joy and contentment.
But I digress and you now have another book recommendation from the pen of Josef Pieper. This book, however, is at least equally brilliant. This Brief Reader does not focus so much on the making of beautiful things, but it focuses upon the forming of beautiful souls. Such souls as these will undoubtedly, when given enough leisure, make beautiful very things. This is a book about what must happen to the individual id we are to see any beautiful art come to be at all. Today we see the product of ill-formed souls making art all around us. Too much of the contemporary art scene is full of ugliness, disorder, and asinine expressions of despair. What else could we expect from a generation whose souls have been cut out before they even knew it. As C. S. Lewis once put it, “we castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
If Lewis’ Abolition of Man was the diagnosis of modern education’s disease, this book which I am now introducing to you is an excellent dose of medicine towards the cure. A good education must shape the hearts of students to love what they ought and despise what they ought. But what ought they to ought? Pieper tells us “All duty is based upon being. Reality is the basis of ethics. Goodness is the standard of reality. Whoever wants to know and do the good must direct his gaze toward the objective world of being, not toward his own ‘sentiment’ or toward arbitrarily established ‘ideals’ and ‘models’. He must look away from his own deed and look upon reality.”
What could be clearer in our own day than that we live among a generation of people who are not gazing upon reality? We are all too absorbed in our phones and gaming devices and social media to the extent that we almost never look up to see stars and trees and birds. We do not “touch grass” nearly enough. We live entirely in “online communities” that have no real existence and we find ourselves in echo chambers with people who will only ever reinforce what we want to hear and we silence any who oppose our way of thinking with a click of a button. What we all need is a dose of reality!
Pieper emphasizes the critical necessity of learning to be silent and listen. We must quietly perceive and receive what actually is. We must see what exists and contemplate it. We must listen to what others say and consider it. For, says Pieper, “the world reveals itself to the silent listener and only to him; the more silently he listens, the more purely is he able to perceive reality.” The inability to be quiet is a habit of ignorance and, as Pieper notes, certain kinds of non-silence are actually related to despair. Noise, chatter, ceaseless and incessant, these are the sounds of people who know nothing and cannot find truth or hope. We must learn to be quiet and soak in reality. Only then can we begin to act in accordance with the way things really are. Once in tune with what God has made we begin to live the life of virtue and become “the utmost of what a man can be” and realize our full human potential.
In this fantastic little book, Pieper walks with us on a tour of the seven virtues of the human heart. He shows us how the divine gifts of faith, hope, and love are capable of breathing supernatural life into the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. He shows us how these seven virtues are the keys to unlocking the life we were made to live, the good life, the happy life. Happy indeed is he who lives in accordance with how God made him to live. Virtue is righteousness. Righteousness is virtue. Both are happiness.
The world is on fire and modern education is in shambles, but you don’t have to be. Our children don’t have to be broken. They need only some guidance and direction about what it means to live as God intended and why we should desire to. Outside of the pages of Scripture themselves, this is one of the best books I know to recommend to anyone about how to set our feet upon the path of living as God intended.
Below you will find links to each section of the study guide for Josef Pieper’s “A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart” as they become available. If you would like to pick up a copy of the book to join in the study you may do so by clicking HERE. To see a list of other Great Books study guides already available, in development, or planned for the future you can click HERE.