Dr.

Robert Hickson

10 February 2015
St. Scholastica
Agnes Muriel Hickson (R.I.P. d. 2009)

Josef Pieper's Presentation of Purity and Virtuous Temperance

--Epigraphs-For us men and women of today [in 1988], who are of the opinion that in order
to know the truth one need only more or less strain one's brain, and who scarcely
regard as sensible the concept of an ascesis of the intellect [i.e., the wholesome
discipline of a cognitive asceticism]for us, the deeply intrinsic connection
that links the knowledge of truth to the condition of purity has vanished from
our consciousness. [Saint] Thomas notes that the firstborn daughter of unchastity
is the blindness of spirit [caecitas animi]....An impure and selfishly degraded
will for pleasure ruins both the decision-making power [of virtuous prudence]
and the inmost resource of the soul to give silent heed [receptive attentiveness]
to the discourse of reality. (Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the
Human Heart (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988)p. 42my emphasis added)
***
That sin is a burden and a bondage is nowhere more apparent than in
intemperantia, in that obsession of selfish self-preservation, which seeks itself in
vain. Temperance [i.e., the fourth cardinal virtue], on the contrary, is liberating and
purifying. This, above all: temperance effects purification....[One also thus]
begins to understand purity as the fruit of purification....That most disputed
statement of Aristotle points in the same direction. Even the Holy Spirit's gift of
fear [the Donum Timoris], which Saint Thomas assigns [and makes
subordinate] to temperantia, purifies the soul by causing it to experience,
through grace, the innermost peril of man. Its fruit is that purity by dint of
which the selfish and furtive search for spurious fulfilment is abandoned.
Purity is the perfect unfolding of the whole [created] nature from which alone
could have come the words: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord!' (Luke 1:38) A
new depth here opens to our view: purity is not only the fruit of purification; it
[purity] implies at the same time readiness to accept God's purifying
intervention, terrible and fatal though it might be; to accept it with the bold
candour of a trustful heart, and thus to experience its fruitful and transforming
power. This then is the ultimate meaning of the virtue of temperance. (Josef
Pieper, Fortitude and Temperance (London: Faber and Faber LTD., 1955), pp.
125, 126-127italics in the original; my bold emphasis added)
***
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It is now many years ago that a learned Catholic priest said to me in passing and with modesty
during one of our conversations that in the Old Testament there was always a close connection
between impurity and idolatryas is so today with sexual promiscuity's link to the 'cult of man'.
This was indeed a searchlight insight, as Hilaire Belloc once called Cardinal Manning's sudden but
abiding words to him as a boy, which Belloc was more deeply to understand and to apply later in his
life, not only as a Catholic in the British Parliament: All human conflict is ultimately theological.
Moreover, in that memorable conversation in the mid-1970s, Father promptly added: Yes, and
the link between impurity and idolatry is to be seen in the Old Testament not only in the shameful
manifestations of temple-prostitution, itself a grave degeneration and human degradationand an
unmistakable blasphemy. For idolatry, he said is to worship something created, not the
Creator.
In an essay I was later to read, these words about the link between impurity and idolatry were
likewise expressed by Monsignor Romano Guardini, a teacher of my own mentor Josef Pieper, with
whom I also later discussed at length these searchlight insights and their fuller range of implications
in our restless and roaming Modern World not only as to our own individual (and constricting)
spiritual struggles with lust and with the disorder of covetousness; but also the presence of impurity and
idolatry in the history of the Catholic Church. For, Saint Thomas Aquinas also saw such things in his
teaching on the virtues and the vices, as Josef Pieper so well expressed it:
Virtue is the utmost of what a man can be [in Latin, the ultimum potentiae]; it is
the realization of the [divinely created] human capacity for being. 1

Moreover, that same human capacity for being also includes man's creaturely capacity to
receive Grace. That is to say, it is affirmed in the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas (and of his grateful
disciple, Josef Pieper) that, by virtue of his Creation, man is Gratiae capax i.e., capable of
receiving and of responding to Divine Grace. And thereby is potentially disposed to be illumined and
strengthened and elevated and purified.
In accord with Saint Augustine's conviction that man has as many masters as he has vices, Saint
Thomas also has a resiliently wholesome view of the off-setting and superordinate power of the virtues:
1 Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 9. This little
book was originally published in German, in 1988, and it fittingly drew upon Dr. Pieper's earlier writings on the virtues,
composed even before, as well as during, World War II with all of its desolating atmosphere and challenging probations
of character. References to this text (and others) will henceforth be placed in the main body of the text in parentheses.

Aquinas, it is true, also says that an acute temptation to unchastity is most

easily conquerable by flight. But he likewise knows that the addiction to
degenerate pleasure-seeking can by no means be cured through a merely
negative approach, through convulsively shutting one's mind to it. Thomas
believes that the deterioration of one power of the soul should be healed and
supplemented by the still undamaged core of some other power. Thus, it
should be possible to subdue and, as it were, to quench the limp
intemperateness of an unchaste lustfulness by attacking a difficult task [i.e., a
bonum arduum] with the resilient joy generated in the full power of wrath.
Only the combination of the intemperateness of lustfulness with the lazy
inertia incapable of generating anger is the sign of complete and hopeless
degeneration. It appears whenever a caste, a people, or a whole civilization is ripe
for its decline and fall.2

In his A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, Josef Pieper reveals another fertilizing
insight from Saint Thomas, both the affirmations and the clarifying contrasts:
Moral virtue, insofar as it is the basic attitude of voluntary affirmation of the
good, is the foundation and precondition of prudence [the first of the four cardinal
virtues]. Yet prudence is the precondition for the appropriate realization and
effect of this basis attitude here and now [i.e., this movement from the
knowledge of reality to the realization (the accomplishment) of the good!]. One
can be prudent only if one loves and wills the good through and through [hence
also willing and loving the good of the intellect: truth]; indeed, only one who is
first prudent can do good. Since, however, the love for good grows over and
over through doing, the foundations of prudence are the more deepened and
strengthened the more that it is fruitful.
[By contrast,] There is an amazing and scarcely fathomable depth in this sentence
of Thomas Aquinas: false prudence [prudentia carnalis] and excessive
cleverness [astutia] are derived from and essentially tied to covetousness
[cupiditas].
This statement puts the virtue of prudence itself and the basic attitude operative
in it [i.e., the voluntary affirmation of the good] into a sharp new light; it
includes the fact that prudence is opposed to covetousness in a most particular
way. With one stroke a nexus among several strands of thought is suddenly
exposed, thoughts [like impurity and idolatry!] that previously did not seem
to be connected. (18-19my emphasis added)

2 Josef Pieper, Fortitude and Temperance (London: Faber and Faber LTD, 1955), p. 116my emphasis added. Further
references to this book will be in the main body of this essay above, in parentheses.

Dr. Pieper will help us further by exploring, with the lucid understanding of Saint Thomas, the
deeper meaning of cupiditas as an inordinate desire, characterized by the clever cunning of
selfishness:
Covetousness here means more than the disordered love for money and
property. Covetousness is to be understood as the immoderate striving after all
possessions [even the alluringly erotic and meretricious ones], through which
the person thinks he can assure his own greatness and worth. Covetousness thus
signifies the anxious senility of frantic self-preservation bent on only its own
assurance and security. Is further explanation needed on how greatly all of this
is contrary to the innermost direction of prudence; how impossible it is for one
to have that silence that knows and recognizes the truth of objective realities; and
how impossible it is to have any conformity to reality in knowing and deciding,
without the youthfulness of a courageously trusting and...prodigal [generous]
renunciation of the conditions of anxious [and quite selfish] self-preservation and
of all selfish interest in mere self-confirmation; how simply impossible, then,
is the virtue of prudence without the constant readiness for disregarding
oneself and without the detachment and tranquility of authentic humility and
objectivity? (19-20my emphasis added)
When there is little disposition to that selfless self-preservation which is the mark of true
temperantia as a virtue, one also has an uprooted and roaming spirit (evagatio mentis), and not only
itching ears (aures prurientes) of anxious curiosity (curiositas), but also the more dangerous
disorder of itching eyes, as it wereespecially in our more electronic world of 2015:
The degradation into curiositas of the natural desire to see can thus be
substantially more than a harmless confusion on the surface. It can be the sign of
one's fatal uprooting. It can signify that a person has lost the capacity to dwell
in his own self [with a tranquillitas ordinis, a serenity of inner order]; that he,
fleeing from himself, disgusted and bored with the waste of an interior that is
burnt out by despair, seeks a thousand futile ways with selfish anxiety that
[thing, perception of reality] which is accessible only to the high-minded
[magnanimous] calm of a heart disposed to self-sacrifice and thus in mastery
over itself: the [that] fullness of being....
The concupiscence of the eyes reaches its utmost destructive and extirpative
power at the point where it has constructed for itself a world in its own image
and likeness, where it has surrounded itself with the restlessness of a ceaseless
film of meaningless objects for show and with a literally deafening noise of
nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted
chase around every window of the senses. Behind their papery [flimsy] faade of
ostentation lies absolute nothingness, a world of at most one-day [ephemeral]
constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are
thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been passed
through; a world which, before the revealing gaze [the piercing eye] of a sound
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spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan

entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and
ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair. (39-40my emphasis added)
Another lesser known connection may be better appreciated now, if we briefly consider how Saint
Thomas unexpectedly presents curiosity in its sobering relationship to one of the Seven Deadly Sins,
sloth, a spiritual disorder which is characterized by an inordinate worldly sadness concerning a
spiritual good in Latin tristitia de bono spirituali which disorder itself conduces to despair.
Josef Pieper's Fortitude and Temperance allows us to grasp this matter in only one of his compact
paragraphs:
Aquinas assigns curiositas to the roaming unrest of spirit, evagatio mentis, which
he says is the first-born daughter of acedia [spiritual sloth]....Acedia is the
dreary sadness of a heart unwilling to accept the greatness to which man is
called by God [i.e., not wanting to live up to man's higher supernatural vocation
in and through Grace]; this inertia raises its paralyzing face whenever man is
trying to shake off the obligatory nobility of being that belongs to his essential
dignity as a person, and particularly the nobility of the sonship of God, thus
denying his true self. Acedia, says Thomas, first shows its effect in the
roaming unrest of spirit. (Its [acedia's] second daughter is despair and this
kinship throws revealing sidelights on the subject of our present discussion.)
Roaming unrest of spirit, on the other hand, manifests itself in verbosity, in
unbridled desire to burst forth from the citadel of the spirit into diversity;
in inner restlessness, in instability of place as well as instability of resolution,
and especially in the instability of curiositas. (120my emphasis added)
Returning now to an illuminating passage in A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart,
we find Josef Pieper incorporating more of Saint Thomas' deep insights into his own:
Still the destructive element of this disorder [of curiositas], born out of and shaped
by illness, is found in the fact that this [restless] disorder obstructs the original
power of a man to perceive reality, that it renders a person unable not only to
attain his own [true] self [coram Deo, before God], but also to attain reality and
truth [i.e., reality unveiling itself to a knowing mind].
If therefore a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the
world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see [i.e., by virtue of
our Creation] assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and selfdefense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person
resists the nearly inescapable temptation to indiscipline with all the power of
selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life
against the pressingly unruly pseudoreality of empty sights and soundsin
order that, through and only through this asceticism of perception [and
cognition], he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's
living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape
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himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.
Man's being in the true sense is found in this: to exist in conformity with reason.
Thus, when one behaves according to truth, then it is said that he is behaving
himself. In a very particular way unchastity destroys this self-possession and
behaving oneself by man. Unchaste abandonment and prostitution of the soul
to the sensual world wound the fundamental capacity of the moral person: to
hearken in silence to the call of the real and out of the recollected silence
within oneself to make [with the decisive practical wisdom of virtuous Prudentia]
the decision appropriate to the concrete situation of concrete action. (41-42my
emphasis added)
Now we should consider the place of Beauty in our reflections on Purity and the Virtue of
Temperance; and then we shall conclude with some of Dr. Pieper's indispensable observations on the
Passion and the Virtue of Hope:
Not only is the satisfaction of the spirit with the truth impossible without
chastity, but even genuine sensual joy at sensual beauty is impossible
[without chastity, without purity]. That sensual pleasure is not excluded by
Christian precepts of living from the scope of the morally good (hence something
more than just permissible) need not be especially elaborated. However, that
this pleasure should be made possible precisely through the virtue of discipline
and moderation [i.e., virtuous temperantia]that is a surprising thought
[perhaps like the discipline of artistic form!]....[Moreover,] Man [says Saint
Thomas]...is able also to enjoy himself beyond the thing [or person] seen and
heard propter convenientiam sensibilium (because of the harmony [hence proper
proportions] of the things perceived), on account of the sensory propriety
inherent in the object seen or heard, by which nothing else than sensual beauty
[also pulchritudo as the splendor ordinis, and even the splendor veritatis] is
to be understood. One often reads and hears that, through lechery, a man sinks to
the level of a beasta comparison that should be used cautiously, since lechery
(and also discipline) is something exclusively human; neither an angel nor a
beast experiences it. Yet from this distinction the figure of speech does draw a
good meaning: an unchaste will to pleasure has the tendency to relate the
entirety of the sensory world, especially sensual beauty, to only sexual lust.
Only a chaste sensuality can achieve true human capacity: to perceive sensual
beauty, such as that of the human body, as beauty and enjoy it, undisturbed and
unstained by any selfish [or unjust] will to pleasure that befogs everything,
for its own sake, propter convenientiam sensibilium. With good reason it is said:
only he who has a pure heart can laugh in a freedom that creates freedom in
others. It is no less true that only he who looks at the world [or a lovely person,
like Our Lady] with pure eyes experiences its [her] beauty....This supreme
realization of purity is expressed in one of the most perfect (and one of the most
unknown) German poems in an image of immaculate beauty and radiant
authenticity: Untroubled, the undaunted Rose/ stays open in hope. (Konrad
Weiss). (43-44, 45-46my emphasis added).
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Josef Pieper's concluding citation of his friend's poem imparts also a fresh insight to us about the
connection between Purity and Hope.
May we not forget Konrad Weiss' evocation of Our Lady, as well, Our Blessed Mother and her
gracious beauty and hope.
Throughout Dr. Pieper's own writings down the years one will find his nuanced, many-faceted,
and enduring reflections on the concept and reality of hope. He vividly conveys not only the
existential and irascible passion of hope as one of the abiding preservative powers in man's nature
as he contends and takes risks in his adventure to attain a steep good (bonum arduum); but he also
helps us to understand the virtue of hope its importance, indispensability, and implications
inasmuch as hope is only a virtue as a theological virtue and, thus as it is infused from above
(desursum descendensEpistle of James 3:15) in the supernatural order of Grace. By way of
clarifying contrast Josef Pieper also vividly presents the two forms of hopelessness: presumption
and despair. Presumption is too prematurely convinced of the security of its final fulfillment; and
despair is too prematurely convinced of its final futility and non-fulfillment. Both forms of disorder
(and hidden pride) avoid or try to bypass the abiding tension of hope. There is, moreover, a certain
quality of Fear reverential (and filial) Fear that provides a protective Guard (and is also a Gift)
against the prideful danger (and the grave sin) of Presumption.
Let us now allow Josef Pieper with his Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart to
lead us gradually into these deeper matters of hope and corrosive hopelessness:
One of the scarcely examined principles from which our age's governing image
of humanity is drawn asserts that it is not fitting for man to be afraid. In this
attitude the waters from two sources are mingled. The one is Enlightenment
liberalism, which relegates fearfulness to the realm of the unessential, and in its
view of reality, room and place are assigned to fear only in an unessential sense.
The other source is an un-Christian Stoicism [as seen in the life of Emperor
Marcus Aurelius and in his Meditations] with a concealed link to impudence as
well as to despair; it [Stoicism] opposes the fearful things of existence, which are
clearly seen, with defiant immobility, without fear, but also without hope. (46
my emphasis added)
Since Hope intrinsically makes reference to the future and is, thus, not completely under the
human will's aspired-to autonomous control, Stoicism has always looked askance at it; and the Roman
Stoic, Seneca, even called Hope (Latin Spes; Greek Elpis) an Insania (an insanity, irrationality, folly,
mad extravagance!).
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Dr. Pieper continues his analysis by presenting a traditional contrast to both Enlightenment
Liberalism and the various forms of Stoicism:
Classical Western moral teaching does not conceive of denying that there is
something fearsome in human existence; it is also remote from Christian moral
teaching at all to say that man should not or might not fear for the fearsome.
Nonetheless, the Christian inquires after the ordo timoris, the order of fear; he
inquires about what is genuinely and ultimately fearsome; and it is his concern
that he not fear things that are not at all truly and definitively fearsome, and
likewise that he not regard as harmless something ultimately fearsome. What
is truly fearsome, however, is that man might separate himself from his ultimate
Ground of Being [or Author of Created Existence and Grace, namely God]
voluntarily through his guilt. No person can bear this serenely or desire to
incur it. This fearsomeness, which accompanies as a real possibility the life of
every man, including the saintsthe fearsomeness and this fear are not
surmountable by any mode of heroism; on the contrary, this fear is a
prerequisite for any genuine heroism.
The moral good is nothing else than the continuation and fulfillment of the
[created] natural tendencies of our being: in the fear of the Lord man's natural
anxiety in the face of any diminishment in being or of annihilation is realized. If
this natural human fear, contemplating nothingness, is not fulfilled through the
[reverential and filial] fear of the Lord, then this anxiety erupts unfulfilled
and destructive into the realm of spiritual and mental existence. (46-47my
emphasis added)
Dr. Pieper certainly presents us with fundamental, indeed existential, matters from which fears
and moral choices we may run, but cannot hide.
Leading us now into a consideration of hope by way of a reflection on our incomplete
creatureliness our condition of having been created and being still wayfarers in statu viatoris
(47) en route to a possible, but as-yet uncertain, fulfillment Dr. Pieper will again interweave several
important strands of thought and actuality (some of it being unavoidably abstract, at first):
For man who, in statu viatoris [in the inescapable status of a wayfarer not yet
home!], in the state of being on the way, experiences the essential creatureliness,
the not yet really [fully] existing being of his existence, there is only one
appropriate answer to this experience. The answer cannot be despairfor the
meaning of creaturely existence is not nothingness but rather is being, which
means fulfillment. The answer cannot be the comfortable [much less smug!]
security of possessions [i.e., presumption]for the creature's being as becoming
still borders in peril [at risk] on nothingness. Both of these, despair and assurance
of possession [a presumed final attainment of fulfillment], militate against the
truth of real things. The only answer that is suitable for man's authentic
existential situation is hope. The virtue of hope is the first appropriate virtue of
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the status viatoris; it is the genuine virtue of the not yet [not yet there, not yet
fulfilled, not yet finally lost, not yet in Beatitude, not yet in vita aeterna]. In the
virtue of hope, before all others, man understands and affirms, that he is a
creature, a creation of God. Human existence and everything that immediately
pertains to it has the structure of hope. We are viatores, on our way, not yet
beings....Who could say he already possesses the being intended for him...?
(47-48my emphasis added)
Josef Pieper will also have us consider more vividly the qualities that characterize both natural
hope and supernatural hope:
Youthfulness and hope are associated with one another in multiple senses. They
belong together, in both the natural and the supernatural realms. Natural hope
springs from man's youthful power and dries up along with it. For supernatural
hope, however, the reverse is true: it not only is not tied to being naturally young
but also is itself the basis for a much more substantial youthfulness. It endows
a person with a not yet that simply surpasses and is remote from the decline of
the natural power of hope. And the supernatural vigor of hope overflows and
radiates even into the rejuvenated powers of natural hope. Nothing assures and
establishes eternal youth (in the most literal sense of the word) as does the
theological virtue of hope. It alone is able to provide man with...that
stouthearted freshness, that resilient joyousness, that composed bravery of
confidence [i.e., trust, confiance], which distinctly characterize a young person
and thus make him lovable.
Such supernatural hope implants in man...a simply inexhaustible not yet, it
establishes a new youthfulness....In the two forms of hopelessness, in despair as
well as presumption, this youthfulness of the hoping person comes to nothing all
the same, but in different ways: in despair, in the way of the senile; in
presumption, in the way of the infantile....Yet never can a pagan be tempted to
such deep despair as a Christian....Furthermore, a person, who in the final analysis
is in despair [not just tempted to despair], can appear to be a thoroughgoing
optimist in the penultimate concerns of existence, such as the naturally cultural,
to others and to himself, as long as he is able to seal off radically the inner
chamber of despair, so that no cry of pain can erupt outward. (49-51my
emphasis added)
After such searching disclosures and fortifying comments, Josef Pieper will draw us to a further
integrity and humility, and to an honesty and purity ardently desiring to be without guile and without
self-deception:
It is easy to flatter oneself that one hopes for eternal life; however, it is hard truly
to hope while in the midst of temptations to despair. In the situation of utmost
bravery [as with the blood-witnesses, the humiliated Christian martyrs] it becomes
evident whether the hope is authentic. No one knows more deeply that one
who is truly brave thatand how greatlyhope is a virtue and thus not to be
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had casually and, as it were, without charge; no one experiences more clearly
that the hope for eternal life is a grace.(52-53my emphasis added)
Remembering the courage and unmistakable heroism of Ernst Jnger on the battlefields of World
War I and Jnger's later writings on courage (before he finally became a Roman Catholic towards the
end of his long and lucid life), Josef Pieper confronts the formidable matter of heroic despair:
It can happen that, in a period of temptations to despair, all inner prospects for
a happy ending grow dark. It can also happen that, for the person confined to
the natural, nothing else remains than the hopeless bravery of the heroic
downfall. Indeed, this possibility will present itself as the only one to the true
gentleman, since he is just the one to forego soothing self-deception and
narcosis along with, as Ernst Jnger notes, the outlet of luck. In a word, it can
also sometimes happen that supernatural hope remains simply the only
possibility of hope at all [as with the Hope of the Christian Martyrs who,
amidst a great concentration of wounding evil, never blasphemed God nor the
inherent Goodness of His Creationan astounding historical and spiritual
Witness]....Even [etiamsi] were He to kill me, I shall have no other hope than
him Sperabo!] (Job 13:15)....Christian hope [esprance, as distinct from
espoir in French] is first and foremost an existential direction of man toward
the perfection of his being, toward the fulfillment of his essence, thus toward his
ultimate realization, toward the fullness of being (to which, to be sure, there also
corresponds a fullness of fortune or rather of happiness [beatitude]).
If, then, as has been said, at times all natural hope becomes meaningless, then
that means that at times supernatural hope remains simply the only possibility
for man to align himself toward Being. The despairing bravery of the heroic
downfall is fundamentally nihilistic; it looks toward nothingness; it
presumes that it is able to endure nothingness.
The bravery of a Christian, however, thrives on the hope in life's abundance
of reality, in eternal life.... (53-54my emphasis added)
In this context, we may now freshly remember that poetic image of immaculate beauty and
radiant authenticity and, under Grace, Our Blessed Mother's Consenting Fiat of Coruscating Purity:
Untroubled, the undaunted Rose stays open in Hope (46)

--Finis- 2015 Robert D. Hickson

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