Joseph Pieper Quotes on God
Joseph Pieper, a leading twentieth-century interpreter of Thomas Aquinas, wrote of God with a characteristic clarity drawn from the classical and medieval tradition, and the quotes gathered here reflect it. Pieper held that worship lies at the root of human culture rather than being one of its products, and that the festival is the highest form of the affirmation of creation. He drew a striking contrast between human and divine knowledge: human beings feel wonder precisely because they do not fully know, whereas God, knowing in the most absolute and perfect way, does not wonder. He also held that friendship with God opens the eye to dimensions of reality hidden from ordinary sight. Drawn from Leisure: The Basis of Culture and his other works, these passages present God as the source of wonder, worship, and the deepest knowledge of the real.
Quotes
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Worship is the source of culture, not its product.”
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“Leisure lives on affirmation. It […] includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation. The highest form of affirmation is the festival; and according to Karl Kerenyi , the historian of religion, to festival belong "peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once." The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning”
The Kerenyi quote is from Karl Kerenyi, Die antike Religion (Amsterdam, 1940), p. 66. -
“Since "the answers of the special sciences" do not reach "the horizon of total reality", they are given " without having to speak at the same time of 'God and the world.'”
The Philosophical Act | p. 96 -
“He who knows does not feel wonder. It could not be said that God experiences wonder, for God knows in the most absolute and perfect way.”
The Philosophical Act | p. 106 -
“Modern religious teachings have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965) -
“The eye of perfected friendship with God is aware of deeper dimensions of reality, to which the eyes of the average man and the average Christian are not yet opened.”
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance(1965)