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This new edition of The Heart (out of print for nearly 30 years) is the flagship volume in a series of Dietrich von Hildebrand's works to be published by St. Augustine's Press in collaboration with the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project. Founded in 2004, the Legacy Project exists in the first place to translate the many German writings of von Hildebrand into English.
While many revere von Hildebrand as a religious author, few realize that he was a philosopher of great stature and importance. Those who knew von Hildebrand as philosopher held him in the highest esteem. Louis Bouyer, for example, once said that von Hildebrand was the most important Catholic philosopher in Europe between the two world wars. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger expressed even greater esteem when he said: I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.
The Heart is an accessible yet important philosophical contribution to the understanding of the human person. In this work von Hildebrand is concerned with rehabilitating the affective life of the human person. He thinks that for too long philosophers have held it in suspicion and thought of it as embedded in the body and hence as being much inferior to intellect and will. In reality, he argues, the heart, the center of affectivity, has many different levels, including an eminently personal level; at this level affectivity is just as important a form of personal life as intellect and will. Von Hildebrand develops the idea that properly personal affectivity, far than tending away from an objective relation to being, is in fact one major way in which we transcend ourselves and give being its due. Von Hildebrand also developed the important idea that the heart in many respects is more the real self of the person than his intellect or will.
At the same time, the author shows full realism about the possible deformities of affective life; he offers rich analyses of what he calls affective atrophy and affective hypertrophy. The second half of The Heart offers a remarkable analysis of the affectivity of the God-Man.
A book of everyday ethics by a man whom Pope St. John Paul II called one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century, The Art of Living is Dietrich von Hildebrand's essential guide to the moral life.
In just over one hundred pages, Dietrich von Hildebrand, with his wife Alice, presents a distinctive view of the virtuous life that begins with reverence, the mother of all virtues, and includes chapters on Faithfulness, Goodness, Hope, The Human Heart, and many others.
The essays that make up this book began as a popular series of radio lectures in 1930s Germany, and their conversational tone comes through in this new edition, which maintains Alice von Hildebrand's original translation, and updates this beloved work for a new generation of readers.
The Art of Living promises to provide clarity, hope, and fresh insights for those seeking to live life more fully, faithfully, and beautifully.
Editorial Reviews
The author is true to his title. Hildebrand writes about virtue with an artist's flair. He shows us the moral life as it is -- and so we can see the overwhelming appeal of every virtue, every value. It is the art of living virtuously that makes love possible and leads us to friendship and communion - with God and neighbor. A better life, the life we want, begins in these luminous pages.
-- Scott Hahn, bestselling author of over forty titles, including The Lamb's Supper and Reasons to Believe.
The essays in Dietrich von Hildebrand's The Art of Living are a sublime treasury, filled with light and truth. Whoever longs to live fully and truly will do well to discover and cherish this golden book.
-- Eric Metaxas, New York Times Bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
The primacy of moral virtue has never had a more passionate, insightful--and bracing-- champion in the modern era than Dietrich von Hildebrand. Men and women of all faiths should celebrate the reissue of this inspired volume.
-- Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, Senior Director, The Tikvah Fund
How to have a stronger, happier marriage
These pages will give you what you need to make your marriage a source of profound happiness and lasting peace:
Especially today, this beautiful book - which reveals the sublime vocation of Christian marriage - is a must for anyone who is eager to live worthily this great mystery of love.
Marriage will show you:
A magnificent treatise by a distinguished philosopher on the pursuit of spiritual perfection.
ùPublishers Weekly
A major contribution to the only important question: the transformation of our soul in Christ.
ùArchbishop Fulton Sheen
A masterpiece of modern spirituality: eminently practical and highly recommended.
ùFr. John Hardon, S.J.
A solid and penetrating analysis of the Christian virtues, and their application in the struggle toward Christian perfection.
ùLibrary Journal
Of all sins, pride is the most dangerous . . . and the most sorrowful: it cuts you off from God, estranges you from others, and leaves you lost and unhappy.
These pages show you how to drive pride from your soul. You'll learn to recognize its many forms (including some that masquerade as virtue), and you'll come to see just why they're such barriers to happiness and to holiness.
You'll also discover the incredible strength of humility, the only virtue that has the power to expel every vestige of pride from your soul. These pages will help you to begin experiencing the joys of humility today.
You'll learn:
A probing meditation on the nature, value, and beauty of purity, In Defense of Purity is not a book of sexual ethics, nor a how-to guide to purity--but for readers with open minds and hearts, the book promises to be transformative.
When Dietrich von Hildebrand converted to Catholicism in 1914, he was surprised to find that, despite an abundance of books on the dangers of impurity, there were practically none on the positive values of purity. So, writes Alice von Hildebrand, widow of Dietrich, in a new foreword to the book: this is what he set out to do in In Defense of Purity: to explore purity as a positive reality and only in light of its beauty to describe its contrary.
First published in 1927, In Defense of Purity anticipates many of the most pressing social issues of our day. Hildebrand's vision of the human person offers an antidote to a contemporary attitude that treats the body as a mere object and fails to appreciate its integral unity with the person.
In Defense of Purity has influenced thinkers like Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II, whose own Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body share and build upon many of Dietrich von Hildebrand's insights. This new edition stands to influence a new generation of readers, looking for enduring answers to the perennial questions about human life and love.
In Defense of Purity cuts through the current debates to offer a fundamental view of the very essence and meaning of purity. Hildebrand's insights on love, marriage, virginity, and sexuality offer fresh wisdom to people in any stage of life, from first dates, to religious vows, to golden anniversaries.
Dietrich von Hildebrand offers here the most nuanced version that we have of a value-based ethics, building on the ethics of Max Scheler, but going far beyond it. The Prolegomena of the work gives an account of Hildebrand's understanding of phenomenology. In the first fourteen chapters Hildebrand lays out a general theory of value, in which he distinguishes himself from his predecessors by not limiting value to the sense of what is good for the human person, but instead placing at the center of his reflections what is good and worthy in itself, prior to its beneficent impact on human persons. On this basis he develops his signature concept of value-response, wherein a person gives value its due, along with his signature concept of the transcendence of the person in value-response. He re-thinks virtue theory on the basis of his value philosophy, and in doing so he places virtue at the center of his ethics long before the revival of virtue theory in Anglo-American thought. Of particular importance is his re-thinking of moral evil in its different forms, and he throws new light on the question how it is possible knowingly to do wrong. The book concludes with probing account of the religious dimension of the moral life and the place of God in morality.
Now with a new foreword by Sir Roger Scruton.
How does a person become Hitler's enemy number one? Not through espionage or violence, it turns out, but by striking fearlessly at the intellectual and spiritual roots of National Socialism. Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Catholic thinker and teacher who devoted the full force of his intellect to breaking the deadly spell of Nazism that ensnared so many of his beloved countrymen. His story might well have been lost to us were it not for this memoir he penned in the last decades of his life at the request of his wife, Alice von Hildebrand. In My Battle Against Hitler, covering the years from 1921 to 1938, von Hildebrand tells of the scorn and ridicule he endured for sounding the alarm when many still viewed Hitler as a positive and inevitable force. He expresses the sorrow of having to leave behind his home, friends, and family in Germany to conduct his fight against the Nazis from Austria. He recounts how he defiantly challenged Nazism in the public square, prompting the German ambassador in Vienna to describe him to Hitler as the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria. And in the midst of all the danger he faced, he conveys his unwavering trust in God, even during his harrowing escape from Vienna and his desperate flight across Europe, with the Nazis always just one step behind. Dietrich von Hildebrand belongs to the very earliest anti-Nazi resistance. His public statements led the Nazis to blacklist him in 1921, long before the horrors of the Third Reich and more than 23 years before the assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. His battle would culminate in the countless articles he published in Vienna, a selection of which are featured in this volume. It is an immense privilege, writes editor John Henry Crosby, founder of the Hildebrand Project, to present to the world the shining witness of one man who risked everything to follow his conscience and stand in defiance of tyranny.
This slim volume can be read as a handbook for the restoration of truth to its rightful place at the throne of human reason. In the essays presented here, Dietrich von Hildebrand dismantles the various intellectual and political movements that have worked to undermine truth over the last century: relativism, skepticism, materialism, historicism, psychologism, Communism, and Nazism. He shows the utter insufficiency of such arguments and reveals their common root in the denial of God and people's attempts to be like gods themselves. To anyone who has looked at the modern world and wondered how did we get here? and how do we get out? this book shows the way.
Pairing the original philosophical insights of Dietrich von Hildebrand and his student Balduin V. Schwarz with enriching selections from Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini, this slim volume invites us to a deeper appreciation of the essential and transformative role of gratitude in our lives.
Alice von Hildebrand From the Foreword
What Is Philosophy? is a foundational study in epistemology by the eminent phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand. Hildebrand begins by analyzing closely the receptivity that is proper to all kinds of knowledge. As a result, Hildebrand holds a robust philosophical realism according to which the mind does not impose its terms on the object known, but receives the object on the object's own terms. He does acknowledge that certain aspects of the physical world do indeed depend on the human mind, such as color qualities, but he avoids idealism by the way he embeds these qualities within things that are known in their own proper being. Perhaps the major contribution of this work lies in the account that Hildebrand gives of our knowledge of the essential structures and laws of being (what the phenomenologists called eidetic intuition). Such knowledge is inconceivable to those empiricists who think that we connect with the world only by way of empirical observation. Hildebrand shows that in addition to such observation we also possess rational insight into what things essentially are and are not. With great originality, Hildebrand examines just what kind of essential structure it is that makes possible rational insight into necessary laws of being. He also engages in debate with those empiricists who think that these necessary laws of being are reducible to tautologies. He argues that these laws are not just grounded in our word-meanings, but in the very being of things. He thus agrees with Kant that we possess necessary truths that we express in synthetic propositions; but he disagrees strenuously with Kant's idealist account of how such propositions are possible. Hildebrand's What Is Philosophy? is perhaps the most significant and nuanced work we have that defends the position of realist phenomenology.
Is morality relative? Does it depend on one's perspective or on external circumstances? It has become popular, even commonplace, to assert that what is moral is dependent on one's situation.
Dietrich von Hildebrand saw this trend coming, and at the earliest outset he authored this book as a refutation of situation ethics and an affirmation of the unchanging and universal call of true morality.
The book takes up the central challenge of situation ethics to argue, definitively, that some actions are always and in every situation wrong.
But Hildebrand is sensitive to the special circumstances of individual people's lives, and he does far more than simply offer judgment. He leads us first to understand the allure of self-righteousness, of the tragic sinner, and of sin mysticism, and how these can obscure true morality.
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Through the wealth and carefulness of his analyses, along with the skill with which he discovers the kernels of truth and beauty wherever they are to be found, von Hildebrand uncovers the errors of false situation ethics. But at the same time, he finds fault also with self-righteous, complacent mediocrity, and juridical moralism that is false and lifeless. Thus he clearly sets forth the uniqueness of Christian morality. - Bernard H ring
The Augustinian tradition is a great one in Christian philosophy and in Dr. von Hildebrand's work one finds an example of how alive, wholesome, and sound it can be today, and how very much in contact with what is of value in contemporary thought. Clearly all can profit very much from this work. - Germain Grisez
With the release of Aesthetics Volume II, the Hildebrand Press introduces English readers to a major new work of philosophical aesthetics.
Written in the early 1970s during the last years of his life, as if harvesting a lifetime of reflection, Dietrich von Hildebrand's Aesthetics is a uniquely encompassing work.
The first volume develops an original theory of the beautiful, and the second applies that theory with tremendous breadth and attention to the various types of artwork and to many of the world's most beloved works of art.
It is a testament to the work's broad significance that two of the most respected voices in contemporary aesthetics have joined together to offer forewords to each volume: Dang Gioia to Volume I, and Sir Roger Scruton to Volume II.
Sir Roger Scruton writes on Volume II: In this second volume of his treatise on the subject Hildebrand assembles the results of a lifetime's thought about the arts, and expresses his devotion to beauty in terms that the reader will find immediately engaging.
He continues: Most philosophers of aesthetics content themselves with a few examples from the realm of art, and make no attempt to explore the distinct disciplines or to catalogue all the parts that contribute to the overall aesthetic effect. One purpose of this second volume, however, is to show the completeness of the artistic enterprise, and the way in which it penetrates human life in its entirety, so that the idea of beauty enters our practical activity at every point.
Dietrich von Hildebrand's Aesthetics occupies a place in the great philosophical aesthetic tradition of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, while incorporating the fresh and fundamental insights of phenomenology. With this publication of the first English translation, Dietrich von Hildebrand becomes a contemporary spokesman and defender of the importance of beauty and aesthetic values at a time when many think that beauty is relative and art unnecessary.
What importance is to be attributed to beauty in the life of a Christian? What role should it play in the life of those who have been redeemed? What is the relationship between redemption and beauty? Did beauty lose its significance after the redemption?
These are some of the questions Dietrich von Hildebrand answers in this collection of essays, which introduces his philosophy of art, truth, and beauty.
Dietrich von Hildebrand provides a uniquely in-depth and astute analysis of the many ways we substitute false idols (the graven images) for true Christian morality. This is not a simple book on the differences between good and evil; most people do not replace true morality with pure evil, but with some other extramoral good, like respectability or honor. Hildebrand guides us through these false alternatives, helping to show both what is good in them, but also where they fall short of the uniqueness of true Christian morality.
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When this book first appeared in 1957, it was a whirlwind of fresh air in the field of moral theology and philosophy. The novelty was first of all methodological: the attempt to go back to things themselves and to start an investigation that makes a direct appeal to the lived experience of the inquirer. The task of the philosopher is not that of reading books, combining them in different ways, and then producing a new book. The primary textbook of philosophy is human experience itself and the reader (or, rather, the listener) is called to make an active comparison between what is presented to him and what he experiences in his own life. Philosophy in this sense is not so much a doctrine as an activity: the textbook is human life itself. -- Rocco Buttiglione
