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The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays
Three essays concerning the life and work of St. Thomas Aquinas
On Thomas Aquinas -- The negative element in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas -- The timeliness of Thomism
A single theme runs through the three essays on St. Thomas gathered in this book. It is the theme of mystery or, more exactly, the response of the searching human intellect to the fact of mystery. Both the fact and the response are suggested in a short biography of Aquinas that forms the first essay, and are then sketched out in detail by a presentation of the "negative element" in his philosophy. The third essay shows that contemporary Existentialism is in basic agreement with the philosophia perennis on this fundamental element of philosophical thinking.
Includes bibliographical references.
On Thomas Aquinas -- The negative element in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas -- The timeliness of Thomism
A single theme runs through the three essays on St. Thomas gathered in this book. It is the theme of mystery or, more exactly, the response of the searching human intellect to the fact of mystery. Both the fact and the response are suggested in a short biography of Aquinas that forms the first essay, and are then sketched out in detail by a presentation of the "negative element" in his philosophy. The third essay shows that contemporary Existentialism is in basic agreement with the philosophia perennis on this fundamental element of philosophical thinking.
Includes bibliographical references.
122 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1953
17 people are currently reading
314 people want to read
About the author
Josef Pieper
143 books312 followersJosef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and an important figure in the resurgence of interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in early-to-mid 20th-century philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance; Leisure, the Basis of Culture; and Guide to Thomas Aquinas (published in England as Introduction to Thomas Aquinas).
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 20, 2019
Pieper is, without a doubt, one of my favourite thomists. In this book, he discusses the negative aspects of Aquinas's philosophical theology. He succcessfully holds in tension two equally important claims: (1) beings can be known by man, and that they can be known is rooted in the fact that they are created by God. (2) Nothing, not even created beings, can be fully understood, comprehended, or grasped by another created being, as to do so, would be to grasp the being as it is known by God. These two claims knowability and incomprehensibility must be held in tension upon the truth of divine creation.
As usual, Pieper knows how to challenge his readers, and bring Thomistic thought into dialogue with the predominant philosophical tendencies of his day (and ours), such as the existentialism of Sartre, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
A must read. Period.
As usual, Pieper knows how to challenge his readers, and bring Thomistic thought into dialogue with the predominant philosophical tendencies of his day (and ours), such as the existentialism of Sartre, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
A must read. Period.
January 12, 2026
“…Man, in his philosophical inquiry, is faced again and again with the experience that reality is unfathomable, and Being is mystery—an experience, it is true, which urges him not so much to communication as to silence. But it would not be the silence of resignation and still less the silence of despair. It would be the silence of reverence.”
November 6, 2019
Excellent series of essays on the theology and philosophy of St. Aquinas. The previous review by David Haines sums it up nicely. Basically, Pieper explores the fundamental, over-arching concepts that were reinforced by Aquinas, but directly and indirectly. Specially, he addresses Aquinas' explanation for why all created beings have intelligibility and can be known to other created beings. This signifies, "that things can be known by us because God has creatively thought them; as creatively thought by God, things have not only their own nature ('for themselves alone'); but as creatively thought by God, things have also a reality 'for us.' Things have their intelligibility." As I understand this, because all of reality and created beings are brought forth from the Divine Logos, ipso facto, creation must have intelligibility that can be accessed and appreciated by other creatures.
However, as finite creatures, Pieper points out that we are limited in our ability to fully appreciate the total reality and nature of any created being. Truth is not something that can be fully captured in a single philosophy or the mind of a created being; rather, it is something that is probed and explored, but we will always live in this tension between knowledge and inscrutability. This also does not imply, that we are condemned to a world of existentialism endorsed by Sarte, but rather, "that man, in his philosophical inquiry, is faced again and again with the experience that reality is unfathomable, and Being is mystery - an experience, it is true, which urges him not so much to communication as to silence. But it would not be the silence of resignation and still less of despair. It would be the silence of reverence." Thank you, Dr. Pieper, for this wonderful gem.
However, as finite creatures, Pieper points out that we are limited in our ability to fully appreciate the total reality and nature of any created being. Truth is not something that can be fully captured in a single philosophy or the mind of a created being; rather, it is something that is probed and explored, but we will always live in this tension between knowledge and inscrutability. This also does not imply, that we are condemned to a world of existentialism endorsed by Sarte, but rather, "that man, in his philosophical inquiry, is faced again and again with the experience that reality is unfathomable, and Being is mystery - an experience, it is true, which urges him not so much to communication as to silence. But it would not be the silence of resignation and still less of despair. It would be the silence of reverence." Thank you, Dr. Pieper, for this wonderful gem.
November 27, 2023
An interesting and engaging introduction to Thomas Aquinas that is splendidly brief. One part biography and two parts Thomas’s thought and its significance.
March 29, 2024
forgot to say i started it, but another lovely set of essays from pieper - where in silence is the only response to the great abyss of light we gaze upon when seeing reality.
August 27, 2022
Pieper is becoming one of my favorite interpreters of St. Thomas. This short work contains three essays on the life of Aquinas, the negative element of his philosoco-theology, and the timelines of Thomism. My favorite insight was Pieper's claim that some level of commensurability exists between the Existentialists and the work of St. Thomas through the common acceptance of the mystery of being. He also defeats the age old mischaracterization of Aquinas' philosophy as a system, when in reality it presents itself as both an attitude and something far more.
April 7, 2021
The second chapter, on the “negative element” in St. Thomas’ philosophy is particularly illuminating. Pieper suggests that the Creator/creation distinction is the key to Thomistic thought — that Aquinas’ realism is grounded in the fact that the nature of things is intelligible only because natures exist as ideas in the mind of God.
January 7, 2025
A good intro into the negative aspects of Aquinas' theology. There's also a fun biographical sketch in the introduction.
January 19, 2023
Josef Pieper’s work, The Silence of St. Thomas, is a collection of three essays which all illuminate the idea of St. Thomas that “truth and unknowability belong together” (59), and show that this idea leads us to not only a realistic and healthy epistemology, but a profound, silent reverence of creation, rooted in hope - an experience and attitude that St. Thomas himself had.
The first essay, “On Thomas Aquinas,” begins by going through St. Thomas’s life, especially how he views intellectual disputes as “a common striving for the victory, not of one of the contenders, but of truth” (22). It explores his conception of the world as an ordered creation in which our knowledge, through both bodily sense perception and our spiritual intellect, can know true things. But far from being a systematic, facile, “solutionistic” thinker, as many would portray St. Thomas to be, Pieper emphasizes how in fact Thomas began his Summa Theologica by saying “we are not capable of knowing what God is but only what He is not” (37) and left the Summa unfinished, deliberately stopping his writing altogether after having a mystical experience of God: “All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw…compared to what I have seen…” (40). Altogether, this first essay shows that Thomas’s life demonstrates both his strong belief in knowing truth through creation and his coming face-to-face with the deep unknowability of truth.
This segues the reader into Pieper’s next essay, “The Negative Element in the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.” This essay unpacks how, from the foundational truth that everything is created, things are both knowable because God has creatively thought them and thus made them intelligible to us (see 55-6), and also things are unknowable (with reference to their essence) because they all bear a likeness to God who is infinite (see 57-66). St. Thomas says that the highest knowledge is the knowledge of God as the Unknown; Pieper shows how, related to this thought, we can also see that “not only God Himself but also things have an ‘eternal name’ that man is unable to utter” (65). Thus, created reality has both an ontological clarity coming from created things in their self-revelation and also an infinite inexhaustibleness of even a single fly’s essence – both of these ideas together being a reflection of how everything “has its origin from God and also from nothing” (67). Pieper extracts from all this that “hope is the condition of man’s existence as a knowing subject” and our existence as knowing subjects will always be one as a traveler, as one “on the way” (69), since we can never get to the bottom of even a single created being, let alone the Infinite Creator Himself. Thus the “negative element” of St. Thomas’ philosophy regarding the unknowability of things is set against a background of an embracing affirmation of hope and each thing that is unknowable is not ultimately “dark and impenetrable, but only something that has so much light that a particular finite faculty of knowledge cannot absorb it all. It is too rich to be assimilated completely…” (60) Thus, even in the negative (“dark”) element, we have illumination.
The third essay in the book, “The Timeliness of Thomism,” brings these conclusions into our modern world (which still struggles with many of the same ideological difficulties as the 1950s when this book was written) in which understanding both the knowability and unknowability of things is a timely corrective to errant ways of thinking. Pieper notes how much St. Thomas would actually agree with the Existentialists in the 50s. The Existentialists repudiate others that consider the whole of creation as something completely fathomable through technology and scientific progress. One of them - Sartre - made a distinction, like St. Thomas, between artificial things, which receive their “measure” from man, and natural things, which do not, and that artificial things can be completely grasped in their essence (such as the nature of a letter opener), but natural things cannot. Where St. Thomas differs from Sartre is in saying that we can have insights and assertions about the nature of things – not exhaustive knowledge, but still true knowledge. Pieper shows how this divergence from Sartre is rooted in the insight that “true philosophy can come into being only when it refers to a true theology” (101). Existentialism ends by saying there are no essences of natural things because there is no form-creating, knowing mind who designed their essence, and thus there is no essence of man. But St. Thomas, building off of ideas of Plato and resonating with ideas of Augustine, says that the archetypal pattern of things dwells within the Divine Logos and thus all things are designed by God and exist through his “mind’s eye.” Thus, all concepts understood through the philosophical act aspire toward deriving truths, knowable truths, from an inexhaustible divine Source (see 98).
Pieper’s argument for the paradoxical union in created beings of both their truth and unknowability is a compelling one which he approaches through different angles in the three essays of this book: the angle of understanding the concept through St. Thomas’ own lived experience of it, diving deep into the philosophical nature of the unknowability, and placing this concept of St. Thomas in dialogue with the modern world. Personally, I admit to having seen St. Thomas as a systematic, cold, hard thinker, but this book refutes all such views of him, showing his profound reverence for the unknowability of the essence of things. Through Pieper’s clear - and at times almost lyrical and narrative - philosophical prose, he inspires the reader with a broadened mindset to go deeper into this infinite discoverable realm of unknowability and, like St. Thomas, personally experience the very wonder which his thesis is aimed towards illuminating.
The first essay, “On Thomas Aquinas,” begins by going through St. Thomas’s life, especially how he views intellectual disputes as “a common striving for the victory, not of one of the contenders, but of truth” (22). It explores his conception of the world as an ordered creation in which our knowledge, through both bodily sense perception and our spiritual intellect, can know true things. But far from being a systematic, facile, “solutionistic” thinker, as many would portray St. Thomas to be, Pieper emphasizes how in fact Thomas began his Summa Theologica by saying “we are not capable of knowing what God is but only what He is not” (37) and left the Summa unfinished, deliberately stopping his writing altogether after having a mystical experience of God: “All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw…compared to what I have seen…” (40). Altogether, this first essay shows that Thomas’s life demonstrates both his strong belief in knowing truth through creation and his coming face-to-face with the deep unknowability of truth.
This segues the reader into Pieper’s next essay, “The Negative Element in the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.” This essay unpacks how, from the foundational truth that everything is created, things are both knowable because God has creatively thought them and thus made them intelligible to us (see 55-6), and also things are unknowable (with reference to their essence) because they all bear a likeness to God who is infinite (see 57-66). St. Thomas says that the highest knowledge is the knowledge of God as the Unknown; Pieper shows how, related to this thought, we can also see that “not only God Himself but also things have an ‘eternal name’ that man is unable to utter” (65). Thus, created reality has both an ontological clarity coming from created things in their self-revelation and also an infinite inexhaustibleness of even a single fly’s essence – both of these ideas together being a reflection of how everything “has its origin from God and also from nothing” (67). Pieper extracts from all this that “hope is the condition of man’s existence as a knowing subject” and our existence as knowing subjects will always be one as a traveler, as one “on the way” (69), since we can never get to the bottom of even a single created being, let alone the Infinite Creator Himself. Thus the “negative element” of St. Thomas’ philosophy regarding the unknowability of things is set against a background of an embracing affirmation of hope and each thing that is unknowable is not ultimately “dark and impenetrable, but only something that has so much light that a particular finite faculty of knowledge cannot absorb it all. It is too rich to be assimilated completely…” (60) Thus, even in the negative (“dark”) element, we have illumination.
The third essay in the book, “The Timeliness of Thomism,” brings these conclusions into our modern world (which still struggles with many of the same ideological difficulties as the 1950s when this book was written) in which understanding both the knowability and unknowability of things is a timely corrective to errant ways of thinking. Pieper notes how much St. Thomas would actually agree with the Existentialists in the 50s. The Existentialists repudiate others that consider the whole of creation as something completely fathomable through technology and scientific progress. One of them - Sartre - made a distinction, like St. Thomas, between artificial things, which receive their “measure” from man, and natural things, which do not, and that artificial things can be completely grasped in their essence (such as the nature of a letter opener), but natural things cannot. Where St. Thomas differs from Sartre is in saying that we can have insights and assertions about the nature of things – not exhaustive knowledge, but still true knowledge. Pieper shows how this divergence from Sartre is rooted in the insight that “true philosophy can come into being only when it refers to a true theology” (101). Existentialism ends by saying there are no essences of natural things because there is no form-creating, knowing mind who designed their essence, and thus there is no essence of man. But St. Thomas, building off of ideas of Plato and resonating with ideas of Augustine, says that the archetypal pattern of things dwells within the Divine Logos and thus all things are designed by God and exist through his “mind’s eye.” Thus, all concepts understood through the philosophical act aspire toward deriving truths, knowable truths, from an inexhaustible divine Source (see 98).
Pieper’s argument for the paradoxical union in created beings of both their truth and unknowability is a compelling one which he approaches through different angles in the three essays of this book: the angle of understanding the concept through St. Thomas’ own lived experience of it, diving deep into the philosophical nature of the unknowability, and placing this concept of St. Thomas in dialogue with the modern world. Personally, I admit to having seen St. Thomas as a systematic, cold, hard thinker, but this book refutes all such views of him, showing his profound reverence for the unknowability of the essence of things. Through Pieper’s clear - and at times almost lyrical and narrative - philosophical prose, he inspires the reader with a broadened mindset to go deeper into this infinite discoverable realm of unknowability and, like St. Thomas, personally experience the very wonder which his thesis is aimed towards illuminating.
April 27, 2021
Thought provoking in the extreme, fans of St Thomas Aquinas will want to take this in bite size chunks, and walk away to think. For many Thomas’ works are to be read and remembered, but this book reminds us they are for thinking about, too!
October 9, 2024
They all blur together................
November 5, 2025
The third and final essay in this collection is especially powerful in its criticisms of various sclerotic and debased forms of “Thomism,” some of which are still with us today. Pieper makes a strong case for the sort of thoughtful philosophical engagement with St. Thomas that resists the temptation to set up a readymade Thomistic “system” good only for mechanical transmission and inculcation.
March 12, 2008
This was the first book I've ever read about Saint Thomas, and perhaps that's why I didn't really enjoy it. Usually I really like the author (Joseph Pieper) but this time I just got lost in a lot of his discussions. St. Thomas seems interesting, but I couldn't get into the arguments Pieper was making, whether because the author wasn't making them well or I didn't really care much about the points...
Want to read
December 14, 2009Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 7, as one of Several Books to Quietly Read to Stir Thoughts of the Highest Things.
Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Intro to Part Three, as one of Fourteen Books by Josef Pieper.
Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 20, as one of Ten Books on the Humanities.
Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Intro to Part Three, as one of Fourteen Books by Josef Pieper.
Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 20, as one of Ten Books on the Humanities.
March 21, 2014
A mix of biography and of Thomas's view of mystery.
"..man, in his philosophical inquiry is faced again and again with the experience that reality is unfathomable and Being is mystery - an experience, it is true, which urges him not so much to communication as to silence. But it would not be the silence of resignation, and less still of despair. It would be the silence of reverence."
"..man, in his philosophical inquiry is faced again and again with the experience that reality is unfathomable and Being is mystery - an experience, it is true, which urges him not so much to communication as to silence. But it would not be the silence of resignation, and less still of despair. It would be the silence of reverence."
April 7, 2013
Wow, anybody who wishes to study St. Thomas should read this first.
February 11, 2016
An incredible book. Pieper's writing is so crisp and lucid. One of the best introductions to St. Thomas Aquinas I've ever read. I'll be rereading this. Frequently.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews