Four Cardinal Virtues

Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: I believe this work to be, perhaps, one of the most important that I have read to date. Ideas can be a very powerful thing. I believe this book delivers and packages ideas that are truly life-changing. Be prepared to stretch your vocabulary, your mind, and your heart.

Rating:
Summary: You Really Need Both Books
Review: I first came into contact with this work because it was a required text for my seminary class on ethics. Pieper is a first rate German philosopher and expert on the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.

If you study this book, The Four Cardinal Virtues (fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence), along with his other book, Faith, Hope, Love (the three theological virtues), you will have a wonderful primer on ethics.

One word of warning. Philosophy is not light reading. I know, it was one of my majors. Philosophy written in German and translated into English produces a book not for the timid. If you are willing to take on the challenge, more power to you. It is worth the effort, but you should know what you are getting into before you put down your money. This is a book for those who want to think and wrestle with ethics. It is not for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: You Really Need Both Books
Review: I first came into contact with this work because it was a required text for my seminary class on ethics. Pieper is a first rate German philosopher and expert on the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.

If you study this book, The Four Cardinal Virtues (fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence), along with his other book, Faith, Hope, Love (the three theological virtues), you will have a wonderful primer on ethics.

One word of warning. Philosophy is not light reading. I know, it was one of my majors. Philosophy written in German and translated into English produces a book not for the timid. If you are willing to take on the challenge, more power to you. It is worth the effort, but you should know what you are getting into before you put down your money. This is a book for those who want to think and wrestle with ethics. It is not for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Thomistic
Review: I read this book over and over again. Pieper is a great antidote to the vagueness of some modern Catholic writers who tend to use a feel-good approach to virtue and write vaguely about sharing, caring, and being nice to people. This book tells you what the virtues really are and what they have meant to the Church for two thousand years.

Rating:
Summary: Thomistic
Review: I read this book over and over again. Pieper is a great antidote to the vagueness of some modern Catholic writers who tend to use a feel-good approach to virtue and write vaguely about sharing, caring, and being nice to people. This book tells you what the virtues really are and what they have meant to the Church for two thousand years.

Rating:
Summary: Good worked through analysis of the cardinal virtues
Review: If you are looking for a book you can't put down, a fast read you devour with complete comprehension, look elsewhere. Pieper's tome on the cardinal virtues is an exquisite, carefully thought out exposition of nuances of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance that not only explains them, but elucidates their relationship to each other and to the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

Pieper is a superb moral thinker, but one firmly grounded in the Gospel. He says "Growth in love is the legitimate avenue and the one and only justification for 'contempt for the world.'" The Unibomber should have read that line first.

This is a book to read every six months profitably, to make marginal notes in and underline. I suggest reading it alongside Budziszewski's book Written on the Heart.

Rating:
Summary: Don't let your enemies define you.
Review: Simply brilliant reading. Living naturally is what the crux of this book is all about.

The book delves into ethics, civics, justice, philosophy, psychology, and I think it is a healthy tool for understanding classical literature: Shakespeare, for example, and the inner psychology of his characters as this moral plain, that Pieper describes, is so much closer to his than most of what we hear in our modernity.

Pieper, here, spends time defining what the classic moral compass is, taken primarily from the last officially sanctioned church doctor St. Thomas Aquinas. Pieper brings Aquinas and other philosophers' language up to date, for the ears of the modern mind. Christianityfs definition has too much to do with how it's enemies, or alterior users, wish to define it and Pieper spends a short time correcting this in places.

If you liked this you might like Pieper's Virtues of the Human Heart which is a bit less discriptive but more powerful.