Customer Reviews

In Tune With The World

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Josef Pieper is probably best known for his book "Leisure: The Basis of Culture." This book on festivity is a good companion to that volume. Pieper discusses festivity's contrast to ordinary, everyday work, but points out that festivity involves more than the absence of labor. Real festivity also requires a quality of spirit which makes enjoyment possible, and that quality of spirit is love. He says, "One who loves nothing and nobody cannot possibly rejoice." The artificial festivals created by business can not possibly regenerate us the way festival is meant to do, because they are rooted in acquisitiveness rather than love and generosity of spirit. This is a beautiful book which will make you want to celebrate something truly festive!

Pieper's argument is outstanding, expansive and joyful. This particular edition, on the other hand, is riddled with typographical errors that make the reading more of an effort than it would otherwise be. One example is that the letter "b" often appears as the letter "h". One wonders why these errors were allowed to make it into print and thus sully what is otherwise a very pleasant way to pass an afternoon.

Father Thomas Hopko has remarked, along with many others, that man is essentially homo adorans. That is, we are created to glorify and celebrate. God, the chief object of our glorification, and the very nature and cycle of our existence are the continual subjects of adoration and festive reflection across so many cultures and times. Even when the concept of God is removed from society, there persists the nagging need to commemorate and celebrate the past in terms quite religious. Memorial Day is a real anamnesis, Thanksgiving is eucharistic, etc. Some will disagree with this thesis, but I think it bears consideration.

Pieper does something similar in his work by drawing on the ancient and more recent past to analyze the notions of Feast, sacred rest, and joy. This book ties in very well with his book on leisure and is very insightful. I would also recommend Alexander Schmemann's "For the Life of the World" as an excellent introduction to the sacramental worldview. Enjoy!

In Tune with the World is a fine translation of a German monograph on feasts and festivals by philosopher Josef Pieper. It is a short but high quality softcover with heavy paper, large print, and nice wide margins.

I had never read anything of Pieper's before and knew only his name from hearing of "Liesure, the Basis of Culture." I found him to be an interesting writer. He is a philosopher of Christian background who writes philosophy rather than religious texts. He references here Aquinas, Nietzsche, Rousseau and the French Revolution, and socialists from Hitler to Trotsky. He is therefore, squarely in the realm of the philosophical conversation of the 20th century.

As for what festivity is, let me try to summarize his argument:

Festivals are special days, and therefore require ordinary days to exist.
Ordinary days are days consisting of servile work, that is, work that is not just busy but has meaning in the utilitarian support of life.
The opposite of servile work is not non-work but non-utilitarian work.
Therefore, festivals are days of non-utilitarian activity, or work that is meaningful in itself.
In order to define festivals, then, one must be able to define work that is meaningful in itself.
Historically, religious and philosophical authorities have defined contemplation--the joy of seeing the world--as the ultimate form of activity that has meaning in itself.
In order to engage in contemplation, one must have existential wealth, or the ability to be joyful; i.e., festivity and nihilism are not compatible.
Joy requires an object or reason for joy, and if festivity requires joy, festivity then requires an object or reason, such as an event like a marriage or birth.
Events are reasons for joy only if they are microcosms of the essential goodness of the universe.
Therefore, festivals are properly days for remembering or confirming the essential goodness of the universe: "To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole."

Pieper goes on to examine other aspects of festivity, such as its ritual nature, its need to touch on something eternal, its relationship to art, Easter as its ultimate example, and its relationship to modernity, including the incompatibility of festivity with totalitarianism.

Although Pieper writes in a somewhat serpentine fashion, digressing and then returning to his main point over and over, and can be hard to follow at times because of this, I think this would an interesting read for anyone serious about festivals and celebrations, Christian or not.

The principal thesis of Pieper's book is that festivity is first and foremost a celebration of being and the whole creation as gift. For Pieper festivity and worship are interconnected. As usual, Pieper's writing is crystal clear and a joy to read. On easter, he writes: "Easter itself, although it celebrates a historical event, could never be a real festival, let alone "the festival of the Church", if it were not more than and different from a mere memorial day. What is in truth involved is a mysterious contemporizing of this event, which evokes an incomparably more real present than memory can". This thought resonated with me following a week spent at Solemes Abbey, where each Mass was (and is) an extraodinary solemn and festive occasion. I experienced there a powerful sense of memory i.e. the Church's memory of the Lord's last supper and passion was a real lived and sacred memory which was being kind of breathed into my memory, so that it became my memory too.

To be sure, this is a brilliant and thoughtful work, but it is so ponderously Germanic that it took me a year to get through this very thin book. True festivity, as the author defines it, comprises a great number of factors, most of which are predicated by an acknowledgment of God. I wish the author had made reference to more real-world examples than he did. He briefly mentioned the manufactured festivals of the French Revolution as examples of pseudo-festivity because of their secular, man-focused worship, but I would have liked him to expound on the praxis of true festivity as seen in history. I think of the great Catholic festivals as celebrated in the past. I compare them with the dreary and depressing experience of "celebrating" a Catholic "holy day" in modern times, and I wonder what exactly has changed, since we are still- at least ostensibly- celebrating the exact same things as in the past. This is a wonderful little monograph, but those of us with more concrete modes of thought might not appreciate the abstract and disembodied ideas at the center of this subject.

Sometimes it helps to take a second look.

I wasn't halfway through the first chapter before I was disappointed with In Tune with the World. It was my own fault: Despite the book's subtitle, I had been expecting practical suggestions for recovering festivity in a society where abundance is commonplace. However, when Pieper says "a THEORY of festivity," that is exactly what he means.

What's more, the first few pages put me off because Pieper seems to be dividing our lives between work and festivity, with work pretty much defined as what men do to earn a living, and I kept thinking, "But you still expect the women to cook and clean for your festivals; if they separated their work from the feast, it wouldn't be much of one!" He was writing in the early 1960's, so I can't say he's free from that attitude, but there's much more to what he is saying, and my preconceptions definitely distorted that first chapter.

Before I had finished the book, however, I realized that it deserved re-reading for what it is rather than for what I wanted it to be. I'm not generally one to read books of philosophy -- largely, I'll admit, because I find them hard going. There is only so much of this kind of writing I can take without my eyes glazing over: "Human acts derive their meaning primarily from their content, from their object, not from the manner in which they are performed. Play, however, seems to be chiefly a mere modus of action, a specific way of performing something, at any rate a purely formal determinant."

The text is well worth working through, however -- perhaps several times.

Pieper writes as a Christian, and clearly views Christian festivals as the highest and best of celebrations. Yet the theory of festivity he posits has its roots firmly in pagan, primitive, Jewish, Roman, and other practices as well, and the book is rife with quotations from sources many and varied.

You can read In Tune with the World in under an hour, but Pieper's ideas are inexhaustible. If you consider what he has to say about the festivals of the French Revolution, you'll never look at the Olympic Opening Ceremonies the same way again.