While reading Stephen Coughlin’s seminal and all-important Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, I frequently encountered quotations the author used to stress his many points that in terms of defending this country from Islamic incursions, or, rather, failing to defend it, the language of the defenders has been corrupted and rendered meaningless. The quotations came from Josef Pieper’s Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (Mißbrauch der Sprache, Machtmißbrauch), first published in 1974. The quotations were so intriguing that I ordered the book, which is actually a 54-page pamphlet featuring two essays by Pieper, “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power,” and “Knowledge and Freedom.” Coughlin remarked that Pieper’s book “underlies much in what I do.”
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a German philosopher and a key figure in the Thomist revival. In his teens, he was initially drawn to the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, but after being recommended a work by Aquinas, Commentary to the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel, he became a lifelong devotee to Aquinas. Ignatius Press’s Insight reveals that:
Pieper went to the University of Münster in 1923, and later on he went to Berlin. The plan of his first book – which he ultimately submitted to the university in order to obtain his doctorate in philosophy – was born during a lecture on Goethe and Thomas Aquinas, given by Msgr. Romano Guardini at the Jugendburg Rothenfels on the Main in 1924; the lecture was entitled “About Classical Spirit.” Pieper’s first book, Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute (Reality and the Good; contained in Living the Truth [Ignatius Press, 1989]) based on St. Thomas’ works, tries to show that the good is nothing else but what is in accordance with the reality of things.
