The Courageous Witness of Bl. Franz Jagerstatter
by REGIS MARTIN
The time was 1941, the war then raging across Europe had entered its third terrible year, and a young Catholic philosopher by the name of Josef Pieper had just brought out a book, a lovely little thing of less than sixty pages, called A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart. Amazingly enough, it survived the Nazi censors, who seemed determined on suppressing anything even remotely hostile to the Third Reich. Was it the thinness of the volume that allowed it to escape the book burners? We’ll never know. But its relentless insistence upon goodness as the norm of reality, and that whoever wishes “to know and do the good must direct his gaze toward the objective world of being,” could scarcely have been more subversive of the ideology of the Reich, which was at that moment busily engaged in tyrannizing half the world.
“The luminous domain of free human action,” he announced on page one, was the subject he had in mind. Within that hallowed setting, he declared, the life of the human being annealed to the good would find its natural footing. “Virtue,” he told us—on which the happy outcome of the human enterprise crucially depends—“is the utmost of what a man can be; it is the realization of the human capacity for being.”
Nowhere was that realization in greater or more immediate need than in those nations overrun by the armies of Adolph Hitler; whose depredations threatened not just the peace of Europe, but the survival of all that was good and decent in the civilization of the West. Certainly by 1941, everyone knew that. Knew also that here was an evil against which great courage would be required. And what is courage but the form that every virtue must take at the point of testing. In a fallen world, in which both the weak and the wicked predominate, being brave is not an option. And Pieper clearly understood the total context in which the embattled soul needs to awaken to the urgency of giving it expression. “Fortitude,” he explains, “presumes vulnerability; without vulnerability there is no possibility of fortitude. An angel cannot be courageous because it is not vulnerable. To be brave means to be ready to sustain a wound. Since he is substantially vulnerable, man can be courageous.”
Yes, even in the face of death it is possible to demonstrate real courage. In fact, the least of the wounds inflicted by life in a fallen and broken world remind us of death, prefiguring a presence that is never distant. Even the merest scratch serves as an intimation, a hint of that final and ineluctable fall into dissolution. “Thus every brave deed,” he tells us, “draws sustenance from preparedness for death as from its deepest roots…. A fortitude that does not extend to the depth of readiness to fall is rotten in its root and lacking in effective power.”
Of course, as Pieper is quick to point out, there can be no true value in being brave unless the reason that summons us to show courage is a just and prudent one.
The time was 1941, the war then raging across Europe had entered its third terrible year, and a young Catholic philosopher by the name of Josef Pieper had just brought out a book, a lovely little thing of less than sixty pages, called A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart. Amazingly enough, it survived the Nazi censors, who seemed determined on suppressing anything even remotely hostile to the Third Reich. Was it the thinness of the volume that allowed it to escape the book burners? We’ll never know. But its relentless insistence upon goodness as the norm of reality, and that whoever wishes “to know and do the good must direct his gaze toward the objective world of being,” could scarcely have been more subversive of the ideology of the Reich, which was at that moment busily engaged in tyrannizing half the world.
“The luminous domain of free human action,” he announced on page one, was the subject he had in mind. Within that hallowed setting, he declared, the life of the human being annealed to the good would find its natural footing. “Virtue,” he told us—on which the happy outcome of the human enterprise crucially depends—“is the utmost of what a man can be; it is the realization of the human capacity for being.”
Nowhere was that realization in greater or more immediate need than in those nations overrun by the armies of Adolph Hitler; whose depredations threatened not just the peace of Europe, but the survival of all that was good and decent in the civilization of the West. Certainly by 1941, everyone knew that. Knew also that here was an evil against which great courage would be required. And what is courage but the form that every virtue must take at the point of testing. In a fallen world, in which both the weak and the wicked predominate, being brave is not an option. And Pieper clearly understood the total context in which the embattled soul needs to awaken to the urgency of giving it expression. “Fortitude,” he explains, “presumes vulnerability; without vulnerability there is no possibility of fortitude. An angel cannot be courageous because it is not vulnerable. To be brave means to be ready to sustain a wound. Since he is substantially vulnerable, man can be courageous.”
Yes, even in the face of death it is possible to demonstrate real courage. In fact, the least of the wounds inflicted by life in a fallen and broken world remind us of death, prefiguring a presence that is never distant. Even the merest scratch serves as an intimation, a hint of that final and ineluctable fall into dissolution. “Thus every brave deed,” he tells us, “draws sustenance from preparedness for death as from its deepest roots…. A fortitude that does not extend to the depth of readiness to fall is rotten in its root and lacking in effective power.”
Of course, as Pieper is quick to point out, there can be no true value in being brave unless the reason that summons us to show courage is a just and prudent one.
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