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# Why You Should Read Josef Pieper
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-you-should-read-josef-pieper/
- Published: 2026-08-25T11:00:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-25T11:00:31.000Z
- Description: Pieper offers a generation inundated by irony, anxiety, productivity-obsession, and cynicism a unique account of joy that owes less to mindless optimism than the rational consequences of recognizing the goodness of reality.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Griffin Gooch, Formation, Book Reviews

This past summer, I tried to get a trend going. A friend and I thought it’d be funny to select an obscure figure - someone who’s on almost no one’s radar - and construct a whole fake narrative about how the general public was now dying to get on board with their work. And so naturally we chose Josef Pieper.

Yet in the midst of the wheelhouse of jokes we made about how everyone from the upper echelon of Tik Tok stars to Taylor Swift were hopping on the Pieper bandwagon, I was surprised to find that *people actually started reading him.* Not hundreds, but probably around 60\. Which might not seem like a lot, but drumming up enough interest to get 60 people to read a dead German Thomistic philosopher is no small feat. 

And in the midst of championing a fake trend that became real, I started realizing why Pieper was so great. 

Pieper offers a generation inundated by irony, anxiety, productivity-obsession, and cynicism a unique account of joy that owes less to mindless optimism than the rational consequences of recognizing the goodness of reality.

—

I first ran across the name Josef Pieper while reading [Alan Noble’s](https://substack.com/@oalannoble?r=2mvy4l&utm%5Fmedium=ios&utm%5Fsource=stories&shareImageVariant=light) recent book *To Live Well*. Noble is older than I am, but he’s perceptive about our cultural aches and has a pulse on Gen Z’s core longings. Some of the Pieper quotes I read resonated with myself and friends around my age. So I picked up *Leisure,* his most famous book. Soon after, I bought 12 more copies to give away. Distilling the appeal of Josef Pieper is a tough task, but if I had to pick a phrase, I’d say *joyous realism.* 

It’s not that Pieper is all about fun and games and contentment in a simplistic way, though he is technically about all of those things. It’s more so that Pieper thinks of happiness as a byproduct of a virtuous life with God. Happiness is a result of leisure—the ability to rest and enjoy and contemplate the deeper facets of reality that go beyond mere work. And it is not illusory joy—it is joy rooted in philosophical and theological realism about the state of reality. 

He [says](https://ignatius.com/faith-hope-love-fhlp/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that since loving another person is the desire to “share in beatitude with them,” then joy is the outcome, the fruit, the outpouring of all authentic love. As such, all acts of loving are necessarily knit together with and in pure joy. In fact, if we didn’t feel happy after acting in accordance with a genuine desire to love someone else, we wouldn’t really be acting out of love, but out of stoic duty. And stoic duty is, for Pieper, anathema to both cultivating real virtue and inhabiting life well. 

It’s partly his indebtedness to Aquinas that makes him willing to repeatedly return to this idea (which, at my current count, appears in six of his books), since Aquinas said “Man desires happiness naturally and by necessity” (ST I-I, q. 94, a. 1), “To desire to be happy is not a matter of free choice,” (I-I, q. 19, a. 10), and ultimately pointed to communion and union with God as the *summon bonum* (II-II, q. 1-5)*.* 

But there’s something more complex about his orientation to happiness and joy that you’ll scarcely find elsewhere—especially not within the timid-to-get-associated-with-prosperity-gospel groups. It’s not just wishful thinking; it’s more like highlighting happiness as a logical, rational, necessary consequence of faithfully abiding in Jesus. It’s not something to be surprised about.

Part of what enables this emphasis is Pieper’s [conviction](https://ignatius.com/only-the-lover-sings-olsp/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) that humans only “are” as they “become.” There is no “is” within a human being if that “is” doesn’t account for their being in a state of progression, movement, or continual momentum. He thought that we must understand that in the act of being created, we are all “shot toward our destination like an arrow.” We’re insanely and beautifully teleological. 

In other words, we’re pilgrims—perpetually on-the-way. And this reality that we have “not yet arrived,” that we’re in a perpetual state of pilgrimage, we come to accept an intrinsic lack of wholeness in our present state. But once accepted, it angles our desires so that we’re always aware that they’re restless for now. It disciplines the nagging craving for nirvana and metabolizes instead our slow and arduous pilgrimage toward eventual beatitude. It reminds us to wait longingly for this “state of bliss (*Gückselikeit*).” In his words, “The object of this dynamism, the destination of this journey, the aim, therefore, of this becoming and the moving force underlying it all, is the good.” And our pilgrimage is a constant journey of participatively receiving the good in all its forms.

In my personal favorite entry in Pieper’s bibliography, [*In Tune with the World*](https://books.google.com/books/about/In%5FTune%5Fwith%5Fthe%5FWorld.html?id=pHINAQAAMAAJ&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* he lays the foundation for *why* someone with an astute background in philosophy, a field which has historically fertilized an immense number of brooding cynics, can actually rejoice and rejoice always. He asks the question of “why do we rejoice and have festivals?” It’s because of the realization and affirmation that everything around us is *good.* 

Even though many biblical texts indicate that the world is corrupted and ruled by “the evil one,” this doesn’t mean that it isn’t truly and thoroughly *good*. To borrow metaphysical terms, seeing the world as entirely evil is only feasible within a framework that accepts creation’s substance as taking on the necessary property of “evil”—having its substance altered. Instead, since God declared His creation “good/very good,” He bestowed upon us an essential nature that isn’t stripped away by the comingling of the properties of corruption and sin. Sin corrupts creation; but it doesn’t transform God’s good creation into an ontological [mistake](https://bookshop.org/p/books/creation-regained-biblical-basics-for-a-reformational-worldview-albert-m-wolters/5ccb5faf8ee812ad?ean=9780802829696&bkshp-astro=t&ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

Central to this affirmation of the good is the rejection of what is evil, and the renunciation of all that’s not edifying even on a momentary basis. In affirming what’s good and true and right, we come to create a real and tangible *reason* for joy. Affirming isn’t a blind reduction or ignorance of what’s evil, but a thorough identification of the aspects of our reality that are praiseworthy. And this is where true joy comes from; it can’t come without a reason, as that would make for the artificial joy of hedonic pleasure. But affirming the goodness of the world and life and our being on-the-way toward God is where joy and festivity necessarily sprout from. 

So even though joy and festivity are intrinsically secondary (our purpose and sense of meaning cannot be scaffolded upon happiness alone) they are still healthy byproducts of a life that happily acknowledges that God exist—and how great it is that He exists! 

Conversely, “festivity is impossible to the naysayer.” Put another way: festivity is impossible for the cynic, the nihilist, the chronic pessimist. It’s only possible when one has meaningful affirmations to celebrate. Early Christians even called exclusion from the eucharist a banishment into “unfestivity.” This is where all religious festivals stem from—themselves reminders to live in accord with an affirmation of the goodness of creation and our embodied, fallible existence. 

Much of this is uncomfortable for those more used to hearing that the world is marred and a threat to righteousness. And Pieper acknowledges that the world [*can*](https://ignatius.com/guide-to-thomas-aquinas-gtap/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) indeed threaten the faith. But it is not primarily and most significantly an environment that wreaks havoc on righteousness. 

Pieper is not just creating a useful fiction for generating good vibes or hollow optimism; he’s identifying reality: that there is a goodness to what is created, and part of loving the good (which occurs primarily through loving God, others, and what He’s made) involves the secondary consequence of realizing that happiness and joy must flow from this. 

Beyond his pure philosophy, there’s much about Pieper’s general posture that’s commendable. He knows how to communicate ideas to non-specialists. His work is dense, but not impenetrable. He is unafraid of crossing the boundaries of academic specializations. Though he is a philosopher, he oscillates between the theologian voice and historian voice at will. And this works to his benefit: he writes as a philosopher, but his conclusions are theological – opening up new ways to think and live and move and have our being as theologians. 

Pieper is also refreshingly ecumenical. He quotes C. S. Lewis in many of his books and even pays a painstakingly thorough compliment toward Chesterton’s scholarship on Aquinas. For a generation burnt out from “my denomination” triumphalism, reading a serious philosopher pay serious respect to those on the other side of denominational lines feels like an Advil knocking out a lingering headache. 

His work now exists as a time capsule. There aren’t really monographs written about him in the way that people write about Moltmann or Barth. So it’s purely the interest of readers that keeps his work alive. 

And yet, despite how seemingly unpalatable his work might seem to younger generations, there is a kind of post-postmodernism (or metamodern) angle to his work. It’s appealing. He’s hopeful. He knows all the worst things that could happen in the world, the sheer weight of our negativity bias that draws us into a perpetual rumination of all that’s wrong and all that could go wrong. 

And yet, he still believes, he still hopes, he’s still confident in love’s power to overcome hate and fear. He identifies our formation into the virtues as a worthwhile battle. He realizes the worst possible scenarios but invites us to move forward anyway. For him, despair is the outcome of a life bent toward rejecting an affirmation of the good. His total allergy to cynicism speaks to a generation fatigued by mistrust and suspicion. For younger people who are arguably more inclined toward despair than any generation before, that’s the kind of affirmation we’re craving. We know that all is not well with our souls; but Pieper shows us why and then lights a way to follow.