- "Philosophical questioning is neither an intellectual luxury nor a mere interest in an academic area but a fundamental component of the human spirit."— Dietrich von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand (October 12, 1889 - January 26, 1977) was a German philosopher and writer. Informally called "the 20th Century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII, he was a major figure in the phenomenological and personalist movements in philosophy, writing on every major field in philosophy, like ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and more.
Hildebrand was born in Florence, in the Kingdom of Italy, to sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and Irene Schaueffelen, and lived in a former Minim friary-turned-villa on the outskirts of Florence (visitors included Richard Wagner, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Richard Strauss, the last of whom visited the Hildebrands when Dietrich was born); he was their only son and the youngest of six children. The personalities of the Hildebrands profoundly shaped Dietrich as much as the beauty of Italy, art, and music. On the other hand, the Hildebrands were ethical relativists and, being liberal/nominal Protestants, believed that Jesus Christ was merely an extraordinary man; Dietrich rejected his family's ethical relativism and accepted the divinity of Christ, even in his childhood. That said, his family respected whatever interest spontaneously arose from their children's souls and never tried to shake him out of his convictions.
Until he was fifteen, Hildebrand had private tutors, only attending the Theresien Gymnasium in Munich the last three months before making his Abitur. At this age, he developed a lifelong interest in philosophy. He enrolled at the University of Munich two years later, taking the courses of Theodor Lipps, a philosopher of aesthetics. Hildebrand joined a circle of students who initially followed Lipps's ideas, but they eventually were won over by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In this circle, Hildebrand met Max Scheler and became good friends; though he did not formally study under him, Hildebrand credited Scheler for playing a significant role in his intellectual development and eventual conversion. Sadly, this friendship ended when Scheler left the Church in 1924 and eventually committed himself to pantheism.
Hildebrand's conversion took place in 1914, a year after assisting the first holy communion of one of his five sisters, in the Catacombs of St Calixtus in Rome. He married Margarete "Gretchen" Denck in 1912, and she was received into the Church with him. They had one son, Franz.
In 1909, Hildebrand attended the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Husserl and Adolf Reinach, whom he credited with shaping his philosophical views. He completed his Ph.D. in 1912 and published his dissertation, The Concept of Moral Action, four years later.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Hildebrand was drafted as a physician's assistant in Munich. During this time, he became acquainted with Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, a staunch critic of German nationalism, and came to his defense when he was attacked. At the end of the war, Hildebrand was given the position of privatdozent at the University of Munich, where he became an associate professor in 1924. In between, he published Morality and the Knowledge of Moral Values in 1921.
During the years 1923 to 1933, Hildebrand wrote major works, like In Defense of Purity (1927), Marriage (1928), and Liturgy and Personality (1933). He also hosted a reception in his home every second week, where multiple people gathered for refreshments and discussed a religious topic.
As early as 1921, Hildebrand was an outspoken critic of the Nazi Party, which had formed a year prior. He examined its intellectual and spiritual roots and condemned it for being anti-Christian and contrary to true philosophical views, leading the Nazi Party to blacklist him. After Adolf Hitler's Putsch in 1923, Hildebrand was forced to flee from Munich, but Hitler's rise to power in 1933 made Hildebrand realize that he should either keep silent while witnessing Nazi persecution or face imprisonment in a concentration camp.
On March 13, 1933, Hildebrand and his family ultimately resolved to leave Germany for good, first to Italy, then to Vienna. There, he founded the anti-Nazi weekly paper, The Christian Corporative State, with the support of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, and wrote some seventy articles condemning Nazism. He was also appointed a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1935, but then he learned that the Nazis sentenced him to death in absentia.
In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, and Hildebrand was forced to flee again; he, after the members of the Austrian government, was at the top of the Gestapo's list of arrests, which he considered an honor, and Franz von Papen, the Nazi ambassador to Austria, once snarled: "That damned Hildebrand is the greatest obstacle for National Socialism in Austria. No one causes more harm". On March 11, Hildebrand and Margarete fled to the border of Czechoslovakia; the Gestapo raided Hildebrand's apartment five hours later, only to find it empty. Hildebrand then fled to Switzerland, then moved to France, where he became a professor at the Catholic University of Toulouse at the invitation of its rector, Msgr. Bruno de Solages.
When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Hildebrand was forced into hiding, but after many hardships, he, with the heroic aid of Frenchmen, including French Minister of Justice Edmond Michelet, the Dominicans at Marseilles, and the American journalist Varian Fry, got an exit visa on September 7, 1940. When he arrived in Lisbon, Hildebrand received a letter stating that he was one of the hundred European scholars invited by a Professor Alvin Johnson to come to the United States. From there, he traveled by ship to Brazil, then to New York on December 23, 1940. He was appointed a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Fordham University, and taught there since February of 1941.
On July 29, 1957, Margarete died, and Hildebrand married Alice Marie Jourdain, a philosopher and theologian who was a student of his at Fordham and would become a philosopher in her own right, two years later. In the meantime, Hildebrand also wrote more works, including Ethics (1952), The New Tower of Babel (1953), and Graven Images: Substitutes for True Morality (1955), which he co-wrote with Alice. He also wrote a memoir to Alice chronicling his life before fleeing to America.
Hildebrand retired from teaching in 1960 and spent the last years of his life writing multiple books, both in German and in English. He was very critical of the many ways in which the Second Vatican Council was implemented into the Church, especially the liturgy (the Mass of Paul VI, or the Ordinary Form), and wrote Trojan Horse in the City of God (1967) on the subject; he promoted appreciation and attendance of the Tridentine Mass (the Extraordinary Form), even founding Una Voce America, an American Branch of the traditionalist Catholic federation Una Voce. That said, his work, especially that on marriage, Christian philosophy, the evil of anti-Semitism, and the inherent value of the human person, shaped many aspects of the Second Vatican Council's teachings, and Hildebrand stressed reading the council's documents in continuity with Church tradition. He also wrote in 1968 The Encyclical Humanae Vitae: A Sign of Contradiction, defending the eponymous encyclical's reaffirmation of its stance on marriage and against artificial birth control.
Hildebrand died on January 26, 1977 in New Rochelle, New York, after a long struggle with a heart condition.
Pope St John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, and he once told his widow Alice: "Your husband is one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century." Pope Benedict XVI, whom Hildebrand knew as a young priest in Munich, remarked: "I am personally convinced that when, at some point in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time."
Major Works:
- The Concept of Moral Action (1916): Hildebrand's dissertation, written under the direction of Husserl, who gave it a distinction of opus eximium, the highest honor. Hildebrand would revisit this theme with The Heart.
- In Defense of Purity {1927): A work exploring the essence and meaning of purity, and how sex is different from other bodily instincts like hunger and thirst.
- Marriage (1928):
- Liturgy and Personality (1933): His work in which he discusses how the liturgy of the Church, by ordering man to God, plays a role in the flourishing of man.
- Transformation in Christ (1940): A work that explores the idea of spiritual transformation and the journey towards holiness in the Christian life. He wrote this under a pen name, Peter Ott, and published it in Switzerland due to the Nazis attacking him.
- Ethics (1953): A major work showing Hildebrand's value-based ethics, building on that of Scheler. It examines morals in terms of the "merely subjectively satisfying" and "value-response", wherein a person gives value its due.
- Graven Images: Substitutes for True Morality (1957): A work where he shows how most people replace true morality not with evil, but rather an "extramoral" good, like "respectability" or "honor".
- What is Philosophy? (1960): An epistemological treatise showcasing his phenomenological roots. He analyzes the receptivity proper to all kinds of knowledge and shows how the mind does not impose its terms on the object known, but rather receives the object on the object's own terms.
- The Heart (1965): An analysis of human and divine affectivity. It is essentially a more philosophically mature reworking of his dissertation.
- The Art of Living (1965): A book on everyday ethics, rooted in his value-based ethics.
- Morality and Situation Ethics (1966): Hildebrand's critique of the concept of "situation ethics," which aims to show that morality depends on perspective and external circumstances. Hildebrand takes care to mind the special circumstances of the individual's lives, but he ultimately shows that there are actions that are always and in every situation wrong.
- Trojan Horse in the City of God (1967): Hildebrand's critique of the many ways the Second Vatican Council was implemented, specifically by the so-called progressives, and its disastrous consequences, forcing Catholics to either accept the secularization of the Church or deny the authority of the Council. His answer is simply to interpret the documents in continuity with Church tradition, hoping that such an interpretation will result in a renewal of the spirit of Christ in the Church, which was the primary aim of the Second Vatican Council.
- The Nature of Love (1971):
- Aesthetics (1977, 1984): One of the last works that Hildebrand wrote. The first volume argues that beauty, rather than being a purely subjective phenomenon, is objective and can point to the true, the good, and ultimately the divine. The second, posthumous volume applies his theory of the beautiful, using many examples from architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and music.
- Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (1980): A reflection on death, resurrection, and the hope of eternal life.
- On Gratitude (1980): A short essay on (surprise!) gratitude and its essential and transformative role in a person's life.
- My Battle Against Hitler (2014): A collection of writings chronicling his struggles against Nazism, published long after his death. The first part is a memoir he wrote at the request of his second wife Alice, who was over thirty years his junior, and details his life from childhood to his escape from Vienna. The second part is a selection of his essays against Nazism.
