Dietrich von Hildebrand. Master and Witness -
In Commemoration of the Centenary of his Birth

- Francisco H. Rivero

It is for me an honour, a very special honour, to evoke here, before so many of you who were for almost a lifetime his disciples and his friends, the personality and memory of Dietrich von Hildebrand.

Given the presence among us of his wife, Dr. Alice Jourdain von Hildebrand, and of several of you who were part of the circle of his intimate acquaintances for years, Dr. William Marra, for example, or my dear friend Dr. Josef Seifert, Rector and Founder of the Akademie, both of whom knew, and loved, and revered him, much before, and much after, my short but indelible acquaintance with his person and his thought, I felt it unseemly on my part to come here and stand authoritatively before you to discuss, not some point or implication of his doctrine or his thought, but the very person of the master and the man.

I will endeavour, therefore, not so much to relate to you my personal memories and appreciations of this unforgettably great man, as my good friend, Dr. John Crosby, organizer of this Symposium asked me to, as to try to recount, what before an audience such as yours, I can, with all authority testify and witness to, and that is, what Dietrich von Hildebrand, not only in his words and teachings but in his very person, acts and gestures made me see and understand of what philosophy and philosophical existence are, demand, and answer to.

All revelation is, in a sense, a confirmation and a call.  Such, in any case, was my experience on meeting Dr. von Hildebrand for the first time.  In all, I don't think I saw him more than five or six times in my life, and that was in the period between 1962 and 1965 when I was a student at Fordham and Georgetown. We met twice, at least, in his apartment in New York City, of which I distinctly remember the working table with the Crucifix upon it; once at a luncheon in Connecticut, where Dr. Seifert and I met for the first time; and once or twice again in his later, and definitive home, in New Rochelle.  Seeing and hearing him instantly confirmed, way beyond what any words could possibly describe, what I for the first time discovered and discerned in the person and the words of my dear and also unforgettable friend and master, the Lebanese philosopher and statesman, Charles H. Malik.

I was then in my senior year at Harvard, sorely pressed by the need to decide upon a professional career, yet unable to do so because I couldn't come to terms with the underlying and tacit implication that the universe of human activity and work; that the world of intelligence and thought; that the life of dedication and of study which any profession demanded and required, and which I was being called to enter on, wholly resolved themselves into mere questions of method, practice, technical expertise, and purely formal competence, ability, and training, all obviously in view of making a "successful living," or, at the very most, of attaining notoriety and fame either through becoming a recognized instance and example of "human self expression and achievement," or an effective instrument and agent of "man's increasing power and control over nature and its works."

All of this seemed to me, even then, though obscurely and for reasons then unknown, perfectly void, insufficient, and inane; a mere posture and a sham.  Science and knowledge couldn't just be mere "instruments" or "functions" of a general, relative, and unspecified "utility and progress"; for what could "utility and progress" ever mean, if the ultimate significance and meaning of intelligence and science on which they depended and they hinged, didn't radically illumine and determine the essential being and reality of humanity and man?

The restlessness, the lostness, the sense of insufficiency and void, the inanity of an essentially undefined and undetermined "liberal" education as proposed; the surprise, if not overt derision or bemusement, when one inquired after truth; the senseless ecclecticism, implicit nihilism, and essential abstraction of it all; the thirst and need of something "else", without a clear inkling of what that "else" could be or mean, had been growing and gnawing at me increasingly throughout my college years at Harvard, the more so, as I had practically despaired by then of finding and expressing what I sought and hungered for, and of understanding why the specific ethos of learning and of knowledge then prevailing at one of the world's greatest universities discomfited me so.

It was then, and from what in the light of it I can only honestly acknowledge as a providence of God, that I happened to attend a lecture by Charles Malik who was then guest professor of political philosophy at Harvard. He was speaking that day on the political philosophy of Plato. In minutes, in what was but an instant and a flash, I found what I had unknowingly groped and thirsted for: the overwhelming evidence and reality of Truth; the experience and actuality of spiritual and intellectual vision and insight; the infinite spirituality, vitality, and ultimacy of Intelligence and Thought; the inexpressible wonder and irrepressible joy with which the spectacle and reality of Being overwhelm and fill the soul; the pure and absolute gratuity and newness of it all; the veritably awesome, humbling, and exalting mystery of existence and participation: of speaking, yet not speaking; of seeing, yet not seeing; of being, yet not being; of knowing, yet not knowing, from which all inspiration, humanity, science, and true action flow and upon whcih they feed; the absolute individuality and goodness of each and every instance of reality and being; the infinite transcendent presence of divine Unity and Order revealed and manifest in everything that moves, and lives and is; the awful, transfiguring, cleansing grace and beauty of the World which reveals the constitutive festivity of things and human life as called and ordered to actual participation in a Feast; the wondrous happiness, purity, transparency, simplicity, and innocence with which the Truth overpowers, renews, and humbles man, effacing and dissipating without a trace of asperity or violence his self complacency and pride, thus freeing him to be, to live, to act, to love, to wonder, and to joy. The understanding, finally, that Philosophy is nothing, and less and worse than nothing, if not this hunger and desire for feasting on the Truth.

No earthly power, ability, method, science, contrivance or technique can afford man the vision and delection of this Good. It is a gift, and therefore free.  That is why there is no wisdom without God.  That is why philosophy is inseparable from Divine Happiness and Life and all its love and quest of knowing beings, ends, and expresses itself, not in books, treatises, arguments, commentaries, descriptions, disputes, doctrines, and schools of opinion or of thought, but in the actuality and reality of Life thus seen, revealed and understood.  This is what the great phenomenologists rightly sought and hungered for; this is what they meant when they asked us to recover and go back to reality itself, or as they put it, "to the reality of things themselves;" this is why there never has been, nor ever will be, any other foundation for classical metaphysics apart from the wonder and insight into Being upon which all great philosophy rests.

This is what, in awkward and pitifully imperfect terms, I understood and saw and found philosophy to be, require, and express, in and through the person, life, and words of my unforgettable friend and master Charles H. Malik.  This is what I again found, exalted and confirmed, in every word, gesture, glance, and turn of thought and mind of that "giant of a man" which, to use the expression with which he used to refer to Kierkegaard, Dietrich von Hildebrand preeminently was.

When one is given the Grace, for it is a Grace, of seeing, hearing, touching and conversing with such men, and here perforce I must evoke the memory of Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, one understands why Christian philosophy is the norm, measure, culmination, and fulfillment of all philosophy; one understands why all return to Greece which is willfully exclusive of Revelation and of Christ, is not a genuine return to the sources but an aesthetic or agnostic affectation and therefore a demeaning of the sources and of the free and pure openness and love which originally ordered them, not to "academic" or aesthetic purposes and ends; not to the "thought" or "experiencing" of the Divine, but to the truth, and therefore contemplative and loving knowledge and possession of the living reality of God.  God is, thus, the perfection and therefore the transcendence of philosophy itself.  That is why Christian Revelation, far from diminishing, limiting, or perverting the "purity" of philosophy, is in principle, and has been historically in fact, its freedom, perfection and accomplishment.

The end is the perfection of the thing.  When the end is the knowledge and the love of the Divine, wherever that love and knowledge are preeminently found and manifest, there is the freedom, perfection, and home of philosophy itself. That is why philosophy is intrinsically inseparable from the sanctification of existence and of life and infinitely more than a purely intellectual or academic enterprise. That is why the end and fulfillment of philosophy is life and the philosopher, as philosopher, is not primarily, nor fundamentally, the "thinker" but the man. Put in other words, that is why the philosopher, paradigmatically, is man, and the "thinker" is a thinker insofar as he is man. Far, therefore, from constituting and configuring a specialized, immanent, and self contained universe and way of life; far from being ordered to the theoretical or practical prospecting and analysis of "worlds" instrumentally and objectively coextensive and connatural to man, philosophy has no final object in this world, whence its disconcerting independence, its radical universality and freedom, its spiritual and moral incoercibility and autonomy, its professed ignorance, and its irony and humour before all claims of worldly wisdom, finality, and truth.  That is why, being no mere speculative, linguistic or doctrinal concern, philosophy is irreducible to "systems", "doctrines", "languages", or "theories" of any kind or sort.

An activity, in effect, whose sole meaning, end, and object, is the love and contemplation of Reality itself, and which therefore has no order, term, or limit, other than the fullness of the Truth, cannot be grasped or understood as just one more phenomenon, object, or event among the infinite variety that integrate and constitute the "world" as measured and defined by men. Specified by an End which effectively transcends all positive determination and objectivation, such an activity is incommensurable itself, and therefore represents a "break", or "leap", as Kierkegaard would say, in man's relative awareness and consciousness of being. That is precisely what transcendence means.  That is why philosophy is nothing less than the expression, manifestation, and epiphany of infinity itself in the consciousness and soul of man. Its actuality is the actuality of man's constitutive participation, through truth, in divine reality itself. That is why, in differentiating and discovering the Transcendence and Infinity of Being philosophy differentiated and discovered the absolute Perfection and Actuality of God, the ontological and moral specificity of Man, and the constitutive Unity and Order of the World.

Having, then, no mere immanent finality or being, philosophy transcends both objectivity and subjectivity and thereby all purely temporal causality as such. In that sense, it has no being, or rather, its entire being is a movement and becoming; a pure quest, tensions, and desire, evoked, rooted, and sustained by the very beckoning and lure of Absolute Reality Itself. Such self transcendence is ineffable.  It is, in effect, a consuming extasis and love, or, if you will, a dying, next to which what men call living is but sleep, as the great mystical Greek philosophers, especially Socrates and Plato, understood and saw.  That is why it is the very actuality of action, inseparable from life, and existential through and through. Philosophical truth is, in effect, philosophical existence, transcendent in itself, constitutively free, and impossible to teach.  Which is just another way of saying that the master and the witness philosophically are one.  A constitutively moral and spiritual action and event, its locus therefore, is the person, not the "facts" or some realm of ideal essences and pure objects of the mind.  From this derives its intrinsically social and political nature and its essential universality as a principle and source of Order, Community, and History by right. Infinitely more, then, than a merely academic enterprise, its true home as the Greeks and later the Christians showed and taught, is in the open air and in the streets, and in the midst, not of professors, but of men.  Which is just another way of saying that philosophy transcends all schools, and that, among other things, is precisely what philosophia perennis signifies and means.  That is why, finally, philosophical existence is an instance of grace, as the pagan philosophers well knew, and the true image and prefiguration of Revelation and Incarnation, as the great Christian fathers and doctors saw and taught.  A gift of God therefore; offspring of Infinite Bounty and Pure Need, as Plato once remarked and Socrates' entire life confirmed.

That is why when one comes face to face with a man whose very voice, expression, gesture, and turn of thought and mind witness an existence formally and connaturally attuned to the Divine, all attempts at explanations, definitions, classificiations, and descriptions, are but chaff.  Such a man was Dietrich von Hildebrand.  No words can express what in reality he was because no words can express, or ever will express, the beauty, power, transcendence and reality of a soul lived, possessed, and taken over by the Truth. He was the living evidence that Plato literally spoke truth when he made Alcibiades in the Symposium liken the nature of Socrates, the philosopher, to that of a being possessed and inhabited by gods (215 b-d), only immeasurably more so, as is the case when it is the very Charity of Christ that inhabits and conforms the life and action of a soul.  Of the infinite bounty of that man I, and all who had the good fortune of knowingly approaching him, still live. Hence the justice and propriety of these words which Gregory of Nazianzus once addressed to Basil, his brother in the Faith, in lovingly commemorating our master and our friend ... "Do you, however, come to me and revive my virtue, and work with me; and whatever benefit we once gained together, preserve for me by your prayers, lest otherwise I fade away by little and little, as a shadow, while the day declines. For you are my breath, more than the air, and so far only do I live, as I am in your company, either present, or, if absent, by your image" ...

Acknowledgements:

My sincerest thanks to Dr. Josef Seifert and Dr. John Crosby for their invitation to participate in this Symposium in honour of our common friend and master Dietrich von Hildebrand.
My most grateful acknowledgements to Mrs. Luisa Rodriguez de Mendoza; Mrs. Leonor Giménez de Mendoza; Mr. Eugenio Mendoza R.; Dr. Pablo Pulido M.; Mr. Moisés Benacerraí; Mr. Francisco Aguerrevere; Mr. Felix D'Ambrosio, and the Directors of the Banco Latino Foundation, all of Caracas, Venezuela, without whose gracious generosity and help I could not have personally come to address you here today.

Liechtenstein, Dezember 2, 1989