,
6 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Those delicious final sentences of Ralph McInerny's introduction to Joseph Pieper's book The Silence of Goethe (Über das Schweigen Goethe)...! 
Josef Pieper wrote this in 1945 being plucked from the chaos of war and delivered into a German military prison cell. Here he learned about Goethe's "not only Castle of the soul but also the town", the walls Goethe built around his mind to stay true to himself. The Goethe Option?
Reading this I can make sense of Goethe's incredible calm. He was present during some very violent fighting and must have seen chaos up close, first hand. But still, the walls of his soul preserved him.
“We and our ilk prosper only in stillness...as the hermit who, though still in his cell, hears the raging of the sea.” — Goethe, in a letter to Charlotte von Stein, 1816
“What is best is the deep stillness in which, against the world, I live and grow, and gain what it cannot take from me by fire and sword.” — Goethe, in revolt against the modern world, 1780.
Josef Pieper's father was the only teacher in the only school in his remote Westphalian village, but for secondary school he attended the Gymnasium Paulinum in Münster, the oldest school in Germany, founded 797 A.D. by St Ludger (742-809).
