In the Preface to Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper explains his attention to the “doctrine of virtue.” He notes the unselfconscious way in which the virtues supplied a framework for ethical speculation in the emergence and continued tradition of Western thought. Pieper describes the intellectual framework supplied by the four cardinal virtues as “one of the great discoveries in the history of man’s self-understanding.” He observes that this doctrine of virtue “has become a basic component of the European consciousness, as the result of centuries of persistent intellectual endeavor by all the creative elements of the emerging West, both the Greeks (Plato, Aristotle) and the Romans (Cicero, Seneca), both Judaism (Philo) and Christianity (Clement of Alexandria, St. Augustine).”
Having rooted the doctrine of virtue in a certain kind of universality, Pieper turns to address his reliance on the single figure of St. Thomas Aquinas. Here I quote in full:
Some readers may wonder why, in my effort to revive a classical heritage, I so often cite a certain medieval writer, Thomas Aquinas. I do so not from a more or less accidental historical interest, but because I believe that the testimony of the “universal teacher” of a still undivided Western Christianity has a special value. This lies not so much in his personal genius as in the truly creative selflessness with which he expressed the vast, contrapuntal range of possible statements about the cosmos—even as he recognized and called upon his readers to go beyond the limitation of his own vision. Marked though this thought is by an altogether extraordinary grasp and the most disciplined, dynamic, and penetrating independent thinking, there yet speaks through it less the individual writer, Thomas Aquinas, than the voice of the great tradition of human wisdom itself.
The interpreter, in these latter days, invokes this tradition in the hope of seeming less ridiculous as he boldly drafts a moral standard for humanity which he, in his own daily life, is utterly unable to meet.
Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, Preface, xii-xiii.