An Ontology of Love: A Patristic Reading of Dietrich von Hildebrand's "The Nature of Love."

The Courage of Dietrich von Hildebrand

Crisis Magazine: Waging War against Hitler

Dietrich von Hildebrand on the Promulgation of the New Missal

The Remnant Scrapbook History ~ In The Beginning (via Pertinacious Papist)

In a letter dated April 27, 1970, von Hildebrand wrote a letter to Walter Matt’s brother, the new editor of The Wanderer, summing up, in effect, the meat of the matter that had separated the two Matt brothers. Von Hildebrand wrote:

Dear Mr. Alphonse Matt:

I thank you very much for your kind letter. But I believe that there is some misunderstanding. You assume that the new ordo missae and especially the rubrics constitute for me merely a personally painful change by replacing something very beautiful and perfect with something less beautiful and less perfect. But unfortunately it is my conviction that the new ordo missae is the greatest pastoral mistake and that its consequences for the Church may be disastrous.

I agree however completely with you that it is a grave problem, whether one should criticize it publicly or only intra muros. Concerning this problem every one must follow his conscience. But I frankly cannot understand that you do not only abstain from a public criticism of the new ordo missae but make the “Wanderer” an instrument for propagating and praising the new ordo. You even suggest in your letter, dear Mr. Matt, that I should join this propaganda. As you say that you agreed with my article in “Triumph” in which I stress that obedience to practical decisions of the Pope does not imply approval of them – it is difficult for me to understand why you expect me to utter a univocal approval of something which seems to be, from the purely religious point of view, a “suicidal” practical decision. I do not believe that a mere loyalty to the present Pope who does not act against those who destroy the Catholic faith daily more and more – like Kueng, Schillebecks, Padovano, Greeley and many others – and who does not use the means by which the Church survived through 2000 years: anathema and excommunication – can preserve Catholic faith untarnished.

Dear Mr. Matt, it is painful for me to disagree with you because of my sincere admiration for the “Wanderer” throughout the past years and our warm personal union in Christ. This disagreement, however should in no way affect our friendly relations.

Faithfully yours in Christ
Dietrich von Hildebrand

Recognized in Nomocracy

Nomocracy: “Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Battle against Hitler,” By Marshall DeRosa

Alice von Hildebrand on Her Husband Dietrich

Post by Hildebrand Project.

Dietrich von Hildebrand

Post by Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project.

The Personalist Project

Info

Sometimes, all you can do is just wait for a bad idea to run its course and die out.

Interview with John F. Crosby, Part 2

Dietrich von Hildebrand: Giving the Heart Its Due (Part 2)

An Interview with Hildebrand Legacy Project Director

By Andrea Kirk Assaf

ROME, JULY 23, 2010 (Zenit.org).- When searching for a way to dialogue with modernists, Catholic philosophers would be wise to study and utilize the thought of phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand, says John Henry Crosby, the founder and president of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy project.

Last month, phenomenologists and other academics related to von Hildebrand's work converged in Rome to take part in a conference live-streamed on the Internet, organized by the legacy project.

In the wake of that event, ZENIT sat down with Crosby to discuss the continuing and even growing contribution of von Hildebrand’s thought within the Church and secular culture.

In Part 2 of this interview, Crosby explains how von Hildebrand restores the heart to its rightful place as the greatest among equals.

Part 1 of this interview appeared Thursday.

ZENIT: Why should we read Von Hildebrand and phenomenology today?

Crosby: Von Hildebrand is a great thinker to know because he is distinctly modern in many ways. He made traditionalists a little nervous because on the one hand he was one of their greatest proponents when it came to the Latin Mass; he wrote passionately in defense of the Tridentine Mass and grieved its loss yet at the same time, while the typical traditionalist was a strict Thomist, he was a cutting edge philosopher out of this modern movement of phenomenology. It’s also useful that he’s got all the right credentials -- you can go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale and they have to accept that with von Hildebrand you’ve got a really serious person. Aquinas is a blip in their weak sense of history but here’s a person whose colleagues were Edith Stein and Heidegger. And you have the witness of his life -- philosophical beliefs sealed in heroic living.

Adolf Reinach, whom Edith Stein and von Hildebrand saw as their true master while Edmund Husserl is known as the father of the phenomenology movement, wrote an essay on phenomenology in which he says that phenomenology is a certain way of doing philosophy -- a willingness to look deep into experiences, to take concrete cases seriously. Von Hildebrand defined it as the systematic unveiling of one’s prejudices, so that one went into a subject by cleansing oneself not just of moral prejudices but of intellectual prejudices, of assumptions and inclinations. What that expresses is an ardor for truth that defined every other aspect of his work, a readiness to make any sacrifice for it, whether personal or giving up his career.

That radical pursuit of truth at all costs defines the man and his character as a thinker. One of the extraordinary things about him is the unity of thought and life -- the great intellect and the heroic witness, especially at that time in history. The idea that you have to put your life on the line for your philosophical beliefs is nobody’s preference, it wasn’t his either, but he didn’t think twice about doing it. When he was at Vienna all his Catholic colleagues opposed him, they all wanted to find ways to make it work with Hitler -- "building bridges" they called it. He had a willingness to go alone out of this dedication to truth, and a trust that God would honor that. He once said he could never justify a physical risk for adventure but the moment it involved a possible assassination for what he thought was right, the consequences could never be too high.

ZENIT: What is distinctive about his thought?

Crosby: In terms of his thought, it’s not as if there are things he says that no one else has said because with philosophy all thinkers build on and borrow from one another, but von Hildebrand, certainly more than any medieval thinker and even more than most modern Christian thinkers, was very intent on giving the heart its due in the understanding of love, the subject of our Rome conference. He thought the traditional focus on the will was totally inadequate, that love is ultimately an expression of the heart, and the traditional distinction of man between intellect and will just doesn’t hold true to experience. In literature, in poetry, even in biblical faith, the heart is always used as a way to express the deepest in man but in philosophy it has a kind of "stepson status." From a philosophical point of view it starts to look irascible, unreliable, fleeting…Von Hildebrand said we have to think of man as having three different centers -- intellect, will, and the heart, with the heart being the deepest of them. Then he has some very beautiful things to say about how, when we think of it this way, the heart expresses our nature the most deeply because the deepest experiences we have, whether they be joy, freedom, or peace, are expressions of the heart, not experiences of the will. They are states of being that are expressed in a felt way and they are all gifts -- you can’t seek joy as an object and have joy, it just won’t be granted in that way. You can’t love someone simply to be happy, you won’t find happiness that way. The fact that all the deepest experiences are fundamentally received is very telling, it reflects our status as finite, dependent beings. Rather than complaining about that, he sees all the experiences of the heart fundamentally as gifts and a philosophy of the gift arises from that. Some people have done research on how this links up with the thought of John Paul II and his writings on the philosophy of gift.

You could say that, as a matter of principle, von Hildebrand sees the human person as fundamentally oriented to being fulfilled only by receiving all of what is most essential to human fulfillment as a gift. So in that sense it goes against the naturalism of Aristotle that says if you know the right goods you can pursue them and therefore reach a state of flourishing. With von Hildebrand it’s a little bit more complicated -- we have to live in right order to the good but our happiness in one sense is super added, it’s not directly in our control. I would say that the retrieval of the heart is one of his greatest contributions.

ZENIT: Contemporary culture seeks to appeal immediately to our emotions. Can the work of von Hildebrand engage the emotions-based secular philosophy that is so predominant today?

Crosby: I recently spoke to a Catholic man who was very upset with the Church for its lack of attention to the heart in its preaching and presentation of the Gospel. He said there are Catholics in California who will go to the Catholic Mass on Saturday evening and then to the mega churches for their emotional sustenance on Sundays -- they meet the requirement one day and then get their nourishment the next day. He said this is a failure of the Church to meet the affectivity of the person. I think von Hildebrand would agree in principle with this because the heart has to be engaged. He had none of the distrust of the emotions that we sometimes find in certain cultural traditions in which we stifle emotions or at least think that what is really serious is what is in our heads, not our hearts.

Von Hildebrand is trustful of the heart but also seems to understand all the different deformations of the heart; you can see in his writings that he’s trying to understand that we have to form the habits of discernment to know when we are being swayed by our concupiscence. As a Christian he didn’t at all think that we should trust any impulse. He’s not saying that anything we want we should have because the heart is good, rather he’s observing that most of the really important, deep experiences we have in life are precisely in the heart.

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On ZENIT's Web page:

Part 1: www.zenit.org/article-29971?l=english

On the Net:

www.hildebrandlegacy.org

Interview with John F. Crosby, Part 1

Dietrich von Hildebrand: Giving the Heart Its Due (Part 1)

An Interview with Hildebrand Legacy Project Director

By Andrea Kirk Assaf

ROME, JULY 22, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Despite Benedict XVI's prediction in 2000 that Dietrich von Hildebrand would become one of the "most prominent" intellectual figures of modern times, the German-born Catholic philosopher was at the time in danger of being relegated to obscurity.

But because of the work of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project to translate, publish, and disseminate his books, essays, and anti-Nazi tracts, the Christian personalism of von Hildebrand (1880-1977), a large number of whose works still must be translated from the original German, is enjoying something of a revival.

A significant step forward in the organization’s goals occurred in May when phenomenologists and other academics related to von Hildebrand's work converged in Rome to take part in a conference live-streamed on the Internet.

ZENIT sat down with the project's young founder and director to discuss the continuing and even growing contribution of von Hildebrand’s thought within the Church and secular culture.

Here is part 1 of the interview. Part 2 will appear Friday.

ZENIT: How did you come to devote yourself full time to preserving and promoting the legacy of Dietrich von Hildebrand?

Crosby: I founded the project in 2004, rather unintentionally, which is probably how some of the best projects get off the ground. I had wanted to translate some work of von Hildebrand and then write a dissertation on it. So I called our old family friend, Alice von Hildebrand, and said I wasn’t really sure about going to graduate school, but what did she think about helping me to raise support to do a one-year privately funded fellowship to translate von Hildebrand’s work.

She and I had talked about translation work over the years but it never got off the ground, so she said fine and gave me 10 names who might be interested in this project. One of them was Mike Doherty who was the chairman of the board of the Franciscan University of Steubenville at the time and he told me, “This sounds great, what do we need to do to get going?”

He helped me start my own 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization and then we started to put together an advisory board. In about October 2004, less than a year into the project, then-Cardinal Ratzinger accepted an honorary position on our board. Now we have a wonderful advisory council of 20 people including Cardinal Schönborn, Rocco Buttiglione, several individuals known in the Catholic world, several of von Hildebrand’s students; I tried to select them according to the different areas of von Hildebrand’s thought -- the philosophers, the theologians, the political figures, those who represent the artistic and cultural side.

ZENIT: Why did you choose von Hildebrand in particular?

Crosby: The reason I was even able to do this is that there are links to von Hildebrand on both sides of my family. My father was one of his students and got to know him as a 22 year old at Georgetown. He invited von Hildebrand to speak, he had read some of his works, and this talk that he gave at Georgetown made a huge impression on my dad.

Then von Hildebrand in turn essentially directed where my dad studied and so he went to study with one of von Hildebrand’s students, but every free moment he studied in Austria with von Hildebrand or back in the U.S. in New York. My mother is Austrian and she was already a second-generation friend of von Hildebrand.

My grandfather got swept up in the Hitler youth when very young in Austria. When von Hildebrand left Germany for Austria to set up his anti-Nazi newspaper, he had to give an opening lecture at the University of Vienna where he had a small appointment. Von Hildebrand was so known as an outspoken anti-Nazi that the talk was somewhat violently protested by Communists on the left and National Socialists on the right, and my grandfather was on the right with the Nationalist Socialists yelling “Down with von Hildebrand!”

My grandfather had a conversion during the war when he lost a lung and spent some time in the hospital. He became a Catholic -- he had been Lutheran -- and then after the war found his way back to von Hildebrand and they became friends.

Alice von Hildebrand remembers a moving episode where my grandfather approached von Hildebrand sometime in the 1950s and knelt down in front of him and asked his forgiveness. My grandfather was a historian by trade by then, in fact he was the archivist of the Diocese of Salzburg where my mother was born and raised. My mother knew him as a young girl and kept up a correspondence with him. She came to the United States to study in 1977 just before his death. Without getting too much into it, von Hildebrand had a lot to do with my parents’ marriage because my father was a philosopher with his head in the clouds and von Hildebrand was a great promoter of relationships. My mother told him that she was interested in my father, so von Hildebrand pulled some strings and my father eventually woke up.

ZENIT: What is the mission of your organization?

Crosby: It was a much smaller initiative initially without seeing the full potential of what was there. The mission now is twofold -- on the one hand to promote von Hildebrand’s legacy through translating his work and make his writings known; a lot of his work hasn’t yet been translated from the German and a lot of books are out of print. We also aim to have an audience for these books, so we started having an annual moderate-sized conference, less frequently if it is a large conference like this year's in Rome. The public side has largely been in the form of these conferences, but we will also have a robust Web presence as a place for the international community of scholars to meet and share their research.

When you're promoting a thinker, I think it's important that the issues [that] the thinker was engaging are not lost. So in that sense part of our mission is to promote an authentically philosophical approach to these perennial questions of life and offering von Hildebrand as a great guide, but not the only guide.

Our mission statement says we are inspired by the need to recover and reinterpret and translate our intellectual patrimony, and at the same time we operate with a great spirit of gratitude toward contemporary thinkers. Phenomenology has classical roots, but it's also a modern movement within philosophy. We're often assumed that new insights can't be had; that sometimes happens with traditionalists who think that the last word on an issue has been said. I don't want to single them out, but you get that with Thomists sometimes because there is a system with Aquinas.

Von Hildebrand reminds that we can always move forward; it doesn’t mean that we are throwing everything else out but there are questions that are distinctive to a period in time, just as there are questions that arise in every generation. I don't think John Paul II built his papacy on the idea that nothing had changed since 1100. Sometimes we don't like to use the expression "the history of ethics," but there has been a slow-growing, and in some ways relentless, process of greater illumination. I think personalism is built around the idea that historically there is a new and deeper understanding and appreciation for what it means to be a person.

I happen to also think that personalism is a very useful way to engage modern issues because personalists love notions such as freedom, which puts them in a strong position to talk to people who are perhaps confused about freedom, like with the gay rights movement. A personalist has a great language to use, you can understand their intuition, but you are also rooted in fundamental concepts like human nature, which they don’t have; the general liberal problem is the belief that the human is just an atomized individual who doesn’t want to accept any limitation. Human nature is a limitation so you don’t want it, you want everything to be subject to your freedom. Personalists understand that intuition but they also understand that our freedom is finite.
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On the Net:

www.hildebrandlegacy.org

Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project Rome Conference

The Christian Personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand:
Exploring His Philosophy of Love

List of speakers

Supposedly there are some videos of the lectures available... ah, they are at UStream.

DvHLP on Facebook

Debating Beauty: Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand, by Alice von Hildebrand
(h/t to Jeff Culbreath)

Dietrich Von Hildebrand Legacy Project

On EWTN Live today:
John Henry Crosby & Dr. Alice von Hildebrand
The Dietrich von Hildebrand Spiritual Legacy Project

The audio should be archived shortly.

Related links:
Growing Up with Dietrich: A Conversation with John Henry Crosby

Pope Hails von Hildebrand Project

Pope Hails von Hildebrand Project

Conference Remembers Catholic Philosopher

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio, OCT. 25, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI, expressing his appreciation and support for the work of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project, said that it will have fruitful consequences for the evangelization of contemporary culture.

The Pope said this in a letter written to John Henry Crosby, the founder and director of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project.

Crosby read the letter from the Holy Father during a conference hosted by the legacy project at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, held Oct. 12-13. Some 150 participants from eight countries gathered to honor the philosopher on the 30th anniversary of his death.

Alice von Hildebrand, widow of the German philosopher and keynote speaker at the conference, commented, "I was extremely happy to see that so many new people are discovering the importance of my husband's message."

Dietrich von Hildebrand was born in 1889, the son of a famous German sculptor. He studied philosophy under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and was profoundly influenced by his close friend, German philosopher Max Scheler, who aided von Hildebrand's conversion to Catholicism in 1914.

Von Hildebrand openly criticized Nazism from within Germany and Austria, earning him the contempt of Adolf Hitler. He is also known for his religious and spiritual writings, and his passionate defense of truth and beauty.

Distinctive contribution

Benedict XVI said in his letter: "Following my recent meeting with you and Mrs. Alice von Hildebrand, I wish to express my appreciation for the efforts of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project to promote greater knowledge of and esteem for Professor von Hildebrand's distinctive contribution to Christian philosophical thought.

"Drawing inspiration from the Augustinian tradition and its Thomistic reception in the light of Aristotelian philosophy, von Hildebrand sought to advance that tradition by creatively reinterpreting it in the context of modern thought and its concerns.

"He was far from a 'petrified' vision of the teaching of Thomas, based on a narrow and uncritical devotion to the 'words of the Master,' and could well make his own the classic dictum: 'Amicus mihi Thomas, magis amica veritas!'"

"It is this 'legacy' which has motivated your project," the Pontiff added.

Benedict XVI continued: "Grounded in the rich philosophical movement which stretches from the Pre-Socratic's through Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, to Augustine, Thomas and the great thinkers of the modern age, and taking up the challenge set forth in the encyclical 'Fides et Ratio,' the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project aims to enter into reasoned dialogue with contemporary currents of philosophy, bringing the full scope of reason to bear on fundamental human questions and contributing to the recovery of the sapiential dimension inherent in the 'philosophia perennis.'

"Without such a commitment to the philosophical enterprise, Christian faith would fall prey to a 'fideism' which would deprive it of its grandeur as man's free submission of intellect and will to the splendor of God's truth, and gravely compromise its missionary dynamism, whereby believers are called to offer to all a reasoned account of the hope that is within them.

"I therefore express my appreciation and support for the work of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Project, and my confidence that this praiseworthy initiative will bear abundant fruit for the evangelization of contemporary culture."

Interview with John Crosby

Von Hildebrand's Voice of Reason
Interview With Founder of Legacy Project



ALEXANDRIA, Virginia, JUNE 13, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI sees in Dietrich von Hildebrand a voice of reason in an age that has largely despaired of reason, says the founder of a project to disseminate the philosopher-theologian's writings.

John Henry Crosby recently spoke with ZENIT about the mission of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project and the influence the German thinker had on the Catholic Church throughout the 20th century.

Crosby works closely with Alice von Hildebrand, the widow of the philosopher. Dietrich von Hildebrand lived from 1889 to 1977.

The Legacy Project recently released a new edition of "The Heart," which can be purchased at the project's Web site.

The project has pledged to donate 10% of all purchases through this link to ZENIT, and orders destined for the continental United States are eligible for free shipping.

Q: You and Alice Von Hildebrand recently met with Benedict XVI. What is the Holy Father's interest in this project?

Crosby: This is a challenging question because the Holy Father is interested in the Legacy Project or, more precisely, in Dietrich von Hildebrand, at many levels.

Many people will not know that the Holy Father knew von Hildebrand already as a young priest, when as young Father Ratzinger, he was the assistant pastor at von Hildebrand's parish church in Munich.

From the very start, Father Ratzinger had a deep esteem for Dietrich von Hildebrand, both as a personality and as thinker.

Beyond his personal admiration, however, the Holy Father also sees von Hildebrand as a Catholic figure who left a tremendous mark on the Church -- a mark about which many Catholics are regrettably unaware.

One could hardly attribute a greater historical importance to von Hildebrand than Cardinal Ratzinger did when he wrote about von Hildebrand in the year 2000: "I am firmly convinced that, when at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the 20th century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time."

These are not idle words, and the Holy Father has gone to great lengths to demonstrate how seriously he meant them.

Soon after the Legacy Project was founded in 2004, he took the rare step of joining as an honorary member, and even after his elevation to the papacy his support has been faithful and concrete.

The Legacy Project just released our first publication in collaboration with St. Augustine's Press, namely a new edition of von Hildebrand's book "The Heart."

The book appeared around the time of our audience with the Holy Father. Alice von Hildebrand and I were able to present the very first copy to him, to which he responded, expressing his gratitude, "Ah, the young people will like this."

Naturally, all of this collaboration only heightens the question of the Holy Father's interest in Dietrich von Hildebrand. Among the many different reasons that come to mind, two in particular, or, perhaps, two ways of explaining his support, stand out.

To begin with, one might say that the Holy Father sees Dietrich von Hildebrand as a voice of reason in an age that has largely despaired of reason.

How often have we not heard it said that there is no objective moral law but only what is right for me; that there is no reality except what I choose to make my reality?

This was hardly the way of von Hildebrand, who was always concerned with conforming himself to reality or, as he often expressed himself, to "listening to the voice of being."

Von Hildebrand has been described as a "knight for truth," and this marvelously expresses the way he not only sought and understood the faith but the manner in which he defended it and gave witness to it through his life.

Too few people know of the great Christian witness of von Hildebrand which, during the 1920s and 1930s, reached a heroic highpoint in his intellectual anti-Nazi resistance.

I am reminded here of some words which Cardinal Christoph Schönborn recently wrote to me in a letter about von Hildebrand, for they drive home the importance of von Hildebrand for today: "I continue to think, as I have in the past, that the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand stands among the very great Catholic contributions to the thought of the 20th century."

"Precisely in our time," Cardinal Schönborn continued, "it is becoming increasingly clear to me how precious it is to have great thinkers formed in the faith through whom we can find orientation and support in the midst of the confusion of the present time."

A second reason for the Holy Father's interest in Dietrich von Hildebrand lies in the fact that he sees the "personalism" of von Hildebrand as a kind of instrument for making the Gospel fully intelligible to the contemporary world.

How ironic it is that one of the bloodiest centuries in history, namely the 20th, went hand in hand with a deepening understanding for the dignity of the human person.

We see this in the whole language of "human rights," which is an expression of precisely this deepening sense for the dignity and inviolability of the person.

The philosophy that has arisen around this deepening sense for the dignity of persons, both as its cause and consequence, often goes by the name of personalism.

One of the greatest practitioners of personalism was the late great Pope John Paul II, who was capable of transforming so many thousands of lives in no small measure because of the personalist approach he always took.

Like John Paul, the thought and witness of von Hildebrand are rooted in his personalism, for von Hildebrand too was deeply interested in the nature and dignity of human persons -- indeed, one can say that the personal forms a kind of axis of his thought.

In his personal style as well, von Hildebrand acted out of a deep sense for the mystery of personal existence -- always with warmth, with love, with respect, and with a passionate desire to "win over" his interlocutor -- and this, I believe, was a crucial reason for his capacity to reach people so profoundly.

If there could ever be any "test" of successful Christian living, it would have to be that of conversions -- genuine conversions motivated by Christian witness. Von Hildebrand had over 100 godchildren -- a remarkable reflection of the personalism he both taught and lived.

Q: What inspired you to found the von Hildebrand Legacy Project?

Crosby: I am often asked why I founded the Legacy Project. How is it that a young man of 26 -- my age at establishing the project in 2004 -- should devote himself to the work of appropriating, preserving and disseminating the legacy of von Hildebrand?

The answer begins in the close bond of friendship that connected my family to von Hildebrand many years before I was born. I t is hard to imagine my maternal grandfather and my parents without the profound and formative relation they had to von Hildebrand.

And while I never knew von Hildebrand personally -- he died in 1977, the year before I was born -- throughout my teenage years I had the privilege of coming to know his widow, Alice von Hildebrand.

My appreciation for von Hildebrand grew especially during my university years. I felt increasingly that his rich and abundant vision of the world was becoming my own, and I began to understand why generations had been nourished by his prolific writings.

Dietrich von Hildebrand was a philosopher I could follow. His heroic struggle against Nazism fired my imagination; his single-minded love and pursuit of truth presented me with a vivid embodiment of the true philosopher; and his passion for music, literature and art taught me that life without beauty is impoverished and inhuman.

The Legacy Project is my response to the gift that von Hildebrand has been in my own life. I do not doubt that I am acting on behalf of the thousands who received this same gift in their own lives.

Q: Von Hildebrand was himself a convert to Catholicism. What led to his conversion?

Crosby: Von Hildebrand's friend and teacher, Max Scheler, drew his attention early on to the saints. Von Hildebrand discerned in them a supernatural beauty that spoke of God and bore witness to the truth of the Christian faith.

He was struck by the way in which their being was transformed by their love for Christ. The new moral ethos of the Christian saints won his heart and deeply affected him.

But it was in particular the radiant beauty that he experienced in the saints, and most of all in the God-man -- it was this beauty that drew him to Christ and led to his conversion.

We can say that his book "Transformation in Christ" is in a way the story of his conversion; for the beauty of "new creature in Christ" that he unfolds so masterfully in that book is the very thing that fired his imagination and made him a Christian.

Q: Why is von Hildebrand considered one of the most influential Catholics of the 20th century?

Crosby: Historians will have to discuss this question in the years to come, for von Hildebrand's legacy looms large in many different areas. Still, a consideration of this question could hardly ignore his prolific writings on marriage, man and woman, purity and virginity.

Given the influence of these writings on the Church's teaching on marriage at the Second Vatican Council and in the encyclical "Humanae Vitae," it is perhaps not an overstatement to say that von Hildebrand's thought on marriage has affected thousands upon thousands of Catholic marriages.

For centuries Catholic writers had stressed almost exclusively the procreative meaning of the marital act. Von Hildebrand was one of the first to see that over and above the procreative meaning there is also the unitive meaning of the marital act -- the enactment of the love of the spouses for each other.

With his writings on man and woman in the 1920s he prepared the ground in the Church for the teaching of Vatican II on the dual meaning of the marital act.

There is another teaching of Vatican II that he also helped to prepare, namely the new emphasis found in "Gaudium et Spes" on the dignity of natural and human values.

He did not think that only a soul in the state of grace really counted and that other values, such as values of culture and human thought, were of no real significance.

He instead contributed to a new Christian humanism in which all human goods and values are redeemed. This humanism can be seen in his rich philosophy of love; for he does not think that only Christian love of neighbor counts as love, but he takes seriously all the kinds of human love, giving particular attention to the love between man and woman.

These human loves are meant to be transformed and redeemed and not to be replaced with Christian love of neighbor.

Q: What do modern Catholics have to learn from the writings of von Hildebrand?

Crosby: Yet again, this is a challenging question, given the wide range of possible answers. I would like to draw attention to one aspect of the writings of von Hildebrand, not only because it is particularly important but also because it is not always properly appreciated.

Von Hildebrand was deeply formed by the tradition of Christian thought, above all by his great love of St. Augustine. On the other hand, he was a student of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who was also the teacher of Edith Stein -- St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Like Edith Stein, von Hildebrand drew freely on both the tradition of Christian thought and on the many contributions of contemporary thought -- including those of his famous teacher, Husserl.

In this respect, von Hildebrand and Edith Stein went against a certain Christian tendency that views contemporary thought with a degree of skepticism and even an unwillingness to acknowledge its insights.

Von Hildebrand, as well as Edith Stein, overcame, or better, superseded this tendency in the best and most effective manner, namely, by making contemporary contributions fruitful in his own work.

Not only does this mean that Christian thinkers may benefit from the rich insights of von Hildebrand; it will also help them to approach contemporary thought with a view to harvesting its true and therefore timeless aspects.

This bodes well for the tradition of Christian thought -- which will only become richer and deeper.