In ordinary conversation, including among the "educated", the word "sin"
rarely gets mentioned except when one is trying to be coy or facetious.
As Thomas Mann once said, "sin" is nowadays "an amusing word used only
when one is trying to get a laugh".
But this small work will interpret sin in its true -- that is, serious
-- meaning. What will emerge from its analysis is the discovery that the
concept of sin can still serve to unlock the mystery of existence, at
least for a thinking that wants to press down to the very foundations.
Needless to say, such an effort will require a kind of "mining energy"
of an archeologist of ideas who knows how to recover what was once known
(or at least suspected) from time immemorial but has now been forgotten.
But Josef Pieper does more than bring to bear on this issue his famous
powers of excavation; he also makes meaningful the concept of sin to the
ways of thinking and speaking of our time.
Readers of his work already know Pieper as an extraordinarily fitting
master in this art of making "the wisdom of the ages" a living reality
today. And in this work he brings Plato, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas
into a living dialogue with T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, even with Jean-Paul
Sartre. As he shows in this powerful work, none of these writers leaves
any doubt that the fact of sin is central: It is the willful denial of
one's own life-ground, a denial that alone rightly bears the name of
"sin". Paradoxically, this reality is both willed and yet also
pre-given, that is, both adventitious and yet somehow innate to our
existence -- a paradox which, next to the mystery of existence itself,
is the most impenetrable mystery of all.
