Not nearly as many people are familiar with the thought of Dietrich von Hildebrand as are now familiar with the thought of René Girard—yet I believe von Hildebrand’s work is extremely under-appreciated and that it is critical to understanding the world and the human person.
(Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos, on the topic of the heart, fails to reference DvH’s writings on affectivity, which left me somewhat aghast—but it does make reference to John Henry Newman, von Hildebrand’s most important predecessor in rehabilitating the topic of the heart. Still, the encyclical is representative of the kind of overlooking that DvH often gets.)
Last year I asked my friend Michael Matheson Miller, who knows both thinkers well, if he would be willing to do a ‘mash-up’ of them for the 2023 Novitate conference that I hosted in DC, addressing the connections, complementarity, and antagonisms between Girard and von Hildebrand. He graciously accepted.
There is certainly a tension at the heart of their philosophies. That’s a good thing. I believe each thinker sheds light on, and clarifies, the other. For instance, I’m often asked a version of this question: “So is it mimesis all the way down, then?” Von Hildebrand would give a resounding: “No!” And in fact much stronger than that: our desires—and with them our entire personality—are shaped by our response to objective values, not mimesis. Mimesis has a role to play in value response, but it does not determine it.
Michael, true to form, found a fascinating topic through which to examine the intersection of these two thinkers: liturgy.
He and I had first had a long conversation on that theme at Nonna’s Trattoria in Ada, MI. I have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since. I was thrilled to hear, then, that he would pick the topic back up and present a more formal version of it at last year’s conference.
I’m proud to be able to share the video of his talk with you all.
Happy New Year!
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