The best thing I read this summer was Josef Pieper’s In Tune with the World: A Theory for Festivity. Like most of the little volumes he is famous for, it is a presentation of Christian truths, but in a philosophically probing manner heightened by Pieper’s knowledge of both Thomism and German philosophical literature. I had read it before, but too hastily to appreciate its riches. The precipitating reason I returned to it is was puzzlement about certain claims made by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, and I had a feeling Pieper could help me with them. Now the claims I had in mind were the ones connecting the Dionysian with the tragic, and while In Tune with the World says little about that issue specifically, there is a kind of underlying dialogue, emerging here and there, that it does have with Nietzsche.
Another reason for my delight in the book is that I’ve always been interested in thinking about play, the dance, and I guess, the party, i.e., the “good time” element that makes for “good time music.” As indicated in my discussion of “Social Dance in the Films of Whit Stillman” in this volume, the fact that man is a political, an erotic, and a poetic animal, means he is a dancing animal, too. Pieper, as we shall see, would add: “And a religious animal—don’t forget that!” Indeed I cannot—in my chapter on Stillman I attempted to summarize what his Violet character (in Damsels in Distress) says about social dance, evidently speaking for the director himself:
Social dance does bring couples, groups, and generations together. It is an expression of joy, even one of religious gratitude for the goodness of bodily life, although the very “ridiculousness” contained in many of the dances, which banishes a too serious “cool” manner, brings a comic element to the gratitude.
I also quoted there this definition from The International Encyclopedia of Dance:
Social dancing in most cultures is a choreographic activity devoid of ritual meaning (such as dances that incite to war, honor a deity, exorcise demons, or ask for rain…etc.) It is…expression of joie de vivre. It is an orderly, rhythmic activity that allows the participation of all—men and women, young and old, either jointly, or in separate groups. It…creates a sense of belonging… One constant is the interaction of men and women on the dance floor.
Pieper focuses his study not on social dance, nor on the “party,” but on the festival and festivity. That proves a helpful framing. One too-little known fact of social history is that in Christian/modern civilization, the “party” is actually an invention of bohemia, emerging in Paris around the 1830s and only really catching on later. Even if Falstaffian “tavern life” was a constant, as were festivals, you do not see the respectable classes having “parties” in things like the novels of Jane Austen. You rather see certain families inviting friends over for cards and drinks, or sets of families organizing closely-regulated balls.
Pieper’s talking of the festival takes us back, to times when those we might call the “party people” were not the vanguard of a “new generation” of say, the 1920s or 1960s, eager to gather on the basis of a new creed of unabashed hedonism, nor a set of people preoccupied with class-distinctions and propriety; it takes us to when those in a smaller city, town, or district became caught up in a religion-rooted festival. For a time, they became a people of festivity, with social distinctions down-played, and with a spirit that could be called hedonistic, but which turns out to be difficult to capture in any words. I think Pieper is saying—he pens the book in 1963--that we are still at bottom quite like those people, and our organized celebrations would become more fun, actually, if we could reshape them to be more like the older festivities. He is certainly saying, quite rightly, that we must not approach this topic with the modern-day pattern of the “party” setting the parameters of our discussion.
This will not be a review of Pieper’s book, but a quotation collection that gives you a sense of his main argument, as laid out in its first two thirds. I perhaps will later do the same for the last bit of it, although the kernel of his argument can be seen here. I label the quotes A-through-Z, the better to facilitate discussion; I provide no page numbers, but nearly all of them are in the order in which they appear.
A) Certain things can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life. Death and love are such subjects. Festivity, too, must be included in that category.
B) If…we consider the distinction between the festive and the workday, we do not mean only that a working day and a feast day are mutually exclusive; we also mean that work is an everyday occurrence, while a feast is something special, unusual, an interruption in the ordinary passage of time.
C) Perhaps both work and celebration spring form the same root, so that when the one dries up, the other withers.
Pieper devotes his best-known book to the importance of leisure, but here, he is suggesting that a society that wants to make festivity an everyday occurrence destroys it. Joe Pug (see Songbook # 22) sang about this kind of scene in 2008:
When the party starts on Monday,
Christmas starts in June,
when no one minds I’ve just arrived and I’ll be leaving soon…
But back to In Tune with the World:
D) …Christendom’s sacred books call work, and incidentally death also, a punishment.
E) …true festivity cannot exist in such a state [a totalitarian one]; the very nature of the state is against it.
F) …To celebrate a festival means to do something which is in no way tied to other goals, which has been removed from all “so that” and “in order to.”
G) Nietzsche, “The trick is not to arrange a festival, but to find people who can enjoy it.” The implication is that festivity in general is in danger of extinction…As the history of religions tells us, empty and wearisome pomp existed even at the Greek festivals. Nevertheless, it is peculiar to our time that we may conceive of festivity itself as being expressly repudiated.
H) What is a good time? Does anything of the sort exist? May it not be that the only kind of good time that is really possible is a time of good work? These are questions we cannot answer unless we have a full conception of man. For what is involved is the fulfilment of human life, and the form in which this fulfillment is to take place. Inevitably, therefore, we find ourselves concerned with such ideas as “the perfection of man,” “eternal life,” “bliss,” “Paradise.”
I) The traditional name for the utmost perfection to which man may attain, the fulfillment of his being, is visio beatifica, the “seeing that confers bliss.” This is to say that the highest intensification of life…takes place as a kind of seeing…
One of Pieper’s other little works, perhaps his most Aquinas-infused one, is Happiness and Contemplation.
J) …we cling to the feeling that a special spice, essential to the right celebration of a festival, is a kind of expectant alertness.
K) A definite span of usable time is made, as the ancient Romans understood it, “the exclusive property of the gods.”
L) Absence of calculation, in fact lavishness, is one of its [a festival’s] elements.
M) The talk of “valuable working time” is, after all, not just talk; something utterly real is involved. Why should anyone decide to sacrifice this precious article…?
N) …no one denies that it should be, by its nature a day of rejoicing. John Chrysostom “Festivity is joy and nothing else.” [Next page again Chrysostom:] “Where love rejoices, there is festivity.”
O) But the reason for joy, although it may be encountered in a thousand concrete forms, is always the same: possessing or receiving what one loves, whether actually in the present, hoped for in the future, or remembered in the past. Joy is an expression of love.
P) The celebrant himself must have shared in a distinctively real experience.
Q)…the past cannot be celebrated festively unless the celebrant community still draws glory and exaltation from that past, not merely as reflected history, but by virtue of a historical reality still operative in the present. If the Incarnation is no longer understood as an event that directly concerns the present lives of men, it becomes impossible, even absurd, to celebrate Christmas festively.
These last two quotes drove me to write my recent 4th of July piece, in which I confessed that, in the wake of 2020 and 2021, I could barely feel a “still operative” reality of an American “celebrant community” that I belonged to.
R) Here is where we must be able to name the reason underlying all others, the “reason why” events such as birth, marriage, homecoming are felt as the receiving of something beloved, without which there can be neither joy nor festivity. Again we find Nietzsche expressing the crucial insight—one painfully brought home, it would seem, as the result of terrible inner trials, for he was as familiar with the despair of being unable to take “enough joy in anything” as with “the vast unbounded Yea- and Amen-saying.” The formulation is to be found in his posthumous notes, and reads: “To have joy in anything, one must approve everything.” …Underlying all festive joy kindled by a specific circumstance there has to be an absolutely universal affirmation extending to the world as a whole... Naturally, this approval need not be a product of conscious reflection; it need not be formulated at all. Nevertheless, it remains the sole foundation for festivity…
S) So that the converse of the sentence we have just formulated is also valid—and again Nietzsche has formulated it: “If it be granted that we say Yea to a single moment, then in so doing we have said Yea not only to ourselves, but to all existence.”
These last two quotes lead into several very difficult questions, such as the Problem of Evil. Know that I do not mean to quote Pieper here in a complacent spirit of, “see, he has answers for all of this!”
T) Festivity lives on affirmation. Even celebrations for the dead, All Souls and Good Friday, can never be truly celebrated except on the basis of faith that all is well with the world and life and whole.
U) Naturally, for a festival to develop a broad and rich appeal, jesting, gaiety, and laughter cannot be excluded from it, nor even some riotousness and carnival. But a festival becomes true festivity only when man affirms the goodness of his existence by offering the response of joy.
I.e., there is certain wildness in festivity. Nietzsche tried to explain this element by speaking of the Dionysian—and he had a rather precise theory about such (but one which he utilized more, oddly enough, to explain the origin of tragedy than that of the drinking party, the orgy, or cult Bacchanalianism1). Pieper probably needed another chapter to address suggestions present in Nietzsche’s and others’ works about this mode of festivity, or angle upon it.2 I hope to say more about that angle in another post, albeit one that will look more to Afro-American sources than German ones.
T) …non-assent may also appear under a disguise. For example, it may be covered over by pleasure—agreeable enough in itself and springing from sheer vitality—in dancing, music, drinking, so that the rejection remains for a while hidden even from the self. Above all, this rejection may be concealed behind the façade of a more or less sham confidence in life.
This connects to the fact that one often notices a certain desperation, or worse, a certain all-around hardness, in the “hard-partier.”
The next two quotations bring us to an initial definition and conclusion.
V) To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole. This statement harmonizes with the conclusions cultural and religious historians have drawn from their studies of the great typical festivals in ancient cultures and among primitive peoples.
A very strong definition. But as for the last sentence, it is a little too Christianity-in-perfect-tune-with-the-best-of-the-pagan-and-vice-versa. I could jump into several of the early chapters of The City of God, and quickly find instances of Augustine railing against the inner ugliness of this or that pagan festival.
W) The conclusion is divisible into several parts. First: there can be no more radical assent to the world than the praise of God, the lauding of the Creator of this world. …If the heart of festivity consists in men’s physically expressing their agreement with everything that is, then –secondly—the ritual festival is the most festive form that festivity can possibly take. …--thirdly—there can be no deadlier, more ruthless destruction of festivity than refusal of ritual praise. Any such Nay tramples out the spark from which the flickering flame of festivity might have been kindled anew.
X) When we say that the ritual festival is the most festive form of festivity, do we mean that there can be no secular festivals? Of course not.
Y) The pallor of merely “legal” holidays is evident from the fact that there is much discussion of how they really should be “celebrated.” This is not to say we should not single out days of “Unity” and “Constitution” …but can we seriously call them festival days?
Z) Secular as well as religious festivals have their roots in the rituals of worship. Otherwise, what arises is not a profane festival, but something quite artificial, which is either an embarrassment or…work.
A rich and encouraging little book, and I have only dipped into its first two-thirds. Pieper has more to say, as you’d expect, about festivity’s connections to Christian doctrine and practice.
Do notice, finally, that the last quotes help us see that Pieper speaks of a) the ritual festival, as opposed to b) secular or profane festival, and finally, an c) artificial/forced festival, and the first two apparently overlap. This might explain how Pieper’s theory could work with the encyclopedia definition of social dance I provided near the beginning of this piece, which claimed that social dancing was never ritual dancing. It appears that for Pieper, some elements of the festival and festivity will be ritual, others will not—they will be “rooted in” or shaped by the ritual elements. The social dance in the town square follows the service or procession, or the Mardi Gras partying precedes Ash Wednesday. The more party-like element of festivity in these instances is thus ordered and made possible by the more ritual element of it, and especially, as is most evident in the Christian festivals, by the Good News upon which the rituals rest.
I explained above why such a work might especially appeal to me, given some of my special interests, but it is also worth wondering why it resonated with me at this time in particular. It is not because I am experiencing a whole lot of festivity and thus am being led to wonder about it! Rather, as my regular readers know, I have provided strong reasons, particularly in pieces related to what I call the Covid/Vax Disaster, such as “Flock of Dark, Bowl of White” and “Out of Denial’s Frying Pan,” for thinking that we live in uniquely dark times. Or listen to the Bari Weiss speech I promoted in my last post, to see what I believe we are up against, even if we were to just bracket out the coming anguished reckoning with the Disaster.
A rock star once sang, And these are hard times, to fall in love. Are ours not hard times for festivity, for festival? But maybe that is all the more reason to seek it out, or at least, to keep it present in the mind, to prepare the ground for renewal.
Both Van Morrison in his songwriting way, and myself in my essayistic one, have been sounding the alarm about the way our Covid-era despots have been keeping us from even the possibility of festivity, one which we know can be present in the rock concert (or even more so in the “rock ‘n’ roll” one). I put together a song-list for 2020 in which the Specials’ “Ghost Town” was number three, and so it did not surprise me that that song became a best-seller again in 2021: bands don’t play no more—yes, that is the kind of thing that speaks to the bleakness we’ve all been feeling, a feeling perhaps best captured in Morrison’s recent “Can’t Go on This Way.”
Witness also the recent Kevin Morby tunes, one of which reported, rather matter-of-factly, And I don’t remember, how it feels to dance.
So I think I’m drawn to this book in 2022 because I want to better remember what the festivity I have lived felt like, whether at a show, or less often but nonetheless in a very real way, during, or just after, a church service; and to live it more in the present; and, to think about the longing I have experienced since I was a teenager—haven’t you felt it too?—for the perfect party, the one where all the best music and people you know and want to meet, come together, and what that longing means.
To gather people for festival, for dance and song, feasting and games, for what is worship at bottom—it would not be so cliché in our time, would it, to speak of such as a revolutionary act? For it is to act against this attempt to mainstream the acceptance of despotism, disconnection, etc.
And, as Pieper shows you, it is a timeless feature of the good life. Yes, the party-on-automatic spirit adopted by many over the last six decades, the one questioned by Joe Pug, deadened them, and made them, I believe, ready to accept being locked away from it, so long as they could keep fiddling with their screens; however, the longing for the festival, for true festivity, ah, it is still with us, even in these times. Pieper shows us it will even be there if times of outright collapse really do come.
It is waiting inside of us, ready…
And as his translator Walter Kauffman admitted, several of his assumptions about the murky origins of Greek tragedy, ones shared by not a few scholars of his time, were likely wrong. Tragedy likely did not emerge from Dionysian-shaped choral dance displays. See the fine classicist book on the subject by Gerald Else. I’ll leave to the Nietzsche scholars the task which emerges once we admit that, namely, the determination of what his full theory would have us retain from his theory of the Dionysian that is laid out in the Birth of Tragedy, a book which Else himself never doubts the overall greatness of.
If one of our readers could provide an opposed quotation collection of Nietzsche on festivity, that would be most valuable—I’m not that sure where to look, because as with anything important subject, I’m sure he writes about it all over his corpus, and often in epigrams or other short passages.
My daughter is getting married in March. There will be well over 100 guests in attendance. I'm going to drink a little, dance a little, and laugh a lot. I think I'll paraphrase some quotes from this and bid everyone be festive, remember all the good still in this world, and forget the bad for awhile.
I absolutely want to read the Pieper book now. Three points come to mind:
1. Similar to the frustration of the COVID lockdown of celebrations, I was frustrated that there were not celebration by pro-lifers after the Dobbs decision. I think that celebration was intentionally thwarted by the media (who are pro-choice machiavellians) and the leaker on the court (whoever it is, is a disloyal citizen of the US that ought to be punished).
2. It makes complete sense that Pieper would write on this subject; his other books on leisure and happiness amplify points found in Aristotelian ethics. Play is also discussed in Nicomachean Ethics X.7:
"The happy life is thought to be virtuous; now a virtuous life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. And we say that serious things are better than laughable things and those connected with amusement, and that the activity of the better of any two things-whether it be two elements of our being or two men-is the more serious; but the activity of the better is ipso facto superior and more of the nature of happiness. And any chance person-even a slave-can enjoy the bodily pleasures no less than the best man; but no one assigns to a slave a share in happiness-unless he assigns to him also a share in human life. For happiness does not lie in such occupations, but, as we have said before, in virtuous activities."
3. Sports holidays as well as religious holidays are times of near universal celebration in America- see Hank Williams Jr and "all his rowdy friends"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RVyqnmO9i4