What is important to understand in this thesis is that it is not an attack on real philosophy a pursuit of the whole, of all that is. We cannot set up some demand on the divinity to answer the mysteriousness of our ways and the incompleteness of our knowledge. On reflection, we realize that these things from revelation make sense, make us to be at peace, to know that things do fit together after all. What has prevented our seeing the unity of things was precisely our demand that we find the source of all things in ourselves. Pieper has a remarkable genius, often displayed in this little book, of summing up in a few sentences a whole philosophic perplexity.
Man is by nature a being that thirsts and yearns . . .
Revelation is what makes us see the world we live in. We are graced beings, even while being finite beings. Man, even in his most sublime spirituality, is always an incarnate being. This bodily reality, which makes each person either a man or a woman, even on that highest level of spiritual life, does not constitute simply a barrier and a limitation, it is at the same time the beautiful wellspring of all human activity. To that penetrating insight, Pieper simply adds that even Aquinas and Plato agree on it.