Josef Pieper:
Only the Lover Sings

Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.

To be sure, no human being has ever really seen everything that lies visibly in front of his eyes. The world, including its tangible side, is unfathomable. Who would ever have perfectly perceived the countless shapes and shades of just one wave swelling and ebbing in the ocean! And yet, there are degrees of perception. Going below a certain bottom line quite obviously will endanger the integrity of man as a spiritual being. It seems that nowadays we have arrived at this bottom line.
—Josef Pieper, "Learning How to See Again", Only the Lover Sings

IN THE CORRESPONDENCE between Screwtape, under-secretary to the devil, and his nephew, Wormwood, instructing him in the most expedient ways to tempt the followers of the Enemy, namely Jesus Christ, he writes, "Music and silence—how I detest them both!" Indeed, as Josef Pieper, German Catholic philosopher makes clear in his exquisite collection of essays, Only the Lover Sings, in which he extols all the creative arts as well as making reference to C.S. Lewis' satirical, epistolary tract, The Screwtape Letters, it is the act of seeing that must be similarly lauded as being on a par with the auditory realm for its divinatory effects on the human soul.