Stories From the Silver Screen: A Hidden Life

It is 1941, the war raging across Europe has entered its third year, and Josef Pieper, a young Catholic philosopher from Germany, has just brought out a book, a lovely little thing of fewer than sixty pages called A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, that has managed to escape Nazi censorship. Doubtless its very thinness, along with divine providence, enabled it to survive the book burners.

“The luminous domain of free human action,” he announced on page one, is its theme, within which the moral life of man annealed to the good is meant to find its natural setting. “Virtue,” he tells us, on which all human happiness ultimately depends, “is the utmost of what a man can be; it is the realization of the human capacity for being.”

Nowhere was that need more pressing than in those nations facing the mobilized fury of Adolf Hitler’s armies on the march. By 1941 everyone knew that. Knew also that resistance to such evil would require no little courage on the part of quite ordinary men and women, understandably fearful of losing everything amidst the encircling terror and madness. “Fortitude,” says Pieper, “presumes vulnerability,” which is why angels are spared having to show courage. Indeed, they’ve literally nothing to fear. But for the rest of us, necessarily wedded to the body, being brave implies constant readiness “to sustain a wound.” Especially when the wound proves deadly. But only if it is in a cause, or for a reason, transcendent to the self, as in dying for love of one’s family, or country, or God. Knowing all the while, of course, that there will be much fear along the way, which one will not succeed in banishing altogether.

Examples of men who, despite every horror, nevertheless stand tall in the saddle, holding fast to a standard of honor and courage—indeed, willing to ride into the very furnace of death itself on the strength of a single principle—are few in every age, but not unknown. Certainly not unknown to God, for whom a far greater crown awaits them. The young Austrian farmer, Franz Jagerstatter, for instance, deservedly cast as the hero of this remarkable film directed by Terrence Malick, was a quite simple and ordinary man, yet whose resolute opposition to Germany’s annexation of his own country completely baffled everyone in St. Radegund, a tiny and remote village situated amid the steep hills of Upper Austria. His was the only vote against an Anschluss that all of Austria appeared to welcome with enthusiasm. And while Austria would later come most bitterly to regret the terms of unification (like a handshake with the hound of hell), his refusal greatly incensed both the authorities and his neighbors at the time.

Even more so, of course, his subsequent refusal, when conscripted for military service, to swear fealty to the Fuhrer, which would eventually cost him his life. “Everyone tells me that I should not be doing what I am doing because of the danger of death. I believe it is better to sacrifice one’s life right away than to place oneself in the grave danger of committing sin and then dying.”

Is it possible he’d read Pieper’s book? Perhaps the passage identifying what it truly means to be a human being made in God’s image? And what is that identifying mark, that basic template? What is it that finally distinguishes us from all the other primates on the planet, lacking which we are, to use an image from C.S. Lewis, no better than “trousered apes”? Professor Pieper describes it quite beautifully as, “the fundamental capacity of the moral person to hearken in silence to the call of the real, and out of this recollected silence within oneself to make the decision appropriate to the concrete situation of concrete action.”

Life as a moral performance, in other words, which, in order to enact properly upon the stage of one’s life, will not infrequently require great courage, indeed, the kind of courage captured in scene after scene of this marvelous cinematic depiction. Watching young Franz, for example, repeatedly refuse to become complicit in a war he knows to be unjust, a war that not even the banner of one’s own flag can make just. As a wise man once said, there can be no flag large enough to cover the infamy of killing innocent people.

To be sure, the witness of this young man, so vividly brought to life thanks to Malick’s inspired direction, did not depend on his having read Josef Pieper, or anyone else for that matter. The film makes the point perfectly clear. In fact, he is frequently shown struggling mightily with the conundrum of whether to serve or not to serve, while others, including his parish priest and even his bishop, urge him to acquiesce. But he will not. Nor will his wife, who knows his heart, and shares the same deep sentiments that will determine his will to stand fast against the forces of evil. Even as they will conspire to kill him in the end. Not unlike the young serving girl Radegund, devoured by wolves in the forest while on a mission of mercy, who later becomes the sainted patroness of the village named after her.

It comes as no surprise, of course, that he will soon be made to pay for his principles. Besides liquidating much of Europe, the Nazis managed to execute tens of thousands of their own people, whom they deemed a threat to the morale needed to keep the war machine going. And thus the moment it became clear that he could not allow himself morally to assist in any way in the waging of a war he knew to be wicked, Franz Jagerstatter is arrested, sent to prison, then convicted of high treason. On August 9, 1943, he was guillotined, thus consummating his witness to the good, and to the God who is the author of all that is good. Only to be beatified, years later, by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007.

And so his heroism, unlike the obscurity of his life, does not go unnoticed. The chaplain, a Father Jochmann, who was with him at the end, who ministered to him in the last days and weeks of his life, was so moved by the example of his holiness and courage that he declared: “I can say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint I have ever met in my lifetime.”

Thanks to this splendid film, of which the cinematography alone will leave one breathless, we may all meet him as well.