IN DEFENSE OF PURITY

In Defense of Purity offers a fundamental view of the very essence and meaning of purity. Hildebrand’s insights on love, marriage, virginity, and sexuality offer fresh wisdom to people in any stage of life, from first dates, to religious vows, to golden anniversaries.

“Rarely does a book come along that takes up a perennial theme in such a fresh and unexpected way as to transform all subsequent discussion of the issues. This is one of those books. A concern for purity, especially purity of heart, of course, is as old as many ancient faiths, and common to most. But in this book, Dietrich von Hildebrand inaugurated a new approach to thinking about sex and how the body reveals the human person.”

Alice von Hildebrand | From the Foreword

Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer.  Pope Pius XII called Hildebrand "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church".  He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics.

Benedict XVI also had a particular admiration and regard for Hildebrand, who knew Ratzinger as a young priest in Munich: "When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time."

Hildebrand is known for his consistent public opposition to Nazism before and during World War II.