The Dean’s daughters, although they live virtuous lives, have been unsuccessful in “hand on moral knowledge” to the community. They sing hymns, study the Dean’s writings, and gather for worship services, but nevertheless “sad little schisms would arise” ( BF, 3–4). Their religious leader, known in the narrative as the Dean, has died, and “his disciples were becoming fewer in number every year, whiter or balder and harder of hearing.” 6 The congregation remembers the Dean’s message but individual members have trouble living it out. This is the crux of the tension and discord in Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast: moral knowledge has not permeated the community. discussion leaves us to wrestle with the problem: how to hand on moral knowledge in a society which often fails to inculcate the doing of what is right.” 5 In an insightful essay on Pieper’s work, Gilbert Meilaender notes that “doing what is right requires being good, but we can become good only by doing what is right. Schumacher notes, “In the history of philosophy, hope has never been a dominant theme it was generally treated, if at all, ‘incidentally,’ just as it continues to be treated today among the majority of philosophers.” 4 Yet the experience of hope is fundamental to the human condition the loss of hope for an individual or for a community can be devastating. 3 Nevertheless, the theme of hope has not been the focus of much philosophical inquiry aside from Kant as Bernard N. 2 “How much I, basically unsuspecting, had fallen into a simply inexhaustible theme, which I had been capable of sketching only in outline at best, became clear to me quite soon,” Pieper notes. 1 About twenty years before Babette’s Feast was published, the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a work titled “On the Meaning of Courage.” He was encouraged by his publisher to write treatises on the seven virtues, to which he responded with great enthusiasm, publishing On Hope in 1935. So when she wrote a short piece for an American audience, she centered the transformative action of the story on a splendid meal. Dinesen, a Danish writer, had heard that Americans were interested in stories about food.
Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast was first published in 1950 in Ladies’ Home Journal.
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