Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.,
has died at the age of 91
by Carl Olson
April 17, 2019
Fr. James V. Schall, the prolific and much-beloved Jesuit, professor and author, died earlier today. His family states that “he was comfortable and at peace” at the time of his death.
He was born in Pocahontas, Iowa, January 20, 1928. Educated in public schools in Iowa, he graduated in 1945 from Knoxville, Iowa High, and then attended University of Santa Clara. He earned an MA in Philosophy from Gonzaga University in 1955.
After time in the U.S. Army (1946-47), he joined the Society of Jesus (California Province) in 1948. He received a PhD in Political Theory from Georgetown University in 1960, and an MST from University of Santa Clara four years later. Fr. Schall was a member of the Faculty of Institute of Social Sciences, Gregorian University, Rome, from 1964-77, and a member of the Government Department, University of San Francisco, from 1968-77. He was a member of the Government Department at Georgetown University from 1977 to 2012.
Fr. Schall penned hundreds of essays on political, theological, literary, and philosophical issues for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He wrote dozens of books over the course of some fifty hears, on philosophy, social issues, spirituality, culture, and literature.
How wonderful that the first full eulogy for the passing of the great Father Schall should come from theologian Tracey Rowland, herself a woman of many parts and great intellectual gifts that she has been deploying, as Fr Schall did, to illuminate the circles she moves in and those of us who read her writings.
Uncle, Father, Jesuit, Professor, Giant
Fr James Schall had the capacity to be an intellectual father to many because
he was himself a very together alpha male who knew perfectly well that 2+2=4.
by Tracey Rowland
April 18, 2019
Jerry Schall (left) with his older brother, Fr. James Schall, with Jerry's two young sons, in the early 1960s. (Photo: Fr. James Schall)
The marketing blurb on the book
When Jesuits were Giants begins with the statement:
No one in France or the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century doubted that the Jesuits, loved and honored by friends, hated and feared by enemies, were a force to be reckoned with. Scholars, missionaries, educators, adventurers, social innovators – they were Renaissance men, giants.
This Holy Week the Church has lost one of the last sons of St. Ignatius in this mould.
“Uncle Jim” to his vast extended family, “Fr Jim” to his friends, and “Professor James V Schall SJ” to generations of political philosophy students, passed away at 12.48 PDT on Wednesday, the 17th April.
He has been described as “America’s Chesterton” because of the style and humour of his opinion-piece reflections on contemporary ecclesial and social life. He was also a world-class political philosopher. He not only knew what St. Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas had said about some political issue, he could go through the entire Western canon, starting with the pre-Socratics, work his way through the Church Fathers, the medievals and until he finally reached the moderns. The post-moderns he thought were just mad and not worthy of his attention: anyone who thinks that 2+2 might in some alternative universe equal 5 had some kind of mental disability.
As is typical of these Renaissance types he was open to all that classical wisdom had to offer, but argued that there were certain problems beyond the capacities of even the greatest of the Greeks and Romans to solve.
These hitherto unresolved issues required the Incarnation – a kind of ontological revolution. Educated people had to be at least open to the possibility that this really did happen, that God really did become incarnate in human form – since it is the only way of making sense of “all that is” – one of his favourite phrases.
It is said that students would enroll at Georgetown University just to “Major in Schall”. In a sense he was his own academic department.
I first came across his name when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. Instead of reading the books my lecturers had recommended I would spend hours in the library working my way through articles by James V Schall.
On my first trip to the States in 1988 I found my way to Fr Jim’s office at Georgetown. I was in my early 20s and it never occurred to me to send a polite letter before I turned up outside his door. I simply tracked him down and introduced myself as someone who loved his work. He was about to go and deliver a lecture but he told me he would talk to me after the class. I asked if I could stay in his office and look at his library and he agreed to that. I spent a couple of hours taking down references to books on his shelves, and when he reappeared he gave me a cup of tea, we had an academic chat, and then he took me on a tour of his University.
I can’t remember anything about our intellectual exchange but I do remember his walking up to students who were smoking and praising them for having the courage to be politically incorrect. Their responses indicated that they knew who he was and that they loved him.
Quite simply he had the capacity to be an intellectual father to many because he was himself a very together alpha male who knew perfectly well that 2+2 =4.
Not only did he not like political correctness, he had an especially mordant view of feminism. This did not mean that he thought women in any sense inferior to men. He had many friendships with intellectual women and was proud of the females he had taught who went on to occupy high professional positions. Those included Jane Haarland Matlary, a Professor of International Relations at the University of Oslo who served as Norway’s State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1997-2000.
However, he thought that women who wanted to be like men, who didn’t value their femininity, or who thought that marriage and family life was somehow beneath them, were victims of an ideology. He also thought that men and women were ‘wired differently’ and he was the chivalrous, dragon-slaying type, who preferred to put women on a pedestal and worship them, rather than virtue-signaling his belief in gender equality.
When I first arrived at Cambridge University he would send me copies of his publications in envelopes addressed to “Mrs Stuart Rowland”. This really impressed the porters at my college who were mostly former military men. They were not much into feminism either. A memo actually went around the porter’s lodge to the effect that all post arriving to “Mrs Stuart Rowland” was to be put in Tracey Rowland’s pigeon-hole, since when Fr Schall’s envelopes first started arriving, no one knew what to do with them. I was later told by the college chaplain that I was one of the porter’s favourite students and I think it was because they loved this little act of politically incorrect chutzpah.
Before I went to Cambridge, and when I was a complete academic no-body, I managed to publish an opinion piece about post-modern philosophy in a secular newspaper. Fr Jim liked it and used a quotation from it in one of his articles, citing “Tracey Rowland” alongside Aristotle and St. Augustine. He then sent me the article with a short covering note saying “Happy St. Valentine’s Day – regards to Stuart, pray for me, Fr Jim!” I took multiple photo-copies of his article and proudly handed out copies to my friends. One of them joked that I was lucky to be mentioned alongside Aristotle and Augustine and not Snoopy and Schroeder. He loved the Peanuts cartoons!
However by far his greatest act of chivalry occurred when my book
Ratzinger’s Faith received a two page ‘bad review’ in the
Times Literary Supplement.
Ratzinger’s Faith actually sold very well and was translated into three other languages and my publisher was not at all concerned about the fact that the reviewer didn’t like my book. The publisher said: “a double-page spread in the TLS is a double-page spread in the TLS” – in other words, all publicity is good publicity.
The reviewer however had ridiculed my book by calling it “a papal romance”. He said words to the effect that I was in love with Ratzinger and that my reading was completely unreliable because it didn’t square with the profile of Ratzinger that he had been given in his interviews with Hans Küng.
What annoyed me most about the review was that my book was not a biography in the sense of an attempt to deal with Ratzinger the man, but only with his ideas.
Even theological liberals agree with me that Ratzinger was never a liberal, which is one of the points I tried to emphasize.
In any event, when news of the “papal romance” article reached Fr Jim via his friend Monsignor Sokolowski, he was in hospital recovering from an operation for cancer of the mouth. At the time he was being fed through a drip but he still managed to type out an article blasting the reviewer for all manner of intellectual ineptitudes. The reviewer informed Fr Jim that he had friends in the Society of Jesus, and Fr Jim’s response was something along the lines of “so what, I am 80-something, in hospital, with cancer, do your worst”.
No doubt many academic articles will be written in the years ahead about Fr Jim’s contribution to Catholic political philosophy. His books and papers will be his legacy to future generations. Unlike so many other Jesuits since the Arrupe era he never went down the path of fostering the rag-bag of Leftist political causes. He had no time whatsoever for Marxism.
He believed that there will always be elites and that the best thing that a Jesuit could do would be to ensure that the elites were in both belief and practice Catholic! He thought that if the social leaders were good, holy people, then this would foster the good of all. The idea of allowing Communists a say in the choice of bishops was, for him, an idea from planet Pluto, or maybe even from hell.
When new generations of Catholic students want to study political philosophy the name “Schall” will feature prominently on their book lists. Already his book
Another Sort of Learning is well known in Catholic undergraduate circles. It offers extensive reading lists for students who want to immerse themselves in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
For those of us who knew him, who were privileged to be on his mailing list, there is a sense that we haven’t just lost a friend, we have lost one of the last old-style renaissance-men of the Jesuits. We have lost one of the giants!
I am devastated. It feels like a member of the family has died. I went to THE CATHOLIC THING this morning thinking to myself, "Surely, there must be a commentary by now from Fr Schall on Benedict XVI's Klerusblatt essay"... and instead, this news. What great moments of reading pleasure and mental stimulation he has given me all these years since I first 'discovered' him when I became involved in the Benedict XVI forums back in 2005, and he soon became for me not just the best and most brilliant commentator on Benedict XVI's works and words, but also my favorite Jesuit of all time. Dear dear Fr. Schall, who has now gone back to the bosom of God, thank you for the legacy of your thought and solid Catholic orthodoxy which thankfully live on in your books.
In the past 14 years, I have occasionally thought what it could have been if Fr Schall and that other great American Jesuit, the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, had lived closer together in time and space and circumstance, which would have been more fantastic even than if Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had been contemporaneous and interacting. On a more practical plane, I was always hoping there might have been an occasion for Fr Schall to sit own with benedict XVI whom he unhesitatingly called the greatest mind of all the world figures today, and to whom he always felt a kinship because they were almost the same age (Schall was born eight months later than Joseph Ratzinger).
Last year, as he turned 90, his colleagues at THE CATHOLIC THING put together a tribute called SCHALL AT 90 which is very apropos today.
Schall at Ninety
by The Friends of Fr. Schall
January 16, 2018
Editor's Note:
The ever sharp-eyed Brad Miner noticed a few weeks ago that our colleague, James V. Schall, S.J., was turning 90 on January 20. I immediately sent out a message to some friends asking for brief comments to be published on that occasion; and you may read them, in alphabetical order, below. But I should have known. Before we could assemble and publish them, Fr. Schall himself sent me a column, scheduled for today, on the very same topic. So we’ve had to move up our musings; and now, in addition, you may read his own meditations on turning 90 at the end of these brief tributes. – Robert Royal
Robert Royal
I’d known the good padre’s work before I came to Washington in the early 1980s. Around then, I reviewed somewhere his book
The Politics of Heaven and Hell. A new DC friend warned me, “Be careful about reviewing books by Schall. You start doing that, and you’ll never do anything else.” I never wrote another review of Schall (though maybe
Another Sort of Learning?). I have tried (unsuccessfully) to keep up, nevertheless to incalculable benefit.
But I also benefitted, thanks to the friendship of Denise and Dennis Bartlett, colleagues of Schall’s when they were together in San Francisco. They began to invite us all to their DC home for birthdays, holidays, special occasions (book parties, to be sure). So for over twenty years, the Bartlett and Royal families and magister Schall lived some high moments together. My children didn’t realize until they were adults that the unassuming and amusing priest they knew was also a certifiably world-class Catholic brain.
But familiarity and normalcy were of a piece with his vast, wide-ranging, insightful oeuvre, because in the Schallian scheme, everything true is an intelligible and related part of “what is” (a phrase he has often intoned with near magical effect). For most of us, it’s not as easy to know “what is” as we think. But that’s why we need and – as generations of his formal and informal students know – are eternally grateful to the Creator for these 90 years – may there be many more – of James Schall.
Hadley Arkes
In the early 1980s, I was on leave from Amherst College, visiting at Georgetown. An unanticipated gift: Jim Schall was my new colleague, and became an enduring blessing. We took long walks through Georgetown, and we would think aloud, together, on questions in political philosophy that we were trying to answer – and to explain to students. When I finally came into the Church, in 2010, Fr. was with me, to concelebrate.
One thing that fascinated us were the teachings of my former professor, Leo Strauss, on the tension between reason and revelation. John Paul II would write on this in
Fides et Ratio. But long before, Fr. Schall had said some of the most sensible things about the problem:
“Revelation can be articulated because it contains logos.”
Both revelation and reason, then, were only accessible to a creature that had the wit to sift the claims of revelation that were plausible and implausible:
“If what is said to be revealed is irrational or contradictory, it cannot be believed, even according to revelation.” This has political as well as purely philosophical implications:
“Ironically,” it turns out that we will not understand the world if it is only the world we seek to understand. [And] we often suspect, at our highest moments, that in being in this world, we are not made only for it, dear as it can seem to be.”
Looking ahead to that world, Father ends his notes: “Pray for me . . . Jim.” And I ever will.
Bruce Fingerhut
Here is a man who taught hundreds of students every year, always reading and responding directly to them rather than using an assistant. He suffered from physical difficulties and never spoke of it; he wrote major articles from history to philosophy, from basketball to Catholic understanding.
Here is a man whose relations with young and old alike centered in intelligence, learning, and friendship, but in the end, I believe, the greatest gift he has given us is purpose. For all of us who have had the honor to know him, it is to realize how green is our valley.
Matthew Hanley
I did not have the benefit of Fr. Schall’s instruction in college. But at that age, like most products of our ambient culture, I doubt I’d have absorbed a fraction of the wisdom he had to offer. Still, a time came, early in my professional life, when I needed to go digging for meaty Catholic commentary:
for firm fidelity in a hostile cultural environment, and for felicity in putting forth the relevant reasoning. And like anyone who goes looking for such things, I found the name Schall.
Thank God Schall did not limit himself to the classroom! His prolific corpus is a lifetime act of generosity; his wide range of subject matter attests to the interlocking truths of the faith and of reason he so cherished and defended at every turn. But what impresses me even more is the fact that he has done all this while enduring, shall we say, rather dispiriting developments in higher education – when most curricula typically frown upon confronting cultural collapse, even with good cheer.
Few will match his output, but we will need many to emulate his faithfulness – in a time where that quality may well mean an uncomfortable embrace with various degrees of estrangement.
Daniel Mahoney
Father Schall is a gifted political philosopher, an indefatigable student of the Church and the world, and one of the great defenders of the “natural order of things” – of “what is,” as he likes to say. He still participates in public and scholarly discussions with the energy of a man half his age.
I have known him since 1983, and have followed his books and writings; surprisingly, he has followed and encouraged my own work over the years.
He is one of the great Catholic critics of the ideological distortion of reality – of the lies that increasingly dominate late modernity. As the Church is tempted in this new Franciscan dispensation to once more “kneel before the world” (Jacques Maritain),
Father Schall is more indispensable than ever.
He resists the temptation to “immanentize the eschaton” – to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian project of this-worldly amelioration.
-nLucid and informed about political economy, he resists the lie that “the poor are poor because the rich are rich.”
- He rebukes the pacifist delusion that “war is always immoral and never has any legitimate justification.” Tyranny must be resisted and civilization must be honorably defended.
- He opposes the secular religion of radical environmentalism as an enemy of life and human fecundity.
- He cannot abide the self-evident lie “that Islam is only a religion of peace.” He knows that it has always “expanded by military conquest.”
- He is the scourge of relativism because he knows that a human being can know truths “about himself, the cosmos, or God.”
Turn to “Fifteen Lies at the Basis of our Culture” in his book A
Line Through the Human Heart for a brilliant summary.
All God’s blessings to our great friend on his ninetieth birthday
Brad Miner
I’ve known Father Schall (“Jim,” as he prefers) since the late 1980s, although I’ve gotten to know him well only since the launch of The Catholic Thing in 2008. Our friendship since then has been almost entirely epistolary: not letters but emails – about two per week.
Readers of his remarkably voluminous writings know of his erudition and wit and, yes, his wisdom, and all that comes through in correspondence with him, except that the formality of books and essays evaporates in the Socratic exchanges we share. (He’s Socrates, although I’m a very poor excuse for Plato.)
Jim is without question the greatest teacher I’ve ever known, and I’ve often recalled Henry Adamss’ observation that
a great “teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Schall is the man Adams had in mind.
Jim and I share thoughts about the Vatican and about college football, but I haven’t hesitated to ask him for guidance concerning spiritual matters, because, although I’m no philosopher, I am a sinner, and Jim is above all a priest – a living testament to the virtues of the Jesuit way of life. He ends every email, “Pray for me.” It’s also my most fervent request of him.
Fr. Gerald E. Murray
Is there such a thing as an ideal Jesuit? Of course! The early generations of Jesuit missionaries and teachers became the standard in the Society of Jesus. Fr. James Schall embodies many characteristics of Jesuit saints such as Robert Bellarmine and Peter Canisius.
In my grateful experience of eight years studying under Jesuits, I came to know that
a true son of St. Ignatius is above all a convinced Catholic who uses the intelligence given to him by God to promote the Faith by teaching and writing and, most importantly, by living that Faith. Fr. Schall is one of that breed of bold men who entered the Society of Jesus, learned exactly what was expected of them, and so lived with great fidelity.
An old Jesuit high school teacher liked to remind students that “knowledge makes a bloody entrance.” These days, the same goes for knowledge of Catholic teaching. Unreflective prejudice against anything that contradicts popular assumptions is the enemy of all serious Catholic professors. Educating students in the truths of the Faith involves moral combat. Fr. Schall has valiantly carried out that battle in the lecture hall and through his outstanding writings for a long, long time.
Thank you, Fr. Schall for being the true son of St. Ignatius that you are.
We thank God for men like you know that we need today exactly what St. Ignatius proposed to his first followers: to make Christ known and loved ad majorem Dei gloriam. Happy 90th Birthday!
Michael Pakaluk
A religious conversion in college taught me I almost knew nothing of the long history of thinking about ultimate things. Then Schall’s
Another Sort of Learning pointed me to a “second education for which all education exists.”
It was not adventures of ideas, but of truths, through books.
“Anyone can get an education if he can read” – but one must take care to read “books that tell the truth,” which are rare. He looks over a fine old copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He loves Cicero and finds himself wondering how often Johnson mentions Cicero. The adventure begins.
It’s an adventure still. But in the future it will actually be a “third education.” It will be even harder to discover, because it will remain essentially contemplative: nothing electronic, nothing glowing, simply symbols on a page that capture someone’s speaking to us.
Schall will be speaking to one of those future students, who will even more need an education, despite being in college. Someone may text then, “Mr. Smith had somehow found a book, a well-preserved first edition of Schall’s
Another Sort of Learning, the cover of which I damaged in my enthusiasm to open it.” And he’ll find there lists of truthful books, and by taking the hand of that author, he will meet: Plato and Aristotle, Knox, de Lubac, and Pieper. And, like us, as he embarks on his adventures, he will glow with gratitude for meeting, too . . . Fr. Schall.
Fr. Paul D. Scalia
I still can’t keep up with him. He’s been retired for several years, and I’m still chasing his writings and his recommendations. And I wasn’t even one of his students. At least not officially.
I met the famous Father Schall (“He’s a good Jesuit….at Georgetown”) in 1996, when I was a newly ordained, 25-year-old priest. He and I somehow started getting together for lunch. He seemed old even then. Every so often we would meet at Georgetown campus and then – at his rapid pace – walk several blocks to Martin’s (of course).
Lunch conversation was a round robin of who thought what about this or that. Without holding forth he was instructing. Nor was he an ivory tower professor. Conversation could be as much about handling pastoral situations as about having him explain Strauss (again). Several days later I would inevitably receive a thank you note. . .and a packet of articles to read.
It was an important and timely lesson. The temptation for the newly-ordained priest is to pour himself into parish activities. Seminary and study are in the rear view mirror, and now he can get down to real work.
Father Schall provided a reminder of the priest’s need to continue reading and studying – for the sake of his pastoral work. It was Saint Francis de Sales who said that for a priest study is the eighth sacrament. It was Schall who taught it to me.
Cynthia Searcy
When I was an undergraduate at Georgetown, Fr. Schall distributed a column to the class titled “Schall at 75.” The student sitting next to me leaned over and said, “Our children will probably be assigned ‘Schall at 105.’” We’re now at the half-way mark. As these tributes attest, Fr. Schall is a rare scholar, writer, friend. But I think Fr. Schall would agree, that there is nothing he excels at more than as a teacher.
I found his use of the Socratic method terrifying, at first. But older students gave me some tips: 1) Always remember when Aristotle died; 2) Never, ever, answer: “I don’t know.” This was the only wrong answer, and evoked a swift, “Yes, you do!” (Once he learned I was from Kentucky, it was also good to be keep up on college basketball.)
His use of the Socratic method, I came to realize, reflected his general outlook on teaching. Students are each worth knowing, and should be treated individually, capable of growing in knowledge and virtue, not coddled or pandered to. Miraculously, this made him widely popular. His courses were almost always over-subscribed and he was repeatedly selected professor-of-the-year by the senior class (my own included).
His legacy will be that he never wavered in the conviction that human beings are capable of knowing the truth, and that with good teachers, young people could be inspired to want to know “what is.” I am among thousands eternally grateful for his commitment to that vocation.
Fr. Robert Sokolowski
Dear Fr. Schall, You are retired from Georgetown and no longer lecture in a classroom, but you’re still teaching a grateful audience; they are all over the country and in far corners of the world. The Internet, like the printing of books, was invented for people like you.
You are never dull, always insightful, and at ninety, as energetic as ever; and you are one of the best friends we have. With God’s grace, may you continue to express His Word and, in the spirit of St. Ignatius, bear witness to His great glory.
David Walsh
Dear Jim, we wish you a Wonderful 90th Birthday celebration. We miss not being able to invite you to Chesapeake Beach for dinners where we can parade you, especially for visiting Irish, as our own bona fide celebrity. Thank you for the friendship you continue to sustain over the years, especially in your non-retirement!
You definitively explode the myth that there is any retreat from the life of the mind. Your reflections on a variety of challenges, ecclesiastical, political, and existential, continue to dazzle and amaze, as you whisk us aloft on those intellectual leaps that are vintage Schall. But beyond your global well-wishers and admirers, there is one group in particular for whom you remain the indispensable.
I refer to the lonely scribblers who, when they toil, know not whether any one will read or care. As a lowly member of that fraternity I can assure you we take great consolation in knowing there is at least one who will take up the volume and read it with penetration and generosity. It is in this way you have become the silent partner of the work of so many who sit at their desks and wonder, “what will Schall think of this?”
David Warren
I first became aware of Father Schall as a reader, nearly forty years ago – decades before I was received into the Catholic Church, and when I had only recently become a Christian. A notice of his wonderful book,
Welcome Number 4,000,000,000, appeared somewhere, and I began hunting his by-line thereafter in magazines, or anywhere.
My interest was, back then, more in politics than religion. For whatever reason I had come to associate contemporary Catholics with the battier forms of liberalism.
But in Schall, as in another Catholic thinker I discovered in the later 1970s (a certain Joseph Ratzinger), I found a quality of mind that changed this outlook. Or rather,]at least four qualities, intersecting: real learning, good sense, generosity of spirit, and patient courage or steadfastness.
Through the intervening years I have come to know him as companion and guide – as teacher – without knowing him personally nor ever sitting in his class. The question, “What would Schall think?” has often acted as a restraint upon me, and more often still as an encouragement.
By now his name alone comes to mind as an assurance, that even through a long crisis in “Western Civ” or Latin Christendom, God has provided. And even among our contemporaries, we will never be without truly Catholic companions and guides. He is utterly reliable: as high praise as I could give for any man. What a blessing he has been.
And Fr Jim himself, of course, contributed his own thoughts...
Schall at Ninety
by James V. Schall, S.J.
Beginning with “Schall at Seventy,” I have written a birthday comment (January 20) every five years. At seventy, I would be teaching at Georgetown for another fifteen years. On December 7, 2012, I gave my “Last Lecture” in Gaston Hall. On the first day of Spring, 2013, I flew to California, and have resided here in Los Gatos since. It is a good place for tired and retired Jesuits. Some forty of my various classmates have died here since I arrived. We do not call this center “The Waiting Room” or “The Last Assignment” for nothing, but all in good cheer.
In reading Brad Miner’s book,
The Compleat Gentleman, I came across the following passage: “But, God willing, we will all turn ninety, and then what? We can plausibly think of fifty as young, but ninety?” Indeed.
This Los Gatos house is where I entered the Order as a novice in 1948. I left here for studies at Gonzaga University in 1952. This second run is already longer than the first. One manages to keep busy. The computer enables many things. I have had a number of books published since I arrived here.
In one,
Remembering Belloc, I recalled his
Path to Rome. There he said something pertinent to what concerns us as we age. In 1901, Belloc reflected that,
in later years, we begin to worry about the human side of the supernatural Church.
When I arrived here five years ago, I did not suspect that the center of the Church, Rome, where I taught for twelve years, would turn out to be something to worry about. In recent decades, the Church seemed to be in sure hands. Now many people I know throw up their hands and wonder what will collapse next. My books,
Catholicism and Intelligence and
The Modern Age, more or less spelled out the world as I came to see it.
A former student, Scott Walter, recalled the annoyance that Walker Percy felt when constantly asked in interviews
why he was a Catholic. He simply inquired: “What else is there?” My experience finds this to be the most productive of answers. See what you come up with in trying to find something better.
On examination, what is claimed to be better almost invariably turns out to be worse. One good thing about evil and sin is that we can think about them with a cold eye. But just because nothing is better does not prove that no basic problem exists at the center.
In retrospect, much of my life consisted in recommending things to read. I discovered Plato at a relatively advanced age. At Georgetown, every so often, I would spend a semester with a class in which we would read as much of Plato as we could.
To read Plato, however, it helps to be well-grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas. Few are more helpful in putting all these together than Charles N. R. McCoy, Josef Pieper, Joseph Ratzinger, and Robert Sokolowski. I had been fortunate in my early studies to have had as teachers Clifford Kossel, S. J. and Heinrich Rommen.
When asked what “field” I was in, I usually said “political philosophy.” But lest that sound hopelessly narrow, I argued that from this beginning one could and should go in many directions. If there is any “distinct” Schall contribution to political philosophy, it is basically distilled in my
Political Philosophy & Revelation: A Catholic View.
The essential point is that
reason and revelation belong together in a non-contradictory way. But we see this only after acknowledging what questions that philosophy can ask but not answer by itself. At this point, we become aware that an intelligence is found in revelation. The mind of revelation and the mind of reason have the same origin.
What I best like to write is the short essay –
The Satisfied Crocodile (American Chesterton Society) is the latest collection. What I like to recommend are short books that take an unsuspecting student or curious adult to the heart of things. Such books can be found. Suggesting them was the burden of
Another Sort of Learning and
Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught.
Ultimately, “teaching” consists in two things: 1) the teacher and the student together read the same books that bring both to the truth, to the heart of things (Plato is the quickest way); 2) A professor, to recall Frederick Wilhelmsen, must state, over the years, what he has learned in his teaching.
That Schall at ninety has said all that he has to say is probable, but don’t count on it! As we age, we can, with Belloc, worry about the human side of the supernatural Church. But about Schall’s corporeal side, little leeway is left. The words of the rousing old tune state it best: “The Old Grey Mare she ‘ain’t’ what she used to be, many long years ago.”
Last Christmas, Fr. Schall had a post-surgery crisis that was quite critical, but he recovered soon enough, not just to celebrate his 91st birthday, but also to resume writing right away for his usual outlets - The Catholic Thing, Crisis magazine, and Catholic World Report.
I should have known something was amiss again when he failed to 'react' to Benedict XVI's latest essay, much less the Notre Dame fire, and I thought he would link them up in his inimitable way. I will never forget how, within hours of the Vatican's publication of the Regensburg lecture as soon as it had been delivered - even before the global wave of malice that washed over it 24 hours later - Fr. Schall posted online for the world to read a full-bodied appreciation of the lecture for the seminal intellectual and moral landmark that it was, the first great address of the 21st century. [Does anyone remember anything comparable? Other, that is, than the subsequent September addresses to the world that Benedict XVI delivered in Paris, London and Berlin, not forgetting his undelivered address for La Sapientia University.]
Dear Father Schall, now you rest in God. Pray for us and for the Church and faith you served so well.