Father James V. Schall, S.J., is a legendary professor emeritus of government at Georgetown University. Having “retired” in December 2012 at age 84, after 35 years there, he is still writing profusely from a Jesuit retirement home in Los Gatos, Calif. His most recent collection of essays is The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures. He talks with National Review Online about the year in review, the pope and the family, and much more. — KJL
Kathryn Jean Lopez: What have been your predominant thoughts about happenings around the family in Rome?
Father James V. Schall, S.J.: For a Church that prided itself on the clarity of its thought and its rootedness in revelation and tradition, things seemed at times a bit murky. A friend of mine says that he never reads what the media say that the pope says, but only the text. Others point out that the media only stresses what it wants to hear, what will make headlines. So it sounds to many like the Church now has no problems with an active gay lifestyle or divorce. Or it is assumed that it’s just a question of time until these are approved. The fine print of the text does not say such things; but, for many, it is already “a done deal.” Cardinal Francis George said that one of the things that he would like to ask the pope, when these confusions arise, is: “Why does he not clarify himself?” Jeffrey Mirus and George Weigel think that, of late, the pope has realized that he must do this. The last thing we need is a fuzzy Church. But fuzziness abounds in our time. That is what conforming to the culture comes to mean.
Lopez: What is significant about Pope Francis?
Father Schall: One of the Renaissance popes was said to have remarked, “God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.” Actually, I think Francis enjoys being pope. He wants everyone to love him. Like John Paul II, his very presence generates attention and enthusiasm. We have come to expect him to say something that requires tons of explanations.
I have never been much impressed with his riding in a small Fiat, being called Bishop of Rome, not Pope, not wearing all traditional garb, or living in a hostel. Something may be gained by this, but something is lost also. The pope is very talkative. I try to read the reporting of his daily homilies. They are not official texts. They are quite lengthy. Often they are very good; almost always they have a personal recollection of his own life in Argentina. But for me, the most important thing about Francis is his remark that the most significant document published after Vatican II was Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi. Francis’s agenda is contained and not contained in this statement.
Lopez: Is the Cuba news a hopeful development?
FATHER SCHALL: I listened on TV to Raul Castro affirming in the Cuban assembly that this initiative was a victory for the Cuban revolution. As far as I can see, he was simply stating a fact. The Cubans gave up very little. They still have troops in Venezuela and enforcers about in other areas. They do not change any major issue unless it is in their favor.
Both John Paul II and Benedict wanted relations with Cuba opened up. Many people have been imprisoned and tortured in Cuba. Many of their relatives are now in the States. If we listen, they give vivid descriptions. Cubans have never managed to rid themselves of the Castro brothers. One has to admire their tenacity and shrewdness in holding on to one of the world’s most closed absolutist systems.
I suspect that this new policy will do more to change the United States than it will to change Cuba. Cuba is a country of very intelligent people, many of whom have fled if they could. No doubt, in the post-Castro era, Cuba could seek to imitate China, where absolute control is retained with a transformed semi-state capitalist economy. (I have argued that Fidel is already “immortal” and, unlike Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and friends, he and Raul will be here forever sitting on top of the Cuban people!)
Lopez: What do you make of the general lack of attention to the potential extermination of Christians in Iraq and Syria?
FATHER SCHALL: The elimination of all non-Muslim peoples from what are called Muslim lands is part of the overall vision of Islam. This goal has always yielded to feasibility in given areas. But its hope is what motivates those who maintain that the world should all be Muslim and worship Allah in the way prescribed in the Koran.
In no Muslim land is there a significant minority of non-Muslims. Most of the Muslim lands were once Christian. When Christian armies were defeated, the subject peoples mostly became Muslim or remained a second-class, tax-paying minority. What we see today, the cleansing by brutal force, is not particularly surprising to anyone who knows history. The only thing that surprises me is the surprise that people show in witnessing it. The surprise leads to a paralysis about whether anything can be done about it.
Christians in the Near East read the writing on the wall. They know their fate. They get out if they can, whoever pleads that they stay. Many are simply butchered in the process. The world looks at yet another unsolved problem. Part of the issue is the unclarity about what Islam is. Some desperately, in spite of evidence, hold that it is a simple religion of peace. Others read the history and the Koran to find out that it is also a religion of jihad. Muslims themselves are caught in this contradictory difference.
What is behind the issue, of course, is the voluntarism that grounds the Muslim understanding of itself. This philosophy is a necessary option if one is to maintain the coherence of the Koran itself. If good and evil are based on the will of Allah, if we are infidels when we refuse to deny that the all-powerful Allah can be limited by Logos, then we really have few grounds of communication unless we ourselves become overt or covert voluntarists and deny any objective order but that of our own wills.
Lopez: What’s most dangerous to man today?
FATHER SCHALL: The most dangerous thing to man today is the same as it was in Eden — namely, his own free will, something itself also essential to his being and dignity. We keep hearing that something else, like guns, or bombs, or technology, or earth warming, or some such, is where we should be looking. Such answers serve to deflect us from our souls, from our inner order or disorder. In order to protect ourselves, we have to become relativists or ourselves voluntarists, so that we do not have to face the nagging sense that we are first to order ourselves by some standard that we do not ourselves create.
But voluntarism is itself a claim of a truth, a truth that there is no truth aside from whatever God or man wants, whatever it is. The free will, however, is itself ordered to what is, to reality, a reality that in fact reveals its own order, an order given to us, not made by us. Man, to be man, is made to affirm the truth of things, including the truth of his own being. Thus, what is most dangerous to man is the theoretic and practical denial of truth and the subsequent affirmation that the will has no relation to this truth.
Lopez: A new collection of your essays just crossed my desk called The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures. What’s different about this book?
FATHER SCHALL: Like all books that one writes, it presupposes every other thing he has written. This book follows, in particular, on two earlier books: On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing and Reasonable Pleasures. In one sense, this present book is a defense of the short essay as one of the great literary forms. I wrote an earlier book, Remembering Belloc, in which I remarked that Belloc is the greatest essayist in the language. I have always been fascinated with the essay, with how much one can put into a short space.
So this is a collection of some 53 short essays that I have written in recent years. I have often been struck by Aristotle’s teaching that the activity of knowing is itself a pleasure, perhaps our highest pleasure, in which all other pleasures take their order. The pleasure of knowing, it has always struck me as both a student and a professor, is at the heart of education and through it of life itself. All of our faculties have their own proper pleasures. They are there to encourage the act’s proper purpose. Inner disorder in our soul comes when we separate a pleasure from the purpose of the act in which it properly exists. We can do this separation. It is easy to do.
But this is precisely why the classical issue of virtue, as Aristotle understood it, is so important. We are to rule ourselves at the cost of not reaching that kind of being we are intended to be. But these essays are mostly lightsome. They are intended to make the point of the book: that, for most of us, some “classical moment” arrives when something of beauty, truth, or delight so strikes our soul that we know that we are being taken out of ourselves by being ourselves, beings related to what is.
Lopez: So this is retirement?
FATHER SCHALL: Retirement was never intended to mean “Stop doing anything.” A lot depends on one’s health. I live in a house with some 60 or 70 fellow Jesuits, most of whom I knew in years of studies. They are in various degrees of decrepitude, as I like to put it. We are encouraged to keep as active as we can. Sixteen men, all friends and colleagues, have died in the less than two years since I have been here in Los Gatos. As I like to put it, “Here we do not have to meditate on the four last things; we just have to go down to breakfast in the morning.” Human life has its own cycles, as we read in the Psalms, in Cicero, and in Socrates. It is all right.
Lopez: Do you have any favorites of your books and collections that perhaps felt more urgent and vocational than others?
FATHER SCHALL: I suppose that I would have to distinguish the books that I have written about political philosophy from the others. In retrospect, what I found myself working through in the political-philosophy books was the relation between philosophy, revelation, and politics. My last book, Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic View, I think, brings it all together in terms of how reason and revelation are related in a coherent way that makes the questions that arise in political living ultimately intelligible. As I look back at the books that led up to this most recent book — The Politics of Heaven and Hell, Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy, Jacques Maritain: A Philosopher in Society; Roman Catholic Political Philosophy, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, The Regensburg Lecture, and The Modern Age — it seems clear that I was wrestling with the same issue of how do things fit together in such a way that they make sense and do not contradict each other.
As I said, I am rather addicted to the essay. I was always moved by Chesterton and Samuel Johnson, as well as Belloc. Schall on Chesterton is a collection of my essays on that extraordinary man. Aquinas gets in there with his ability to state things so clearly in such a brief space. I am particular fond of the collection called Idylls & Rambles, obviously a title mindful of Johnson. What I call my “English book” — The Praise of “Sons of Bitches”: On the Worship of God by Fallen Men — has become something of a rare book, but it will be given an American edition by St. Augustine’s Press. Some of my best essays are in this oddly titled book.
When I am asked which book of Chesterton I like best, I usually have to say, “The one I last read.” But in my own case, I suppose that I have to say On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs. It was with that book that, I think, I saw how and why things fit together and “do not fall apart,” except by our own free agency. It is in these later books that Plato becomes more of a force in my writings. My essay “On the Death of Plato” in The American Scholar was a turning point.
Lopez: Do you find yourself gaining a clearer understanding of Christmas with each year?
FATHER SCHALL: Funny that you would ask that question. I have written many, many essays on Christmas over the years. I never thought of collecting them. I just wrote an essay entitled “The Mystery of His Nativity” at the Catholic World Report and “The Reason for the Season” at the Australian website MercatorNet. Monsignor Robert Sokolowski at the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America remarked that opposition to Christianity does not come from disbelief in God but mostly from refusal to accept the Incarnation and Nativity of Christ. This is correct, I think.
So we really get a clearer understanding of Christmas when we see the increasing force used against even mentioning it. It is the central truths of our existence that will cause the most adamant and violent type of rejection. This opposition means that it is this event, its understanding, that is most central. I often like to cite Benedict XVI’s book Jesus of Nazareth. Here he goes through the history of every objection to the truth of Christ’s Incarnation and Nativity. In the end, the objections do not hold water in reason. The conclusion is simply that the Child born in Bethlehem was the Son of God, as He said He was. This fact is the clearest understanding we can have. Since it happened, the world is not and cannot be the same.
Lopez: Pope Francis talks a lot about treasuring people as they get older. From your current perch, what’s the wisdom you might download about this?
FATHER SCHALL: I like those words — treasuring, perch, wisdom, download. We are in fact “perched” in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking the Santa Clara Valley. I do like the notion of “treasuring” our friends. And I have never quite learned the knack of downloading anything. As to wisdom, I found the following passage in Mario d’Souza’s new Maritain reader, Being in the World: “The wisdom of salvation is not open to our achievement. We do not carry a key that opens heaven. Heaven itself must open the gates.” Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi, rightly pointed out that the modern world is explained when we realize that it seeks to achieve by scientific, political, or economic means in this world those ends that Christianity held must be the results of revelation and grace in the next world. This conclusion is one that I had drawn from my reading of political philosophy, drawn out especially in The Modern Age.
This reflection takes us back to Francis’s remark. It is not states and institutions that gain eternal life, only actual, individual human persons with names and real existence beginning in this world. Each person has his ultimate origins in the Godhead. He is intended to return to that origin. But he must decide to do so within the context of his life. That decision is what this world is about, at bottom. We “treasure” this destiny in each person we meet. Chesterton cited his father to the effect that he would thank God for his existence even if he were to be damned. Our lives are gifts, not results of sheer accident with no meaning. This origin and destiny is the basis of the dignity of each person. No one is automatically or necessarily saved. This too is our dignity, for if we do not choose to receive a gift, it cannot be given to us. This decision is the drama of our personal existence.
Lopez: What’s the most important lesson you could impart, if someone reading you never read another word you had written or said? Perhaps something I could tweet, if you’ll forgive me. (Tweeting seems a far cry from your using the Socratic method as a guest lecturer in my freshman year at Catholic University in Politics 101.)
FATHER SCHALL: Goodness, I am always astonished that Kathryn remembers a fleeting Schall visit to CUA. Nor is Schall up to date on tweeting. I have heard that the pope runs a lively tweeting site. It occurs to me that if a pope can do this, Schall should be able to figure it out. I presume infallibility is not a major factor here. I have no idea what are the minimum and maximum limits of a tweet entry. In any case, try this: “Revelation is addressed to the human intellect when the human intellect is most itself, most engaged in seeking the truth apart from a man’s own passions and disorders of soul. But even here it is a gift, like our existence itself.”
Lopez: Having done so more than a few times, can you tell us what is a good way to start a new year?
FATHER SCHALL: Yes, “having done so more than a few times.” I have always liked the end of the year, the Halcyon Days, winter days, when storms abate at sea, the long nights and short days, Christmas, the end of a year. An “old” year ends and a new year “starts.” One of the Psalms says that we are given 70 years, 80 if we are strong. We are also told that we know not the day or the hour. Burke, I believe, said that there is no old man who does not think he will live through the next year.
A good way to start a new year is to understand that you can in fact “start” things. You can change things, make them better, make them worse. But you cannot do this unless you know the difference between better and worse. So the best way to start any new year is to be sure you know this difference between good and evil, and, in consequence, choose to do well, and be content, even if things do not go well.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online, and founding director of Catholic Voices USA.