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LAST VOLUME: CANR 116
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PERSONAL
Born January 20, 1928, in Pocahontas, IA; died April 17, 2019, in Los Gatos, CA; son of Lawrence Nicholas and Mary Schall.
EDUCATION:Gonzaga University, B.A., 1954, M.A., 1955; Georgetown University, Ph.D., 1960; University of Santa Clara, M.A., 1964; Oude Abdij, Drongen, Belgium, Jesuit studies, 1964-65.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, priest, and educator. University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, instructor in political science, 1955-56; ordained Roman Catholic priest, Society of Jesus (Jesuits), 1963; Gregorian University, Istituto Sociale, Rome, Italy, lecturer, 1965-77; Georgetown University, Washington, DC, associate professor in Department of Government, beginning 1977, professor, retired 2012. Associate professor in department of government, University of San Francisco, spring, 1968-77. Member of Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace in Rome, 1977-82, and National Council of the Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984-90.
MIILITARY:U.S. Army, 1946-47.
POLITICS: Democrat. RELIGION: Catholic.WRITINGS
Also author of booklet Political Theory and the Jesuit Intellectual Tradition, Institute for Political Philosophy and Policy Analysis (Chicago, IL), 1979. Author of introduction, Acquaintance with the Absolute: The Philosophy of Yves R. Simon, edited by Anthony O. Simon, Fordham University Press (Bronx, NY), 1999. Contributor of articles to numerous periodicals, including Commonweal, World Justice, New Scholasticism, Catholic World, America, Social Order, Modern Age, Worship, and Thomist, and to political science journals. Columnist for Crisis, Midwest Chesterton News
SIDELIGHTS
A Jesuit priest and professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., James V. Schall wrote about a wide range of topics and issues, including politics, religion, and philosophy. As he explained on his personal Internet site, “My academic background is in political philosophy, itself a discipline that touches about everything.” Schall went on to point out, “Naturally, I am interested in religious issues. It often takes a lifetime to manage well one discipline or even one small area of a discipline. Still much is to be said for being interested in many things. Somehow, if you stick to just one thing, you will find that you will not know even that well, as other things are necessary as background or explanation. Nothing is wrong with this.”
Schall once told CA: “A number of my titles are distinctly odd. The word ‘meditations’ in [ Unexpected Meditations Late in the Twentieth Century ] comes directly from the classic [Meditations] of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and is intended to be a Christian reconsideration, as well as something of an autobiography, of the classic Stoic’s own reflections. The irreverent ‘sons of bitches’ [in The Praise of ‘Sons of Bitches’: On the Worship of God by Fallen Men ] comes from the playwright Arthur Miller’s comment that we are all either ‘sons of God or sons of bitches, as God and the prophets have always held.’ The point of this book is that we are all both sons of God and sons of bitches at the same time; we are ‘not pure spirits.’”
In Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society, published in 1999, Schall presents a study of the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), whose writings influenced political thought in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. In the book, Schall explores Maritain’s understanding of the relationship among society, state, and government in the context of human rights and duties. Schall also discusses the many manifestations of evil in its political guises. “Maritain is presented as deserving attention precisely as a political philosopher because in an era of unparalleled ideological violence, he argued to and through political philosophy from a consistent metaphysics and theology,” William J. Corliss wrote in a review of the book for the Review of Metaphysics.
In On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing, Schall turns his attention to the importance of not always taking life too seriously. Schall quotes from such diverse sources as Aristotle to Charlie Brown of the Peanuts comic strip to show that wasting time is just as important as our culture’s emphasizes on achievement and utilitarian values. For Schall, two primary components to happiness are the wisdom to take time out for play and contemplation. It is these kinds of activities, he explains, that help us go beyond ourselves and relate to “our transcendent destiny.” Writing in the National Review, Michael Potemra called Schall “one of the most valuable participants in the public life of our nation’s capital; against the political obsessiveness of his neighbors, he proposes a more reasonable understanding of what life is about.” The critic further hailed the author’s “exceptional learning” and “lightness of heart.” Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, said that he found Schall’s essays both entrancing and infuriating. “What is entrancing about them stems from the religiously informed perspective,” noted Olson, who went on to point out that they infuriate “when they don’t seem to come to the point,” among other reasons. Olson concluded, “On the other hand, they delight for the same reasons.” “Over and against the excessive value that modern thought places on the practical and the useful, Schall defends the importance of leisure,” Marc Guerra observed in First Things. As a result, the critic concluded, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs “will no doubt add to [Schall’s] well- deserved reputation” as a thinker unafraid to buck trends.
In Roman Catholic Political Philosophy, Schall takes on complex topics related to his particular religious tradition. Christopher S. Lutz, critic in the Review of Metaphysics, suggested: “Roman Catholic Political Philosophy will provide rewarding reading to any student, professor, or lay reader who is interested in the relationship between religion and philosophy, especially as this has developed within the Catholic tradition.”
Schall analyzes a controversial 2006 speech by Pope Benedict XVI in The Regensburg Lecture. Writing in the Catholic Historical Review, John Jay Hughes commented: “Much of Schall’s analysis of the lecture will be heavy going for non-philosophers. But the book contains much for which one can only be grateful.” Journal of Church and State reviewer, Clyde Ray, suggested: “Schall’s book on the Regensburg lecture is a very worthwhile contribution to not only understanding the philosophical underpinnings actuating the conflict between the West and radical Islam, but also what the biblical message is for peaceful dialogue and reconciliation.”
The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays includes twenty-two essays. He interacts with the work of philosophers, including Leo Strauss, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, and G.K. Chesterton. “The Mind That Is Catholic, is a learned, insightful and stimulating collection,” asserted William Gould in America. Gould added: “The Mind That Is Catholic will be of interest to scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and to the intellectually adventurous general reader.” Writing in the Review of Metaphysics, William A. Frank suggested: “Given the complex, subtle network of ideas that unfolds throughout this collection of philosophical and political essays, the reader will be grateful that James Schall writes with uncommon grace and, indeed, with something like poetic delight in language and its power to bring truth to light.”
In The Modern Age, Schall discusses the concept of modernity and explains how it figures into religious philosophy. M.V. Dougherty, contributor to the Review of Metaphysics, remarked: “While this volume bills itself as a work of philosophy, to some readers it will seem to be too heavily theological. Perhaps this should be expected, as Schall’s contention is that the modern mind too quickly closes itself to the transcendent.” Reviewing the book in Catholic Insight, Brian Welter suggested: “The Modern Age questions the basics of the modern project and shows how tradition, largely based on western theology and the Catholic interpretation of Greek philosophy, offers a clear and wide-ranging understanding of why the Church and a faith-inspired philosophy remain the best answer to the oftentimes grisly world that we have been creating.”
Schall chronicles the life of respected writer in Remembering Belloc. Writing in the Catholic Historical Review, Joseph Pearce commented: “This book is not for the self-appointed purist or the fastidious pedant, any more than Belloc is for the pedant or the purist, or, for that matter, the puritan. Schall on Belloc is a marriage of minds made in heaven. This book is an invitation to the wedding.”
Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught finds Schall sharing his observations on learning and sharing knowledge. He highlights the attributes of a good student and discusses the value and origins of lessons passed on by teachers. Thomas P. Harmon, reviewer in Modern Age, commented: “The teacher always hands on what he himself has learned from his own contemplative activities and from those who have aided him to know what he now knows. Schall is a great—even legendary—teacher.”
Released in 2019, the year of Schall’s death, The Universe We Think In is another essay collection by the author. “Those not fortunate enough to have had Professor James Schall in the classroom would do well to add this book to their reading list,” remarked Jude P. Dougherty in the Review of Metaphysics.
While Schall had a long career in academia and has written eruditely about politics, philosophy, society, and religion, he maintained that people should keep the pursuit of learning and knowledge in perspective. “The amount of knowledge currently available to us is simply overwhelming,” he pointed out on his Internet site. “On the other hand, we are not gods. It is all right to be content with what we can know in the time given to us.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, May 11, 2009, William Gould, review of The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays, p. 32.
American Political Science Review, March, 1999, review of Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society, p. 200.
Booklist, October 1, 2001, Ray Olson, review of On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing, p. 286; February 15, 2007, Ray Olson, review of The Regensburg Lecture, p. 18.
Catholic Historical Review, 2008, John Jay Hughes, review of The Regensburg Lecture, p. 753; 2014, Joseph Pearce, review of Remembering Belloc, p. 625.
Catholic Insight, February, 2012, Brian Welter, review of The Modern Age, p. 32.
Catholic Library World, April, 1996, review of Does Catholicism Still Exist?, p. 42.
Choice, February, 1997, review of At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From “Brilliant Errors” to Things of Uncommon Importance, p. 1034.
Christian Education Journal, Mark D. Eckel, review of The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, p. 207.
Chronicles, August, 2012, Chilton Williamson, Jr., review of The Modern Age, p. 28.
First Things, August-September, 2002, Marc Guerra, review of On the Seriousness of Human Affairs, p. 81; 2009, David G. Bonagura, Jr., review of The Mind That Is Catholic, p. 61.
International Philosophical Quarterly, March, 1999, review of Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society, p. 102.
Journal of Church and State, Winter, 1998, review of At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From “Brilliant Errors” to Things of Uncommon Importance, p. 199; winter, 2008, Clyde Ray, review of The Regensburg Lecture, p. 163.
Journal of Politics, August, 1999, review of Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society, p. 862.
Journal of Religion, April, 2001, review of Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society, p. 135.
Modern Age, summer, 2017, Thomas P. Harmon, review of Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught, p. 81.
National Review, March 25, 2002, Michael Potemra, review of On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, p. 60.
Publishers Weekly, October 15, 2001, review of On the Seriousness of Human Affairs, p. 59.
Review for Religious, November, 1994, reviews of What Is God Like?, Idylls and Rambles and Does Catholicism Still Exist?, p. 943.
Review of Metaphysics, September, 1999, William J. Corliss, review of Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society, p. 199; December, 2001, Thaddeus J. Kozinski, review of Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes, p. 416; 2005, Christopher S. Lutz, review of Roman Catholic Political Philosophy, p. 914; 2009, William A. Frank, review of The Mind That Is Catholic, p. 212; 2012, M.V. Dougherty, review of The Modern Age, p. 382; 2019, Jude P. Dougherty, review of The Universe We Think In, p. 809.
Review of Politics, spring, 1997, review of At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From “Brilliant Errors” to Things of Uncommon Importance, p. 381.
James V. Schall, http://www.georgetown.edu/schall/ (May 15, 2002).
ONLINE
Crisis, https://www.crisismagazine.com/ (October 17, 2019), author profile.
Crux, https://cruxnow.com/ (January 29, 2019), Kathryn Jean Lopez, author interview.
OBITUARIES
Crux, https://cruxnow.com/ (April 20, 2019).
Rev. James V. Schall, S.J.
Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books including The Mind That Is Catholic from Catholic University of America Press; Remembering Belloc from St. Augustine Press; and Reasonable Pleasures from Ignatius Press. His later books include A Line Through the Human Heart: On Sinning and Being Forgiven (2016) and On the Principles of Taxing Beer and Other Brief Philosophical Essays (2017). His last books are Catholicism and Intelligence (Emmaus Road, 2017); The Universe We Think In (CUA Press, 2018); Run That By Me Again (Tan, 2018) and The Reason for the Season (Sophia Institute Press, 2018).
Jesuit Father James Schall, philosopher, author and professor, dies at 91
Catholic News Service
Apr 20, 2019
CONTRIBUTOR
Father James Schall, SJ. (Credit: Photo courtesy of Ignatius Press via CNA.)
LOS GATOS, California - Jesuit Father James V. Schall, who retired in 2012 after a long tenure as a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, died April 17. He was 91.
He was living in the Jesuit residence in Los Gatos and died after a brief hospitalization there.
Schall was “one of the great treasures of American Catholic academics,” a writer for Catholic News Service once wrote in reviewing two of his more than 30 books: “The Sum Total of Human Happiness” and “The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking,” published in 2006.
“Throughout his career, Father Schall has been a champion of the traditional liberal arts education, with much of his work dedicated to remedying the gaps in college-level curricula that can leave even the most impressively credentialed among us strangers to history’s greatest intellects,” the reviewer said.
Besides his books, Schall edited or co-edited eight other volumes, wrote several pamphlets and authored essays that appeared in numerous publications, including the St. Austin Review, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, and the National Review.
James Vincent Schall was born Jan. 20, 1928, in Pocahontas, Iowa. He was educated in the public schools, graduating in 1945 from Knoxville (Iowa) High School.
He was in the U.S. Army from 1946 to 1947 and joined the California province of the Society of Jesus in 1948. He attended Santa Clara University in California, then earned a master of arts degree in philosophy from Gonzaga University in 1955. Five years later he earned a doctorate in political theory from Georgetown University. He was ordained a priest in 1963. A year later, he earned a master’s degree in sacred theology from Santa Clara University.
Schall was a member of the faculty of the Institute of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, 1964-77, and a member of the Government Department at the University of San Francisco, 1968-77.
Among the sources for many of the priest’s lectures were Scripture, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton and Pope Benedict XVI. He strongly supported the pope’s critique of Western culture which categorizes it as a “dictatorship of relativism.”
“We are living in a time where the logic of disorder is at work, rejecting systematically the logic of being a human being,” Schall once wrote.
Schall was considered an expert on Chesterton; the priest edited two volumes of Chesterton’s collected works and wrote his own volume of essays on the famous Catholic convert.
He joined the faculty of Georgetown in 1977. Among his numerous honors, he was presented the Edward B. Bunn, SJ, Award for Faculty Excellence by the senior class in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown in 1993, 2004 and 2010. He was named to the 1997-98 John Templeton Foundation Honor Roll of outstanding professors.
He was on the faculty of the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought held in August 2003. Run under the auspices of the Wyoming Catholic College of the Cheyenne Diocese, the school offers university-level theology classes to church leaders “seeking a revival of Catholic culture and an antidote to the culture of death.”
Schall had several health challenges over the years, including one that resulted in blindness in one eye. In the summer of 2010, he had a cancerous jawbone, which was removed and replaced with bone taken from his leg.
“For Father Schall, the principal job of the philosopher is to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. This may sound pointless, but it is essential to understanding why the human experience of recognizing the reality of something that is not oneself is so very important,” said CNS reviewer Brent Kallmer.
“Indeed, the mere realization that the chair I sit on is distinct from me is a thing of wonder and delight for the philosopher, and - Father Schall argues - we come to know ourselves by interacting with the things that are ‘not us,'” he said. “In this, the Jesuit is emphatic that we can have no better instructor than Plato: ‘Unless there is a reading of Plato, there is no university, and it is best to escape from any institution that does not know this, does not live by it.'”
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Life and death with a Jesuit: Father James Schall on the important things
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Jan 29, 2019
CRUX CONTRIBUTOR
Jesuit Father James Schall. (Credit: Georgetown University.)
If this were your last interview, what would you say?
Jesuit Father James V. Schall had a close call at the age of 91 earlier this month. A longtime professor of politics at Georgetown, he’s been living in retirement with his brother Jesuits in Los Gatos, California.
“At 91, one has little leeway. The old hide-and-seek cry, ‘Here I come, ready or not,’ is in place,” the priest said.
“We do not know the day or hour. So, we abide in what is given to us in the now. We do not know if we are ready - we just try to be, to have faith and courage,” Schall continued.
In an email exchange, Kathryn Jean Lopez spoke to the Jesuit about life and death.
Lopez: What is best about life?
Schall: What is best about life? The first thing is having it, actually being in existence and knowing that we exist as this human being, that we do not cause ourselves to exist. We are given life. What is best about life is to know that it is a gift rather than some blind development with no internal meaning to itself as this, and not that, being.
Following on this realization of our own existence, what is best is knowing that we are not alone. We live among others and seek and rejoice in our friends. We discover in revelation that we are also to become friends of God. Our lives are often filled with sin and suffering, when we need others most, for forgiveness, for help, for understanding.
What is best about life is also the fact that we can walk this green earth, see things, and especially know what not ourselves is. We exist also that what is not ourselves in all its variety and complexity can be known to us. We are not deprived of the world or others because we are not they. Instead in knowledge, the world and our friends return to us. We know a world that is not ourselves; we are blessed.
What is most challenging about life?
Finding its order. My book, The Order of Things, goes into this issue. At first sight, the world seems a chaos, a disorder. But the earth and all in it reveal an order that is not there because we put it there. We find it already there. This is what we discover when we discover anything.
Modern (and Muslim) voluntarism will claim that nothing is stable (an old Greek view also). Everything can be its opposite. Therefore, there are no evils. But there are evils, due precisely to a lack of order. Moral evil is a lack of order that we put in our own thoughts and deeds because we reject that order that is given to us that constitutes our own real good. The challenge of life is to deal with the reasons for evil without despair or without affirming that evil is good.
Even in the worst circumstances, we strive to see what is in order. But when it is our responsibility to affirm or allow that order, we can prefer our own ideas. In doing so, we implicitly reject the being that is. Thanks to the redemption, this rejection can be repented and reordered, but even here, we are required to act in a way that confronts what is really wrong. We are responsible for our own lives. In the end, the story of our personal existence will be told in terms of how we lived and understood the gift of life that we have been freely given.
What’s most unappreciated about life?
In a way, I suppose it has to do with what Aristotle said was the beginning of our knowledge, namely, our capacity to wonder. Samuel Johnson (whose life is simply one of amazing wonder) cautioned that we are not to go about just wondering. We are to learn and come to conclusions. We are to know the truth of things, we in our very own minds. But we are provoked by what is not ourselves. What is out there beyond our ken? We are not content simply to say, “I do not know or want to know.” We come to full knowledge only gradually. And we never cease to wonder about what is out there even when we know something about it.
So, I would say that what is most unappreciated about life is the adventure of it, the sense that it is really going someplace, and this lovely world is not its ending but beginning. In addition, we do not appreciate how much we can damage ourselves and others when we do not know the truth of things and reject the order of things to impose our own order on our lives and world. We have been redeemed, but we have not been excused in our freedom. We are not able to be friends with one another or with God unless we choose; by the way we finally live, to do so.
What is the most important gift of your life, besides life itself? Your priesthood? The sacraments?
I have long said, and urged the point on anyone who will listen, that the best thing that our parents give us is brothers and sisters, and eventually along with their children. Even if my two good brothers are with the Lord, their welcome to me and our own hassles have been a context of life that has always been a consolation to me. My good sister and my two step-sisters are also here.
Of course, priesthood and sacraments, the life of the Church as I have been given in the Society of Jesus loom large. The Order in my time has provided me with education and opportunity that I could not otherwise imagine for a young man from a small town in Iowa. I have lived for a time in some great cities-San Francisco, Rome, Washington. But the great gift to me was the chance to live a life relatively free to read and write and wonder how it all fit together. I have never been a “specialist,” and it probably shows, but I have thought often about the whole. I think that leisure to wonder about what it is all about has been a great gift to me.
I have loved teaching and the students that somehow kept coming to my often meandering classes in which I was often but one step ahead of them, and not always then. Indeed, having young men and women there, to tell them just what there is to be read that will open their eyes to what is, has been part of this gift. If I could entice but one student to read Joseph Pieper-an Anthology or E. F. Schumacher’s, A Guide for the Perplexed, I would be happy with the chance of being there to see the delight the student saw on actually reading these good books, or Plato or Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas or Johnson.
Are you ready? And how do you know that you are?
At 91, one has little leeway. The old hide-and-seek cry, “Here I come, ready or not,” is in place. We do not know the day or hour. So we abide in what is given to us in the now. We do not know if we are “ready” - we just try to be, to have faith and courage. If we had certitude about these things, we would already be dead.
Are there any last words that you might like to add in the unlikely event that this is your last interview?
What an amusing way to put it! The “unlikely event”! Yes, Schall can be long-winded. I noted the other day that the complete listing of what I have published according to date and source since my first essay in The Commonweal, in 1954, comes to about 150 pages. This includes books, book reviews, chapters in books, academic essays, columns, lighter and shorter essays, interviews, letters to editors, and newspaper essays. Indeed, St. Augustine’s Press is yet to publish one of these days a collection of my earlier JVS interviews.
I think that my last words remain those that I cited from Chesterton at the end of the “Last Lecture” - that all inns lead to that Great Tavern at the end of the world when we shall drink again with our friends in that eternal life that is offered to us by our very God when he called each of us out of nothing to exist and participate in His inner life.
The Trinity has always fascinated me. A chapter in my first book, Redeeming the Time, was entitled: “The Trinity - God Is Not Alone.” Aristotle wondered if God was lonely and therefore lacked one of the highest of human values. Since there is otherness, love, and inner-relationship in God, He does not need the world to explain his glory. The world as we know it reflects His glory, but His glory as it is awaits us. Our lives transcend the world, even while we remain in this world, with all its own tragedy, drama, and uncertainties. The last words remain-we are bound for glory, Deo Gratias!
James V. Schall
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James V. Schall, SJ
Born
James Vincent Schall
January 20, 1928
Pocahontas, Iowa, U.S.
Died
April 17, 2019 (aged 91)
Los Gatos, California, U.S.
Occupation
Academic
Known for
Philosopher, author, professor, priest
James Vincent Schall, S.J. (January 20, 1928 – April 17, 2019)[1] was an American Jesuit Roman Catholic priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher. He was, most recently, Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He retired from teaching in December 2012, giving his final lecture on December 7, 2012, at Georgetown;[2] it was entitled "The Final Gladness," and was sponsored by the Tocqueville Forum.[3] Of his many publications his book Another Sort of Learning ("a reflection on different aspects of lifelong learning")[4] has been hailed as exceptional.[4]
Contents
1
Biography
2
Medical issues
3
Writings (selection)
4
References
5
External links
Biography[edit]
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Born in Pocahontas, Iowa, and educated in local public schools, he graduated from Knoxville (Iowa) High School in 1945.
After time in the U.S. Army (1946–47), he joined the Society of Jesus (California Province) in 1948, and then attended Santa Clara University in California. He earned an MA in Philosophy from Gonzaga University in 1955.[5] He earned a PhD in Political Theory from Georgetown University in 1960, and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1963. In 1964, he earned an M.A. in Sacred Theology from Santa Clara University.
Fr. Schall was a member of the faculty of the Institute of Social Sciences, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, from 1964–77, and a member of the Government Department, University of San Francisco, from 1968–77. Among the sources for Schall's lectures were Christian Scripture, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton, and Pope Benedict XVI.[4]
Before retiring, he had been a member of the Government Department at Georgetown University since 1977. In 1993, 2004 and 2010, Fr. Schall was presented the Edward B. Bunn, SJ, Award for Faculty Excellence by the senior class in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University.[6]
Schall retired from his position at Georgetown in December 2012 and moved into the Jesuit retirement home in Los Gatos, California (on the same property as the location of his old novitiate) where he continued to write books and articles for publications and websites.[4] He also continued to give presentations to small groups on request.[4]
Schall served as a member of the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, in Rome from 1977-82. He was also a member of the National Council of the Humanities, and a member of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1984-90.[5]
A prolific writer, he wrote more than 30 books and edited or co-edited 8 others. By July 2002, his website listed his authorship of 356 essays, 148 book reviews, and 660 columns, including his monthly column, "Sense and Nonsense," for the Catholic journal Crisis, and his columns in Gilbert! magazine, the Saint Austin Review, and the University Bookman.[7]
Fr. Schall was an expert on the thought of G. K. Chesterton; he edited two volumes of Chesterton's collected works and wrote his own volume of essays on the famous Catholic convert.
Schall was a vigorous supporter of Benedict XVI's critique of western culture which categorizes it as a "dictatorship of relativism".[4] Schall taught that Catholicism is where "Revelation is addressed to reason" and stated that "We are living in a time where the logic of disorder is at work, rejecting systematically the logic of being a human being."[4] Schall stated that the societal re-examination of the definition of the family "is not just an accident," but is the culture "rejecting heavenly answers and replacing them with human answers. A will is leading you, and it says there is something wrong with being human. That goes back to the whole drama of the Fall. C.S. Lewis says the ultimate sin, the ultimate disorder, is to say what is good is bad, what is bad is good."[4] A reporter summed up his statements as "If we [in society] reject the intelligibility and goodness of creation, will we still be able to hear God’s voice calling us to our supernatural end?"[4]
Medical issues[edit]
Schall survived a few major illnesses, including one that resulted in the loss of function in one of his eyes. In the summer of 2010 he had a cancerous jawbone and its attached teeth removed and replaced with bone taken from his leg.[8]
Writings (selection)[edit]
Books:
Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967) ISBN 0807113034
Redeeming the Time (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1968) LC 68-13845 ASIN: B0006BUD2I
Human Dignity and Human Numbers (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1971) ISBN 0-8189-0217-5
Play On: From Games to Celebrations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971) ISBN 0-8006-0173-4
The Sixth Paul (Canfield, OH: Alba Books, 1977) ISBN 0-8189-1147-6
Welcome, number 4,000,000,000! (Canfield, OH: Alba Books, 1977) ISBN 0-8189-1145-X
The Praise of "Sons of Bitches": On the Worship of God by Fallen Men (Slough, England: St Paul Publications, 1978) ISBN 0-85439-145-2
Christianity and Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981) ISBN 0-89870-004-3
Christianity and Politics (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981) ISBN 0-8198-1407-5
Church, State, and Society in the Thought of John Paul II (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1982) ISBN 0-8199-0838-X
Liberation Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982) ISBN 0-89870-006-X
The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984) ISBN 0-8191-3992-0
Unexpected Meditations Late in the XXth Century (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1985) ISBN 0-8199-0885-1
Another Sort of Learning (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) ISBN 0-89870-183-X
Religion, Wealth, and Poverty (Vancouver, B. C.: Fraser Institute, 1990) ISBN 0-88975-112-9
What Is God Like?: Philosophers and 'Hereticks' on the Triune God: The Sundry Paths of Orthodoxy from Plato, Augustine, Samuel Johnson, Nietzsche, Camus, and Flannery O'Connor, even unto Charlie Brown and the Wodehouse Clergy (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press/Michael Glazer, 1992) ISBN 0-8146-5020-1
An edition of What Is God Like? was published in Manila, P.I., by St. Paul's, 1995. ISBN 971-504-338-0
Does Catholicism Still Exist? (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1994) ISBN 0-8189-0694-4
Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994) ISBN 0-89870-456-1
At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From "Brilliant Errors" to Things of Uncommon Importance (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996) ISBN 0-8132-0832-7; paperbound, ISBN 0-8132-0922-6
Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) ISBN 0-8476-8683-3
Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000) ISBN 0-8132-0963-3
On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (Wilmington, DE: ISIBooks, 2001) ISBN 1-882926-63-3
Reason, Revelation, and Human Affairs: Selected Writings of James V. Schall, Marc D. Guerra, editor (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001) ISBN 0-7391-0198-6
Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006) ISBN 0-7391-1703-3
Sum Total Of Human Happiness (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2006) ISBN 1-58731-810-5
The Order of Things (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007) ISBN 1-58617-197-6
The Regensburg Lecture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007) ISBN 1-58731-695-1
The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008) ISBN 1-933859-61-X
The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical & Political Essays (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008) ISBN 0-8132-1541-2
The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, Dec 15, 2010) ISBN 1-58731-124-0
The Modern Age (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, Dec 10, 2010) ISBN 1-58731-510-6
Pamphlets:
A Journey through Lent (London: The Catholic Truth Society, 1976) 24pp.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (Leesburg, VA.: Catholic Home Studies Institute, 1993). 22pp.
Ethics and Economics (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 1998) 40pp. ASIN: B000GT3QW4
A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000) 66pp. ISBN 1-882926-53-6
Edited with Introduction:
The Whole Truth about Man: John Paul II to University Students and Faculties. (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981) ISBN 0-8198-8201-1
Sacred in All Its Forms: John Paul II on Human Life (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1984) ISBN 0-8198-6845-0
Essays on Christianity and Political Philosophy. with George Carey. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984) ISBN 0-8191-4275-1
Out of Justice, Peace. Pastorals of the German and French Bishops. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984) ISBN 0-89870-043-4
G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. IV, What's Wrong with the World, etc. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986) ISBN 0-89870-147-3
Studies on Religion and Politics. with Jerome J. Hanus. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986) ISBN 0-8191-5391-5
On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy: Essays of Charles N. R. McCoy. with John Schrems. (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) ISBN 0-8132-0679-0
G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. XX, Christendom in Dublin, Irish Impressions, the New Jerusalem, etc. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002) ISBN 0-89870-854-0
QUOTED: "The teacher always hands on what he himself has learned from his own contemplative activities and from those who have aided him to know what he now knows. Schall is a great—even legendary—teacher."
Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught
By James V. Schall
(St. Augustine's Press, 2016)
On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing
By James V. Schall
(ISI Books, 2001)
The best teachers may not be alive when we are. We may teach those who
do not yet exist, or those who do exist but whom we shall never meet.
Yet teaching depends on presence. Books make present him who is long
dead, who is far away, who speaks a language not our own, yet who is
human as we are.
--James V. Schall, Docilitas, 27
The "radical" nature of this book, the essence of which is emphasized
by the centrality of the word "unserious," is the effort to reaffirm
the truth of the central tradition of our culture: man is not the
highest thing in existence even though his being, as such, is
good--and it is good to be. Recognizing this truth does not lessen
human dignity but enhances it.
--James V. Schall, Unseriousness, xii
James V. Schall characteristically introduces his essays and book chapters with quotes he takes from authorities, which shine a light on his purpose and argument and also situate his own writing in the context of the great thinkers from whom he has learned. The teacher always hands on what he himself has learned from his own contemplative activities and from those who have aided him to know what he now knows. Schall is a great--even legendary--teacher. His valedictory lecture on "The Final Gladness" at Georgetown upon his retirement from teaching there drew seven hundred undergraduates, former students, friends, and luminaries from academia and politics to Georgetown's Gaston Hall in 2012. He has taught thousands of students directly in his classes over his teaching career, which spans six decades. For those of us who were never able to take a class from him, we can have recourse to his countless published essays and his more than forty books, which, as Schall says, make him present to us even though he is far away. For those of us who are teachers, we fortunately have recourse to Schall's books on teaching.
Schall's understanding of teaching and learning is distinctly countercultural. For example, the common view of students entering college as freshmen, as well as of most university administrators, is that the professor acts as a deliverer of content. The professor possesses information, which he then downloads into his students. His students in turn reproduce that information so the professor can evaluate what the student has learned and the university quality-control administrator can finally evaluate the professor's teaching effectiveness. Professors are employed on the basis of their ability to convey information to students efficiently, effectively, and in as high a volume as possible. Students pay tuition on this basis as well, as consumers of academic product: the information that professors deliver to them that will allow them to get jobs and advance in them. At its more elevated levels, this model of teaching and learning can include mental skills like critical thinking that can be applied in many different employment settings. The ritual of the student evaluation is supposed to present to the university administration data on consumer satisfaction.
For Schall, the model of the teachers' function sketched above is deeply flawed from its principles, because "what they teach, if true, is not theirs. They do not own it. They did not make it or make it to be true." As a result, "any financial arrangement with a true teacher (I do not here mean just anyone employed by a school system) is not a salary or a wage but an 'honorarium,' something offered merely to keep the teacher alive, not to 'pay' him for ownership of a segment of 'truth' said to be exclusively his" (Unseriousness, 64). Those who, like the sophists, charge for what they teach, for their special knowledge or their expertise, implicitly claim either that they possess for themselves the knowledge they claim to pass on to the student, or that there is some kind of method that is proprietary and in their control, or that truth is something that is made by man, not discovered as already existing (our word fact, which is almost identical with what we mean by truth nowadays, comes from the Latin word factum, which means "made"). Schall's position is therefore in the long tradition of Socrates, who claimed to be only a midwife of learning and not a teacher, and of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom the only true teacher was the truth itself. The human teacher is therefore only a teacher in an extended sense.
Schall's critique of the currently dominant model of teaching and learning leads directly to his critique of the entire anthropological and even metaphysical basis on which it is founded. This is why Schall says that human affairs are "unserious": because we are not the highest things, and we exist already in a relationship to higher things. He points out, "The highest things, including ourselves, are given to us; we do not make them to be what they are" (Unseriousness, 153). Our desire to know those things is what constitutes our being at its highest level. We desire to know naturally, and we desire to know the highest things most of all. Further, we are really capable of knowing those things. He says, "We are in principle not confined to ourselves. Nor do we want to be. We are beings who want to be related to all that is not ourselves. If we look at this fact about ourselves, we come to realize not only are we related to all things that are but we are related to those beings which are likewise related to all that is" (Docilitas, 23). Schall never tires of using the Thomistic phrase describing our minds capax omnium, capable of all things.
Even more, our desire to learn, to "be related to all that is not ourselves," has an outward drive: we find, once we have come to know something, that we also desire to share what we know. The student desires to learn and the teacher desires a pupil with whom he can share what he has learned. Schall observes, "What does it mean 'to teach'? Teaching is correlative to learning. In the end, the successful teacher and the successful pupil know the same truth, which neither of them owns and to which both are subservient" (Docilitas, 27). Knowledge of the truth, when unfettered by pride or other vices, leads naturally to friendship, since the truth is a common good that can be shared without being diminished.
One of the effects of the shift to an understanding of students as consumers has been to shift the entire, or nearly the entire, burden of learning onto the teacher. Because the customer is always right, the exigencies of the higher educational market increasingly demand accountability on the part of the professor, while decreasingly demanding accountability on the part of the student. Professors and serious students will, for that reason, be gratified to find that Schall affirms that students have obligations to their professors, foremost among which is the student's capacity and willingness to be taught--his "teachability," or docilitas in Latin. To explain this unfashionable virtue, Schall says, "The virtue of 'docility' asks: 'Are we capable of being taught by all things, especially by the highest things?' In the end, we stress the 'being capable of being taught,' rather than the ability to teach, though that too is a fine art" (Docilitas, 191). If docility or teachability is a virtue, then it also has its proper obstacles. A great deal of Schall's writing on teaching is dedicated to unveiling these obstacles.
The first obstacle to learning, Schall says, is internal and is what the liberal arts are originally supposed to address. The liberation that the liberal arts are supposed to bring about does not issue into, as Schall says, freedom as a "power to make things, including ourselves, to be otherwise, to restructure the state, the family, the inner soul. Rather it is the liberty to affirm and follow what we are wherein what we are is not something we make or define, but what we discover ourselves to be" (Docilitas, 100). The liberal arts are supposed to free us from the tyrannical desire to be the source of truth or for the truth to match our desires. These desires are what Plato and Aristotle, each in his own key, regarded as excessive attachment to one's own, and what the Christian tradition called pride.
The second obstacle is related to the first: lack of discipline and corresponding lack of an order to study. If I regard myself as the source of truth, there is no need for disciplined self-mastery; there is no need to adjust myself in line with what exists outside myself. If there is no truth outside myself, then there is no transcendent order that demands either my attention or implies the right way--and corresponding wrong ways--to come to know it. As Schall says, "To learn something, we have to be internally free to do so. We need especially to be free from ourselves, from the notion that what 'I want' is the most important thing about us" (Docilitas, 11). Schall recognizes that I am most at peace with myself and most free to learn when my desires match up with the objective order of what is. When my desires are not oriented by what is, I am a slave to them because they prevent my wanting to know the truth, which might conflict with what I want and might require me to change the way I live my life. Schall points out with a reference to Plato:
In the seventh of his Letters, Plato advises that the best way to find
out if an intelligent young tyrant--all potential philosophers are
also potential tyrants--was really interested in knowing the truth is
to explain to him how much he has to sacrifice in terms of hours of
work, singular devotion, poverty, and ridicule in order to be a true
philosopher. Our universities, no doubt, are full of young men and
women, potential philosophers all, who like the rich young man in the
Gospels turn and go away sadly when they find what they must do to be
good, to be perfect, to know the truth. (Unseriousness, 35)
The truth makes difficult demands on its devotees.
The lack of confidence that there is an order to reality that transcends me and exists independently of me has its institutional expression in the chaos that is the modern university curriculum. If there is no discernible order in reality, or at least none that can be known, then there can be no order in learning other than the order imposed by power for purposes other than the love of wisdom--to get a job, to raise consciousness, to advance the cause of social justice, etc. But what happens most often is that the material students are presented with is just a maelstrom of randomly collected subject matter, which, as Schall remarks, presents serious pedagogical challenges: "Much of our difficulty in provoking students to learn, I think, arises precisely from the sense of loathing and confusion that naturally arises when they are confronted, as they usually are, with a mass of unrelated material" (Unseriousness, 23). The contemporary situation universities find themselves in has the effect of reducing what is taught there to trivia. If the curriculum itself does not present a case for its content and structure, then students will not care about it. The question, or similar questions, about "How will this help me get into medical school?" is always ready to hand. But the curriculum will not be able to make such a case if the university, as an institution, does not affirm that it is a good thing to seek knowledge about the order of reality, which itself must include at least the suspicion that there is an order to reality. "If our philosophic presuppositions, in effect, allow no answers to any questions," Schall emphasizes, "we cannot have a university, only a debating society that allows no verdict" (Docilitas, 41).
The university itself, Schall thinks, ought to be a place of contemplation. Concerns about the world that surrounds students ought to be put on hold during this privileged time. Truth does not follow fashion, and real learning can take place only in a setting undisturbed by the urgency of practical action. Paradoxically, however, that lack of concern for practical effectiveness can be most effective. The course of St. Augustine's life, for example, was entirely changed by his encounter with one book by Cicero, the Hortensius, which convinced Augustine that he should try to become a philosopher. And because the course of Augustine's life was changed by that book by Cicero, the course of the world was changed, too.
Schall constantly points his readers and his students to the reading of great books by great thinkers. He most often refers to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and Samuel Johnson. But he also resists the fetishization of the great books or their treatment as magical talismans. Instead we ought to regard those classic books as teachers that are still in some way our contemporaries. "The classic books and the ideas that flow out of them are capable of being assimilated in the soul of anyone who thinks his way through them." When we read them, they can also read us and allow us to see things about ourselves that remain invisible otherwise. For instance, "We should try to see that Socrates speaks to the trouble in our own souls. We should realize that Socrates is still teaching us" (Unseriousness, 118). Knowledge of a text, even a great one, cannot constitute wisdom. The point of great texts is to teach, not about themselves, but about reality and how their readers fit into reality.
Even so, Schall says, it may be that we do not have time even in a whole life to master even one of the great books. The job of the teacher, especially one who teaches young students, is not to raise his students to the level of mastery of the books he teaches, but "to facilitate the first reading of his students without which a second one is not metaphysically possible or, often humanly speaking, likely" (Docilitas, 43). As with any hard task, making a start is often the most difficult step and reading a great book only once is most certainly just making a start. Reading a great book can be a thrilling experience on the first attempt, but it can also be dry or confusing and frustrating. For most students, it is more likely to be the latter. If they are not exhorted, cajoled, charmed, or even coerced and bullied into making a start, there is no possibility they will come back and reread. Schall observes that this means that a course is sometimes not completed until years after, if at all, "if [the student] is still pondering, remembering, and re-reading what he had once read and considered" (Docilitas, 45). That can be an encouraging thought for the professor, especially one burdened by academia's own "hot take," the student evaluation.
No essay on the thought of James V. Schall is complete without a consideration of the place of divine revelation. It is revelation, Schall thinks, that holds out the hope that the human task of learning might be completed. The desire for and necessity of revelation, Schall says, arises out of the nature and task of philosophy and science, which are always searching and always lacking the perfection they seek. He says,
Revelation does not replace philosophy or science. Yet the very fact
that they do not complete themselves leads to a certain wonder if
their completion is addressed to us in another way. It is not "outside"
of rational research that its limits are found, but within them....
There may be a "way" to the "completion of truth." We can choose to
close off this way, no doubt, but that very closing off would itself be
a sin against the light of the mind itself. (Docilitas, 58)
Schall's understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation points to a higher kind of docilitas the student needs: a capacity and willingness to be taught about the very highest things, to which science and even philosophy cannot themselves attain on their own.
Thomas P. Harmon is dean of humanities at John Paul the Great Catholic University in Escondido, California.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Intercollegiate Studies Institute Inc.
http://www.isi.org/journals/modern_age.html
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Harmon, Thomas P. "Unserious Docility." Modern Age, Summer 2017, p. 81+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A503309443/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=efe549dd. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A503309443
The Modern Age
by James V. Schall
South Bend: St. Augustine's Press
207 pp., $30.00
The thesis that modern ideologies are a secular replacement for transcendent religions is old hat even to the half-educated in Western society. (The phrase "immanentizing the eschaton" was coined by Eric Voegelin and popularized by William Buckley in the 60's.) And so a cursory glance at James Schall s book suggests that the author is simply recycling familiar ideas, now become historical-philosophical platitudes.
But that is not the case. Schall views his subject from an original perspective that adds both freshness and dimension to his argument that Gods plan for the salvation of man as announced by revelation, and modern mans plan to save himself through an historical project of self-realization, have a great deal in common. "Modernity" Schall says, "is essentially an alternate plan of redemption, an alternate version of the last things." Being a purely rationalist program, however, based on the rejection of revelation and the conviction that man is in need of nothing beyond himself and his own reason to accomplish his aim, it 'not only cannot achieve what it proposes, but, in its proposing, skewers and corrupts what politics and human living can be."
Schall's book was inspired by Benedict XVI's encyclical Spe salvi which he calls "a document of great profundity." In his opinion, personal and public disorders can be traced to faulty thinking, usually that of "some 'thinker' recognized as great. The great battles of the world take place first in the sometimes quiet, sometimes acrimonious discussions of the philosophers seeking to relate to what is." In the modern age, the belief that there is no truth beyond the "truth" of our own making has led inexorably to the replacement of reality by mind--what John Lukacs calls "abstraction."
Benedict says that politics must be restored as politics--that is, to the prudential practice and application of ethics to public affairs. And the reason why politics is no longer politics, Schall explains, has to do with the modern age's confused understanding of art as it relates to prudence, and of both in their relationship to metaphysics. Owing to this confusion, our age is "a quasi-artistic human creation" intended to counter and replace the traditional response to reality indicated by classical philosophy and revelation.
While art and prudence are both aspects of practical reason, they are not one and the same thing, nor are they interchangeable. Art is properly concerned with the things produced by the human world; prudence, with those with which the natural world confronts us. Art springs from will, and reason from prudence, "Understanding the modern age, then, includes understanding what has become of political regimes that embody as their justification the will and not reason as their foundation"--an assertion of human will and logic that Schall traces from Machiavelli, whom he credits with having established the standard for the new political "art." The artist has license to present a new image of man, so long as it is not degraded man. But the prudential man of affairs is never justified in making or remaking the template that determines what it is to be a human being. Hence,
by considering politics an art
rather than a prudence designed
to achieve a known good through
habit and experience, we are
said to be free to define "rights"
and "goods" however we want.
We can do [sic] this redefinition
through the narrow use of an instrumental
reason. We do not
ask about our ends as human beings
who transcend this world.
We rather ask reason to achieve
what it is we think we want, now
defined as "reasonable," in this
world.
Quite logically, therefore, issues relating to human life and its meaning are central to the modern project: abortion, euthanasia, contraception, conception outside the womb, cloning, stem-cell research, gay "marriage," "eternal" life attained through the indefinite extension of longevity.
"Modern man confuses happiness with salvation when he sees himself as the cause and source or both." This accounts for the contemporary fervency of political life, a fervency that properly belongs to the sphere of religion. Yet it needs to be pointed out, as James Schall does, that salvation on these terms, and achieved by these means, is reserved for the happy few: those few who merely happen to be walking around when the earthly paradise their ancestors strove to create has finally been achieved. As for those countless generations that came before them, they are the unhappy and un told myriad who had the bad luck to be born before the time of humanity's coming of age: humble, underdeveloped laborers and laboratory subjects subordinated to the project of a human self-perfection they were not around to realize for themselves. Life's not fair, as the saying goes.
According to Socratic principle, it is never right to do wrong. But a system of law lacking a divine component is one definition of modernity, Schall suggests. That is why Benedict emphasizes that politics is primarily a moral, not an eschatological, enterprise.
I must add, in closing, that the authors Appendix T, "One Hundred Years of Orthodoxy," is the best comprehensive essay on G.K. Chesterton that I have ever read.
Chilton Williamson, Jr's latest book. The Education of Hector Villa, is available from Chronicles Press. After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy, will be published in September by ISI.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Rockford Institute
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/about/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williamson, Chilton, Jr. "The life you save could be your own!" Chronicles, Aug. 2012, p. 28+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A307184607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=224fa1af. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A307184607
QUOTED: "The Modern Age questions the basics of the modern project and shows how tradition, largely based on western theology and the Catholic interpretation of Greek philosophy, offers a clear and wide-ranging understanding of why the Church and a faith-inspired philosophy remain the best answer to the oftentimes grisly world that we have been creating."
THE MODERN AGE
WRITTEN BY James V. Schall
PUBLISHED BY St. Augustines Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58731-510-7, Hardcover, pp. 224 PRICE: $34.50CDN
To order please see our bookstore ads or contact your local bookstore.
"The interrelationship between contraceptives, abortion, euthanasia, extra-womb conception, cloning, embryonic stem cell research, gay marriages, and the un-clarity about sex and gender follows a certain iron logic by which we deviate more and more from the criterion of what we are intended to be by nature."
With such words as the above, American Jesuit philosopher James V. Schall puts his finger on many of the less savoury aspects of modern thought, especially as it pertains to politics. Drawing on John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he analyses faith and reason, as well as unfaith and reason, agreeing with John Paul II's Fides et Ratio that a reason turned in on itself, indifferent to revelation, severely limits and even distorts itself. Envisioning a much wider horizon, revelation offers to renew philosophy without handicapping it in any way. Philosophy receives its true vocation when it encounters theology, Schall explains throughout his book.
Again like John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the author strongly connects anthropology and theology. Just as reason cannot know its vocation without faith, so man cannot know his identity and true vocation without knowing God. Our dignity comes from this knowledge, as revelation reveals our greatness by declaring God's intentions for us. The modern age attacks this in part by eliminating objective standards, whether from the natural law or from revelation. This relativizing diminishes and attacks man as well, encouraging the sort of ethical madness depicted in Schall's words at the top.
Those words also note that this relies on a well thoughtout agenda, which the author clearly explains. The modern age, having rejected God, has held onto the transcendent values of Christianity nonetheless, but aims to bring heaven down to earth. The modern age has become its own God, and believes that man is capable of saving himself.
Schall is quick to note the deeper upshot of this, again paralleling Fides et Ratio: "A 'perfect' this-world, defined as such by ourselves, produced in fact a disordered understanding of human life that was contrary to any true human good or destiny." The twentieth century's grisly mass murderers, including Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, all attempted to create heaven on earth.
Schall argues convincingly that politics has overstepped its boundaries. The Western world, having rejected the Saviour, immediately went out and tried to produce or find its own this-worldly saviour. That has led to the string of murderous political uprisings from the French Revolution onwards. The author warns: "Through the irony of Soviet prisoners, we recognized that what we search for is more than actual regimes in this world can provide."
Politics, in other words, cannot satisfy our transcendent purpose. Only the highest, God, can bring us peace. Here Schall keeps coming back to Saint Augustine's observation that our restless hearts only find peace in God.
Schall also follows Benedict XVI's reflections on the loss of the sense of sin, which enables the current Culture of Death anthropology. He quotes Benedict's observation to the Roman clergy on February 7, 2008:
"When one is not aware of the judgment of God, when one does not recognize the possibility of hell, of the radical and definitive failure of life; then one does not recognize the possibility and necessity for purification. Then man does not work well on behalf of the world, because in the end he loses his bearings; he no longer knows himself, not knowing God."
Schall's chapter, "The Brighter Side of Hell," traces modernity's logic through the notion of hell. In order to kill God, modern humans had to deny the reality of sin and its consequences, including God's judgment. Here Schall demonstrates the close connection between Greek philosophy and Christian thinking. Plato required immortality in order for justice to work out, because this world fails to satisfy so much of the injustice that is committed. Modernity's utopian search aims to make this world just. Modern politics simply cannot leave things for God's judgment, having swept God into history's dustbin.
Schall notes the sad irony that the attempt to eliminate hell in the other world and bring justice fully to this one has, in fact, led to hell being brought to earth because it has made politics itself transcendent. "Hell is what happens when we seek to eliminate death or strive to make ourselves perfect by scientific means alone," he notes.
Hell guarantees justice and brings freedom to humans, as it reflects God's granting us the freedom to accept or reject His love. Schall is at his best when he argues, perhaps surprisingly even to Catholics, that hell gives dignity to humans and to our every action by lending eternal gravity and urgency to everything we do, since God takes an interest in our behaviour.
At times striking in its forthright rejection of the politically correct and in its confidence in the truths of Catholicism, The Modern Age questions the basics of the modern project and shows how tradition, largely based on western theology and the Catholic interpretation of Greek philosophy, offers a clear and wide-ranging understanding of why the Church and a faith-inspired philosophy remain the best answer to the oftentimes grisly world that we have been creating.
Bran Welter has BA, BTh, MTh, and DTh degrees. He has been a freelance writer and book reviewer with many different publications.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Catholic Insight
http://catholicinsight.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Welter, Brian. "The Modern Age." Catholic Insight, Feb. 2012, p. 32+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A281460783/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5eb8a8b4. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A281460783
QUOTED: "Those not fortunate enough to have had Professor James Schall in the classroom would do well to add this book to their reading list."
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SCHALL, James V. The Universe We Think In. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019. ix + 208 pp. Paper, $24.95--James V. Schall was emeritus professor of government at Georgetown University, known to generations of students at Georgetown simply as Fr. Schall. Up until his death in April of this year, he continued to write with all the verve of a young man amazed by what is going on in the world, as the title of the book suggests. The Universe We Think In is a collection of fourteen essays, plus a conclusion that brings it all together. A late essay may be found in the April 2019 issue of the New Oxford Review, where he writes under the title "Mind the Gap, On the Presence and Absence of Things." The absence is modern philosophy's propensity to neglect the innate or purposeful direction of human life.
Schall was formed in an intellectual tradition represented in the twentieth century by philosophers Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Josef Pieper. A scholar of first rank, in the college classroom Schall was noted for bringing the abstract to earth and the abstruse to clarity. Given his omnivorous intellect there is hardly any contemporary issue of consequence that eluded his attention. He could quote Plato and Harold Berman of Harvard University on one page, and on the next, Charlie Brown and Lucy (comic strip characters created by the thoughtful Charles Schulz).
In the spirit of Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948), Schall speaks of "the world we discover and the world we make." In the world
we make we are not bound by any reality; we can make ourselves over into whatever we want to be. In such a polity, there is no accountability, no standard by which words and actions may be judged. "This is why classical metaphysics and Christian theology are so dangerous [to those who subscribe to this subjectivism] and are met with furious opposition." The multiculturalist's notion that all views of life are equally good and acceptable is a form of this subjectivism with its own consequences. A polity formed in such a light would have no interest in passing on the words and deeds of men who lived before. Schall expresses it this way: "To know who we are as a polity, we need to know what we have been and done. We need to know the record of great men and terrible tyrants, as well as the deeds and words of ordinary people." That is why we have monuments, poems, and written words.
Chapter 7 is devoted to the nature of political philosophy. "Politics," Schall writes, "are concerned with human action and interaction insofar as men are organized together by custom and law to attain the common good." Politics, he finds, is a legitimate object of philosophical enquiry. "The academy is," he says, "or ought to be, a sphere in which not only politics but what is beyond politics can be freely and reasonably addressed. The good of any polity requires that it create a space for what is not just political." Only through a free and open discussion of ends does the politician come to understand the good of citizens who are to be ruled and guided by the policies he adopts, given the many options available. The temptation to tyranny lurks. If a party adopts a particular philosophy, "it then allows no purpose but itself."
The only way a polity can be held accountable for the acts of its leaders and citizens is if there is a standard by which all words and actions are to be measured. Aristotle tells us that politics is the highest practical science but not the highest science as such. Practical knowledge presupposes an end that is given to it, not one that is constructed or made by man. The highest science is metaphysics or ontology, whose proper object is the whole, all there is. Metaphysics opens one to the transcendent. It enables one to recognize a natural order, the immaterial component of human nature, and to speak to the ends of human life. Schall points out that if we deny the force or existence of the metaphysical report, we are then free to construct a world in the light of our preferences. Absent an objective order to which our actions are accountable, "we are free to construct the world as we want it to be, as if the truth of things does not exist."
A particular target at this point is Machiavelli, often called the founder of modern political philosophy. A Renaissance humanist, Machiavelli is an empiricist who vigorously rejected not only the metaphysics of Aristotle but the Catholic moral tradition influenced by Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. Schall in the present volume doesn't spend much time addressing it, but he does say, "From Machiavelli's premise as carried forth by Hobbes, the good state is not one that is in conformity with human nature. Rather, it is one that corresponds to what the prince or democrat wants." What the prince wills is the law, and he is entitled to use any means, even unsavory ones, to ensure the continuation of his rule.
Modern politics is defined by the loss of accountability to a natural order. Modern politics has been an endeavor to replace the normal with the perfect polity of its own design. "In so doing it has distorted our understanding of ourselves, of our death, of our sins, of our very being."
Near the end of this volume, Schall adds this insight: "When we speak of Rousseau or Marx, or before them of Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, we are looking primarily at an intellectual history back from our time to those ideas and theses that made the world what it has become, a world in which the 'fantasies' of modern philosophers are no longer abstractions."
Those not fortunate enough to have had Professor James Schall in the classroom would do well to add this book to their reading list.--Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
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Dougherty, Jude P. "SCHALL, James V.: The Universe We Think In." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 72, no. 4, 2019, p. 809+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592039242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=90718b35. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A592039242
The intellectual life: Its spirit, conditions, methods. By A. G. Sertillanges. Translated from the French by Mary Ryan. Foreword by James V. Schall. Reprint. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 1998. 266 pp. $22.95. paper.
"Let us not be like those people who always seem to be pallbearers at the funeral of the past. Let us utilize, by living, the qualities of the dead" (15). A man who writes such lines must be read. A. G. Sertiilanges's The Intellectual Life is a necessary agent toward molding Christian thinkers. His opening chapter marks the initial salvo in the battle for "The Intellectual Vocation." These pages are choice, conditioning Christian minds to consider the importance of study, pursuit of scholarship, and the practicality of everyday living as an intellectual.
Sertillanges (1863-1948) was a French scholar of the Dominican Order. The Intellectual Life was first published in 1921 and has been used in a multiplicity of contexts from seminaries to military academies. James V. Schall, whose foreword opens the volume, encourages every serious thinker to adopt Sertillanges's intellectual practices. "Practice" is indeed the central premise of the book. Many tomes have been written on the pursuit of knowledge but only this one has been given to the practical outworking of how to practice the craft of being a public intellectual.
The opening chapter references work of the mind as a vocation, a calling, a serious, important pursuit. Virtue marks the second chapter, demanding that the scholar recognize the Spirit's demands on her life. Organization and time follow in succession safeguarding the necessity of life-space to cultivate, create, and continue the life of the mind. One must know their place in fields of study acknowledging the preeminence of Truth as well as Mystery. Preparation is the lengthiest chapter focused on reading, memory, and notetaking. The imperative, arduous nature of writing demands the full attention of the scholar who must communicate her craft to the world. Ultimately, the joyous fruit of one's labor gives cause to pause, reflecting on the good life of the person who has been gifted to use his intellect for beneficence, toward the betterment of all.
Each page contains phrases and paragraphs worthy of memorization. The scholar will be prompted toward both self-examination and pleasure (4-5). The intellectual vocation is a gift from God requiring continuity and methodical effort (3). Discipline and dedication must augment the inherent desires of one called to "this way of life" which must be initiated with "long self-examination" (4). Once the Spirit's prompting is understood, the Christian intellectual is warned "do not prove faithless to God, to your brethren and to yourself by rejecting a sacred call" (5). True intellectual vocation requires "training and tenacity" (4).
Central to Sertillanges's concern is that the Christian intellectual realize the responsibility of her life. The author asks one long question at the bottom of page 11 which is directed to those cloistered in their studies. Humility is essential as "the wisdom of the ages" is shared with others (11). Forming "rules of the mind in our present time" directs "men's hearts toward supreme ends" (12). Opportunities to allow "the gospel to speak out of our lives" (13) provides "life-giving maxims" (15) creates a continuous hunger for Godcentered knowledge.
But what good is knowledge without discipline? Organization of one's life is the core of Sertillanges's writing. Care for the whole person is of first importance (36). Fresh air, exercise, rest, diet, sleep, and self-control are all predominate concerns (37-40). Wives and children are seen as refreshment (41-46), solitude as essential (46-53), and associations (54) as encouragements. Solitude, however, above all else, is essential (55-68). Knowing one self, the best time of day to think, provides the template for chapter 4. Sertillanges reminds this is anything but a selfish pursuit; instead, a necessary, jealous guarding of a thinker's time "when he really uses it, is in reality charity to all" (99-100).
Broadminded study includes the interests of all: "everything is in everything" (102) and "intellectuality admits no compartments" (241). Synthesis, comparison, kindred disciplines, connections, and coherence suggest the continual need toward interdisciplinarity, the emphasis of chapter 5. Focused on one's specialty alone leaves one alone in his discipline, without light "for its own paths" (102). Better, Sertillanges's metaphor claims, crops be rotated so as to "not ruin the soil" (104). Yet one discipline must guide all others: theology (109-13). "The unity of faith gives to intellectual work the stamp of a vast cooperation ... united in God" (110).
Sertillanges also allows no division between content and communication, between study and practice. "Reading and study should be spirit and life" (141). Scholars use resources but must not be used by them (154-156). A "banquet of the sages" (158) mandates each intellectual acknowledge how much she owes to others' past work. Guarding one's memory through recollection and reflection is a mandate (181-186). "The expression of thought in words is an act of life" (202). Christian thinkers work "in a spirit of eternity" in the service of Truth (210). Intellectuals are intellectuals "all the time" (216) delighting in the activity of study (220).
Try to discern in every occurrence the effort that befits you, the
discipline you are capable of, the sacrifice you can make, the
subject you can deal with, the thesis you can write, the book that
you can read with profit, the public you can serve. Take the
measure of all these things humility and confidence.... Then throw
yourself with your whole heart into your task. (232)
Those who have been given opportunity and privilege of higher education now bear the responsibility of the intellectual vocation. The Christian shows her love for others by using her skills for others' benefit. Developing intellectual abilities from a decidedly biblical point of view serves others. The Christian intellectual protects his neighbor from unbiblical ideas through identification, analysis, evaluation, and refutation as well as provides his neighbor with biblical ideas for their general wellbeing as a human being. When everything is taken into account "purity of thought requires purity of soul" (22) mandating that the Christian intellectual benefits her community by committing herself to care of the soul. The practice of intellectual work must have a focus toward practice so that the eternal nature of scholarship has immediate, practical application.
Review by Mark D. Eckel, President, The Comenius Institute, Indianapolis, IN; Professor of Leadership, Education and Discipleship, Capital Seminary and Graduate School, Washington, D.C.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Sage Publications Ltd. (UK)
http://www.uk.sagepub.com
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Eckel, Mark D. "The intellectual life: Its spirit, conditions, methods." Christian Education Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017, p. 207+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A491311245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=431b4535. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491311245
QUOTED: "This book is not for the self-appointed purist or the fastidious pedant, any more than Belloc is for the pedant or the purist, or, for that matter, the puritan. Schall on Belloc is a marriage of minds made in heaven. This book is an invitation to the wedding."
Remembering Belloc. By James V. Schall, S.J. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 178. $22.00. ISBN 978-1-58731-703-3.)
Although readers of The Catholic Historical Review will need no introduction to Hilaire Belloc, the subject of this new volume by the irrepressible James V. Schall, S.J., it will be well to at least remind ourselves of why Belloc is worth remembering.
Born twelve miles from Paris at La Celle Saint Cloud on July 27, 1870, Belloc's birth coincided with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. The family home was evacuated a few weeks later as the Bellocs fled to Paris en route to England, escaping the advancing Prussian army. Educated in the benevolent shadow of the aging Cardinal John Henry Newman at the Oratory School in Birmingham and at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a First Class Honours degree in History, Belloc would become one of the most prolific, versatile, and controversial authors of the twentieth century. Less known today than his talents merit, his influence, considerable in his own day, seems to have waned. There is, however, some sign of a renewal of interest in his life and work, due in part to his association with G. K. Chesterton, whose own star appears to be very much in the ascendant.
Considering the unjustified neglect of Belloc and the more recent renewal of interest, Schall's book that remembers the man and his genius is most welcome. It is, however, important to recognize what this book is not. It is not a definitive study of Belloc's legacy in any of the many areas in which he excelled. Those seeking an in-depth study of his work as an historian will be disappointed, as will those seeking definitive discussions of his brief but explosive political career, or his importance as a poet or as a Catholic apologist. This is not a definitive study of any aspect of Belloc's considerable legacy, still less is it a biography of him. It is a collection of Schall's musings on all things Bellocian, offering the reader the perspective of a highly respected and venerable scholar who has spent a lifetime of engagement with Belloc's works and the ideas that they contain.
Schall on Belloc is akin to Chesterton on St. Thomas Aquinas. One does not read Chesterton's volume on the Angelic Doctor solely or even primarily to learn about Aquinas but to be delighted and enlightened by the genius of Chesterton's own thoughts on Aquinas. Similarly, one should not read this book solely or primarily to learn about Belloc but to be delighted and enlightened by Schall's thoughts on Belloc.
Schall rambles off in odd directions and on strange tangents, much as Belloc wandered through Europe or Sussex, diverting us delightfully with his digressions. Much as Chesterton's Rolling English Road takes us to paradise by way of Kensal Green, Schall's rolling Bellocian ramblings take us on the rolling road to Rome along which the vines of veritas are plucked, and the wines of wit and wisdom are drunk with all due decorum and merriment. This book is not for the self-appointed purist or the fastidious pedant, any more than Belloc is for the pedant or the purist, or, for that matter, the puritan. Schall on Belloc is a marriage of minds made in heaven. This book is an invitation to the wedding.
JOSEPH PEARCE
Thomas More College Merrimack, NH
Pearce, Joseph
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The Catholic University of America Press
http://cuapress.cua.edu/journals.htm
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pearce, Joseph. "Remembering Belloc." The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 3, 2014, p. 625+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A377860733/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=642141de. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A377860733
QUOTED: "While this volume bills itself as a work of philosophy, to some readers it will seem to be too heavily theological. Perhaps this should be expected, as Schall's contention is that the modern mind too quickly closes itself to the transcendent."
SCHALL, James V. The Modern Age. South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2011. 207 pp. Cloth, $30.00--In this work, Jesuit political philosopher James Schall proposes a diagnosis of the modern age, where "modem" is understood as the present or current period. The thesis of this book is that in the modern age the transcendent goals for human beings--the ones that were originally outlined partly in Greek philosophy but more fully in Christian revelation have been modified or redefined, so that now human beings attempt to attain happiness in history by inner-worldly movements and concepts. As Schall puts it, "The modern age has been built on the assumption that it could indeed establish the Kingdom of God in this world by human means." In the modern period, reason is divorced from revelation, and the project of removing evil from human existence is translated into a purely political endeavor. What is needed, in Schalls view, is a reconciliation of faith and reason, where revelation once again can inform thinking about human ends and where the human mind can be open to the whole of reality.
On this view, the modern loss of a transcendent orientation is simultaneously a loss of nature as a regulating principle. Schall takes the state of medicine as illustrative; without human nature or a human purpose as a standard, a physician's role is relegated to asking the patient "what he wants done to him," so that artistry substitutes for prudence. Additionally, contemporary debates on abortion, cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, marriage, sex, and gender are presented as further evidence for the modern age's loss of nature as a norm. Schall contends that the scientific and political methods of the modern age are largely misguided attempts to provide secular solutions to such issues as immortality, resurrection, personal dignity, love, friendship, and worship in the absence of the standard of nature.
Neither the claim that the modern period involves a secularization of Christian concepts, nor the claim that modern politics tries to be a substitute for transcendence, is a novel position. The scattered references to the theorist Eric Voegelin suggest a possible debt in this regard. The novelty of Schalls analysis consists in his development of the thesis as an engagement with texts from Benedict XVI, and to a lesser extent, with those from John Paul II.
On Schalls account, the modern age's tendency to promote reason and reject revelation leads to an inadequate view of the human condition. Schall notes that "revelationally provided answers to this question of why we exist turn out to be more 'reasonable,' even in philosophical terms, than what has been proposed in and by modernity." Elsewhere, he puts the issue more plainly by saying that "[t]he world, including reason itself, makes more sense when these doctrines are considered to be true," and he proposes that in the Christian worldview "a philosophic foundation exists for admitting their feasibility." In conformity with classical arguments, Schall defends the view that the content of revelation, while not discoverable by reason, is not inimical to reason, as revelation proposes comprehensible answers to fundamental questions. In Schall's terminology, there is a "logic" about these revelationally provided doctrines that answer key questions about life. In a chapter titled "The Brighter Side of Hell," Schall provides an illustrative example of his approach. Schall contends that the modern age has attempted to eliminate the doctrine of hell, and he vigorously defends the intelligibility of the existence of hell. After locating discussions of hell in Greek philosophy as well as in Christian revelation, he proposes that hell is a positive, reassuring doctrine, as it guarantees individual and personal dignity, and it bestows a transcendent meaning on everyday acts.
In the chapter "Judgment in Modernity," Schall examines Benedict XVI's contention that the best argument for the Christian doctrines of eternal life, bodily resurrection, and final judgment can be derived from an examination of justice, because if the doctrines were not true, the unjust acts committed in the world would remain unrequited. Following Benedict's lead, Schall references Theodor Adorno's observation that there can be justice only if there is a resurrection that allows for past wrongs to be punished. Schall concludes that the doctrine of resurrection is a more reasonable position that any modern solutions to the problem of worldly injustices.
The last quarter of the book consists of appendices. After a recommended reading list of twenty books on modernity, there is an homage to Chesterton, a short speech on theology, and a disquisition on the life of the philosopher. While this volume bills itself as a work of philosophy, to some readers it will seem to be too heavily theological. Perhaps this should be expected, as Schall's contention is that the modern mind too quickly closes itself to the transcendent.--M.V. Dougherty, Ohio Dominican University.
Dougherty, M.V.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dougherty, M.V. "Schall, James V. The Modern Age." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 66, no. 2, 2012, p. 382+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A312509410/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d950e6e4. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A312509410
QUOTED: "Given the complex, subtle network of ideas that unfolds throughout this collection of philosophical and political essays, the reader will be grateful that James Schall writes with uncommon grace and, indeed, with something like poetic delight in language and its power to bring truth to light."
SCHALL, James V. The Mind That Is Catholic. Philosophical and Political Essays. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. xiv + 337 pp. Paper, $34.95--James Schall's book presents a complex and timely exploration of the essential interconnection between politics, philosophy, and the Christian faith. His genre is the philosophical essay. In this his thirty-second book, he collects twenty-two essays, most of which were published within the last decade. The author is himself a reader of great books, and his argument develops in conversation with the masters of the Western philosophical tradition. Unsurprisingly, one encounters serious engagements with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leo Strauss, but the three thinkers who have the greatest influence on the tone and direction of these discussions are Plato, Augustine, and G. K. Chesterton. Hobbes and Machiavelli provide him with the foil for illustrating the losses and gains of classical political philosophy in its quarrel with modernity. When it comes to identifying defining elements of the "mind that is Catholic," Schall reviews the special contributions of Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, two lions of the twentieth century Thomistic philosophic revival.
One of the greater merits of this book is the way Schall distinguishes and orders the special claims of politics, philosophy, and divine revelation. First of all, he maintains that despite its relative autonomy, politics serves the higher ends of the speculative order. As he understands it, politics is at its best insofar as it establishes practical necessities for the liberation of men and women for the acquisition and exercise of moral and spiritual virtues whose objects transcend politics. Secondly, he holds that reason at work in the speculative sphere adheres to both the principles of philosophic inquiry and a trust in the faithful hearing of the Word in divine revelation.
The logic of his thesis charts an interesting circle: the action governed by political prudence is ordered to human perfection in the thought about first things, and we think best about first things when we also become hearers of the Word of God, and, since we are free insofar as we act in the light of true assessment of reality, one's faithful reception of revelation supports the truth and freedom secured in political judgment. Indeed, his careful identification and coordination of these truths permit us to understand the political predicament of modernity and its postmodern offspring, as one might gather from the following quotations: "The politicization of the speculative order is what is characteristic of modernity wherein will, specifically human will, is found at the center of both nature and human nature" (p. 160); and, "the best way to avoid both the tyranny of politician and the tyranny of intellect closed in on itself is to have a mind open both to what is and to what is revealed to us about what is" (p. 311).
For the most part the essays remain at a relatively high level of theoretical commentary. The soberest practical moment in the book comes in a chapter entitled "The Real Alternatives to Just War," where he argues "war is not the greatest evil, but at times the only means to prevent it," whether on the large or the small scale (p. 275). Against the backdrop of the today's world-wide experience of radical Islamic violence, Schall avers, contrary to prevailing pieties, that the interests of justice in the last several decades have in fact called for more, not fewer, wars. He does not trust the benevolence of contemporary agencies of international "justice," and he warns that the reluctance of Western nations to employ the violence of arms in defense of justice and freedom acquiesces to the likely tyranny of the twenty-first century, which "will not come from armies but from their lack or, better, from the lack of capacity and courage to use them whenever needed to protect justice, freedom, and truth." Schall's judgment regarding the good of war is congenial to a mind that is Catholic. Although man's capacity for predation on his own kind cannot be underestimated, it is but one of the necessities of politics in a postlapsarian world. Another factor is man's capacity to do what is in itself good and for its own sake, what the classical tradition would call the bonum honestum. In addition, beyond politics, on the speculative, metaphysical level, the real shadows of evil in human affairs do not altogether prevent recognition of goodness and beauty beyond our own making. Schall, therefore, can brave harsh realities of our moral and political life by virtue of a mind, free before good and evil, open to philosophical wonder, and liberated by an ultimate trust in the redeeming creator God whose providence expects our prudence in temporal affairs.
Given the complex, subtle network of ideas that unfolds throughout this collection of philosophical and political essays, the reader will be grateful that James Schall writes with uncommon grace and, indeed, with something like poetic delight in language and its power to bring truth to light.--William A. Frank, University of Dallas.
Frank, William A.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Frank, William A. "Schall, James V.: The Mind That Is Catholic. Philosophical and Political Essays." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 63, no. 1, 2009, p. 212+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A208638641/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=045caf05. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A208638641
THE MIND THAT Is CATHOLIC: PHILOSOPHICAL & POLITICAL ESSAYS
by James V. Schall
Catholic University of America Press, 352 pages, $34.95
For decades Fr. Schall has enlightened and entertained readers as one of America's most prolific Catholic authors. Now an octogenarian, Schall has collected twenty-two essays that exhibit the essence of the Catholic mind: "to be open to all things, including those things revealed to us, insofar as we can grasp them."
The essays range from discussions of Catholic thought to political philosophy, friendship, and law. The inclusion of "Sports and Philosophy" alongside "The Ultimate Meaning of Existence" is not an accident: For Schall, "someone who finds no fascination in watching games is probably much farther away from what is highest in our human experience than someone who does," because "games, like ourselves, exist for their own sakes." His purpose in asking questions about "what is" is to "seek not merely 'answers' but the reality itself that/s the answer, particularly the reality of others in friendship."
Like Chesterton, Schall sees friendship with God and others as the end of existence, not a means. And in order to grasp reality itself, he has befriended and engaged the greatest minds of the West: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton, Maritain, and Voegelin, to name only a few.
By beginning "in the confidence that things exist and that we can know them," the Catholic mind chooses both Athens and Jerusalem "to pursue the 'why' of things." Schall's true joy lies not in the answers but in the pursuit, which, as he often notes, ultimately points beyond this world.
Bonagura, David G., Jr.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Institute on Religion and Public Life
http://www.firstthings.com/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bonagura, David G., Jr. "The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical & Political Essays." First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 194, 2009, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A200251384/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=db1c1ff0. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A200251384
QUOTED: "Schall's book on the Regensburg lecture is a very worthwhile contribution to not only understanding the philosophical underpinnings actuating the conflict between the West and radical Islam, but also what the biblical message is for peaceful dialogue and reconciliation."
The Regensburg Lecture. By James v. Schall. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2007. 174 pp. $20.00.
In this methodical yet compendious exposition of Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 lecture in Regensburg, Germany, James Schall elucidates the broader theme latent in the Pope's speech, that is, the modern predilection for philosophical relativism. Though much popular attention was drawn to the lecture's reproof of violence in Islam, Schall effectively argues that the Pope's citation was part of a larger indictment of the modern voluntarism permeating all religion, depriving man of relating ideas of "truth" and "good" to God due to the latter's exalted and ultimately unattainable "otherness" (p. 65).
Schall demonstrates an estimable grasp of the history of Christianity and its assimilation with Greek philosophical inquiry. What both he and Benedict lament is the gradual "dehellenization" process that has robbed society of logos, through which man was able to arrive at reason through revelation. Theology in the modern state becomes classified as a mere tool for practical science, a "self-limitation of reason" (p. 103) that orients man to a subjective good with no objective limit. It is from this well that Schall and Benedict believe suicide bombers and other abhorrent practices spring. Thus the key to laying the groundwork for new relations between Christianity and Islam, and needed a renewed self-understanding for the West, is a rediscovery of the reason God directed Paul toward Macedonia and Greece. Faith and human reason, far from being in heated opposition, form a coherent whole that addresses the true-human good arid what is unreasonable.
The book's strength derives from the author's clear analysis of the Pope's speech within the context of the University of Regensburg. Schall points out that Benedict, a former professor and scholar in his own right, is giving a lecture within an academic setting that precludes disagreement on a whim, bereft of real consideration. In this sense, far from being a fiery jeremiad against Islam, the Pope's lecture is an honest attempt at an engagement with another faith addressed through reason and that must occur on a larger, cultural scale if the claim to do violence in the name of God is to be turned aside. Armed with a fine command of ancient and modern religious and political philosophy, Schall turns the tables on critics of the lecture long enough to parse each section with keen understanding and reflection, lucidly communicating the subject to an audience unspecialized in such philosophical breadth. This drawing on a range of thinkers lends important further illumination to subject matter not easily grasped by readers of the lecture alone.
In the end, Schall has done a masterful job of situating the Pope's speech within the context of postmodern positivism and its implications rot the future of theology. In this sense, Benedict sounds a clarion call for people of all faiths. It is to his commendation that Schall does not get mired in a ponderous back-and-forth about the uproar regarding the Pope's comment on holy war and instead delivers a full analysis of the speech that speaks to a message of rational unity rather than division.
One wonders, though, whether a more focused engagement on Schall's behalf with the Qur'an itself, apart from relatively perfunctory asides to myriad Islamic thinkers, would have afforded a more penetrating study for the Islamic as well as the Christian reader Furthermore, questions brought up regarding abortion and war, though certainly tangentially related and important quandaries within a value-neutral setting, merit an equally thorough discussion in a different text. Despite these foibles, Schall's book on the Regensburg lecture is a very worthwhile contribution to not only understanding the philosophical underpinnings actuating the conflict between the West and radical Islam, but also what the biblical message is for peaceful dialogue and reconciliation.
CLYDE RAY
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY
VILLANOVA, PENNSYLVANIA
Ray, Clyde
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Oxford University Press
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ray, Clyde. "The Regensburg Lecture." Journal of Church and State, Winter 2008, p. 163+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A178944167/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=905069f6. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A178944167
QUOTED: "Much of Schall's analysis of the lecture will be heavy going for non-philosophers. But the book contains much for which one can only be grateful."
The Regensburg Lecture. By James V. Schall, S.J. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press. 2007. Pp. vi, 174. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-587-31695-1.)
Was it prudent for Pope Benedict XVI to include in his lecture at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, the quotation from a Byzantine emperor challenging his Persian interlocutor in 1391 to show him anything Mohammed brought that was new save "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"? The answer to this question depends on how one defines prudence.The Scripture scholar John L. McKenzie, who died in 1991, said that for many Catholics "prudence has long been, not the virtue by which one discerns the Christian thing to do, but the virtue by which one finds sound reason for evading the Christian thing to do. 1 have never read of any martyr who, if he or she had the course in Christian prudence which I had in the seminary, could not have evaded martyrdom with a good conscience." (1)
The English historian and journalist Paul Johnson, whose radar screen has yet to register prudence, wrote shortly after the lecture was delivered:
... The Muslim fundamentalists who came out on the streets foaming at the mouth, shouting and screaming abuse, and who in Africa murdered a harmless and innocent nun, did not read the lecture or have the faintest idea what it was all about. Nor did Western journalist critics who joined in the abuse. In fact, the lecture is a cool, calm, well-documented and penetrating presentation of the case for reason occupying the center of religious life, which argues that its absence, as in Islam, is a fatal weakness. No educated and sensible person who reads it could possibly complain that it is polemical, bigoted, or emotionally hostile to Islam. Indeed, the murder of the poor nun exactly proves the Pope's point about what is wrong with Islam. (2)
Whether Benedict would be grateful for this robust defense one cannot say. His secretary, Msgr. Georg Ganzwein, said over a year later that the hostile reaction in the Muslim world surprised the pope."We only heard of the crude reactions after we'd gotten back to Rome." Ganzwein ascribed them to "newspaper reports which took one quote out of context and presented it as the Pope's personal opinion."(3) In a footnote to the published version of the lecture, included by Schall in this book, Benedict expresses his "hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that [the disputed quotation] does not express my personal view of the Qur'an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion" (p. 147, n. 3).
Much of Schall's analysis of the lecture will be heavy going for non-philosophers. But the book contains much for which one can only be grateful. "Something was said here that no one else had been saying. ... This lecture is one of the fundamental tractates of our time. It is almost the first that really understands the fuller dimensions of what our time is intellectually about." The pope's defense of reason was courageous, Schall writes, in a day when university lectures ''about the truth of Christianity and what it holds, even in Catholic universities, are greeted with claims that they violate 'multiculturalism' or 'toleration ' or 'freedom'.... As the Pope's first encyclical might be called 'Deus est agape,' so this lecture is 'Deus est logos'" (p. 123).
Without the offending quotation, the lecture "might have quietly disappeared in spite of its penetrating analysis of Western intellectual culture" (p. 23). One is grateful to Schall, finally, for rescuing from oblivion Hilaire Belloc's prediction in 1938 "that should Islam ever again acquire the power, it would continue on its earlier conquests"--words that Schall finds "in retrospect rather prophetic" (p. 74).
(1) Qtd. in Emmanuel James McCarthy, "In Appreciation of a Catholic Scholar," America (May 18, 1991), 534-35, at 535.
(2) "Thank God for a Wise, Truth-telling Pope," The Spectator (April 14, 2007),
(3) Qtd. in Zenit, July 27, 2007.
Archdiocese of St. Louis
JOHN JAY HUGHES
Hughes, John Jay
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 The Catholic University of America Press
http://cuapress.cua.edu/journals.htm
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hughes, John Jay. "The Regensburg lecture." The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 4, 2008, p. 753+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A188810542/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55f9eda9. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A188810542
QUOTED: "Roman Catholic Political Philosophy will provide rewarding reading to any student, professor, or lay reader who is interested in the relationship between religion and philosophy, especially as this has developed within the Catholic tradition."
SCHALL, James V. Roman Catholic Political Philosophy. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004. xx + 207 pp. Cloth, $65.00--Fr. Schall's book does not offer a tidy formula for the ideal state, or a grand historical narrative of the failure of modernity, or an apologetic polemic for any imaginary "Catholic" political institution; instead it invites its readers to philosophy in the strictest sense, philosophy that remains open to "all that is" in order to discover "what is," open even to questions arising from the tradition of Christian revelation. Roman Catholic Political Philosophy challenges the prejudices of modern political theory on philosophical grounds, demanding that moderns ask themselves why they have been unable to find a solid foundation for their theories. Ken Masugi has rightly described the chapters of this book as "meditations," for they approach the questions of philosophy and of Roman Catholic political philosophy in various ways, drawing a picture that develops into sharp focus as the book progresses. Three key themes are woven through these meditations: philosophical openness, criticism of modernity, and the promise of Roman Catholic political philosophy.
Philosophy that deserves its name needs to discover and to understand what is rather than to try to mold the world into an image of human ideas. Openness to all that is and confidence that the world is intelligible marked the classical political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and gave birth to the metaphysical tradition that continues through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and their successors. Metaphysics arose in philosophy because philosophers found the need to posit the existence of an underlying truth, transcending our material world, which sets real limits on human choices and provides a real measure of justice and beauty.
Modernity arises in opposition to any such limit. Born of the thought of Occam, Descartes, and Machiavelli, Fr. Schall writes, "The central problem for modernity is in the will, not in the reason, except insofar as reason itself is 'will' based or will controlled as to the intellect's freedom to see what is" (p. 120). This choice, at the foundation of modern thought, has had implications not only for politics but for all of the social sciences. "Strauss hinted indirectly that the other social sciences were disordered because they did not know their proper relationship to political philosophy, which was itself disordered in modernity by an option to ground itself in autonomous will and not in what is" (p. 81). The modern autonomous will expresses itself strikingly in the U. S. Supreme Court's Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision and in its declaration of "a right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" (p. 49). Modernity does not begin in wonder but in will; thus its quest for philosophical foundations remains fruitless because, in fact, its methods prevent it from discovering the reality that it seeks to explain.
Philosophy--genuine philosophy--begins in wonder, and remains open to all that is in its study of reality. Roman Catholic political philosophy begins the same way and is marked by its willingness to enter into a dialogue with the "revelational tradition" in which each allows the other to ask questions and propose answers that. neither could formulate on its own. Where Aristotle puzzled over the mystery of human willfulness and wickedness, Christians recognize the role of original sin and the Fall in human life. Where philosophers seek to understand the given underlying order of things, Christians seek to understand the world as a created order, with faith in the unity of truth, that is, faith that the truth of reason and the truth of revelation is the same. Roman Catholic political philosophy begins in wonder and allows itself to be shaped by its encounter with the Christian faith without becoming an ideological tool for theologians. It remains distinct from theology for, as John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio says, "Philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods" (p. 159) even as it reminds us of the limitations of philosophers. Fr. Schall cites a variety of authors to draw together these themes of philosophical openness, criticism of modernity, and the promise of Roman Catholic political philosophy.
Fr. Schall's critique of modernity, especially in chapter 8, provides an interesting complement to that of Alasdair MacIntyre. Where MacIntyre explains in detail the failure of the efforts of modernity to account for and conserve traditional rules in the moral order, by allusion and implication Schall explains the comparative freehandedness of modernity to innovate in the political order.
Roman Catholic Political Philosophy will provide rewarding reading to any student, professor, or lay reader who is interested in the relationship between religion and philosophy, especially as this has developed within the Catholic tradition.--Christopher S. Lutz, St. Meinrad School of Theology.
Lutz, Christopher S.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lutz, Christopher S. "Schall, James V. Roman Catholic Political Philosophy." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 58, no. 4, 2005, p. 914+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A133493871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8a701877. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133493871
QUOTED: "The Mind That Is Catholic, is a learned, insightful and stimulating collection."
"The Mind That Is Catholic will be of interest to scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and to the intellectually adventurous general reader."
THE MIND
THAT IS CATHOLIC
Philosophical and Political Essays
By James V. Schall
The Catholic University of America Press. 337p $34.95 (paperback) ISBN 9780813215419
James V. Schall, S.J., a well-known Jesuit political theorist who teaches at Georgetown University, is the author of numerous books on political thought, philosophy and education. His newest book, The Mind That Is Catholic, is a learned, insightful and stimulating collection of previously published essays, most of which date from the past decade and a half, although a few of them go back as far as the 1960s and late 1950s. The range of topics is wide, including chapters devoted to the political thought of Jacques Maritain, Plato on piety, Aristotle on friendship, the Trinity, medieval political thought, Etienne Gilson on reason and revelation, political realism in Augustine and Machiavelli, sports and philosophy, the just war and C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.
Yet despite their apparent variety, these essays display considerable unity of theme. For the central theme of the book, surfacing in essay after essay, is the traditional Thomistic conviction that faith and reason are fundamentally in harmony and that grace does not destroy, but rather perfects nature. Although human reason is capable to a large extent of grasping the basic structure of reality (what Schall consistently refers to as what is, always in italics), it is nonetheless limited in what it can achieve. Ultimately, reason's inquiries raise questions that reason, left to its own devices, cannot answer, and awaken longings that it cannot satisfy. It is here that revelation comes into play because it can supply (not unreasonable) answers.
Take, for example, the questions raised by Aristotle's treatise on friendship in the Nichomachean Ethics, where the possibility that human beings can enjoy friendship with God is denied because the gulf separating them is held to be too vast; or by Aristotle's conception of God as the Unmoved Mover, the self-thinking thought, a rather remote and aloof figure who seems unconcerned with human affairs. In both cases, we see the power of reason at work at a very high level and achieving great insight. Yet we are nonetheless left with an understanding of friendship and of our relationship to God that leaves us dissatisfied; we feel that something important is missing.
Fortunately, however, Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle's already rich understanding of the nature of friendship and of God and proceeded to deepen and complete it by relating it to the doctrines of the Trinity (in which God is understood as a community of three persons sharing the same nature) and the Incarnation, which teaches that God united himself with humanity by becoming human (while still remaining God). The result was that Aristotle's basic insights into the nature of friendship and the divine are preserved even as they are enlarged and elevated.
For Schall, then, the mind that is Catholic is one that is open to truth wherever it finds it, whether from reason or revelation, and that recognizes the pursuit of truth is best served when reason and revelation complement and assist each other. Not surprisingly, Schall believes that this understanding of the relation between reason and revelation has important political implications. For reason tells us, as Aquinas (following Aristotle) recognized, that we humans are political animals and that politics at its best is a noble activity. At the same time, revelation, with its teaching about original sin and its insistence on the supernatural destiny of man, calls much-needed attention, as Augustine saw so clearly, to the limits of politics. Accordingly, any sound political philosophy will be one that acknowledges the transcendent and supernatural destiny of man.
Unfortunately, beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, the dominant tendency of most modern political thought has been to deny the transcendent dimension of humanity and to identify human fulfillment in exclusively this-worldly terms. Schall argues that this denial of transcendence encourages people to invest their earthly existence with utopian expectations and to entrust the state with unlimited powers in order to realize these utopian expectations--a danger that found monstrous expression in the fascist and Communist movements of the last century. Moreover, even where it does not lead to totalitarian politics, this closure to the transcendent (often motivated by an exaggerated respect for tolerance) can also lead to a society burdened with paralyzing skepticism and moral relativism, a situation that Schall believes characterizes much of the contemporary Western world.
On the whole, I find myself in fundamental agreement with the basic argument that Schall advances in this book, and I think he does a fine job of showing how faith and reason, when working together, deepen and illuminate our understanding of reality, not least political reality. There are times, however, when his sharply negative stance toward modernity impedes the Catholic mind's openness to truth wherever it may be found. For example, he tends to be dismissive of post-Vatican II Catholicism's strong support for global peace and justice, even though this has been initiated and explicitly endorsed by the magisterium. I am thinking especially of his chapter on the just war, in which he not only rejects pacifism (rightly, in my view), but argues instead for a conception of just war shaped by the context of "the clash of civilizations" and the threat of terrorism rather than by recent Catholic teaching on just war. (He disparages, for example, the American bishops' pastoral on war and peace.)
Similarly, attempts to work toward some sort of worldwide public authority to promote the universal common good are also dismissed, even though Jacques Maritain (one of Schall's heroes) proposed something along these lines in Man and the State, as did Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963). My concern here is less with Schall's rejection of church social teaching (troubling though this is) than with his broader contention that church support for peace and justice represents a capitulation to modernity.
These reservations aside, The Mind That Is Catholic will be of interest to scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and to the intellectually adventurous general reader.
WILLIAM GOULD is assistant dean of juniors at Fordham College at Fordham University in New York City.
Gould, William
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gould, William. "When reason and revelation meet." America, 11 May 2009, p. 32+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A200105528/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3ed3b29e. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A200105528
Schall, James V. The Regensburg Lecture. Mar. 2007. 176p. index. St. Augustine's, $20 (9781587316951). 230.0l.
The uproar over the supposedly anti-Islamic quotation in it occluded the meaning of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12, 2006, University of Regensburg lecture. Including its full text in an appendix, Schall expands upon its themes. Thirteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus' "offensive" words concern the first, religiously motivated violence and the nature of God. The second theme is the loss of European Christian identity; the third, the "dehellenization" of the West. Benedict frames all three issues as matters of reason and religion. Crucial to his argument is the realization that, because of the Incarnation, Christianity doesn't conceive of God as dealing unreasonably with humanity, and as it is unreasonable to force religious belief, violence for religious ends is proscribed. Making the other themes urgent is the educational practice of reserving reason for secular disciplines only, which is why, Schall thinks, the pope made his remarks where and to whom he did. The university and professors can help reverse dehellenization by reconnecting reason and religion in teaching.--Ray Olson
Olson, Ray
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "Schall, James V. The Regensburg Lecture." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2007, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A159963214/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b5c133bb. Accessed 9 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A159963214