Pick up any of the many books by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., and you’ll immediately notice two things. First, Schall’s immense learning and erudition is to be found on every page. Second, you’ll notice his equally ubiquitous wit and humor. The combination of scholar and raconteur is rare. Most scholarly tomes are dry as mummies and obscure as the hieroglyphs that adorn their tombs. Most tellers of tales craft their shaggy baggy stories for the mere amusement of their audience or perhaps themselves: their rhetoric a source of diversion rather than enlightenment. Those who successfully combine the virtues of scholarship and rhetoric while avoiding their excesses are the greatest of teachers.
Meet a champion of higher education who feared truth was becoming a scarce commodity in the Academy.
Born in Pocahontas, Iowa, in 1928, Schall’s own early education was typical for men of his generation: a boyhood educated in local public schools and two years of his early manhood in the U.S. Army, from 1946 to ’47. Upon entering the Society of Jesus in 1948, his education intensified as he passed through a succession of the order’s institutions of higher learning, attending first Santa Clara University, then Gonzaga University, where he earned an M.A. in philosophy in 1955, and then Georgetown University, where he earned a Ph.D. in political theory in 1960. After his ordination in 1964, Fr. Schall would earn another M.A. the next year, this one in sacred theology.
The dual nature of this formation is striking. Common and rarefied. Civil and religious. Ordinary and extraordinary. This allowed Fr. Schall to appreciate people from all walks of life and to engage with them on the most abiding questions of existence in both the classroom and writing.
For nearly 50 years, from 1964 until his retirement in 2012, Fr. Schall would have a teaching vocation alongside his priestly one. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, he would serve on faculties at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the University of San Francisco. His longest faculty tenure began in 1977 at Georgetown University, where he was a fixture in the Department of Government until his retirement. During his long service to that institution, he was awarded the Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence three times.
Fr. Schall’s teaching, however, was not limited to the classroom. He published widely, across disciplines, in many forms, addressing varied audiences. He published academic books in political philosophy such as Reason, Revelation, and the Foundation of Political Philosophy, popular pamphlets like A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, scores of book reviews, and hundreds of columns. He was a master of the essay form, and many of his more than 30 books were collections of them on religion, education, politics, and literature.
Fr. Schall was published widely, across disciplines, in many forms, addressing varied audiences.
He wrote a number of essays on the English writer and critic G.K. Chesterton, many collected in the book Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes, and he edited two volumes of Chesterton’s collected works. The wit, levity, curious digressions, tensions, and paradoxes so abundant in Chesterton abound also in Schall’s writing. Like Chesterton himself, Schall could deploy what might first seem a mere bit of rhetorical play only for it to detonate into a sprawling dialectic with serious implications for our understanding of the world.
In his moving obituary for Fr. Schall, published in Crisis magazine, the theologian Marc D. Guerra describes how Schall’s embrace of theologically informed tension and paradox shaped his understanding of the political order:
Because he understood that the realm of human affairs has a dialectical relationship with Christian revelation, Fr. Schall, like Augustine, was able to take the political order on its own terms. He was never tempted to make the political order carry more weight than it could bear—to turn it into a “substitute metaphysics.” Nor was he willing to downplay its legitimate virtues and possibilities. As a result, he could speak unambiguously as both a Catholic and an American. Recognizing the genuine strengths and weaknesses inherent in American democracy, he never succumbed to the exaggerated hopes for a Christianized America like some Neo-Conservative thinkers did in the 1980s and 1990s. For the same reason, in contrast to today’s most vocal advocates of a quasi-theological Benediction [sic] Option, he saw the folly (and ingratitude) in denying and depreciating the genuine benefits that American democracy affords Christians and non-Christians alike.
Fr. Schall’s intellectual dexterity and penetrating insights into the tensions and paradoxes of human affairs also comes through in his understanding of political economy. A few years before his death, Fr. Schall published a monograph in the Acton Institute’s Christian Social Thought series titled On Christians and Prosperity. In true Chestertonian fashion, he opens this book with a meditation on the paradoxes of poverty:
Poverty is not best dealt with by attending to the immediate relief of the very poor. Yet, we do not here avoid or bypass the fact and nature of dire poverty. … We argue significantly that the great numbers of the poor are best helped to be what they initially strive to be, namely, not poor, when everyone prospers as a result of his own initiative and work. … To reduce the problems of the world to one factor, poverty, shows little comprehension of the forces within human nature.
The economic problems of society are fundamentally human problems that cannot be solved by a simple redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Economic problems such as poverty are problems of knowledge and coordination between people:
The primary cause of the vast improvement in the condition of the world’s poor in recent decades is not so much our giving to the poor what they wanted or needed. It is the development of the means of production and distribution that made it possible for the poor to enter into more productive relationship with those who had already figured out how not to be poor.
Just as the political order must be taken on its own terms, so the economic. Exaggerated hopes and ingratitude for the immense progress made by expanding networks of specialization and trade must be rejected: “Yet, discussion and debate about better and worse ways to achieve prosperity will always remain, even in successful societies.” Prosperity depends on the empowerment of people to draw upon their own initiative and work to transform their circumstances as free and responsible persons created in God’s own image and likeness.
Despite an extensive formation and vocation in higher education, Fr. Schall was convinced that, in our 21st century, “we live in a time evidently when truth is fleeing the Academy.” Since his passing in 2019, the worrying trends have continued. He was nevertheless convinced that restless souls dissatisfied with dumbed-down, materialist, careerist, or politicized curricula would themselves search for “another sort of learning.” This learning, Fr. Schall teaches that Aristotle teaches, begins with wonder. Fr. Schall never lost that sense of wonder. He inspired it in his own students during his life. He continues to inspire it in us with the books he left to us when he entered the presence of the Lord in eternity.
