The Docile Visionary, James V. Schall, SJ

Several years ago I began a review of The Modern Age (St. Augustine’s Press, 2011) by noting the error of the author, Fr. James Schall, in citing Psalm 90, verse 10’s estimate of the standard human age as “four score years and ten” rather than “three score and ten, four score if our strength endure.” Three score and ten is 70, four score is 80. I sympathized with Fr. Schall’s confusion, given that at the time of publication he was 83 and still strolling the aisles of Georgetown University to quiz undergraduates on what precisely Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, or Tocqueville meant by this or that passage, while using his spare time to write essays in dozens of journals and books on the difficulties of faith and reason, the oddities of political philosophy’s autonomy and yet dependence on divine revelation, and the “strange coherences of Catholicism” (as he subtitled another book). “Of the making of many books there is no end,” we read in Ecclesiastes, and we might add to that, “certainly not in the lifetime of Schall.”

By the time you read this preface, Fr. Schall (b. January 28, 1928) will be turning 89, heading toward what his younger, 83-year-old self mistakenly assumed the biblically allotted norm. Of course he did slow down, a bit, retiring in 2012 from his 58-year teaching career, which began with three years in the faculty of social sciences at the Gregorian University in Rome and ten in the government department at the University of San Francisco. He spent his last 35 years as a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University, where he was thrice awarded by the senior class with the Edward G. Bunn, SJ Award for Faculty Excellence, and moonlighted with stints as a member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, National Council of Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

His “retirement” to Los Gatos, California, site of his Jesuit novitiate over six decades earlier, richly deserves ironic scare quotes. All-knowing Wikipedia can’t even keep up with his post-retirement publications, limited not merely to regular columns in The Catholic Thing, Gilbert, Catholic World Report, and The University Bookman and countless venues that had not counted on him sending them something, but received them anyway. (The most recent of his five Logos articles was his “On the Teaching of Classical Literature” in our Summer 2016 issue.) With over 30 books under his belt at retirement, Schall’s books just since 2012 include Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading (CUA Press, 2013), Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism (Ignatius, 2013), The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and its Pleasures (St. Augustine’s, 2014), Remembering Belloc (St. Augustine’s, 2014), On Christians and Prosperity (Acton, 2015), and the book sitting next to me, Docilitas: On Being Taught (St. Augustine’s, 2016). As I write, St. Augustine’s lists as forthcoming At a Breezy Time of Day: Selected Schall Interviews on Just About Everything, On the Principles of Taxing Beer, and The Praise of ‘Sons of Bitches’: On the Worship of God by Fallen Man. As to what manuscripts are sitting on other publisher’s desks at the moment, only God and Fr. Schall know. If he has moved on to the life of a rocking chair, the rocking chair sits in a library very close to the plug-in for his laptop.

While it is common in the lives of people celebrated for great achievements—whether of holiness, artistry, or scholarship—to look back and see hints of what was to come, it is nice to know that an undistinguished childhood does not rule out a very distinguished adulthood. The child might be father of the man, but the apple can sometimes fall a bit farther from the tree. In an interview I did with him in 2005 after a conference lecture, Schall recalled growing up in small-town Iowa (he was born in the delightfully named town of Pocahontas) in the 1930s and 40s: “I knew I could read, but...