A Tribute to Michael Buckley, SJ, 1931–2019: Teacher, Mentor, and Friend

Born in 1931, Michael Buckley entered the Jesuits in 1949, after attending secondary schools in California, New Jersey, and Japan. His long period of Jesuit formation culminated in the interdisciplinary doctoral program at the University of Chicago, the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods. At Chicago, Buckley studied and wrote under the legendary teacher and scholar Richard McKeon, whose close reading of texts and classical orientation complemented the broad training Buckley had received prior to Chicago. After graduating, Buckley took a position at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkley, where he remained until 1986.

Much like an earlier Jesuit, Karl Rahner, Buckley published both high level scholarly tomes that became landmarks in the field and more pastoral works that revealed a deep commitment to religious life. While at Berkeley, he published his first major work, Motion and Motion's God (Princeton, 1971), a comparison of Aristotle, Cicero, Newton, and Hegel. This work reflects the deep and subtle reading of arguments that would characterize his masterwork, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale, 1987), in which Buckley argued that the rise of atheism resulted from theologians losing their mettle in the face of scientific, especially Newtonian, breakthroughs. Buckley's readers learned, much to their surprise, that atheism arose not from theological disdain for modern science, but instead due to their uncritical embrace of it. He would later lay the groundwork for Denying and Disclosing God (Yale, 2004) in the D'Arcy lectures at Cambridge (2000), which traced the development of atheism through the nineteenth century. Buckley interspersed his books on atheism with monographs of more ecclesial concern, one on papal primacy and the other on the Catholic university. In Papal Primacy and the Episcopate (1998), Buckley responds to Pope St. John Paul II's call in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint to think creatively about the exercise of the papacy in the contemporary situation. In The Catholic University as Promise and Project (1999), Buckley argued that educating students in social justice is integral to a humanistic education. This book moved the social justice efforts from the periphery of collegiate life to its intellectual center.

It is perhaps his less academic writings, however, that will prove to have the greatest impact. They also provide an insight into the person of Michael Buckley. Before anything else, he was a Jesuit priest of unmatched religious depth. His final book, What Do You Seek? (Eerdmans, 2016), a collection of short essays based on the questions that Jesus poses in the Gospel, echoed many of the themes from his essays, sermons, and retreats over the past fifty years. Beginning in 1963, Buckley published reviews, articles, book chapters, and popular writings that spoke to the religious dimension of human life. Left unpublished was his thinking on St. John of the Cross and his meditations on the Constitutions of the Jesuit Order. Michael Buckley's religious writings penetrated to the heart of the encounter with the incomprehensible mystery of God, most fully revealed in the suffering of Christ crucified.

After a short stint at the University of Notre Dame, Buckley took an appointment at Boston College, where he stayed until 2006. There, he cultivated a circle of graduate students that constituted a modern day "school," organized around shared debate, liturgy, and desire to learn. While students in his seminars withered under his demanding stare, they emerged having learned to read into the heart and tissue of the argument of any given text. Buckley would drag his students into a text and make them sit there until they appreciated its beauty. He would sit alongside them until they uncovered its layers of meaning. The composition of a seminar paper involved, more than anything, an endless number of drafts. We had to identify "the problem." We weren't allowed to move beyond that opening paragraph until we had gotten our grip on what was at stake in a text or a series of texts. The paper itself had to reflect a mind awake to the difficulty of identifying and...