Fr. James V. Schall on The Openness of the Christian Mind
The Openness of the Christian Mind:
An Advent Conversation
Since 2002 Ken Masugi, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and lecturer in Government at Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, has conducted Advent interviews with James V. Schall, S.J., author of over thirty books on political theory and theology. Fr. Schall teaches in the Government Department of Georgetown University. The Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University has recognized his award-winning teaching with its annual Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. Award for Teaching and Humane Letters. His websites, a portal into his writings and course syllabi, are here and here.
In their latest conversation, they cover topics as diverse as great (big) books, Evangelicals and Sarah Palin, Ernest Fortin, and the nature of God. This interview was conducted over email. The earlier interviews can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Ken Masugi: Your most recent book (The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays [Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008]), your 31st book, I believe, contains an Appendix that reproduces an earlier interview between the two of us published in 2003 on the Claremont Institute website. So I approach this interview with something of the spirit of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discovering the manuscript of Don Quixote early in that book. Obviously the parallels do not hold precisely, as, for one, Sancho Panza likely has more prudence than I.
James V. Schall, S. J.: It is not exactly the same problem as the death of Moses either. His demise was found in a book written by himself. The analogy, I take it, however, is to the fact that we can still "pull up," as they say in "computerese," the earlier interview. Likewise, the present book is a "re-presentation" or a calling our attention anew to the 22 JVS academic essays published in various journals or media places over a half-century span. Whether either of us is more "prudent" than Sancho is, I am sure, on this basis alone, doubtful. But prudence is not an excuse for inaction. So we can go ahead and see what we come up with. Not a few of the world’s wisest thinkers, after all, thought the notion of the Incarnation was quite imprudent on God’s part. But He forged ahead without them, the result of which, I think, was the most stimulating, though, as the Thomists say, the most indirect thing that ever happened to philosophy as such.
Our interview that appears in the new book was not originally in the manuscript I submitted. It was suggested by Professor Bradley Lewis who read the manuscript for the publishers. He had seen the earlier on-line Claremont Interview. He suggested that it would be appropriate to add it because, both in spirit and content, it, like the book, was a reflective summation of what it is Schall has been thinking about over the years, but in a more conversational context. I appreciated this suggestion. We have done, I think, some four previous Claremont Interviews. I have always learned something from them even about what I held but never articulated in quite the same way. Without your initiative, none of these interviews would have existed.
The interview now in the book was later published in Perspectives on Political Science (2004) under the title, "Political Philosophy’s ‘Hint of Glory.’" And I can think of no better brief summary of a theme, a reality that I have been circling all my life. This delicate title was not mine. It evidently came from the editor of PPS [Peter Lawler]. It does relate the "this-worldly" enterprise of politics to a "glory" that politics itself does not provide. But it does "hint" that it is around somewhere, lest its own efforts be finally "in vain."
This "in-vainness" is that about which Aristotle worried might be the danger if there were no order in things, including human things. As my old friend Henry Veatch said in his great book, Aristotle, the burial of teleology was not final. Chapter 16 of the book reproduces an essay from the Review of Politics (1993) entitled, "Transcendence and Political Philosophy" that takes up this theme, as, really, does the final essay on Narnia, and most of the other essays in this book." My recent book, The Order of Things, is a further elaboration of this position.
During all of my academic life, since I first had it pointed out to me by Father Charles N. R. McCoy, I have been guided by Aristotle’s placid remark that if man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science, with the careful caveat that man is not the highest being. The real dividing line within political philosophy, something that spills over into all other disciplines in one way or another, is over the truth of the Aristotelian position. If it is denied, then political philosophy at its very foundation becomes, and has to become, as McCoy put it, a "substitute" metaphysics, of a strangely dangerous sort, one based on will, not reason.
Incidentally, McCoy’s book, The Structure of Political Thought, remains a practically unknown treasure of philosophical study, particularly on the intellectual relation of movements and ideas in political thought. I was very pleased that William Haggerty recently published a remarkable retrospective analysis of its core theme, "Beyond the Letter of His Master’s Thought: C. N. R. McCoy on Medieval Political Theory," in Laval thèologique et philosophique (64, 2 (juin 2008): 467-483). Previously, in 1990, the Catholic University of America published a collection of those insightful McCoy essays, not found in his book, under the title, On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy. I have often thought, with Ernest Fortin and Robert Sokolowski, that the inattention to political philosophy, to Strauss’ famous title, What Is Political Philosophy?, is what causes much of the problems with modernity in theological and papal writings, as well as in modern philosophy itself.
KM: There has been a spate of books about atheism. Your argument over the years has been that reason and revelation require one another to bring out their greatest strengths. Is atheism synonymous with a commitment to an infantilism? Is hard atheism worse for people’s souls than soft agnosticism or even soft belief? I’m alluding to the problem of soft despotism, as Tocqueville called it.
JVS: The recent books about atheism have often been written by physical scientists. Reviewers have often remarked that the said scientists, if they proved one thing, proved that, if they knew as little about science as they seem to know about philosophy, we have to question the validity of the whole scientific enterprise! My favorite comment was in, I think, the Times Literary Supplement. A reviewer said that, when
