By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
Schall, James V., SJ, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2016. ix + 194 pp.
Generations of students at Georgetown University know James Schall as simply Fr. Schall. A popular undergraduate teacher, he was known for his clarity and wit in the classroom and for his availability and warmth outside of the classroom.
Docilitas is a collection of lectures and essays, some given as commencement addresses when Fr. Schall was the recipient of an honorary degree. They bear titles such as “Questions Proper to the University,” “What Makes Liberal Education, ‘Liberal’,” “Seneca on Personal Libraries,” “Aquinas and the Life of the Mind,” and “Why Professors Need Students and Other Philosophical Fables.”
With titles like that, how can one resist the book, and having read it not recommend it as something to be read by anyone who is likely to stand behind a lectern in a college classroom?
Schall, ever willing to learn as well as to teach, tells us that once on departing from the West Coast, his niece gave him a book to read on the flight back to Washington. To his amazement he discovered that St. Cassian of Imola (a small town near Ravenna), has long been identified as the patron of teachers. It seems he was murdered by his students at the behest of town officials because, as a Christian, he could not honor the gods of the state.
Schall adds: Today this fourth-century martyr would merely be denied tenure.
One finds in the book a meditation “on what ought to be known,” perhaps written after an encounter with a Georgetown student in the university library, a student who was amazed at the immensity of things that can to be known, but did not know where to begin. Though signs in a library typically remind its patrons to be quiet, Schall muses, “[L]earning is an activity that we must engage in ourselves is true. Yet it is characteristic of knowing that we want to tell someone about it. What goes on in our souls seems to be intended for other souls.”
Schall until his recent retirement bore the title, Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. By his own account his discipline begins in antiquity. All of the essays in the present volume draw heavily on classical philosophy.
“Behind universities as we know them,” he writes, “we find in our history the Academy of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle, the Porch of the Stoics, Cicero’s Orations, the works of Augustine and the Church Fathers as well as the monasteries of St. Benedict and the Cathedral Schools of the Middle Ages — Oxford, Cambridge, Paris — and the Italian Schools.” Even the Jesuit schools, he adds, came out of this tradition.
Schall is not confined with respect to sources. Among contemporary English authors, his favorites are Belloc, Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. But he is equally at home on the Continent with Maritain, Camus, A.G. Sertillanges, Josef Pieper, and Francois Mauriac.
Leo Strauss, a German political theorist whom Schall frequently invokes, is difficult to classify. Perhaps Strauss, who became a United States citizen, is best identified with the University of Chicago, where he taught for 20 years as the Robert M. Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor.
Somewhat like Chesterton, who could write an essay on a bedpost, Schall is given to picking up a notion here or there and running with it. Informed that Lincoln said, “Nearly all men can handle adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power,” Schall develops the thought.
He is reminded that, “[i]n the Laws of Plato, the Athenian Stranger tells the Spartan and Cretan gentlemen that the real thing that tests a man’s virtue is not war which tests only courage, but peace which tests all virtues.”
Schall continues: “What to do when not at war is the central moral question.” The end of war may be peace, but as Augustine said, peace is the “tranquility of order.” Schall adds, “This tranquility must first be known and chosen and put into our lives and politics.” For a start, back to Aristotle’s Politics, of course.
With Francois Mauriac, James Schall can say, “Tell me what you have read and I will tell you what you are.”
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