By DONALD DeMARCO
Pocahontas, Iowa, is a community of 1,693 people. It is the 181st largest city in the state of Iowa and the 11,683rd largest city in the United States. Its website boasts of three notables who were born in that fair town.
The first is Larry Bittner (born 1945) who played 14 years as a first-baseman/outfielder for five different major league teams. Over that span of time, he hit 29 home runs.
The second is Margaret (“Peg”) Mullen (1917-2009), an anti-war activist and writer who was motivated when her son was killed in Vietnam by “friendly fire.”
The third notable is the subject of this essay’s tribute, James Vincent Schall, whom the Pocahontas website describes as a “prolific Catholic writer.” In 1963 Fr. Schall was ordained a priest and added “SJ” to his name.
The term “prolific” may be inadequate. Perhaps “prodigious” would better capture his literary output: 30 books, 356 essays, 148 book reviews, and 660 columns (not to mention the number of works he edited). Accounting, of course, does not do justice to the man who taught with love, passion, and erudition. He loved what is lovable and wanted his students to share in that love and gain that benefit.
Perhaps most of all, he was a teacher of virtue.
After 34 years of teaching philosophy at Georgetown University, he gave his final lecture, sponsored by the Tocqueville Forum. He titled it “The Final Gladness.” It was December 7, 2012, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. A quotation from Hilaire Belloc was placed as bookends at the beginning and at the end of his lecture: “Then indeed I have each time remembered my boyhood, and each time I have been glad to come home. But I have never found it to be a final gladness.”
Fr. Schall passed into the next life on April 17, 2019 at the age of 91. His last lecture was a summary of his life as a teacher and his anticipation of a final abode wherein he would enjoy eternal gladness with all those he loved and all those who loved him. This world is not our lasting home. It is a place, however wonderful, where a tinge of gladness is always missing.
We have our destinations and we have our destinies. Each destination gives way to another one. We fly to Chicago, are driven to our hotel, get to our room, and find our bed. The next morning inaugurates a new set of destinations which will be dissolved one by one as they surrender to a new and temporary destination. But what is our ultimate destiny? It is not of this world.
Fr. Schall cherished the thought of the ancients. He had a special affection for Cicero’s essay “On Old Age” and quoted a passage from it in his last lecture: “Nature gives us a place to dwell in temporarily, not one to make our own. When I leave life, therefore, I feel as if I am leaving a hotel, I feel as if I am leaving a hostel rather than a home.” Neither Pocahontas, Iowa, nor Rome, Italy, nor Washington, D.C., would be his permanent home.
“Our passingness,” Fr. Schall wrote in his book, Idylls and Rambles, “is ultimately why we cannot be content either with this world or with those theories that suggest this world and its arrangements are all there is.”
Midway through this final lecture, he offered a quote from one of his most admired writers, G.K. Chesterton, one from which, he was pleased to tell his audience, he has “never quite recovered.” It is a passage that encapsulates Fr. Schall’s life as well as his afterlife:
“Comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel…our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure forever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters. And when we drink again it shall be from the flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.”
He took this passage from Chesterton’s book, Charles Dickens, The Last of the Great Men (New York: The Press of the Readers Club, 1942, p. 212). It enthralled Fr. Schall perhaps because he saw in it a mirror of his existence. He also saw in it echoes from passages from Isaiah and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Another passage captured Fr. Schall’s soul, one from St. John Paul II: “Man is capable of elaborating a uniform and organic conception of knowledge. The fragmentation of knowledge destroys man’s inner unity. Man aspires to the fullness of knowledge, since he is a being who by his very nature seeks the truth and cannot live without it. Contemporary scholarship and especially present-day philosophy, each in its own sphere, needs to rediscover that sapiential dimension which consists in the search for the definitive and overall meaning of human existence.”
There are three kinds of students, as any teacher worth his salt comes to understand: 1) those who are in class for the grade; 2) those who think they know it all; and 3) those who are eager to learn. Fr. Schall’s mission, as he saw it, was to convert the first two groups to the third. To this mission he responded with alacrity, wisdom, and patience, helping students to turn from fashionable opinions to truth.
He would not enjoy Heaven in the company of Dickensonian characters, but he looked forward to eternal comradeship with many of his former students.
We all look forward to our own “final gladness” and many who knew him will thank Fr. James Vincent Schall, SJ, for helping them to find the way.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary. He is a regular columnist for the St. Austin Review. His latest books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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