Helping Us ‘Turn Around’

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National Review:

A great master teacher discusses the pope, friendship, and why we still need Plato.

 

Fr. James V. Schall, S. J., a longtime, legendary Georgetown political-science professor took leave of his role only a few months before Pope Benedict XVI stunned the world with his news. Fr. Schall delivered his “last lecture” —

— at Georgetown in December. He talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the retiring pontiff and his teaching, what books might help save your soul, and future and final things.

 

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: How is retirement? Do you feel a kinship with Pope Benedict XVI because of his transition?

 

FR. SCHALL: “Retirement” is a funny word, isn’t it? You “withdraw” from something, but retirement is not life, though it is a phase of life. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am about six months younger than the pope, but I announced my retirement six months before he did. Actually, I gave pretty much the same reasons he did, except the “burden” of our respective offices cannot be at all compared. When Benedict XVI talks of “retirement,” it means very little, in a way. He is a man of mind. Mind remains the same waiting to be thought, be it that of Plato, Aquinas, Samuel Johnson, or Chesterton. Few in the world have really been willing to come to terms with the reordering of mind that this man has accomplished in his long and fruitful life. It is in this reordering that the real seeds of our future lie.

 

 

LOPEZ: How do you think history will remember Pope Benedict XVI?

 

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FR. SCHALL: It will remember him as the greatest and most learned intellect ever to occupy the Chair of Peter. No public official in our time has been anywhere near his intellectual equal. This disparity is itself the cause of much disorder, if we grant, as we must, that truth is the essence of intellect and indeed order. In reading Benedict, I have always been struck by how familiar he is not just with the Old and New Testaments (in their original languages) but with his constant referring to the Fathers of the Church, especially Augustine, and the intellectual popes like Gregory the Great and Leo the Great, and also Irenaeus, Basil, Maximius, Origen, Bonaventure, and I do not know them all. He knows German philosophy well, and always cites Plato. He is at home with all the Marxist philosophers. Indeed, in Spe Salvi, he cited two of the most famous ones as witness to the logical need of a resurrection of the body. Benedict is a member of one of the French academies. No one has really begun to do his homework on what this pope has thought his way through. The media and most universities are, basically, hopeless. I suspect his final opera omni in a critical German edition will equal in length that of Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure.

 

 

LOPEZ: Why is his Jesus of Nazareth significant?

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