Remembering David L. Schindler

The first time I came across the name Schindler, I was a doctoral student in Cambridge, working on the topic of tradition-constituted rationality in the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre.

The couplet “faith and reason” shares an intellectual partnership with the couplets “nature and grace” and “history and ontology”. It was through my trawling of the intellectual histories of these partnerships that I came across the Communio journal and the contributions of David L Schindler on the relationship between nature and grace and American culture. From David’s articles, I back-tracked to Henri de Lubac’s criticisms of extrinsicism (the intellectual practice of completely separating these concepts and treating them in hermetically sealed baskets). De Lubac had gone to war against the concept of “pure nature” and the nascent Radical Orthodoxy circle in Cambridge was waging a parallel war against “pure reason”. Just as Schindler challenged the neutrality of the liberal political theory undergirding the culture of America and supported by a strong Calvinist orientation in theology, John Milbank and others in his circle were challenging the claims of contemporary social theory to theological neutrality.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had raised his own challenges, in his own quiet way, to anthropologies that bracketed grace from considerations of the humanum and to ethical frameworks that sought to defend Christian moral teachings by reason alone without recourse to revelation. MacIntyre, Milbank, Ratzinger, and Schindler all shared, in their intellectual DNA, an aversion to the Kantian influence on the Catholic intellectual tradition.

They also shared a critical stance toward the liberal political tradition. MacIntyre famously remarked that ever since he understood liberalism, he wanted nothing to do with it, and that was when he was 18 years old. Ratzinger in various articles explained that without Christianity, modern democracies have a tendency to descend into tyranny. Milbank in his more recent works like The Politics of Virtue, co-authored with Adrian Pabst, has ably argued that many of the ideas commonly associated with liberalism like equality before the law have a much older pedigree and that one can support such concepts without buying the whole liberal package.

Schindler, however, got to the very foundation of the liberal tradition’s problems by examining its metaphysics.

When it comes to understanding secularism and the current crisis of Western culture, this quartet, notwithstanding some variations in perspective, sings in harmony. A fifth voice can be harmoniously added by bringing in the work of Augusto del Noce on the relationship between Marxism and Liberalism. Del Noce argued that contemporary bourgeois Christianity, a European expression of liberal Christianity, or more specifically liberal Catholicism, represents a fusion of a Marxist approach to truth (the priority of ethos or praxis over logos) with liberal attitudes toward moral theology.

No doubt, in the decades ahead, students of theology and social theory and Christian culture will continue to have recourse to the publications of David L Schindler to gain an understanding of where liberalism went wrong and, positively, to thread together the elements of a theology of culture. Included in this package is his engagement with the human rights tradition. Students will also have recourse to his many articles on the nuptial meaning of the body, St. John Paul II’s moral theology as presented in Veritatis splendor, and foundational principles for a Catholic approach to ecology.

On a personal note, for over a decade, I was privileged to attend meetings alongside David at the annual gathering of the Deans of the St. John Paul II Institutes in Rome. Catching up with my American colleagues was always, for me, the highlight of these meetings. David would take me for dinner and I would toss a year’s worth of theological questions in his direction. I especially enjoyed his first-hand accounts of the personality of Hans Urs von Balthasar. David is the only person I have met who could talk about Balthasar and Disneyland in the same breath.

We also shared stories about how Curial officials can often be blissfully unaware of the culture(s) of the Anglosphere. A very genial Italian professor once asked me whether Cambridge is a pontifical university and I had to explain that England went the ‘other way’ in the sixteenth century. Another Italian helpfully chimed in with the comment “there was a king with marital problems”. Even more amusing was a scene of David and Carl Anderson trying to explain to an Italian official that the United States does not have a concordat with the Vatican, as the older traditionally Catholic states of Europe often do! On yet another occasion, I received a blank response when mentioning some point of Mennonite theology to a Spanish professor. He smiled and confessed that he had never heard of Mennonites. “The Mennonites” could have been a contemporary pop group for all he knew. David and I really enjoyed these “only in Rome” moments. I would have been a bit lonely at these meetings had I not been able to share such comical exchanges with the American delegation.

There was nonetheless at least one cultural difference between myself and the leaders of the John Paul II Institute in Washington. Whereas the Americans called their bishops “Your Excellency”, I called mine “My Lord”! David found this very amusing, and I had to explain that a bishop shares the rank of a Lord in the British aristocracy. Even though he got the point every time I turned to my bishop and said something like, “My Lord, your taxi has arrived”, David’s whole face would light up with mirth.

Notwithstanding his intellectual analysis of pathologies within American culture, it seemed to me that David was, in so many ways, an all-American boy. He empathized with seminarians at the North American College who thought it wrong to attend lectures on a day when everyone at home was celebrating Thanksgiving. He also seemed to know an awful lot about the Notre Dame football team, and, horror of horrors, he would ask for ketchup at Italian restaurants!

David was a larger-than-life sort of character. If the Church in the United States is now in a much stronger position than the “local churches” of, let’s say, the Archdioceses of Munich and Brussels, it’s in part because of scholars like David who dedicated their lives to what might be called, in Balthasarian parlance, the “Jacobite mission”. In other words, the mission of the study and defence and handing on of the “memoria ecclesia”, uncorrupted by any dalliance with the Zeitgeist.

In his Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, St Cyril of Alexandria made the following observation:

Our Lord Jesus Christ has appointed certain men to be guides and teachers of the world and stewards of his divine mysteries. Now he bids them to shine out like lamps and to cast out their light not only over the land of the Jews but over every country under the sun and over people scattered in all directions and settled in distant lands.

David L Schindler was such a “type” both as a teacher and as an American Catholic. May he rest in eternal peace and heavenly glory.