On Remembering What We Know: An Illuminating Life | Fr. James V. Schall, SJ | CWR
The life and work of Fr. John Navone, SJ, has been devoted to truth, tradition, beauty, and the knowledge of God
Editor's Note: The following address was given on April 24th by Fr. James Schall at Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA), at the invitation of the school's Faith and Reason Institute, in honor of Fr. John Navone, SJ.
“Remembering one’s tradition is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian identity. Israel’s remembering is essential for her continued existence as God’s covenant people, forgetting God’s saving acts would bring her destruction. ‘You shall remember the Lord your God…that he may confirm his covenant which he swore to your fathers, as at this day. And if you forget the Lord our God…I solemnly warn you that you shall surely perish’ (Deut. 8: 18-10). Through her remembering, Israel’s redemptive history continues in a living tradition where the divine commands perdures as historical events challenging successive generations to decision and that obedience which enables Israel to share in the redemption of here forefathers.”
— Fr. John Navone, SJ, “No Tradition, No Civilization”, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, October, 2002.
I.
The most memorable passage that I recall from many years of knowing Father John Navone, of corresponding with him, and of reading him is the following: “You are what you remember.” Whether this insightful sentence is unique to John Navone, I do not know, but he often used it. I have cited it many times myself, or, in a similar spirit: “Tell me what you remember, and I will tell you what you are.” From this angle of remembrance, I will approach my appreciation of John Navone’s work. “To remember” implies the existence of time and its passing-ness. From there it gets us to tradition and history.
These considerations lead us, not to deadly “timelessness,” but rather to eternity, to the nuc stans, to the “now” that stands in hushed stillness, as Aquinas put it. The reason that the silence, the stillness, is hushed is because this is our first reaction to seeing something of immeasurable, or even measurable, beauty. Beauty is a prominent theme of John Navone. He talks about “remembering” because he thinks that something to remember is constantly before us. The classic definition of beauty was: Quod visum, placet—“What is seen or heard pleases us.” This capacity to be pleased by anything is one of the most curious things about us. We not only encounter lovely things, but they please us, delight us, as if we are made both to receive and to acknowledge the glory of what we have received, of what is not ourselves
In an article by Julie King in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review (June 21, 2008), Father Navone, recalling the Spokane part of his early education, remarked: “It was at Mt. St. Michael’s here in Spokane, with its superb instructors, that I began to study philosophy and learned about what I call ‘The Life of the Mind'.” In 2006, ISI Books published a book of Schall’s entitled, precisely: The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking.” I had no idea at the time that I was echoing John Navone, due, no doubt, to a loss of memory! But Navone was right. The instructors at Mt. St. Michaels in our time were superb. I was in the class ahead of John. I think of professors like Alexander Tourginy, Theodore Wolf, John Sullivan, Edward Morton, and especially Clifford Kossel, one of the best minds ever. We also had a good man we called “Machine Gun Ferretti”, who taught logic. He spoke so rapidly few besides the likes of John Navone could keep up with him.
One other passage from this Spokesman-Review column I would like to cite as indicative of Father Navone’s insights:
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