"David Schindler was a big man. Big in body, strength and stamina. Big in intellect, heart and soul." My recall of the first words in the remembrance by David C. Schindler of his father at the repast 12/2/22.
Magnanimity is one of my favorite words: rarely used, vastly underrated. From the Latin it means "Great in Spirit." It indicates qualities of heart, intellect and will including: generosity, extravagance, heroism, fortitude, perseverance, zeal, ferocity, courage. Its disuse may be due to its rarity in a culture of bourgeois mediocrity. On my top ten list of the most magnanimous people I have personally known, David Schindler is probably number one.
Without using the word, his son David described in just such terms: greatness of heart and mind. He was obsessed with the wonder of God and all that comes from his creating hands. He had a childlike wonder before the Creator and all of creation. And he elicited that from all who associate him. How could such a big man be so small as awe-filled, grateful, receptive, innocent, simple, joyful?
He embodied the reality of magnanimity as synonymous, mysteriously, with humility. The contrary of inflated egoism, it is awe before God, the True-Good-Beautiful, justice, freedom, faith and truth. It is a forgetfulness of self in wonder before what is presented. Everyone at the funeral...friend, student, colleague...repeated: "He valued me so...ME!" He was friend and collaborator to Ratzinger, John Paul, Balthasar, De Lubac...the greatest intellects of our age. He was in their league. But, as someone (his son?) commented: "At a conference, he would prefer a conversation with the most shy student to one with the celebrity lecturer." A friend said "He gave me to myself in so many ways."
I knew him personally through my son and daughter. Spoke with him a handful of times. But whenever he saw my daughter he would ask for her parents. I was important to him...yes little old me! Mind-boggling!
I started reading Communio, his journal, almost 40 years ago. It became my primary intellectual and spiritual sustenance. He became my mentor in channeling to me John Paul, Benedict, Balthasar and the very best of contemporary Catholicism. He is, for me, the singular American Catholic Patriarch of our time.
At a lecture some years ago in NYC he was introduced by Lorenzo Albacete (a peer in brilliance, holiness and charm) as "a friend of the Trinity." That struck me: That is what I want to be: a friend of the Trinity! He presented what he had received from Ratzinger as the three foundations for a good social order: the sacredness of every human life, reverence for marriage and the family, and openness to the Transcendent and human freedom. That has remained with me as the core of my political creed.
Three specific theological themes co-inhered and resonated through his thought.
1. Generosity of God and all of Being. He was a mystic, in a brilliant but down-to-earth way. He was madly in love with God and all that is Good-True-Beautiful...even in the face of sin and evil...in all its extravagance, serendipity, drama, lucidity, and splendor.
2. Receptivity...active, participative receptivity...as our engagement in freedom with God and all the Good that surges in and around us. He properly, classically, subordinated the active to the contemplative. (Which was the heart of his profound critique of America as a late-Protestant, Enlightenment culture desperate for Catholic realities of authority, contemplation, worship, sacrament, Mary, dogmatic clarity and certainty, the evangelical life, and Christ in his whole body. He took his Catholicism thick, undiluted, passionate, joyous, exultant!,)
3. Truth and Love as co-inhering and informing each other. Firmly, fiercely he renounced Modernity's false dichotomy of subjectivity (love as feeling) and objectivity (empirical science as model of truth), the first hyper-feminized and the second over-masculinized. Rather, he saw at the heart of Creation a Logos, the form of Christ, that is at once Good and True and Beautiful.
In our time, his voice was exceptional and extraordinary: virile, fatherly, firm, clear, certain, authoritative, decisive. Like St. Joseph, St. John the Baptist, the apostles-doctors-fathers-martyrs, he exemplified masculinity as gentle strength and strong gentleness.
I was sad to know that in his last months, tormented by dementia, he was vulnerable to anger. I did not see him this way. But I learned otherwise at the funeral. Father Fessio S.J., celebrant and homilist, his friend since youth in a Jesuit seminary, remembered him as a strong, forceful competitor on the basketball court. That same ferocity, he said, informed his work, thought and entire life. His son saw him as a fighter: his nickname in high school was "Dukes." When he would learn from my daughter that my son, his student, was teaching at a Catholic university but without permanency, he would become surprisingly angry.
No doubt there was a human weakness here. More substantially, however, his was a holy wrath against falsehood. When I learned of his anger I realized why I loved his thought so much. He was academic, metaphysical, clear, and flawlessly free of petty emotionalism. But he was always fighting...against falsehood and for truth. He was a Warrior! At the highest level of abstraction and the deepest place of insight, with tenderness but fire, he fiercely affirmed the Truth and passionately attacked falsehood.
Refreshingly, surprisingly, Fr. Fessio in his homily said: "We are not here to canonize him." Rather we were gathered in prayer and hope. "Dare we hope?" he asked, echoing their mentor Balthasar. But ending the sermon he lost his composure (as did I and probably hundreds in the pews) as he imagined his basketball adversary before the Lord saying: "I ran the good race! I fought the good fight!" And Jesus responding "Enter, good and faithful servant, into the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of time."
His collaborator (and peer in theological brilliance) Fr. Paolo Prosperi reflected at the repast: "He was more than an academic master, although he was that. There are many of those. But what he did was start something here. Something very unusual." He did not elaborate. I understood him completely. Around this Institute and journal he gathered an extraordinary "Communio" of learning, prayer, holiness, delightful eccentricity, beauty, and extravagant generosity. I know of no comparable communion in prayer and erudition. His collaborators rival and stimulate each other in erudition, prayer, and peculiarity of charm. A tremendous joy for me has been to be part of this, although from a distance, and even more to see my son study there and my daughter now teach there.
One of his closest partners in mission is Fr. Antonio Lopez. He is dear to me as "Co-Padrino": as he has been spiritual mentor for my daughter in her evangelical vocation and intellectual director of my son's doctoral dissertation. When I saw him momentarily at the repast I suddenly said: "This is a great day. In salvation history." I laughed at myself. Everyone just looked at me. It sounded so funny. No one talks that way. But in my college years, "salvation history" was a buzz word in fashionable renewal theology. It sounded funny, but I meant it. The passing of David L. Schindler is a great day in salvation history. What an inexpressible joy for me to be there at a magnificent funeral mass. To be gathered in a repast with an extraordinary group of people. To glance around at scholars, families and little children running around! To feel the life: vibrant, hopeful, joyous!
May this marvelous, magnificent, magnanimous man rejoice in his reward.
And may we receive, enrich and share the legacy he left us!
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