Joseph Schwartz: Man of Faith and Letters

From the very first time I heard Professor Joseph Schwartz speak—in an address to the new English Teaching Assistants (of which I was one) at Marquette University in August of 1980—I knew that I had encountered a rare teacher. Challenging us to recognize the rare opportunity that lay before us, he spoke with an exceptional self-possession that forever fixed in my mind his charge to us to open to our students an understanding of rhetoric as a moral art. I had never heard anyone speak of rhetoric in such terms before. By the time I graduated in 1984 with my Ph.D. in English literature, I had heard Schwartz say many things I had never heard anyone else say, and say them with a poise and an assurance that were distinctively his. Because of what I heard him say and because of the powerful and memorable way he said it, I came to feel singularly indebted to him as a professor who gave me far more than so many entries on a transcript.

It was, after all, Schwartz who introduced me to T.S. Eliot not only as a gifted poet but also as a devout Christian. And it was his own powerful faith that had made his lectures on Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets memorable metaphysical meditations, as well as probing investigations in literary aesthetics. Schwartz could illuminate with subtlety the free iambic meter of Four Quartets, could tease out veiled allusions to St. John of the Cross, to Dante, and to Milton. But his technical acumen always served a fervent and unabashedly expressed religious faith. To hear him read Eliot/Dante’s magisterial line “Our peace in his will” was to hear a deeply personal and moving confession of belief. He spoke of Eliot’s “wounded surgeon” not merely as an engaging poetical trope but as an invocation of his own profound hope for redemption “Beneath the bleeding hands [that show] / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.”

Quite unlike the many moribund academics who approach religious topics with a detached objectivity, Schwartz expressed unwavering Christian convictions, though always within a philosophically rooted and intellectually sophisticated orthodoxy, never lapsing into a merely sentimental moralism or preachiness. He well knew and could articulate the theories of religion developed by Jungian psychologists and Marxist dialecticians. But he left no room for doubt about his own stand: his faith reposed in a transcendent and supernatural Father, not in any merely human metaphysics. Indeed, with Eliot, he dismissed with something verging on disdain the theories regnant in a world “advanc[ing] progressively backwards,” a world in which “Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god / …professing first Reason, / And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.” With the help of wisely chosen texts, Schwartz forcefully reminded his students that, ultimately, all merely human enterprises must end in “Dung and death.”

Though graduate seminars afforded scope for his erudition that other settings did not, Schwartz never ceased challenging students and colleagues to examine their own first principles more deeply, more thoroughly. At first, it astonished me that as director of the Freshman English program in which I served as a teaching assistant, he had selected G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy as our touchstone text. But as I fell in love with this text, I came to appreciate both Schwartz’s wisdom and his courage in choosing such an unfashionable text as a powerful antidote to the slack metaphysics of students catechized by rock singers and movie stars. Perhaps the choice of an unabashedly religious text should not have surprised me, coming as it did from a program director who actually told me and the other teaching assistants—as no one had ever done before—that we should pray for our students. And I will never forget how he responded during a seminar in which some faculty and teaching assistants pressed for a trendier and less religious freshman text: he rose, a majestic lion among carping jackals, to defend the imaginative capaciousness of Chester-ton’s brilliant work. His critics never had a prayer.

Because I recognized in him a teacher whose judgment I could rely, I sought his advice when deciding what to do when I had completed my doctoral course work. I then acted on his recommendation that I seek an editing internship with the Rockford Institute, a conservative research center in Rockford, Illinois. That internship subsequently became a full-time editorial position, and because Schwartz regularly contributed to the Institute’s book review, Chronicles of Culture, I continued to learn from him by reading his penetrating and fearless literary criticism during my years on the staff.

I savored, for instance, his Chroniclesreview of a trio of books about Chester-ton’s contemporary (and polemical adversary) H.G. Wells. A zealous advocate of Progress, Wells mattered for Schwartz chiefly for the way he ultimately “symboliz[ed] the failure of 20^th-century liberal thought.” The bold rationalist who in the early twentieth century dreamed of a modern utopia based on scientific principles was “fully disillusioned” as he approached the end forty years later. “The decent, Edwardian, scientific, oh-so-sensible view crumbled under the assault of experience,” Schwartz commented, adding piquantly that, “for all his concerns with the future, the final irony is that Wells was bound to the past. What he saw as the promise of a new era was in fact the final decadence of an old one, the last spasms of a bankrupt modernism.”

Also memorable was a review of historian James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America,in which Schwartz carefully examined the cultural transformation that culminated in “the aggressive self-assertion of man demanding independence…[and so] claiming the supremacy that belonged to God.” Though progressive theorists hailed the new metaphysics in which “the person is perceived as the center of reality,” Schwartz warned that whenever modern men and women plead “the dread argument of the individual case, claiming that they are responsible to no tribunal but themselves, they inevitably find themselves facing the abyss. Let Anna Karenina, the most glamorous exemplar of the nineteenth century, stand for them all.” And unfortunately, the terrible consequences of the new human-centered morality put more than one disoriented Russian adulteress in great peril: “Doing without God meant that the image which gave order to culture, an all-or-nothing proposition as the First Commandment made crystal clear, was declared redundant, and the consequences swept through the body politic like the shock waves of an earthquake.”

Though I little guessed at the time how unanticipated later events would deepen my appreciation for it, I highly valued yet a third Chronicles review in which Schwartz praised Evelyn Waugh for the way he made his letters “a form of conversation” in which “he brings everything to life.” An author Schwartz greatly admired for “writings [that] are a fundamentally religious assault (sometimes savage and violent) on modernism, because it failed to nourish itself from the basic roots of Western Civilization,” Waugh made himself “immediately present” in correspondence “characterized by wit, comedy, and sharpness of mind.” Just as he did in his novels, Waugh articulated in his letters an abiding “standard of order,” a standard consistently applied with “good spirits, honesty and candor.”

Not even the best review in print could fully substitute for actually being in the classroom with Schwartz—always poised, always interrogative, always rigorous— but reading his review essays as they came across my desk at the Institute still stirred in me a renewed appreciation for his rare intellectual commitments.

But I enjoyed Schwartz’s beneficent influence in another very important way during my Rockford Institute days. For it was while I was on the Institute’s staff that I completed my doctoral dissertation, and Schwartz asked to serve on my dissertation committee. I confess that at first the news that he had been named to my committee unnerved me, for I had heard horror stories about how impossibly high his standards were for dissertation writers. As it turned out, however, no member of my dissertation committee proved more helpful or more encouraging. As I began my dissertation, it was Schwartz who gave me the most help, steering me clear of the theoretical quagmires of semiotics and then defending my openly philosophical and theological approach against the doubts of other committee members. Because of this guidance, I was able at key points of my doctoral investigation to supplement the abstruse modern schemata of Umberto Eco and Julia Kristeva (much beloved by my dissertation advisor) with the traditional wisdom of Alasdair McIntyre, Lezsek Kolakowski, G.K. Chesterton, and Russell Kirk.

Thanks in large measure to Schwartz, I was able to discern a metaphysical tragedy, not merely the semiotic “code-changing” of an evolving “sign producer,” in Thomas Carlyle’s peculiar evolution from the young bibliophile who hoped that the “Priesthood of the Writers of Books” could miraculously transform “that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY,” to the hardened hero-worshipper who worshipfully prostrated himself before Cromwell, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and other military titans who had accomplished “harder things than writing of books” by delivering “Order…under the Soldier’s Sword.”

When I successfully defended my dissertation in November 1984, my pleasure in receiving Schwartz’s congratulatory handshake was mitigated by my fear that he would no longer instruct and mentor me. That fear, fortunately, proved to be groundless. Schwartz continued to teach and guide me in the years that followed. He did that teaching, offered that guidance, in person when I occasionally visited him at Marquette for lunch and conversation. He continued his mentoring when we occasionally met at a Chesterton conference in Milwaukee or at an Ingersoll Awards ceremony in Chicago. But most of the post-doctoral instruction I received from Schwartz came through scores of letters sent me over a span of almost twenty years, rich not only in warm expressions of friendship but also in formative suggestions for literary experience. I may indeed truly say that perhaps the best part of my literary education occurred as an extended and tuition-free correspondence course for which I never formally enrolled. And like Evelyn Waugh, Joseph (for he became Joseph in his letters) made his correspondence “a form of conversation” in which he was “immediately present,” his written words always characterized by acute “sharpness of mind” and by “good spirits, honesty and candor.”

In a marvelous and completely unexpected way, Joseph’s letters became a wonderful extended tutorial in some of the greatest works of modern literature, especially the literature of faith. These letters ranged over the works of many writers, offering keen insights on each. Thus years after attending my last class as a graduate student, I was able to look anew at Newman (“the finest mind of the nineteenth century”), Francis Thompson (whose “Hound of Heaven” provides powerful evidence that “God is with us even when we are not with him”), Shelley (a poet “so full of faith that he was ready to believe anything”), Frost (creator of “the pastoralism of secular humanism”) and Bellow (a novelist whose “very daring” Mr. Sammler’s Planet takes as its protagonist a “weak man and pil[es] this moral authority upon him…to test Sammler’s thesis that we know, we know”).

It was from Joseph that I learned of Wallace Stevens’s remarkable deathbed conversion to Catholicism (“now a well-documented event which his daughter still hysterically denies”) and of Jacques Maritain’s wonderful dismissal of poets (such as Blake) who orient themselves metaphysically by creating their own mythology (“A man lost in the night might as well invent an imaginary moon because he needs to have his way lighted”). It was through Joseph I discovered Anthony Burgess’s powerful but neglected dystopian masterpiece The Wanting Seed, and through him that I learned of Walker Percy’s affirmations of faith in Love in the Ruins and The Last Gentleman and of Muriel Spark’s profound meditation on the problem of suffering in The Comforters and The Only Problem. (Our exchanges about Percy and Spark led to very gratifying invitations to write essays on these two figures for Renascence, the journal of religiously informed literary criticism that Joseph so ably edited for decades.)

Occasionally, Joseph enclosed with his letter an off-print or a photocopy of some of his published literary criticism. I still relish an article Joseph sent me in which he analyzes Chesterton’s complex response to Tennyson, whom he regarded as a “perfect poet” even though “his gift of expression was far greater than anything he had to express.” I cherish even more an article he sent in which he probes Chesterton’s conception of Christian tragedy, a conception that erases the finality of classical tragedy: “In the Christian tragedy, the ending beckons a new beginning. In the Christian tragedy, pity and terror are replaced by judgment and forgiveness.” Likewise of inestimable value is the essay Joseph sent me in which he limns T.S. Eliot’s growing realization that, for the Christian poet, the imaginative work of writing is “both a gift from God and in the service of God: ‘Lord, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service? / Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers…?’”

But it was not through off-prints or photocopies but rather through a protracted series of his own typewritten letters (often two to three pages, single-spaced—frequently with a handwritten postscript) that Joseph led me through the masterpieces of Waugh, of Wilder, and of Cather. At his urging and under his guidance, I read not only acknowledged masterpieces (such as Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust, Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Antonia, The Professor’s House,and Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, By the Skin of Our Teeth, and Theophilus North), but also neglected and little-known treasures (including Cather’s A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy and Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination).

Looking through Joseph’s eyes, I came to understand the literature we shared much more fully than I ever could have on my own. I came to understand, for instance, that “[A Handful of] Dust is a novel written backwards, like Balanchine did his choreography, from the final climax back to the opening climax.” I came to recognize the interpretive importance in Brideshead Revisited of the Father Brown story that Lady Marchmains reads to the family, a story that reminds the reader that “no matter how far one may wander, a twitch of the string will bring him back.” Joseph helped me tease from Wilder the keys to understanding his approach to literature as “the orchestration of platitudes.” Joseph showed me how to see how Wilder’s own deft orchestration of such platitudes elevates both Theo North and George Brush into their status as “true saints in the modern world, even through they are unalike in so many ways,” George “tend[ing] to reject the world as evil (our Puritan inheritance)” and Theo “totally accept[ing] it with joy (the Catholic Christian position).” I learned through Joseph to appreciate how Cather developed an almost plotless fictional structure by using “a series of portraits in a gallery arranged side by side to speak to us from a very thoughtfully structured story.” And thanks to Joseph, I benefited a great deal from Cather’s penetrating diagnosis of the cultural illnesses afflicting a society in which “most values have been lost or replaced with trashy thought,” a society that is “in chaos, and there seems to be no way to find meaning in it.”

But the letters were not all about literature. In Joseph’s letters, the various events in our personal lives (family events, health concerns) frequently became beads on threads of religious faith, often expressed with reference to literary celebrations of that faith. When my wife and I found it difficult to have children, Joseph confided that he and his wife, Joan, had faced a similar trial. Hope came not through a doctor, but rather through a visit to Chartres Cathedral, where he finally knew that eventually “all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.” The later birth of their son, Adam, validated this deep and comforting intimation. And just as Joseph promised, we likewise experienced our own miracles (three of them).

When I informed Joseph that my wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer, his speedy return letter assured me: “She [Mary] is in my prayers. I have asked our Virgin Mother Mary (whose name she bears) to be a special intercessor to God in this case.” He rejoiced with me in Mary’s complete recovery. But during the years when he struggled with the congestive heart disease that eventually took his life, Joseph frequently acknowledged his own need: “Pray for me.” “Thank you for your prayers. Continue them—mention me by name.” “Let us continue to pray for each other.”

That I offered my prayers as a Latter-day Saint and not as a Catholic never seemed to trouble him. I recognize that some degree of proselytizing motive may perhaps have inhered in some of his reading recommendations, particularly Percy, Spark, and Waugh. But when I drew rich treasures from these works without ever journeying to Rome, Joseph still embraced me as a fellow Christian. Indeed, he repeatedly congratulated me on my callings to positions of lay leadership as a Latter-day Saint and encouraged me in those positions.

I did in truth say many Latter-day Saint prayers for Joseph’s well-being, just as he said many Catholic prayers for mine. But neither of us labored under any illusions as to the terminus for our shared pilgrimage of mortality. In one of the letters he sent me the year before he died, Joseph commented on the recent passing of an esteemed colleague: “John McCabe’s death was a wonderful example for all of us; death is something to be embraced, not feared. It was edifying to be with him and to talk with him. I hope I can keep this memory evergreen.”

Eighteen months later, the letter in my mailbox was not from Joseph. Rather, it was from Professor Ed Block, Joseph’s carefully chosen successor as editor of Renascence. Joseph, Professor Block informed me, had passed away on Labor Day afternoon, 2002: “His wife, Joan, found him in his rocking chair in the little ߢstone house’ behind their home in Mequon, where he used to go to read or think. Joan said it was a peaceful death.”

A wonderful example for us all. I hope’ I pray—that I can keep his memory evergreen.