'We Need to Surround Ourselves with Books'

“Whenever things look particularly bleak, I turn to Samuel Johnson.”

A wise man, James V. Schall (1928-2019), a Jesuit and longtime professor of political philosophy at Georgetown, where my wife was enrolled in one of his classes. His reading was broad, both sacred and secular, which makes Fr. Schall’s writing accessible even to non-Catholic readers. Here he takes as his text Dr. Johnson’s Idler essay from October 21, 1758, which begins:  

“It has been the endeavor of all those whom the world reverenced for superior wisdom to persuade man to be acquainted with himself, to learn his own powers and his own weakness, to observe by what evils he is most dangerously beset, and by what temptations most easily overcome.”

Resoundingly true, of course. But being human, we are weak and rationalizing creatures. We take credit for our powers and minimize or deny our weaknesses. Most of us would likewise deny our capacity for evil and even run-of-the-mill nastiness, and blame our failing to resist temptation on “a good man’s weakness” (once the polite excuse for alcoholism). Schall is struck by the same pointed, unexpected observation in the essay as I am:

“Johnson next says something, on first reading, very surprising: ‘It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep designs and studied deceit; but the truth is that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.’”

Like Johnson, Schall is a moral realist. He is contemptuous of our consoling fairy tales, but understands they remain a human constant. Part of Schall’s longtime devotion to Johnson is a result of the sustained excellence of the writing, of course. He would agree with John Ruskin in Praeterita (1885), who found in the essays “more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable compass.” But Schall, like generations of readers before him, also admired Johnson the man, who is forever struggling with matters of faith and morality. Johnson was no moral exemplar, and he knew it. Much of his life was a pitched battle with himself, a spectacle we come to know through his work. There’s nothing self-righteous about Johnson. Thus, Schall writes, “Whenever things look particularly bleak, I turn to Samuel Johnson.” In The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking (2006), Schall writes:

“We need to surround ourselves with books because we are and ought to be curious about reality, about what is. The universe is not of our own making. Yet it is all right for us to be what we are, because the universe is potentially ours through our knowledge. In knowing, we become the other, become what we are not, as Aquinas taught. But in doing so, in coming to know, we do not change what it is that we know. We change ourselves. Our very intellectual being is intended to become what, in the beginning, we are not.”