Glenn Hughes

Hail and Farewell

Thomas D'Evelyn

Glenn Hughes has served as poetry editor here at VoegelinView since its inception more than two years ago. This Good Friday is the last day on which we publish his weekly offerings. Best known as a philosopher and author of books on Eric Voegelin, Glenn, known to his friends as "Chip," once confided that poetry was at least as important to him as is philosophy. Two volumes of his own poetry have been published and are available from Pecan Grove Press. A few his poems have appeared here.

Looking back now on the more than ninety poems he has offered our readership, we see he has done something really splendid for us. We, who thought we had enjoyed a broad liberal education and were therefore acquainted with the best poetry written in English, were shocked to find, week by week, that many of the wonderful poems Chip was bringing to us were not so well known and not too commonly found in anthologies. We shall always be greatful to Chip for giving us this treasure which will always be ours. Thank you, Chip Hughes!

Chip will continue at VoegelinView in his capacity as a member of our Board of Advisors and we expect to continue to publish both his beautifully crafted poetry and his philosophical prose from time to time.  

As successor to Chip Hughes, we welcome Thomas (Tom) D'Evelyn, an independent Voegelin scholar, founder of the Writing Institute of Portsmouth, and devotee of modern and Haiku poetry. Tom brings us his first offering next Friday–the Friday of Easter Week.  He has promised to accompany the poems from time to time with his own criticism and sometimes ideas drawn from the thought of Eric Voegelin.

We welcome Tom and look forward to accompanying him on a rewarding journey!       

—April 21, 2011             

from the Crow's Nest

A Visit with Lissy Voegelin

by Fritz Wagner

We have just completed a series of reminiscences about Eric Voegelin's years at Notre Dame, collected and edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn in their recent Voegelin Recollected. We have also run a few of our own memories we thought might be of interest. This is the last of them–a sort of story within a story.

In October of 1992, I decided to visit my son who was then living in Oakland, California. Oakland is across the bay from San Francisco and I had never before visited this beautiful area of the United States. I thought it would be a nice opportunity to meet Paul Caringella, Eric Voegelin's personal assistant for many years, so I called him from my home in Ohio and arranged to meet him at Stanford University in Palo Alto, a city just south of San Francisco.

With my son beside me, I finally got to meet Paul at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus. He took us to the cemetery where Eric Voegelin had been buried in January of 1985. It was on a hill top with a lovely vista. One could see many miles across valleys to the distant hills. It was the kind of beauty for which California is famous. A single small wind-twisted tree broke the horizon. Nothing else impaired the view: no monuments, only simple flat headstones. Paul pointed out the headstone for the man lying next to Voegelin. It said simply, "Wiseman."

Later my son and I and a friend of my son from Baden, Germany, a young electrical engineer named Ulrich, went with Paul to visit Lissy Voegelin at the Voegelin home in Palo Alto. We came by appointment and Lissy awaited us sitting up in bed in the master bedroom. She looked elegant and regal in a blue robe, with her freshly permed thick white hair.

Lissy said she never spoke German anymore (I believe she said that she and Eric made it a rule to talk together only in English.) But in the case of Ulrich, when he stepped forward to be introduced, she took his hand and said a few things to him "auf Deutsch."

Paul told Lissy that I had some memories of Eric at Notre Dame back about 1960 and Paul thought Lissy would enjoy them; enthusiastically she encouraged me to share my memories.

Order and History in Bavaria

by William Petropulos

Let me give you a brief summary of some of what I heard at the conference on “Eric Voegelin: Ordnung und Geschichte” at the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, January 29, 2011.

The speakers were Hans Maier, one-time professor at the Institute Voegelin founded, later Minister of Culture in Bavaria, and Professor emeritus of the University (his last post having to do with Christian Philosophy); Peter J.Opitz, whose work you are familiar with; and Michael Henkel, Private Dozent for Political Science at the University of Leipzig, a younger scholar who has written about Staatslehre.

Mr. Maier, who had once had his conflicts with Voegelin, had been asked to go over the history of Voegelin’s time in Munich. Voegelin, according to Mr. Maier, did not think enough about preparing the secondary teachers, and other “multipliers,” but was too focused on educating a scholarly elite.

In general, he thought Voegelin was unsuited for the everyday workings of political science: teaching people about voting laws, institutions, and the rest, and was almost exclusively concerned with the deeper issues upon which society is of, course, based but which political science cannot deal with exclusively. In other words, Voegelin was right, but he was also wrong.

Mr. Opitz had been asked to give an overview of Voegelin’s scholarly development. He demonstrated how Voegelin had deepened his original insights, which were made pretty early in his career, concerning the cognitive and existential basis of science. He emphasized Voegelin’s search for the Ground, the symbols of that experience, and the centrality such experience plays in the order of the soul and society. He also pointed out that Voegelin’s work was an attempt to respond to the “modern crisis” of the loss of spiritual orientation.

from the Crow's Nest

Watching TV, "The Mugging," and Racism

by Fritz Wagner

We are presently running a series of reminiscences about Eric Voegelin's years at Notre Dame, collected and edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn in their recent Voegelin Recollected. We have a few of our own memories we thought might be of interest.The following three that took place in the Law School auditorium mentioned in part 1 of "Voegelin at Notre Dame."

Watching TV

You understand it was 1960 and I was a nineteen year old undergraduate. To give you the setting: Our class was held in the auditorium of the Law School building.  Standard American-Oxford-Gothic law school architecture. The classroom ran the width of the building and there were windows on both sides. In the front was a stage surmounted by a proscenium arch and steps lead from the audience level upto the stage. On the stage was a desk, a lectern on the left side and a blackboard. There were 80 or 100 Voegelin students in a room that might have held 400 or so law students. We sat in comfortable theater seats, unlike the portable student desks found in most classrooms. If memory serves, Dr. Voegelin was always turned out in a well-tailored three piece suit.

I recall one Monday morning. The class bell rang but Voegelin was not poised at the lecturn as was his custom.