Eric Voegelin — A Recollection

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear here in three parts. It  appears with permission of the publisher.

 

I     First Impressions

 

I first met Eric Voegelin in 1940 or 1941 when he came to Baton Rouge to lecture under the auspices of the department of government at Louisiana State University. He may have given a single lecture or a series, and the subject, I suppose, was something that would be part of Order and History, though that large work did not begin appearing for another decade and a half.

 

My first impression of Voegelin was of a speaker of great dignity and ease, of vast learning easily borne and not trimmed to please a general audience, of formality and yet graciousness. Here was a philosopher who had no marks of either the pedant or the popularizer; the gentleman as thinker. Despite a highly technical vocabulary and occasional, but not intrusive, problems of idiom and accent, Voegelin seemed comfortable and fluent in American English. During his stay in Baton Rouge, Eric — I use an informality that was slow to develop — attended a meeting of a faculty discussion group at which I was also present, whether as visitor or regular attendant (I am relying entirely on memory; I have no file of documents, formal or informal, to consult). I remember vividly the type, though not the specifics, of the argument that broke out there between him and several of my colleagues.

 

The latter were depending, as faculties often do, on the fundamental rightness of the current beliefs of social and political liberalism, and no doubt Eric challenged one or more of these; it was not that he was antiliberal in principle, but that he was a vigilant challenger of the going clichés of both left and right. Perhaps his point was that Hitler and Nazism represented less a violation of American democratic ideas than an enduring disorder of a distinguishable philosophical and theological type. I do not remember the details, but I do retain a strong impression that my colleagues, several of whom were my good friends, were badly though unknowingly overmatched.

 

Early during the 1941-1942 academic year there came the news, exciting to all of us who had been greatly impressed by Eric during his visit, that he had accepted a position in the LSU department of government (it had not yet become the department of political science: Bob Harris, then chair, always insisted that the field was not a science) and would arrive in Baton Rouge for the spring semester. Eric's coming seemed to us a major institutional coup, another step toward LSU's realizing a potential that had become evident in various ways. One of the best agents of that potential was Bob Harris: he had an excellent eye for professional quality and, though not a theorist in the Voegelin mold, fully appreciated Voegelin's gifts. Eric would have arrived in January, and I got acquainted with him, I believe, not long after that (my uncertainty about this became an issue during Eric's naturalization proceedings in 1944, a matter that belongs to a later part of this narrative). My wife and I probably met the Voegelins through the Heberles, refugees who had arrived in 1938; Rudolf, a sociologist, had been at Kiel, and his wife, Franziska, was the daughter of the eminent sociologist Ferdinand Toennies.

 

My wife and I found both couples congenial socially. The men were splendid additions to the faculty, and the wives were superior people; they all remained tactfully silent about whatever differences they found between Vienna and Kiel, on one hand, and Baton Rouge on the other. We made special efforts; not only did we want them to feel at home at LSU, but we could imagine their problems in adjusting to a new culture and in having to use a new language. We thought of the daunting difficulties we would face as American refugees in Europe: the problem not only of a new culture but of trying to make a functioning daily tongue out of our graduate-school French or German. We wanted things to work out for the Voegelins and Heberles and hoped that welcoming natives might be helpful.

 

As northerners we too had at first felt like foreigners in Baton Rouge. We had since come to feel very much at home and no doubt felt that, as outsiders-turned-insiders, we would be useful interpreters of the Louisiana mode of American life. In one way, of course, we were doomed to failure: our academic German in no way equipped us to speak and understand the conversational language — a skill that might have temporarily relieved the refugees' burden of having to manage all communication in a second language. They would occasionally fall into German, especially if they had guests whose first language it was. When we were the only monolinguals present, we would sometimes leave early to free the rest for the pleasure of speaking their native tongue without having to be concerned about excluding the two anglophones present.

 

In time we came to use first names. This did not happen rapidly, for society had not yet reached today's stage of instant, obligatory informality, and as individuals we were disinclined to a stylistic intimacy that had not been earned by experience. Perhaps it was we who, as spokesmen for the native mores — we had drifted into the role without seeking it — proposed the use of first names. I mention this because Eric admitted that he found it difficult to call me "Bob," which seemed to him too trivial a vocative to apply to an adult who was at least nominally a scholar. I suppose he got used to it, but for some time he found "Robert" more bearable.

 

We tended to drift together at parties. As Lissy Voegelin said to me years later, "Eric had no small talk." When conversation was called for, he tended to launch into a disquisition on whatever technical issue he was thinking through as he composed Order and History. To an auditor not equipped for such discourse, Eric might have seemed to be exhibiting learning inappropriately or even engaging in a put-down. But anyone who read him thus was utterly wrong. Eric was a considerate man who in social circumstances — as opposed to formal debate, in which no holds would be barred — would never consciously speak in a condescending or indecorous way. He had a strong sense of the proprieties, the decencies, the observances that marked civilized people, and he was incapable of vulgarity, whether in the guise of unrestrained egoism or of simple commonplaceness. If one lacks small talk, at a social occasion one talks about the larger things familiar to him, taking for granted the adequacy of the hearer to the heard.

 

Eric did not monologue. He would make a statement about what interested him and seek responses. He assumed the auditor's competence; he did not talk down to others by sticking to the quotidian or simplifying an issue. Responses were likely to be halfhearted or vague if Eric spoke about, say, the late-medieval origins of the concept of the Third Reich, or the spiritual breakthrough achieved by monotheistic thought, or the derivation of some current political idea from an error by Hegel. He tended to treat his colleagues precisely as if they were fellow members of the philosophy faculty at the University of Vienna. Whatever our professional competence, we were for the most part not quite up to the role. What many of us felt was less resentment than a regretful sense of not being with it, and of wanting the ease of more reassuring company. (Insofar as I may have felt that, the feeling was more than counterbalanced by the awareness of being in the presence of an extraordinary man.) Some people were so defeated by Eric's intellectual superiority that they just wished he'd go away. But he never indulged in derogation, and he tended not to introduce topics he knew would be unwelcome.

 

He was a man of great punctilio. But if controversial topics came up, he did not hesitate to challenge the cliches he heard bandied about. After all, in Vienna he had vigorously attacked rightists even when it was dangerous to do so (in his case it had been life-threatening, and it led to exile). Here in the land of free speech it seemed natural to challenge ideas on the other end of the political spectrum when they seemed inadequate. Obviously, a man who at best was hard to understand and who dared to question long-held secular faiths was not always easy to take.

 

What precedes may suggest that Eric generated only negative reactions. But there were colleagues who, instead of fleeing or being captious, were admiring and devoted and willing to listen and to learn. They might not, however, always be present at parties or handy at given moments. So Eric tended, at social events, to become a solitary, not looking disgruntled or censorious or troubled or neglected, but with his ordinarily pleasant mien — he had a genial air, but with the geniality modified by a certain formality — falling into an expressionless neutrality: registering not bad temper but a sense, somewhat escaping an effort of concealment, that though this kind of sociability had its place and had to be endured (Eric always had a strong sense of obligation), it was still not the most satisfying way of spending several hours. He seemed to be masking discontent or disappointment under an air of detachment. He was not ungracious, but he was genuinely courtly, and that meant that he registered social obligations in a formal key, different from the folksy American geniality based on the exchange of uncontentious trivialities. He was not contemptuous of this American style of social intercourse, but it was not for him a natural way of doing things. Eric was always a thinker before he was a social being.

 

 

II    Acting as Voegelin's "Native Informant"

 

All this is part of a historical picture of Eric Voegelin, but it also serves to introduce an account of my own relations with him. When I said that we tended to drift together at parties, I was not defining myself as his equal or as intellectually superior to our colleagues. In me Eric excited a respect bordering on veneration, for I recognized in him the most extraordinary intellect I had ever encountered, one I could in no way keep up with, especially in the abstruse philosophical matters that could come up spontaneously in any conversation. Although the spirit was willing, the mental flesh was weak.

 

But my good luck was that Eric had as it were established me in a role in which I felt some competence — that, to borrow a term from anthropology, of "native informant." (This is not, of course, to claim exclusive possession of a role that was shared by Bob Harris, Cleanth Brooks, and others who had discovered some congeniality with Eric.) As a non-southerner I might be expected to understand the questions that would occur to another outsider experiencing the Deep South for the first time; in a sense we were foreigners together. But by 1942 I had been in Louisiana for seven years, and I could speak also as an insider. I could act as the interpreter of academic folkways that were unfamiliar to a European-trained scholar. And I knew members of the faculty well enough — LSU was still a relatively small university — to be able to characterize people and to make judgments on their talent, zeal, and professional accomplishment (no doubt with a dash of that free-swinging, confident finality to which one is liable in one's thirties).

 

But the local scene was only a temporary object of inquiry; Eric was more curious about the general habits of American academe — everything from institutional governance to habits of thought to philosophical positions; types of administrative personnel and attitudes; power bases; relations to the outside world; sense of mission and sense of profit; and so on. He knew a great deal about the materia of various fields--the arts, music, history, literature, and of course philosophy — and he was curious about the academic management of these. He would ask about historiographic and critical practices in literature, and often about specific writers: their styles, beliefs, current status in academic esteem; and about individual works and their reputations. His knowledge of literature in English was wide, and he often asked searching questions. These questions, which showed a range of knowledge rare in the practitioners of nonliterary fields, tested the abilities of the informant, whom Eric could praise, assist, and of course challenge.

 

Praise: he once told me that I could and did answer questions that remained unanswered when he directed them to other professors of literature. This puzzled me, for any competent Ph.D. should have been able to deal with most of his inquiries, which by and large concerned central, mainline matters. I can still hear him saying, "They do not answer my questions." I remember his delight when he came across some work he had not known before, such as Ben Jonson's The Alchemist: this play indicated to him an English awareness of, or even tie-in with, the alchemical thought in which Eric had some interest as an aspect of the history of philosophy.

 

Assist: he asked many questions about Shakespeare, and my task was to describe the kinds of scholarly activity practiced by Shakespeareans. I made one sweeping statement — I have forgotten what — about Shakespeareans' habits, and Eric promptly asked what specific person did this sort of thing. When I could not pin down my generalization with an example, he gracefully covered for me: "Ah, it is in the air." This is a phrase I have often found convenient. Now and then, despite his moving primarily in a terminological world of European philosophical practice, he would come up with a simple and useful phrase with an Anglo-Saxon base, for example, "free-floating hatred."

 

Challenge: Eric had a deft way of indicating doubt about some of my judgments and procedures. In analyzing plays and novels I tended to look for the springs of human conduct — the motives, "drives," needs of characters in interplay with one another. It was distressing, then, to discover that Eric considered "psychological" analysis a distinctly inferior mode of criticism. What went on in literature was for him an interplay of philosophical issues and spiritual forces, a clash of symbols rather than a confrontation of psyches. In my later work this view may have somewhat colored my sense of what went on in narratives, but I was not really equipped to see things in Eric's way. Still, I shall never forget the air of innocent and amiable curiosity with which he raised literary questions, and his brief interpositions, ironic but not biting.

 

He would occasionally ask about specific writers. In the late 1940s he observed that much critical discussion of Henry James was going on, and asked what he should read by way of introduction to James. I had been teaching and writing about The Turn of the Screw, and I suggested it. Eric read it immediately — in one sitting, I believe — and wrote me a very long reply (an essay-length letter) interpreting the novel as a study of American Puritanism in which the dramatic actors are God, the Soul, and Ordinary Life (the uncle, the governess, and the housekeeper, respectively). He gave The Turn the highest possible praise when he told me that had he known it when he wrote a book about America after his first visit here, in the 1920s, the book would have been different. I say no more about the subject here because fortunately Eric's letter-essay, with modifications he made several decades later, reached print. ^Fn

 

At the same time that he was asking me questions about literature in English, he was making occasional efforts to educate me about European works; he would recommend novels available in translation. One of these was Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil (I remember his especially praising a "philosophy of laughter" found in that book), and I was sufficiently struck by it to publish a review. Once he urged me to study, if not indeed to memorize, the chapter headings of a volume that would clue me in to how one went about the study of metaphysics. The captions were in German, alas, and I failed the assignment. But Eric was forgiving, and he went on acting as if I were capable of philosophical redemption, despite his inevitable awareness that I was an inadequately endowed pupil.      

 

[This is the first of 3 Parts.  Part 2 will appear next week.]

 

NOTE  

FN. Southern Review, n.s. 7, no. 1 (1971), 9-48; reprinted in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays, 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).