from  The Northern Lights

 

Voegelin at Notre Dame -Part 1

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science and has edited several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Jodi Bruhn is the editor of Vol 13 and also translator of Vols 8, 13, and 32 of The Collected Works. This essay appears as Chapter 4 in Voegelin Recollected–Conversations on a life,  University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2008. This is published with permission and  appears in three parts. Most of the interviews here were conducted by Barry Cooper. A list of the contributors and some information about them is found at the end of this article.

 

 The South Dining Hall 

 

JOHN ROOS: We would often watch out for Voegelin on campus. There was a professor named Anton-Hermann Chroust, a real character. He was a lawyer, philologist, and classicist who had written on various texts of Aristotle. He and Voegelin would hold court, so to speak, over in the South Dining Hall, in a place called the Oak Room. They both smoked cigars, and they would go over there in the mornings and have their coffee. They were both about the same age and had gone through some of the same experiences. Chroust had this line when he would go to class; he would tell Professor Voegelin (I still call him Professor Voegelin, this gives you an idea of the ambience at the time!) that he was going to cast real pearls before real swine.

 

JOHN KENNEDY: I recall a kind of tableau there in the South Dining Hall. Eric lived at the Morris Inn when he was here, but he generally went over to the South Dining Hall for dinner. And Tony Chroust inhabited the place. I can still see him and Tony and a couple of other faculty members at a table together. Their erudition was very impressive. Voegelin's in particular was really impressive.

 

 

 

Did you know that Voegelin would dine regularly with Professor Chroust?

 

JOHN GUEGUEN: I wasn't aware that Voegelin associated with him. Professor Chroust was an elderly law professor and extremely eccentric. He drove around in a flaming red convertible, this elderly man. He was more different, so to speak, than the people he associated with, yet he was trying to be as modern as he could.

Anton-Hermann Chroust 1961

 

DENNIS MORAN: Chroust would go off to Europe and buy a new car every year, a sports car, a very, very expensive one. He would drive it for one year, then he would come back, and ship it back in a boat. Sometimes he'd give Voegelin a lift home to the Morris Inn, even though it was only about a hundred yards.

 

I remember their lunches together. They were the salt of the earth, the two of them. Voegelin would sit there in the South Dining Hall in his brown tweed jacket and smoke his cigar. That was in the good old days when you were allowed to smoke, even in the cafeteria. Sometimes he would be by himself, but he was very often with dinner companions — usually, with Tony Chroust. Basically, Tony and Voegelin didn't give a damn that they were teaching in a Catholic university and they were both agnostics. One time I went into the cafeteria on a Saturday morning. The two of them were there having lunch, and I joined them.

 

We ended up arguing about Lucretius. Chroust was arguing about something Lucretius said, and I said, "Oh, I don't think you should believe anything he wrote! It was just an effort to convince people to think about what they think." Voegelin thought that this was humorous. Chroust was annoyed and said to me, "What do you know about Lucretius?" I said, "I read it." And he said, "Oh yeah, but you didn't read it in the original." I said, "No, I read it in the original." He just looked at me, then he turned to Voegelin and said, "Tell him he's wrong!" But Voegelin just smiled and said, "I can't because I agree with him." So, Voegelin laughed because he also thought that Lucretius didn't believe anything himself and was trying to say that you should avoid superstition.

 

Then we started talking about superstition, which involved the question of the significance of what Lucretius was doing. Voegelin liked to talk about that. I think he was fascinated with people who believed. I don't think Voegelin saw himself as a nonbeliever, but he wasn't a believer either. They used to joke about it. They loved just to scandalize us: in fact, that's pretty much what we were there for. But Voegelin, more than Chroust, was not just laughing about the Lucretius thing. He was genuinely concerned about people who were superstitious, who were overly devotional. I think that that was part of what he was really worried about: about people who go off the deep end.

 

So you would see these distinguished guys sitting there and you'd just go over?

 

MORAN: They'd usually invite you. That Saturday they said, "Hey, come sit down with us" — which probably meant that they were bored with each other and were going to devour this graduate student. As it turned out, Voegelin decided I wasn't so stupid after all. Although, I remember once — I can't remember in what context — Voegelin turned to me and said, "You're a Dummkopf." And I thought, "God, that's an honor." I must have slipped into whatever trap Chroust was trying to set for me and missed it altogether and made a fool of myself.

 

                              Did they have serious debates?

 

Eric Voegelin at ND in 1961

MORAN: They would argue, but Chroust was always irreverent. Voegelin would sit there; he would slightly lean back and smoke his cigar. And he used to have tweed jackets and kind of knit ties. He didn't always wear white shirts, but most of the time they were laundered, nice white shirts. He was a very stiff man. And Chroust was this rumpled-up person who probably hadn't had anything dry cleaned in months, and he would always smoke his pipe and would always be a mess. So, the two of them: Chroust, this rumpled-up character, and Voegelin, this wonderful — someone should make a bust of him. We always used to sit there and think, "Where's he going to put the ash?" Chroust was rumpled up with stains on his clothes and Voegelin would sit there with his cigar and you'd be waiting for the ash to fall. But he never spilled any on himself. He was always impeccable; it was delightful.

 

Sometimes they would get into current events. I think that Voegelin was like Cardinal Newman in certain ways; he was very interested in the angelism of humanity. Chroust was interested in the other side: he was interested in corruption. My impression was that they really defined each other: Chroust was a skeptic, whereas Voegelin was clearly not a skeptic, there was no cynicism about him at all. Chroust wanted to know everything; he wanted to know all the gossip about the university, especially about the priests. Voegelin was much more involved in bigger ideas and he liked to talk about bigger things. They would talk together about big things, too. They argued about the Republic, for example.

 

But at that time, we were all pretty amused to have these two people thrown together. Life could be very amusing! Voegelin was a Lutheran. And Tony was sort of a Catholic, sort of a Jew, sort of an agnostic. He saw everything as a mystery to be solved. He saw everything that was mystery as a detective story, whereas Voegelin's notion of mystery was cosmic. For Chroust, life was a back alley mystery novel! Chroust was always reducing things to the lowest common denominator, to money and women. You must also remember that he was spending his life trying to prove that Aristotle was a spy — on the basis of the lost works of Aristotle!

 

So their approaches to scholarship were antithetical?

 

MORAN: Right. They were on different ends of the telescope. I think what bound them together was that, for any expatriate types, this was the Café Roma of Notre Dame. And in general, they were both kind and generous. They would argue and it would be about something serious, but it wasn't textual. Ordinarily, I would be the unnamed interlocutor in the dialogue. You know, they would simply turn to me and say, "Was that Keats or Shelley?" And I would just say, "Shelley."

 

 

 

First Encounters

 

FREDERICK CROSSON: He was an interesting figure. He was around here at Notre Dame intermittently over a period of, I guess, fifteen years. Father Stanley Parry, the chairman of the department, brought him here. Parry was a Holy Cross priest.

 

Sorry, a what?

 

CROSSON: Holy Cross, that's the order that founded Notre Dame: the Congregatio Sancta Crucis. It's a title, not an adjective! Father Parry had done a Ph.D. in political science at Yale with a well-known conservative, Wilmoore Kendall. Kendall had really put his stamp on Parry. So, when Parry came back here, he did a lot to influence the department toward the conservative side of things. He was the one who brought Voegelin here.

 

Because he was a naturalized citizen, he had to spend a certain amount of time in America.

 

CROSSON: Yes. The first time he came was certainly early on — it would have been the late '50s or early '6os. And he had of course acquired national visibility long before then, whether you loved him or hated him. It was, I guess, thanks in large part to that Walgreen Lecture, The New Science of Politics. It tugged him out of Louisiana onto the larger scene. And it was certainly a boon for us, for our students and for the faculty members who interacted with him.

 

The first time he came, Father Parry invited him. He was going to give a graduate seminar, and the first meeting of it was an open meeting. Maybe I was invited to that because I had done a minor in the Government department here when I was working on my Ph.D. I remember that session very well, mainly because of what might have been a quasi-embarrassing moment for me! His talk that night was on Aristotle, and in the course of it, he said — I can still almost quote the words — "Aristotle says that if you want to understand human nature, you should read the poets." In the discussion afterward, I raised my hand and said, "I don't think that's an Aristotelian sentiment. Where does Aristotle say that?" And he responded in Germanic fashion, which was the way he generally talked, "In the Poetics!" I said, "Gee, I've read the Poetics a couple of times and I don't remember him saying anything like that." He said, "Read it again!" He must have been thinking of the passage where Aristotle compares history to poetry and says, "Well, poetry is more philosophical than history." But that doesn't make it more philosophical than the philosophers! So, he must have been giving his own hermeneutics on that.

 

Professor Kennedy, how did you know Professor Voegelin?

 

KENNEDY: Eric had been a professor on the faculty at this department for a couple of years at least, maybe more, when I met him. He generally came in the spring semester. I believe he was looked upon as part of the regular faculty. He was not a visiting professor. There were inconveniences with the German universities, coordinating his schedule, because the German semester does not coincide with ours. I think he always had to go back early, which caused inconvenience for him at some point. He lectured in the political theory field and also gave public lectures, maybe three of them during the semester in addition to his classes.

 

What was your impression of him?

 

KENNEDY: Basically he was an enjoyable man, a nice person, as far as I was concerned. He had a sense of humor. He was, as I say, an asset. The negative side was the scheduling.

 

When did you first meet Voegelin and where?

 

WALTER NICGORSKI: I'm not absolutely sure whether I was reading The New Science of Politics when I first heard Voegelin lecture, or whether it was a result of that first lecture that I got started on it. But I was in the audience. It was a small audience at the Opus Dei residence on the South Side of Chicago, near the University of Chicago, called Woodlawn Residence. There was quite an interest in Voegelin among the graduate students at Chicago. This was partly caused by graduates of Notre Dame who had encountered him here and then gone up to Chicago into graduate studies.

 

I remember much more vividly my first encounter with him here at Notre Dame. I had been appointed as an instructor and was still finishing my dissertation, working under Leo Strauss on Cicero. This was the fall of 1964, and it was either that fall or the next spring that Voegelin was lecturing here. He was in residence for a term, and back again in 1968 — that was when he did the lectures on Hegel. I asked Voegelin a question at the end of another of his lectures having to do with certain of the Socratic passages in Plato. I didn't realize at the time that I must have touched sensitive ground; I wonder in retrospect if I didn't really touch some of the ground that he and Strauss had gone over long before early in their correspondence, in the letters about myth in Plato. In any case, I remember his intimidating response; he glared down at me and said, "Where did you get that question?" 

 

"From my head!"

 

NICGORSKI: Right! He was pretty upset with it. I can't remember now whether I wormed out of the situation or if he simply moved on to another questioner and dismissed it. Then I went home and wrote him a long, two- to three-page single-spaced letter in which I cited the Platonic texts that had informed the question I gave him.

 

Next day I dropped it in his box at the Morris Inn and taught my class. Not long after I got out of class, the phone rang in the office. It was Eric Voegelin. And his opening lines were, "Oh, Professor Nicgorski, I didn't realize that it was you posing that question!" Certainly in the American university system, we have our attachments to rank and all, but in his experience, attention to rank was much more important! And now he was very cordial; he invited me to lunch to talk it over, and we began a very good and fruitful relationship. Subsequently, others have told me that they also had a very rocky time in the early days of studying with him, but that it turned into a very good relationship as well. But I'm sure my question had something to do with Strauss's emphasis on the Socratic turn and the priority of practical philosophy over myth.

 

How did he respond to other questions?

 

NICGORSKI: He could be pretty rough on people who challenged him.

 

It was my recollection that, if he thought that you were challenging him, he could he rough. But if he thought that you were asking a question because you didn't know, then he would be a gentleman.

 

NICGORSKI: I had similar thoughts. As one comes to understand more the range of his knowledge, and grows in experience and understanding oneself, and faces teaching and lecturing situations — one maybe wouldn't ever have quite the same manner he had, not coming out of the same background and experience, but one has more understanding of what might have been his impatience with certain challenges. Given the clarity with which he saw matters, one comes to be more sympathetic with the passage of time and the gaining of experience.

 

 

 

Teaching at Notre Dame

 

JAMES BABIN: I asked him once where he liked most to teach. He said he liked to teach at Notre Dame, because he could assume the students had at least some basic grounding in philosophy and theology. But otherwise, he liked Harvard because of the library.

 

When did you first meet or hear about Voegelin?

 

GUEGUEN: I was an undergraduate, a major in liberal arts at the University of Notre Dame in the early '50s. The chairman of the department, Father Stanley Parry, and Professor Gerhart Niemeyer were, I guess you could say, strong fans of Eric Voegelin at the time. No one in the department failed to hear about him and to be directed to his writings: to Order and History and The New Science of Politics. He was always the grey eminence in the background, the great interpreter of texts in our field.

 

I returned from Chicago to teach at the Government department in 1962, the year Voegelin returned, and I was assigned as his teaching assistant. My duties were strictly academic. I sat in on his graduate seminar and administered his undergraduate class, provided counseling for the students, read their papers, and assigned their readings. Voegelin had as little to do with the students as possible.

 

What were his lectures like?

 

GUEGUEN: His undergraduate lecture was delivered on the stage at the law auditorium. He would parade back and forth across the stage. I think it wouldn't have mattered if there were anyone there or not! He was discoursing on the subject, always attired in the same dark suit and the same red plaid tie, which made him a celebrity with the students: some of them were profoundly appalled by this, others found it amusing. He used no notes. He talked continuously while he paced back and forth on the stage without stopping. He appeared to have no difficulty whatsoever following the thread of his own thought. There were no interruptions. He came promptly on time and departed promptly on time.

 

Did the students find this intimidating or amusing?

 

GUEGUEN: I got a variety of responses. Some of them thought he was posturing. His eccentricities were the subject of little jokes and that sort of thing. But for serious students, especially those who had been led to take his course by other members of the faculty who knew why he was there and what they were supposed to get from it, I think they learned a great deal. He had a gift of speaking in an audible, easily understood English. Of course, his vocabulary was special. I spent much of my time with the students trying to explain these special words, this special terminology that he had developed.

 

What would their characteristic difficulties be?

 

GUEGUEN: Well, the graduate seminar, for example, consisted of a number of people who eventually got into careers in the university. These were very impressive students. And yet on the second day of the meeting, Voegelin announced that our response to the opening class had persuaded him that we were not ready for what he had originally intended to present. He was more surprised than we were as to the difficulties that he was going to encounter.

 

What was the defect he saw among the students?

 

GUEGUEN: A complete lack of knowledge of history, of culture, of languages — classical languages. We had all been the recipients of a proper gentleman's middle-class education, whereas he was used to an older classical tradition. He may have been teasing us a bit too, because he had been teaching at Louisiana State and he surely understood the kind of student he would have. Maybe he just wanted to intimidate us to help us, to make us more open to what he was doing.

 

Did it work?

 

GUEGUEN: I think it did. I think it did lead to people making a more serious effort. There were study groups; students would get together trying to figure out what this strange professor was up to.

 

TOM FLANAGAN: There were about fifty students enrolled in his undergraduate course. I didn't know it then, but I now realize that it was conducted in the manner of a German Vorlesung. It probably should have had more students to make it really authentic. I don't believe there were any assigned readings — possibly The New Science of Politics, but I had already read that the year before. For the most part, Voegelin simply came in and lectured. Sometimes he talked out of his head, sometimes he used material in black binders, which  I think must have been his unpublished "History of Political Ideas." He lectured on Machiavelli for a while and also on the Encyclopedists of the French Enlightenment; those were two cases where he resorted to his binders.

 

Everything he discussed was fascinating to me at the time. He was for me an oracle. In the previous year in Niemeyer's course, I had read books like Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, and Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, and it all culminated with The New Science of Politics. So, in my mind, Voegelin had synthesized current scholarship and everything revolved around that. It really didn't matter much what he did, I would have found it interesting.

 

 

Some undergraduate Recollections

 

You studied with Voegelin as an undergraduate?

 

ROOS: Yes. I went to Notre Dame from 1961 to 1965. At the time, Professor Voegelin would come every three or four semesters and teach generally an undergraduate course and sometimes a graduate seminar. The one I remember most was either in 1964 or in 1965 and was entitled "Gnosis, Apocalypse, and Christianity." There were about forty or fifty students, and it was a quite striking topic for us. It wasn't quite as obscure as it might have been for a typical American undergraduate at the time, who would have known relatively little about Gnosis and apocalypse. First, we were a Catholic university. Second, Gerhart Niemeyer was here. I had become interested in political philosophy very early on and had taken courses from Gerhart, from Edward Goerner, and from Father Parry. It was a very active place at the time. People like Paul Ricoeur and Yves Simon would lecture relatively frequently, and Hannah Arendt would come down. Through a variety of factors, we had in fact read some of the materials that Professor Voegelin was working on. So, we obviously thought we knew more than we did, but at least we weren't wholly in the dark about some of the themes he was talking about.

 

What text did he use?

 

ROOS: He never used a text.

 

No, I mean what did he have you read?

 

ROOS: Oh, what readings? The reason I emphasized that he used no text is that one of the advantages of our education back then was that, for students who were really interested in political philosophy, none of our teachers used texts. We would read monographs and original works, so that once we got to graduate school, we had some of the skills we needed. We read Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium; we read Hans Jonas, Gnostic Religion; I think we read Gilgamesh; we read Frankfort's book, and Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind. Those are the ones that stand out.

 

Voegelin focused on the basic pattern whereby Christianity raises the possibility of an impulse toward reimmanentizing the eschaton. This was found in early Gnosticism and in the irruption of it with Joachim of Fiora, and then it reemerged in modern totalitarian movements. And so the punch line of the course was that modern totalitarianism in some way can be seen as a Christian Gnostic heresy that tries to reimmanentize the eschaton, which the Incarnation had actually placed outside time.

 

There was a debate between Voegelin and Hannah Arendt published in the Review of Politics on just that question. Did you ever read Hannah Arendt in his course?

 

ROOS: No, we almost never turned to what might be called the contemporary secondary debate. We never read Strauss, never read Heidegger, never read Hannah Arendt. Obviously, Voegelin would alert us to the existence of various views on these materials. But he treated Cohn, for example, as representing to us more or less archaeological evidence, as it were. Our task with this guy was to theorize about these materials rather than engage in secondary debates.

 

What kind of a lecturer was he?

 

ROOS: Hah! I had never been to Germany, but I had certain stereotypes of the German professor. Whether these were right or wrong is another matter, but Professor Voegelin certainly fit the stereotypes I had. That is, he was businesslike, he was didactic, he was intent on covering the material, and he was not inviting of class discussion. He was there to lead us through the materials. And it was partly because it was a large class — there were fifty students! — but the emphasis was certainly on his voice leading us through materials rather than on discussion. If you wanted to argue with him about something, there was always the feeling that he didn't have much stomach for spending the entire class period arguing about something that might turn out to be simply an assertion of will rather than genuine inquiry.

 

Did Voegelin ever talk to you about his experiences in Europe?

 

ROOS: In class, he would try not to get terribly involved in particulars. He would make reference to the atmosphere, not to the particulars of his actual leaving, but to what he considered the gangsters in the classroom, you know — the leftists versus the rightists in the classroom — and becoming a pawn. One got the sense that his attachment to the university was enduring, to the idea of a university. And he wasn't going to let that happen again, so he maintained those boundaries. With the undergraduates, he was not one to reminisce a lot about his personal experiences.

 

I think what I would say — I mean, gee, this is how you perceive things when you're twenty years old! But we really had a group of good students: people like Tom Flanagan; John Gearen was a Rhodes; in the senior class we had five Woodrow Wilsons; we had seven National Science Foundations, six Marshalls; and we were all relatively close. Most of us had already worked with, say, Edward Goerner and Father Parry and Gerhart Niemeyer. So, we were relatively motivated and relatively docile; we already thought that this was pretty good stuff. We might not have agreed with his approach, but there was no real conflict.

 

Around the edges, of course, there would be some adolescent tendencies. The funniest story is about his final exam. The question was, "Relate these terms: immanentization, eschatology, Christianity, Incarnation, Gnosis, apocalypse." Then, "Make reference to readings in the semester." So, he gave the exam and we wrote the exam. Now, I had read not only the materials of this course, but had done a lot of work in political theory and had never received a grade less than A, deservedly or not. And I was getting too big for my britches. So, I wrote this long essay that included Eliade, Frankfort, Cohn, Thomas, Augustine; I had all these materials and I understood the basic linkages. I finished the exam and then, with a little bit of humor, I went back to the top of the exam and wrote, "One hypothesis about the relationship between these terms is as follows . . ." Okay? Then I wrote down Voegelin's thesis of The New Science of Politics, although the exam itself laid out what his exposition was in greater detail! Well, the exam came back with the comment, "This is not a hypothesis, this is science." D-! I was willing to take that; I mean, I was being a smart-ass of course. But the real injustice was when he gave Edward Goerner his grade list saying, "I sometimes make mistakes; look this over. If I have made any outrageous grades, change them to whatever you think is just." Well, Edward looked at mine and he read this exam and the really unjust thing was that he gave me a B! So on my transcript, a D- and all these A's was clearly better than a B from Voegelin!

 

So, we were a little feisty around the edges. But more seriously, Voegelin was already sensitive to what became even more full-blown with postmodernism: that everything is constructivist and everything is simply a hypothesis and all hypotheses are from a perspective. And he just didn't want to hear that.

 

 

Voegelin and Science, Seminars and Students

 

Did you get a sense of what science meant for him?

 

ROOS: I remember two things. One was that his conception of theory was different from what might be called the hypothetical-deductive mode. That is when one simply posits possible axioms, deduces consequences, then compares them to reality and has to refer back to the reality of concepts. Even as an undergraduate, I knew that, by theory, he meant something much like science in Aristotle's science: speculative reason. That is, true deductions from true premises: one had to get the premises, and the premises had to be in touch with being before one could proceed. There would be all kinds of serendipity and coming and going and adjusting and revision, but from the get-go, it was not a question of beginning with simply hypothetical or constructivist principles. So, I certainly had a very vague sense — and I hadn't read a lot of analytic philosophy then — that he was closer to something like what might be called a metaphysical or ontological realist than a constructivist.

 

The second was that he believed that this proceeded in political theory, not by an analysis of sense experience, but by a critical clarification of the relationship of symbolization and the relationship back to being. Now, this was deep water for us. But the great mystery was: how can it be that he at the same time pretty clearly thinks of what he's doing as not simply poetic, simply existential, simply personalistic, but that it has this element of reality? He has also introduced us to the importance of history and changes of consciousness. Of course, the question everyone else always came to was: why doesn't this result in radical historicism and relativism? But in the classroom, it was really clear that he didn't think the historical move ended up in relativity. As little nineteen-year-olds, we couldn't quite dot all the i's, but that is the sense we got.

 

Somebody said about Voegelin's idea of science that it would seem to be dogmatism or arrogance. Surely that must have occurred to you with your experience with the test?

 

ROOS: At the time, of course, that occurred to me. What also occurred to me was that I was being a smart-ass! I knew what I was writing at the top of it and thought he was giving me my just dessert in a curious way! There weren't many conflicts because we thought that it was good to read these books; that was why we were at the university. But sometimes it seemed that he envisioned himself as fending off the chaos. He was going to get on with business, there were things to learn, they could be known, and arguing for the sake of arguing — what Socrates called the eristic person — he just wasn't going to put up with it! The sense of the classroom as fragile, I think, is one way that I would probably construe part of his demeanor in the classroom.

 

At that time, we had every excuse to dismiss him as churlish, but we at least knew enough to pose what we thought was an interesting question and not a frivolous one, and we had actually done some work on some of these materials. And he would perhaps sometimes not listen. But rather than feel outraged, many of us simply had a sense that he was mistaken in his judgments of our capacity for civilized discourse. Yet, we also had a sense that it was not because of any personal desire for domination, but a sense of his role as needing to preserve an atmosphere of inquiry.

 

How did he run his seminar?

 

GUEGUEN: The graduate seminar? Well, there was the commanding presence of Voegelin, who had everything planned out, and we were all flying along behind to the best of our abilities. I don't recall people having to prepare seminar papers. I think it was really a lecture, a sit-down lecture. It was in a room on the third floor of O'Shaughnessy Hall around a table, and he was continuing to do what he did in the auditorium, but at a slightly different level.

 

So, the normal distinction that we make between a lecture and a seminar made no difference to him?

 

GUEGUEN: No, the difference was simply cosmetic, a different setting. He always did what he knew how to do and hoped that we would pick up some of the scraps falling from the master's table! I think that analogy is good. And the students could see that too.

 

How did Voegelin get along with students?

 

KENNEDY: I'm taking so long to answer you because I'm trying to find a positive side. What I have recollection of is fairly negative in the sense that . . . .  Now, I cannot recall who of the colleagues made this complaint, but someone in the department said that you could never get Eric to direct a dissertation.

 

FLANAGAN: Once there was an evening with Eric Voegelin that was organized for students in the class. Maybe some other people came, too, but it was mainly for students in the class, and they had a chance to have a cup of coffee with him and to ask him a few questions. I asked him about his mastery of foreign languages, which had always amazed me — that he was able to read material in so many different languages. And I was saying what an advantage in scholarship that gave him, and his response was, "Well, I wasn't born knowing all those languages." So, the message was that, if you want to be a scholar, you have to be willing to invest the time.

 

But in retrospect, I would say that Gerhart Niemeyer was a much better teacher for North American students than Voegelin. Niemeyer was a remarkable teacher. He didn't teach in the German grand manner: he used a reading list, and everybody was expected to keep up with the reading. And he worked with a kind of Socratic method of questions and answers. He was constantly asking people questions and getting them to explore. And he orchestrated all this so that we would also come together. I can remember all the books I read in Niemeyer's class.

 

In contrast, I can't remember anything specific that Voegelin said, although he was there for an entire term. I was mesmerized by him at the time because he was a good speaker and because what he had to say was tremendously erudite and interesting. But it is striking that I actually don't remember anything. So, is it the teacher's responsibility to be erudite and impressive or is it actually to stir something in the minds of students? I think Niemeyer, on that point, was a better teacher.

 

But Voegelin was a phenomenon. He wasn't really a teacher, he was a phenomenon, and he was treated that way. Various people in the department would encourage their students to take Voegelin's classes as a peak experience of your time at Notre Dame. So, Goerner and Parry and Niemeyer and various others were encouraging their students. All of us who were seriously interested in political philosophy took his course. And in a sense, it was an experience. I just don't remember what it was all about now!

 

ALFONS BEITZINGER: He had a kind of pugnacity about him that could be very antagonizing. I remember at one lecture he was very sharp to a student, and I didn't think it was warranted. The student had had a legitimate point he wanted to make. But you know, he came from a Germanic tradition, although he did study at Wisconsin.

 

Was Voegelin a popular teacher?

 

BEITZINGER: Well, let's put it this way: he had his enemies. That word may be too strong: there were people who opposed him. And some of them were enemies you ought to have, but others were serious people who . . . Well, you could tell that his emotions sometimes would come out very strongly and that that would irritate people.

 

MORAN: I have another weird memory. We had a conference here for him, on him. And he got up at the end of it and lambasted everybody for misreading his works. While he was talking, he would march back and forth on the stage smoking his cigar. It was really a magisterial performance.     

This is the first of three parts. Part 2 may be read HERE.

 

 Contributors

(Information given is as of publication of Voegelin Recollected in 2008)