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.