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.