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.