Plato’s Pupil: James M. Rhodes (February 24, 1940-January 23, 2015)

When I received an email from Maria McMahon about her father’s death, I was both shocked and sadden by the news, as I had no indication that he was ill. The last time we had spoken was eighteen months ago in Chicago, after the Eric Voegelin Society Meeting, when Dr. Rhodes appeared healthy and his usual self: quiet, content, thoughtful. After musing over the message, I booked a flight to Milwaukee for the funeral, although at the time I did not know exactly why. But now, having a moment to reflect upon the matter, I felt that I had to pay my respects to the family of the man who had loved and formed me – to use Dr. Rhodes’ words about his own mentor, Gerhart Niemeyer – in “the vocation of wondering questioning” and to whom I was eternally grateful and in return loved.[1]

Both at the visitation and the funeral, there were his family and friends, neighbors and professional colleagues, and his past students. I eventually pursued a profession in political philosophy and therefore stayed in contact with Dr. Rhodes throughout my career. However, I was surprised by the number of students who were present at the visitation and service, almost none of whom were involved professionally in higher education. It was evident that Dr. Rhodes had left an indelible impression on our lives, regardless of our career paths; and it wasn’t until his passing that we had realized what an effect he had on us: how our souls were moved to contemplate the true, the beautiful, and the good in his classes and conversations afterwards. Although the time spent with Dr. Rhodes was brief when compared to the span of our lives lived thus far, we felt the wondrous impact he had made on us. Such transformative encounters are infrequent in life and therefore should be prized when they occur. I think this is the reason why we felt compelled to pay homage to this exceptional teacher and good man.

But why did Dr. Rhodes have such a lasting effect on his students? Why, after his first semester of teaching at Marquette University, did his students applauded him on the last day of class and awarded him a chalice as a token of their gratitude? Why did his students from the 1980s design a coat of arms labelled “Rhodes Scholars” in honor of their teacher? Why did I and my classmates in the 1990s, who enrolled in every class he offered, also participate in reading groups with him for which we received no college credit at all? And why did those students who came after us speak about the enduring influence he had on their lives, being like a father figure who helped each of them find their own paths in their lives? In short, why was he such a great teacher?

I had asked him this question on several occasions, especially at the beginning of my career as a professor. His answers were essentially the same throughout the years, with some variation. But it was the first time I had asked him that I remember most vividly: his reply was simply, “Love the student.” This answer startled me, not only because as I was expecting a more practical response, but also because it reoriented my entire perspective on teaching away from a mastery of material to a paradigm of the Platonic periagoge, turning the student’s soul to the true, the beautiful, and the good. For Dr. Rhodes, teaching, at its core, was a lived existence in the pursuit of truth with a community of liked-minded people. Like Socrates, who never claimed to know truth but sought only to find it with his students, Dr. Rhodes undertook this same task with grace and delight. In this way he loved his students not by instructing them but rather by inviting them to join him in his search.

When I was an undergraduate student at Marquette, I was fortunate to participate in Dr. Rhodes’ “wondrous questioning.” In the summer of my sophomore year, when I was staying in Milwaukee and enrolled in calculus classes to fulfill degree requirements, I remember being nervous about asking him, who I did not know that well at that time, whether we could read Plato that summer without college credit. I began the request with a long preface of qualifications, thereby giving him a chance to refuse. Dr. Rhodes simply interrupted me and said, “If it is within my power, I will do it.” I was moved not only by his willingness to listen to my rambling but also by his readiness to help me, even though he did not know exactly what I would be asking. I think that he agreed to my, and many other students’, appeals for spiritual and intellectual assistance because he believed that the most important part of his profession was the shaping of his students’ souls, moving us onto the paths to think about the fundamental questions of human existence, while, at the same time, helping us learn how to live in a world of pragmatic matters and practical concerns.

He would continue to grant many other requests of mine throughout my time at Marquette, whether it was enrolling in graduate courses or doing an independent study on Eric Voegelin. The latter event I remember with particular fondness. Because of conflicting schedules, I took the bus once a week to the Bayshore Mall where he picked me up and then drove me to his house where we had tea and discussed Voegelin. After the tutorial was finished, his wife returned home from work and then we had dinner together, after which he dropped me off at campus, or, occasionally, his daughter Maria did, who had come home that evening for a visit.

It was during those tutorials, as well as during his office hours, which I monopolized yet he never resented it, that time seemed suspended from the daily ebbs and flows of life. During these periods, we would talk not only about political philosophy but about life itself: its purpose, its meaning, and where our place was in it. Fumblingly and graspingly, I would express these concerns as best I could in half-articulated thoughts, while Dr. Rhodes would sit back and listen in silent contemplation, thinking about these questions and eventually providing possible paths – never answers – about how to think about them with greater clarity and precision. Those times with him were strange and surreal, almost mystical. In those moments the daily demands of life would recede away into silent contemplation of the highest things, freeing us from the distractions of the day in order to focus on the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Dr. Rhodes’ willingness to take his students’ concerns seriously and be available to them whenever possible only partially explains why students were crammed into his office or waiting outside in a long queue to talk to him after class had ended. The other part of the equation was Dr. Rhodes teaching us in the classroom where he showed us how to think and seek truth as a community. Employing the Socratic method, Dr. Rhodes would start the class with questions, eliciting answers from students and having them justify their responses with logic and textual evidence. He would illustrate that what we were studying – obscure thinkers in translated texts – was relevant to our lives, as these philosophers were answering the question of what it means to be human and what type of community in which we should live. Dr. Rhodes would do this sometimes by incorporating a recent event into the analysis of a text or by showing how the logical consequences of an idea would unfold into our current lives. But the most memorial and best way he would demonstrate the importance of what we were studying was by his own personal anecdotes, for he was a gifted and wonderful storyteller. In these tales, he would show how political philosophy was meaningful to his life and thereby to ours. In fact, there were even times when some students would correct him in the accounting of his own stories as they had enrolled in all of his courses and thus had memorized the “fluffy” or “fishing” accounts by heart.

Dr. Rhodes was always fair in the classroom when students disagreed among themselves, never taking sides but revealing the assumptions, consequences, and internal logic of each position. He also would never mock a student, even when it was obvious to everyone that the student was in error, but instead would gently try to encourage the student onto the right path of how to think about the question. As his close friend and colleague, Dr. Michael Fleet, said, “Dr. Rhodes had high standards but realistic expectations.” Though he was thoughtful, accessible, and funny in the classroom, Dr. Rhodes expected excellence from his students in both speech and writing. But this expectation was tempered by the conditions of specific students. At times, he would climb down from the hilltop and help guide you up the mountain. Although he loved his students and hoped the best for them, he also was a realist, balancing what he asked from them with what they could do.

For teaching ultimately is a personal encounter between teacher and student, as each student is unique and therefore needs to be loved and nurtured according to their individual souls: what may work in one instance may fail in another. Dr. Rhodes not only understood this, but he was able to accomplish this in the classroom with a group of twenty-five or so students where each one felt a personal encounter with the man. How he was able to do this is nothing short of a miracle; and, to this day, I do not know how he was able to do it. If I had to venture a guess, it would be that teaching is more than technique: it is the person who inexplicitly emanates a type of truth to his students. As Aquinas points out, students not only listen to the words of the teacher; they also pay attention to his or her way of living out what he or she teaches.[2] The teacher must be of good character, as inevitably he or she serves as an exemplar for students. Also, he or she should have a genuine care for the truth and be committed to pursuing it, which is a requirement for teaching students well. For the student’s part, he or she must have faith in the teacher as a person and believe that what will be imparted is trustworthy. The teacher and the student must love and trust one another in their joint pursuit of truth: the student must trust the teacher and the teacher must, in turn, encourage and nurture the student to “listen willingly, seek diligently, respond prudently, and meditate attentively” if they are to grow in wisdom.

In spite of his periodic gloomy predictions about the world, Dr. Rhodes fundamentally had faith in the goodness that resided in reality while simultaneously being realistic and pragmatic about the limitations of what one could do. He trusted the common sense of his students to make the right decisions in their lives; and, in return, his students responded to that trust with an openness to truth. Dr. Rhodes was able to make the classroom of twenty-five students be a personal encounter between teacher and student because he trusted his students to join him in his humble effort to search for truth together. Rather than employing gimmicky pedagogical tricks to encourage class participation, Dr. Rhodes elicited student involvement because he was an exemplar of what it meant to be a good teacher and human being. Instead of “flipping the classroom,” Dr. Rhodes was the classroom: he was in tune with the world, with all its hopeful goodness and resigned sadness, and summoned his students to partake in this quest.

This life of the mind and nourishment of the soul was guided by Platonic periagoge and Thomist trust, but it also was supplemented with the Aristotelian virtues that he both possessed and sought to cultivate in his students. On another occasion when I had asked him what made a good teacher, Dr. Rhodes replied first with “Love the student” but then added the ability to foster the virtues of wisdom, reason, and prudence in students, along with ethical virtues, if opportunity arose. Love and trust are required for learning to emerge but the Aristotelian virtues are necessary for the shaping of students’ souls. Without these virtues, students will not be able to navigate the demands of daily life, whether in their families, careers, or other challenges and obstacles thrown their way. Dr. Rhodes sought to instill as much as possible these virtues in his students so that we not only contemplate the true, the beautiful, and the good but also learn how to live our lives well and as life truly is instead of how we imagine it to be.

In a certain sense, Dr. Rhodes understood there were limits to the influence that a teacher could have on his or her students. Molding the movement of students’ souls in Platonic love, Thomist trust, and Aristotelian virtues is the best a teacher can hope for in the brief time he or she has with them. Whether one has a beneficial, or any, impact on a student is ultimately a mystery. The final time we had discussed about how one can know what constitutes good teaching, he simply said, “I don’t know. It’s a mystery. When it happens, you simply know it.” Although his answer was to my specific question, I believe it also encapsulated his view of life as fundamentally a type of mystery in which we have to believe that we can do good in the world, though this good will always be limited, fragile, and transient in nature. It is a belief that cannot be rationally deduced or empirically verified but rather rests on the faith that, despite the corruption and confusion of our times, we as a community of teachers and students have an important role to play in loving, trusting, and learning from each other.

It is our memory of our fleeting time with Dr. Rhodes that brought us to his funeral, because it was a period in our lives when we were moved to contemplate the truth. It is not that we continually dwell in our memories of him but rather that these memories have shaped and guided our lives as we have moved forward. Remembering Dr. Rhodes, we realize that every moment of our lives are precious, as we do not know which ones will have a lasting impact, whether in the classroom, in conversations, or in other such actions. It is our memory of Dr. Rhodes that brought us together as a community of students in his classes, as a community of students across generations, and as a community that partook in a tradition stretching back to antiquity, and that, with Socrates, contemplates the highest things in life. It is because of this one man, a midwife to many children, that we shared in this ancient wisdom, which we saw at work in him, in ourselves, and in the tradition to which we all belong.

When Gerhart Niemeyer died in June 1997, Dr. Rhodes wrote the following tribute to his teacher:

“I realized soon that I wanted to spend all my years doing what he did, in the way that he did it. . . He clarified hundreds of topics with an astonishing erudition that he never flaunted and that I never have hoped to match, as he fostered my growth into a spiritual reality that balanced faith and understanding, as he steadied me in difficult moments, and as he fondly suffered me to shower him with appeals for help as long as he lived. He always displayed an awesome power of silent listening to reality, a generous love of the student, a Socratic humility about the incomplete state of his knowledge, and an undogmatic openness to the boundless unknown that formed me in the vocation of wondrous questioning. . . Although Gerhart Niemeyer had this impact on me, I have hitherto refrained from writing about him because I have feared that no words of mine could be adequate to the good that he did me.”[3]

This portrayal of Gerhart Niemeyer could be said to be the same for James M. Rhodes; and, as Dr. Rhodes’ students, we can say that not only did Dr. Rhodes spent his years doing what Niemeyer did “in the way that he did it,” but our words also fall short of adequately expressing what an exceptional teacher and human being Dr. Rhodes was and what lasting impact he had on us. The brief time we had spent with him moved our souls to partake in his wisdom, as wisdom is not possessed by any one single person but is to be shared among everyone. In this sense, there is no greater pupil of Plato than Dr. Rhodes, who sought to share his wisdom and his search for truth with all of his students. Being mere shadows of our teacher, we students did our best to learn from him. It is our memory of him that not only brings us together as a community in search of truth, but provides us with a cherished image of a good man who is and will remain a constant presence in our lives of what it means to endure loss, love life, and trust the mystery of our existence that it is somehow inexplicably true, beautiful, and good.

Notes

[1] James M. Rhodes, “Gerhart Niemeyer: Seeker for the Way,” Logos 10.2 (Spring 2007): 114.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, “Sermon Puer Iesus: On the First Sunday After Epiphany,” trans. Athanasius Sulvak. Available at http://www.dhspriory.org/thomas/english/SermPuerIesus.htm. II. Coliatio.3. Vivian Borland has an insightful commentary on this sermon: “St. Thomas’s sermon Puer Iesus: a neglected source for his understanding of teaching and learning,” New Blackfriars 88.1016 (Spring 2007): 457-70.

[3] Rhodes, “Gerhart Niemeyer,” 113-14.

Lee Trepanier is a Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University. He studied with Professor Rhodes at Marquette University from 1991-95.

Print