Remembering Ellis Sandoz

My Doktorvater is dead. G. Ellis Sandoz went to the Great Beyond on September 19th.

I met Ellis 31 years ago and indeed the German word Doktorvater captures well the relationship between my 25-year-old self and the sixty year old Ellis.

I had come to LSU to study with the environmental economist Herman Daley, but he soon left LSU to extend his work at the World Bank. I responded to the loss of Daley by entering LSU’s MPA program and as I completed that degree, I began flirting with the idea of studying for a Ph.D. in political science. I completed my first year of study with financial support from the public administration program focusing on international relations, but the politics of the political science department did not play out in my favor, and no funding was awarded for further study.

I had not taken any political theory courses at the time, but I had noticed that there was some exceptional energy and enthusiasm among the students studying political theory. I enjoyed their conversations and the material they were studying appeared to be exceptionally engaging. Perhaps political theory was the way to go, and Ellis Sandoz seemed to be the man with whom to speak.

I walked into Ellis’s office with the naïve hope that he would write me a letter of recommendation to the University of Notre Dame to study political theory there since LSU did not seem to have money for me. At that moment, I saw Ellis’s wit at work. He told me how Allan Bloom always wrote extraordinary letters for every student he had, saying they were the best students he ever had. Ellis looked at me and asked, “What should I write? Todd is the best student I never had?” Somehow out of our exchange, I found funding and a major professor.

I had signed up for a grand adventure in ideas, or more accurately, in the study of the human-divine-experience-symbols of order. The materials we studied were extensive and meaningful – deserving of the time given to their contemplation. Ellis was a student of the philosopher of history, Eric Voegelin, and the remarkable breadth and depth of his Doktorvater’s learning animated his teaching and scholarship.

We delved into the meditative traditions of order going back as far as Pharaonic Egypt, the Achaemenid Empire, the ancient Israelites, archaic and classical Greece, Vedic India, Confucian China and brought it through Pauline Christianity, the thought of the Christian saints, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American founding, the rise and fall of the totalitarian empires, all the way through to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the search for order in the nations throwing off the communist yoke. It was enlightening to participate in this reflective endeavor made possible through using the lenses of the normative sciences of classical and Christian philosophy.

Ellis encouraged open inquiry. He would often implore us, “Look and see if it is not so.” This Platonic injunction allowed for a wide range of questioning. He told us to keep our minds open, but not so open that our brains would fall out. Good advice for those exploring the expanse of human attempts to make sense of humanity’s place in a reality bounded by the mysteries of the beginning and the beyond.

He deployed a great deal of good humor and playfulness as he guided us through these serious matters. One day when I was in the Voegelin Institute playing a war game instead of doing careful research, he walked into my office and not missing a beat, he inquired about how the Great Khan was doing.

Once he asked me who he should give an Earhart Fellowship to. I needed money, but I made the case for two other students. Ellis looked at me, and said with his characteristic mischief, Alyosha (Dostoevsky’s hero from The Brothers Karamazov), you have earned yourself a fellowship.

When I would present some of my more ambitious research plans to him, he would call me young Eric. My ambition outstripped my capabilities, but Ellis knew how to keep his young scholars motivated and aware of their limitations often with a single sentence.

The teasing went both ways. There was an attractive young Russian woman in our seminar covering Plato to Aquinas. She would study with me for exams. At one point she began complaining about one of our political science professors who she found to be a disgusting, fat rat. Her candor led me to inquire what she thought about Dr. Sandoz. I noted Dr. Sandoz was a bit on the portly side. She said, “True… but there is something special about Dr. Sandoz.” I recounted this story to Ellis with my best Russian accent. By the twinkle in his eyes, he seemed to enjoy having something special about himself and perhaps amused by the description of his colleague.

One time I went to his office trying to sell him a raffle ticket to support a medical mission to the Philippines. He pulled out an American Foundation for the Blind envelope from his waste can and said, “I just turned down the blind.” After a few minutes, I managed to get him to buy the ticket.

Despite our hijinks, we were engaged in serious work. The Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies’ motto is and was “in defense of civilization.” What did that mean? It meant we needed to preserve an open inquiry into the nature of reality and embrace virtues that enabled us to wrestle with that reality. There were practical virtues as outlined by Greek philosophy and existential virtues articulated in Christian revelation. Nothing would disturb Ellis more than if you would use language imprecisely and give modern ideologies the unearned dignity of being called philosophy. I made this mistake once and only once. Ellis firmly corrected me and of course, it makes sense since all our work would be for naught if the achievements of classical Greek and Christian philosophy were thrown by the wayside.

I went on to pass my comprehensive exams. I heard through the grapevine my written exams were of very good quality. I had chosen a Chinese dragon tie for the oral exams, and I quipped I hoped St. George would not slay the dragon today. I did reveal some weaknesses in my oral exams. Ellis dealt with these weaknesses in the least painful way possible by having me teach the Federalist Papers in the first course I taught after my comprehensive exams and having me go to a month-long seminar on the Constitution with the Liberty Fund two years later. Ellis wielded his power benevolently.

After a breakneck turnaround in getting my dissertation topic on Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Greeks approved I went off to Heidelberg University as a DAAD scholar. During my time there I had a chance to study with Klaus von Beyme, and Hans Georg Gadamer, and attend a Voegelin conference in Munich where many of Voegelin’s doctoral students, including Juergen Gebhardt, Tilo Schabert, and Peter Opitz, had gathered. It was enlightening to see the various ways Voegelin’s thought had been received. The Germans tended to interpret Voegelin as a scientist in the tradition of Max Weber, and the Americans were more sympathetic to understanding Voegelin’s meditations as having a touch of mysticism at their core with a greater emphasis on the equivalency of the symbol-experiences of philosophy and revelation. I think there is truth in both positions.

 The process of writing a dissertation is a marathon. Working through Strauss and Voegelin’s work and classical Greek thought is not for the faint-hearted. My first submission to Ellis met with a substantial amount of criticism and a path toward liberation. After three months in a cold attic in my parent’s house in Ohio, I worked it into satisfactory form and got a thumbs up from Ellis to defend it. It still needed work, but Ellis knew I would have time to take care of that if I would turn it into a book. He also was sympathetic to the need for a maturing man to find work and start a family.

Ellis networked well. I met with people from the Liberty Fund, a couple of colleges, the superintendent of schools of Louisiana, and finally ended up taking a job with Paul Copperman, a former education adviser to Ronald Reagan and President of the Institute for Reading Development, and the Voegelin scholar Mike Morrissey to develop a k-12 curriculum in literature, poetry, and drama. I also got to enjoy the pleasure of Paul Caringella’s company, Voegelin’s personal assistant, and a circle of scholars and Voegelin enthusiasts living in the Bay area. Ellis got me a very interesting job. The letters of recommendation he would write for me started to resemble the letters Allan Bloom wrote for his students.

Ellis continued teaching way into his 80s and produced many more scholars. I would touch base now and then. I sent him pictures of my children and kept him abreast of my professional progress. I eventually secured a couple academic posts, and I am certain it amused him a bit to see me at a Voegelin conference with a bald head and a white beard. Whenever I would come across someone with a good amount of money, I would see if I could convince them to send money to the Voegelin Institute. Getting that money is not an easy thing. Ellis created a remarkable institution and did an immeasurable good for Voegelin studies and that achievement should never be underestimated.

With Ellis’s passing, I think of Dostoevsky, a writer whom he knew so well. Dostoevsky’s masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, ends with Alyosha affirming the vision of the resurrection to a bunch of young boys who had just lost one of their friends. The boy is young, and the death is untimely – tragic. The prospect of gathering in the future under the auspicious occurrence of God’s grace moves them from their despair to joy. The book ends with the boys shouting, “Hurray for Karamazov!” Those familiar with the novel will know that Alyosha confronted by the same harsh world his brother Ivan rejects finds a way to thrive and endure amid freedom and suffering. “Hurray for Karamazov!” is emblematic of this undying struggle.

Ellis was not a child, but a mature man, 92 years old, when he left us. He could look back on a long life of achievement amidst struggles. He had a loving wife, four beautiful children, and many colleagues and students who admired him. It seems he would have achieved the happiness Aristotle believed a mature man could have. Yet, we still feel sorrow at his loss… our loss.

He certainly relied on his faith to deal with the problem of mortality. He was an unapologetic Baptist. His cause was to allow human beings to live lives of freedom and dignity in a world that unrelentingly burdens us with troubles. As a scientist, he attempted to provide people with the resources to resist the eclipse of reality by those who would deny human beings their freedom and dignity as they confront this reality as it is. Dostoevsky never wrote the story of the mature Alyosha that he planned, but if he did, Ellis’s life would parallel it nicely, if it was about a hero who ran the race until the end. Hurray for Karamazov! Hurray for Sandoz!

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