Voegelin at Baton Rouge (Part II)

Q. When Voegelin lived in Baton Rouge he was ill a couple of times, too, wasn’t he?

jo scurria: I’ll never forget it. He had serious colon surgery and he came to work–he never stopped teaching, very rarely–all bandaged up. I said, “Voegelin came to work with a hole in his side.” He must have still been draining or something. He just didn’t want to miss any time. But he had had serious colon surgery, I remember that. He actually had a hole in his side. It must have been a draining tube under the bandages. But he didn’t take time off; he came right on back to teaching. He was something else.

ellis sandoz: He got some kind of parasite from eating lettuce in Baton Rouge. That’s when he was hospitalized, because of this intestinal parasite he got from a salad. It was a very serious attack. That’s how he got acquainted with a famous physician who had a fine medical clinic, like the Mayo Clinic in the North.

But that’s the only illness I can think of. He came back and said, “They handled me like a piece of meat.” He didn’t want to be handled like a piece of meat. These physicians didn’t know what an important piece of meat he was, and they cared less! They were just trying to get the parasites out.

lissy voegelin: Eric had this operation. It was very painful. It was an awful oper­ation, really.

paul caringella: This doctor was a very well-known doctor; he had developed a technique for this kind of surgery. So, Eric was fortunate to be going to Dr. Oxner’s clinic.

l. voegelin: Well, somebody sent him there. And while I was waiting for him in the evening, I bought Time magazine. I leafed through it, and I saw this article about The New Science of Politics. He was in intensive care, although he was already out of the greatest danger. So, I went to the orderlies’ area and I showed the assistant the magazine. I said, “If you would let me show this to him, it would speed his recovery. ” And she said, “Yes, I think we could do that. ” So, I went in with her. Everything was dark, and Eric couldn’t see any­thing, but I showed it to him and I read it out to him and it cheered him up.

Q. Was he in the hospital very often?

l. voegelin: That time, yes. Because they had to take the intestine out. They closed the whole thing up and had to open it here, you know. And after five or six weeks, they had to close it again. The closing of this opening took many trips. He had to go several times and had to use a girdle.

caringella: But he had been seriously ill already in Tuscaloosa, hadn’t he? Didn’t he have encephalitis?

l. voegelin: He was in the hospital then. And he was so weak, I couldn’t believe it. This was in 1939 or 1940.

Q. I remember him being very robust, physically.

l. voegelin: He was.

caringella: But he had that great weakness in Tuscaloosa, and this major surgery in Louisiana. And then he had his gall bladder removed in 1969. So, every fourteen years: from 1939 to 1953, from 1953 to 1969. And then around 1977, he got something like Legionnaires’ disease. He came back from Ann Arbor and collapsed in the garden.

Q. Apart from the few interludes of illness, he seemed quite healthy.

robert b. heilman: He was a very healthy guy, yes. Well, he had one serious operation. And later on Lissy had a serious operation: breast cancer, I think. I remember him speaking very highly of American medicine. He said, “If we had stayed in Vienna, we’d both be dead right now.” And that, from a Viennese, is some­thing!

Another thing I remember: in Baton Rouge, he used to like to sit in the tub, in cold water, smoking a cigar, with a board from one side of the tub to the other on which he could put books. He was a great cigar smoker, you know. He was a “man of the people.”

sandoz: When Voegelin was seventy years old, he informed me that he had cut back to one hundred and fifty cigars a week. At seventy years old: God knows how many he smoked in his prime! And he didn’t die of lung cancer; he died of congestive heart failure at eighty-three or eighty-four. So, the ques­tion is: how long would he have lived if he hadn’t smoked cigars?

Q. Would he smoke cigars in class?

scurria: At the time, you could smoke anywhere; nobody was afraid of cigar smoke or any kind of smoke. But yeah, he smoked cigars in class. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw Dr. Voegelin without a cigar in his hands, and his fin­gers were just yellow from the tobacco.

But he never moved at a fast pace. He would always just look very relaxed and come into the office smoking a cigar. He never sat down to talk to you, but when he would come in from the classroom, he would stand up at the front of the desk and talk to you. He was never in a hurry. The bell would ring to go, but he was never in a hurry to rush off to his class. I guess he figured that they weren’t going anywhere, and they would wait for him. He was always calm to me, always gave the appearance of being very calm, not excitable.

In the Classroom

Q. In his lecture courses, the German tradition of lecturing is essentially the profes­sor stands in front of his class, reads his lecture or simply declaims his lecture, and everybody dutifully takes notes.

lucille mcdowell: That’s precisely what he did in the government class, the under­graduate class.

Q. Now, did he allow you to raise your hand and ask a question?

mcdowell: I believe that somebody did once in awhile, but I don’t recall him being the kind of a person who said on the first day of class, “I will welcome questions, I want your questions, I want discussion.” He did not really discuss much in that class. But I don’t recall him simply standing at a lectern: I recall him walking around more, and I recall him being an absolutely fascinating lecturer. Not that he told funny stories or anything of that sort, but he made comments that fleshed things out. And, of course, everything was in great detail and extremely orderly.

At the same time I was doing this, I was a reader for the logic class and I was filled with logic; and his course was extremely, beautifully organized. I don’t recall him really referring to notes. He may have had them, but he was just a powerful, wonderful lecturer. Not dramatic: pow­erful rather than that. He had a presence.

Q. Was he a popular teacher as well?

mcdowell: Only for a certain kind of student. I think a lot of students avoided him, actually. I found no difficulty whatsoever in understanding him, but there are lots of people who have trouble with a foreign accent. And he cer­tainly did have a German accent, although he spoke beautiful English. I couldn’t understand any student who said that he couldn’t understand Dr. Voegelin. I think it was more Dr. Voegelin’s ideas that were beyond them, not Dr. Voegelin’s accent.

But the quality of student at Louisiana State University was not as impres­sive as one would have liked. And most undergraduates I knew–not all by any means, but the majority–really avoided anyone if he had a reputation of being demanding, of being difficult. Dr. Voegelin’s was a hard course.

Q. What was hard about it?

mcdowell: Well, it was a hard course because his tests were very hard. Certainly, they were never fill-in-the-blank! Not two or three questions, but sometimes five or six. We had four-hour exams. Most students had great dif­ficulty with five questions and four hours.

I remember the cigar. It reminded me of my father, a big handsome man who smoked a cigar. He was a lot like Dr. Voegelin, a European, and very dif­ferent from some of the fathers of the children in the neighborhood. He even dressed differently. And I think that Dr. Voegelin was a little bit more formal in his dress than some of the professors of the time. It seemed to me that his clothes were well-chosen, suitable to him, attractive.

Q. Did he ever discuss current events? While you were studying with him, that would have been [the Second World War]. It would have been an obvious topic for discussion. Did he ever discuss how the war was progressing and what was happening?

mcdowell: I don’t recall any discussions of the war. Of course, my last year was the year that the war ended. Around Christmas time, the men very quickly started coming back.

ernest j. walters: 181 and 182–those were the introductory political theory courses. There were other courses: I took a course on China and Japan with Voegelin. It was not really his field, but it was a decent survey of Japan and China. He got us to read Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-Sen, so it was interesting in that regard. And then he did a course on Russian politics, although he didn’t really do very much with contemporary politics. It was more of an histori­cal orientation.

Q. Did you have any problems with his accent?

Fortunately, I was taking German, so I could understand fairly well–at least, after a while. But I couldn’t understand all the names he would bring up. The reason was that I wasn’t a liberal arts major. So I didn’t have the proper background, really. But some did: another of my good friends was a chap who later went to New York. He had a good singing voice, and he sang on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.

He was in 181 and 182 with me, and he would just shake his head after one of Voegelin’s lectures and say, “I can’t tell you how many history courses I’ve taken where I didn’t really know what was going on. And here, in fifteen minutes, Voegelin has straightened out the whole thing.” So, he had an enormous admiration of Voegelin from the point of view of explaining different periods of history.

Q. Did he speak from notes?

walters: Well, at that time, we didn’t know that he was working on Order and History. So, I don’t know how much of an overlap there was. But whatever he was working on, he would simply come into class with the manuscript, which showed he was well organized. But if someone asked a question, he could go on for ten or fifteen minutes; he didn’t have to refer to his notes. It was an organized way of lecturing; it was also a way to decide whether he wanted to make changes to his manuscript.

Q. Was he generally admired at LSU by the undergraduates?

walters: Not by the undergraduates as a whole; it really was an elite group of the undergraduates. Sometimes it was guys that were dating girls who were very intelligent: with that group, he had a tremendous reputation. I guess you know the story about Jack Welsh. Jack Welsh was one of the smartest guys I ever knew, a physics major. As a matter of fact, he was also a fraternity brother of mine. And so, in talking another friend of mine into going to Voegelin’s classes, I also talked Jack Welsh into going.

Jack, of course, just breezed through all his courses, and then he took Voegelin’s. Well, by the time he took Voegelin’s class, I was off campus, but he thought the world of Voegelin. He later went into the Army Air Force. The LSU alumni magazine had an inter­view with Jack, and Jack said that he had learned a great deal of physics at LSU, but he also learned a great deal from a man named Eric Voegelin. He described what he had learned with Voegelin. Then they went on in the arti­cle, and Jack pointed out, “All the missiles that the Air Force has, I invented those.” At the time he was interviewed he was a general. So, this was a very smart guy, and Voegelin had an enormous effect on him.

But there’s one story I wanted to tell you about his lecture. One time, Voegelin went to the john and came in and then it was time for class. He started his lecture, but he hadn’t zipped up his pants. And sitting right on the front row were two ladies who were maybe in their sixties–much older than the regular students, anyway. I guess it was five or ten minutes into the lec­ture when he realized this woman was trying to hand him a note. And he looked at the note, which probably said “Your pants are unzipped. ” So, he just turned around with his back to the class, zipped his pants up and turned around and just kept talking! I think that would have thrown me for a loop, but it didn’t faze him.

A Luminary in a Small Department

Q. How did you first hear of, or have anything to do with, Voegelin?

sandoz: I was an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, majoring in history and minoring in philosophy. I chanced into Eric Voegelin’s senior the­ory survey class, Government 181. This must have been 1949-1950. It was sheer chance, except for the fact that I had had a number of other government courses and I’d heard about this strange fellow who knew everything about everything, and who–in a five-man department–was a great luminary. I went in to see what he had to say and found out he knew a lot, knew whereof he spoke, and had an enormous command of his subject. He stood out above other professors I’d experienced in four years at LSU.

Q. He was one of five people in the department. I hadn’t realized it was so small. Is this why he was able to teach such a range of subjects?

sandoz: That’s one of the reasons. But he insisted on teaching American Government every term, because, as you know, he prided himself on the fact that he had made a clean break with Europe, and he wanted to become a real American. One way to do that was to work his way into the American mate­rial. So, he was teaching our introductory course on American Government, Government 51.

He also taught a course on Chinese politics, which I took. This was after 1949–after the Chinese Communist takeover of China, the expulsion of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. Because he had such a facility with languages, he could learn enough Chinese quickly to use some of the primary materials, and he taught a very interesting and respectable course. You might say that the beginning of the chapter on the Chinese Ecumene that comes out in the fourth volume of Order and History was fashioned during the late ’40s and early ’50s, when he started teaching Chinese politics as a semester-long course at LSU.

Q. How did he lecture?

sandoz: He gave well-organized presentations as a lecturer. He was a very fine teacher. He never lost his Austrian accent, so it was a challenge to understand him in speaking with the students. Well, the undergraduates at LSU are not terribly sophisticated. Neither was I, for that matter; I wandered in from Shreveport, and there was this great man. However, we had sense enough to know that he truly was a great man.

The undergraduates knew that Voegelin was a great man from the first time they studied with him. It was not only because of the extraordinary clarity of his presentation, but also because of his ability to take complex theoretical material and give a perfectly lucid pres­entation at a rate that made note-taking possible. At the end of the course, you had a very satisfactory outline. He was an extraordinarily fine lecturer.

He also had a keen sense of humor. He enjoyed presenting the profundi­ties of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to the innocents of Louisiana. He said, “This subject matter is very important, although perhaps what we are doing with it here is not so very important.” The coherence of the presentation was superb. As a result, this guy drew in the best students–you don’t often find electrical engineers, chemists, and physicists that come over and sit in on our courses on political philosophy!

Q. Did he use a text?

sandoz: Nothing really counted except the lectures, as a matter of fact. For readings, he would say, “Well, get the Sabine textbook.” This was when Sabine reigned supreme. The Sabine textbook was what he used, but no exam ques­tions ever came from Sabine. When we did the China course, we had a whole stack of books to read, including Chiang Kai-shek’s China’s Destiny, a collec­tion by McNair, and other things that he directed us to. He did this a little bit more readily than in theory, but for the most part, it was his interpretation of the material based on his History of Political Ideas we were there to get and to understand for test-time.

The tests were straightforward, tough tests, but he was a relatively gener­ous grader. There were a good many A’s and B’s in his classes.

Q. What courses did you take?

marianne steintrager: Most of them were based on the book he was writing. They were based on the whole history of political philosophy, starting at the very begin­ning, and developed pretty much in historical sequence. We just got a tremen­dous amount of fascinating information about how political philosophy developed. A lot of us got hooked on political philosophy at that point.

We were very fortunate at LSU, you know, because we also had Walter Berns there–he had been a student of Strauss. We had René Williamson, who was an excellent political philosophy teacher. A lot of us were in government because there was no decent philosophy department at LSU: it was a one-man philosophy department.

Applying Theory to Current Events

steintrager: He was also good at applying political philosophy to what was going in contemporary politics. I still remember the notion that trying to export democracy to some of the emerging countries was like sending a Molotov cocktail to these countries. That was my first awareness of how ideas have consequences when you begin to export things. I think we learned a lot from him that served us well, even if we didn’t go on and have careers in political philosophy. We learned how to make judgments as to why certain things don’t work, and why you don’t try certain things, because they can have ter­rible consequences.

Q. Would he make other comments –about say, the 1952 election?

steintrager: I don’t remember any of those kinds of comments. It was more, I think, comments about how philosophical ideas like the idea of democracy could affect world politics. But he didn’t even do that very often, make that direct connection for us between what he was teaching and what was going on in contemporary politics. Not that I remember.

bolner: My roommate was Jim Guirard–he’s now a lobbyist in Washington. He said, “You gotta come sit in on this,” so I did. I was, as I’m sure a lot of people were, totally taken in. I was just taken by his vision of life and the whole overarching philosophy of history and of being and so on. It was just awesome. So, I had his course, the 181 course, which is the first part of the sequence.

It was really an experience. I still have my notes from that course. One was transported, because he would come in and he would be so impas­sioned about what he had to say. Well, it was more than just excitement: it was a conviction and a desire to persuade. I made an A in the course, but I was told later that Voegelin graded easily.

Q. How would he teach?

bolner: He would stand behind the lectern, but he would also gesticulate a lot. I never saw him sitting down, never saw him come in front of the desk and lean on the desk. But he would write on the board a lot. He would never have an outline, but words would occur, and he would write with very poor handwriting. And he seemed always to have the shortest piece of chalk; it was part of the excitement, his excitement. He would write these terms down. As he would be talking, he would want to use a term, and he would sense that it was difficult for the students to understand it, so he would write it on the board.

Q. Did you ever have any difficulty understanding his accent?

bolner: Yes, there were times. He would repeat some, and after a while, of course, you got used to it.

Q. Did he ever talk about practical politics?

bolner: No. Well, the course was at such a level that it would have been rather comical in the sense of juxtaposing the profound and the absolutely trite to talk about current events or to talk about the results of the local election or something. You just wouldn’t think of it.

Q. Now, the first course would have been on the Greeks? Did he start, in fact, with the Egyptians?

bolner: Oh yes, he started with the omphalos; he started at the beginning. He had so many connections he would make. He’d make connections to modern writers, to music, to art. He was also teaching Chinese political philosophy at the time, so he would often bring that in. I had never encountered anyone like this: the languages, the history. It was just totally overwhelming.

Q. Would he entertain questions?

bolner: No, he would not entertain questions. I don’t recall in that course his ever stopping and saying, “Is this clear?” or “Do you have any questions?” In fact, to speak frankly, I don’t think he had a great deal of respect for the stu­dents, which is why I was very surprised to get the A. It was perhaps his style, but I think he was condescending.

There was an apocryphal story, which is a good story and one of the first things I was told about him. Once, a student did raise a question, and the question was, “Who came first, Justinian or Socrates?” Apparently, Voegelin got so frustrated and angry that he slammed his folder with his notes in it and walked out. Now, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But it was a story that was repeated a lot.

Q. Which suggests that he would be a professor that you would respect, rather than have a great deal of affection for.

bolner: Oh, yes. However, he was genteel. I remember exactly where his office was, and when I went in, he was busy, but he was very courteous. I told him how much I appreciated his course, and that I had decided to study political philosophy. It seemed as if this had happened so many times that he wasn’t very impressed. But he was very genteel, very calming, and very sociable.

Voegelin, he was a dynamo. He influenced me immediately from the beginning in my own teaching style. And of course the main thing he taught me, if you’re going to be successful, and if you’re going to be good at this, you have to give it your all, you have to be passionate about what you are saying. And really, with all due respect to all of the others, they were not doing that. Now that doesn’t mean they weren’t good, or very clear, or whatever, but he brought to it such a passion.

Q. One of the things that I’ve concluded about Voegelin is that the contemplative, scholarly life was extremely important for him. What he was doing was, he thought, a very serious business. I remember teachers who impressed me with the notion that they were doing something extremely important. If I didn’t under­stand it, it was my problem, not theirs. Would that be fair to say you realized something significant was happening with him?

walters: Oh sure. Oh, we had no doubt about it. Most of us simply said, “This is the first real scholar we’ve ever met.” It was just marvelous in that respect. At the same time, he turned off your run-of-the-mill undergradu­ates. I happened to be at some kind of a convocation sitting with two coeds while Voegelin was giving the main speech. When he started talking, these girls started chattering with each other. They said, “How can anyone under­stand this?” Now I don’t know whether they were talking about the content of what Voegelin said, or whether they simply couldn’t understand his accent, but they weren’t at all interested in listening to him.

Q. You said he was revered by his students at LSU. Was he a popular teacher?

heilman: No, not popular, because popular usually implies a very wide appeal to large numbers. Eric’s appeal was strictly to the very good students. And I even had one very good student in English who couldn’t make head or tail of what Eric was saying.

Q. But the good students nevertheless would attend his courses.

heilman: Ah, yes. I can’t remember what our advising system was, but each of us in the department had a certain number of advisees. And because one felt pretty well acquainted with who were the “real minds” throughout the faculty, one could recommend good people to professors in other depart­ments. And Eric was always one whom I recommended. And the better the people, the more they liked him. But again: the idiom was not a popular one or an easy one, and it put off even some good students.

Q. He also taught a course in the law school. Was that a well-attended course?

heilman: I don’t know. My inclination is that he was greatly admired by law students but that they didn’t know what the hell this was all about. Somehow they had a feeling that this was a very superior guy, but what was this natural law stuff all about anyway? And what’s it got to do with litigation?

I thought it was a great credit to the dean of the law school that he brought Eric in to give the course. This was the guy we all wanted to be president. He was Catholic: Paul Macarius Abare. He was dean of the law school, and he was a characteristic Louisiana Catholic, who knew how the world worked but had also gotten a taste of ideas in his Catholic upbringing. And this made him appreciative of Eric. It was he who was responsible for Eric’s giving the course.

Teaching Law Students

robert pascal: I had been able to convince the dean of the law school and some of the senior colleagues that we should have a course in the philosophy of law in the very first year of law school, and also a course in elementary legal sci­ence–one covering both the Romanist tradition and the Anglo-American.

I proposed that I teach the legal science part and that Voegelin teach the course in jurisprudence, even though he was not a member of the law faculty. So, we worked on that. And until Voegelin left, I think that we had the very best introductory law program in the United States.

Voegelin’s course is written up to some extent in his volume The Nature of the Law. I had suggested that perhaps jurisprudence should be offered first, in the fall semester, and my course in the spring semester, but Voegelin wanted to reverse that. He wanted the students to have some basic knowledge of the legal order before tackling the problem of its philosophy. So, that is how that occurred.

I must tell you that I didn’t have anything to do with dictating the content of Voegelin’s course–you understand that very well. Nor did he attempt in any way to tell me how I should teach mine. We worked together in the sense that we were in constant communication, knew what the other one was doing.

Q. Let me go back. This was an obligatory course for first-year students? Did they enjoy it? Did they object to it?

pascal: As with any course like that, it was primarily the intelligent students, those who were better prepared, who liked it. There were many who did not like it.

But, for the most part, members of the law faculty objected to Voegelin. First of all, Voegelin was difficult to understand, especially in those days. The German accent was even thicker in the early days than it came to be later on. It was hard, sometimes, for our local people to understand him. That un­doubtedly was a factor.

For another thing, although he was generally patient with people, he would show a bit of temper now and then–even in the lec­ture room. He would be lecturing on something, and just turn to somebody and say, “What do you think about this, Mr. So and So?” If the student responded in a manner that showed that he had not been paying too much attention, Voegelin would get really excited–not be too pleasant.

One day, one of our senior law professors was in the lecture room when one of those events occurred. And from that time on, he wanted Voegelin out. I daresay that if it hadn’t been for the fact that Voegelin left the university to go to Germany, he would have been asked not to give the course any longer.

There was opposition to my course, too, because the same individual, the same professor–although he was not the only one, he was foremost of the objectors–kept saying to others that my course was too Catholic. This pro­fessor was concerned that I was too Catholic, and he thought of Voegelin as being too Catholic as well, though he was a Lutheran. So, I say reluctantly that I think our program would have ended anyway, even if Voegelin had not gone to Germany.

Q. Did you have any feedback from his students?

pascal: Oh, yes. I can tell you this without any doubt in my mind: the stu­dents who graduated after having had the two courses under me and Voegelin proved to be some of the best prepared we have ever graduated from the LSU law school. I base this judgment on the fact that, while they were still in school, we found students clamoring for more courses of that kind.

marianne steintrager: We could sometimes hear him shouting “Dummkopf” at his law students.

jo scurria: I don’t think he had much use for the law students. In fact, I don’t think that he felt that he should be teaching law students.

Q. His jurisprudence lectures were finally published, The Nature of the Law, and they were written shortly after The New Science of Politics. They were available in mimeographed form, but only for a couple of years. And then he left. It’s pretty complex material for a bunch of law students.

scurria: I don’t think the students were too happy having to take that course. I don’t think it was a popular course. 

Q. It was a required course, then?

scurria: It may have been a required course, because he used to have large classes. And I don’t think they would have volunteered if the course was not required.

Teaching Graduate Students

lucille mcdowell: I was at LSU from ’42 through ’46. And he was fascinating. His courses and lectures were fantastic; the range of references were amazing. I enjoyed it thoroughly. And I thought, “Well, I wanted to take everything he teaches.” I saw that he didn’t teach a lot. If I recall correctly, it seems to me that he didn’t teach a lot of undergraduate classes at all. But he permitted me finally to get into a graduate seminar, where I really got to know him.

I was out of my depth in that class, although I enjoyed it tremendously. It was an oddball group because there were two ladies in the group–I suppose they were easily ten years older than I–and all the men had just returned from the war. And they really were men; they weren’t boys.

Q. What would he teach in seminars? How would he organize them?

mcdowell: It was mostly readings. My memory of the seminar is rather vague, but he would assign readings. He would cite one work he felt was very significant for a certain period of time, and that would be required reading. There was a lot of preparation and discussion; it was really a discussion sem­inar, but always focused, never just talking. He didn’t speak all that much, but drew out what he wanted. He didn’t lecture in the seminar.

Later in my life, I had other seminars–mostly in the English depart­ment–and they didn’t match what went on in that seminar at all. Often, they were rather dull. There was nothing dull in Dr. Voegelin’s seminar, although I often felt lost. I often felt like writing little notes to myself to check on this, find out about that. I followed up on a good bit of it. So, that’s really all I can tell you about the seminar.

Later, when I did a lot of facilitation and then I myself taught, I thought of him and his methods and the way he worked people. You know what I mean: he drew people out, he was an astute questioner. He chided me now and then, but he was well aware that I was a sophomore, and then a junior, and so forth, and that I was nineteen and graduated when I was almost twenty.

steintrager: He only had boy students in his seminars.

scurria: Oh, did he? I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know it was just boys.

steintrager: He was certainly very cordial, there was never anything arro­gant about him at all. But at least in my class, only the male students were invited to the in-home seminars.

Q. Were these credit courses?

steintrager: Seminars were credit courses. But he had a group of boys only, because I knew them then. I wasn’t invited. And apparently, Mrs. Voegelin stayed in the background, too. She served the refreshments, but she stayed in the background.

Q. Did you ever meet Mrs. Voegelin?

mcdowell: I did meet her, and I only have a vague remembrance of her. She seemed to be very quiet. I remember her clothes: I am always struck by clothes. I recall one time, she had on a dress I thought was very pretty. It was kind of chiffony and it had flowers in it, and it was loose, with a flowing col­lar. It was probably chiffon. It was very graceful.

I was just struck that she looked very, very graceful and perfectly appropriate. I mean, it was what anybody would have worn in Baton Rouge in the late afternoon or evening. She seemed to me to be attractive. She didn’t join the group, but something was served–I don’t remember what, but there was something to serve and she came in. I don’t recall her saying anything, just her being there and being very nice and being in and out of the room. So, that is my whole experience with her.

Seminars at Voegelin’s Home

ellis sandoz: The seminars were always at his house in Baton Rouge. It was the class year of ’51-’52 when I took my seminars with him as a graduate student. We’d go to his house, which was not too far from campus. It would always be about a five-cigar night. He would come out with a handful of cigars and put them on the table, and we would read a text.

There would be one text we would go through carefully. For example, we spent one semester going through Lambda, book 12, of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, because all of us thought we needed to know something about metaphysics, so he led us through that. We would do a few pages each week, then there would be indi­vidual presentations by the various students who were assigned to do papers on whatever topics, and these were discussed.

At some point, the presenta­tions would be interrupted and a silence would fall. Everyone was always very respectful when the silence fell: Lissy then knew it was time to serve tea and cookies, so she would come in with homemade cookies and tea for everyone.We would sit around and sip our tea and munch our cookies. Then after about fifteen minutes, we would go back and talk some more. This would be at least a three- to three-and-a-half-hour session, once a week. Always in a very genial sort of spirit, unless someone had the temerity not to be prepared, at which point things tended to become very tense. But we were about five to seven people in the seminars, and it was a fairly congenial experience.

ernest j. walters: Once, a group of us students got together, and we asked Voegelin to give us a course on Nietzsche, because he never covered him in 181/182. I don’t know the academic procedures at LSU at that time, but apparently he had to submit it to some group, and they rejected it. They rejected it because the head of the philosophy department said that Nietzsche was a philosopher and therefore you can’t teach him at a political science department.

So, Voegelin says, “Well, we have to abide by the rules, so you all will have to come out to my house.” I don’t know if he let us decide the day, but it was something like a Wednesday, and we would go out at seven o’clock. If we were finished by eleven, we were fortunate. We worked through Nietzsche, and we worked through sections on “What is God?” in Saint Thomas.

It was very interesting because we sat around in a circle. And Voegelin had a chair–not quite an easy chair, but everyone knew that was where he was going to sit. In fact, somebody sat in it the first time, and he told him, “You have to move, that’s where I sit.” And he would always come out and put two cigars down on the table; that was as much as he would allow himself during that seminar. When he would come out, if he wasn’t ready to start, we would walk around.

He had had bookcases built into his dining room and into his office, which was a bedroom off to one side. He had scads of books around there, and we would look at those. I recall pulling out one book and looking at it. Then when I went to put it back, it wouldn’t go back: things were too tight. So, I just laid it flat on top of the other books. And, oh, he jumped all over me! He said, “How can I find these books again if you don’t put them in the right place?”

Those seminars were marvelous. I remember I gave a paper on human nature; in fact, I wound up writing my master’s thesis on Graham Wallace’s Human Nature and Politics. I gave this paper, and I guess I read the stupid thing for fifteen minutes or so. You have to recall that, at that time, intellec­tually, we were just learning to tie our shoelaces; Voegelin just shot over the heads of most of us.

Voegelin complimented me on the paper, then pro­ceeded to tell the whole group why it was so good. But after we left that night, one of my friends said, “You know, I didn’t think he was talking about your paper.” What he had done was seen that I had perceived this problem of human nature. He then took off and brought in all sorts of stuff that I hadn’t even mentioned.

Q. Was he a demanding teacher in the seminars?

walters: He was not demanding in terms of grading, but he was still demanding. For instance, I started writing a master’s thesis, and I got inter­ested in Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. So, I suggested to Voegelin that I do my master’s thesis on Spengler. I figured, well, two volumes: I can work though those. I’m a very slow worker.

But Voegelin wandered into the graduate students’ office at one point, and he saw six volumes of Toynbee’s study of history. “Oh, Mr. Walters, you’re already working on Spengler; I think you should also prepare on Toynbee.” Well, I consented to that. Then I thought, “Oh my gosh, six other volumes!” But I set to doing it. Then, by God, before I even really got a grip on working in Toynbee, Voegelin came in one day and noticed a copy of Vico on my desk. “Oh yes, I meant to tell you, Mr. Walters. Throw Vico into your master’s thesis.”

Well, this would have been more than a doctoral dissertation! And it was because Voegelin could do these things himself that he assumed his students could. Of course, I simply had to give the whole thing up and write a master’s thesis when I got to Chicago! But it was because he wanted me to do so much; and it was not just a lot of reading, it was a lot of difficult thinking and understanding. So, in that sense, he was an impractical person.

But I learned so much. In one of these seminars at his house, we studied parts of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. And I’d never even read it, so I really learned a great deal there.

American Students and German Students Compared

Q. Did you notice any difference in the students that he had between America and Germany? Did they come to your house in both places?

lissy voegelin: We had a seminar in Baton Rouge every year, every Wednesday. And in Munich, Eric had a seminar. He had four assistants, and they came together every four weeks or so–not what we had in Baton Rouge. But what we had in America were more like classes.

Q. Did he treat the students differently in the two countries?

l. voegelin: No, I don’t think so.

paul caringella: The students in Baton Rouge were much younger. The ones in Munich were graduate students.

l. voegelin: Yes, they all had their doctorates already. And it was different, of course. But Eric always liked to teach younger students. He always liked to teach undergraduates.

caringella: Like at Notre Dame, he remarked that the undergraduates were often better than the graduate students.

l. voegelin: He said, “We’ve got a good group. ” And he could do with them what he wanted. The ones who had degrees already, he had to undo a lot of learning they had done before, which took a lot of time.

walters: I can remember when I was an undergraduate. Voegelin didn’t just come in and announce it in class, but he would say it with the small group of us: “You know, the undergraduates are much better than the graduate stu­dents. ” Once we became graduate students, I don’t know whether he was being discreet or not, but he didn’t say it that directly!

Q. Did you notice any difference in the way that Voegelin taught in Germany com­pared to the way he taught at LSU?

sandoz: He was mindful, I think, of the fact that the German student was a good deal better informed than the one he was teaching at LSU. These stu­dents knew a lot more. He said as much himself and conducted himself as though this was his judgment. His judgment was that the American students could understand the political theories in the most complicated writings with absolute perfection, but they couldn’t spell the philosopher’s name.

In the case of the Germans, he knew that the Germans knew more history and had more linguistic facility and they were academically better prepared than his LSU students were. But they didn’t have common sense and therefore were not able to relate the content of political philosophy and political theory to the existential problems that face human beings and the practical problems of politics–including such things as the development of democracy in a for­merly totalitarian country, or the basis of totalitarianism and why it might be bad, and so forth.

There was this educational superiority, but also this lack of any center of clarity about the nature of human existence. The Americans had this through the fact that common sense is the prevailing way of under­standing things over here; it is woven into the political culture of the coun­try. Because Germany had no political culture, developing common sense became sort of a slogan around Voegelin’s political science institute.

The Americans didn’t have a philosophical grasp of the material that was present in a rudimentary form in the ordinary air that everybody breathed in Germany. Here, then, the process of developing a more sophisticated theoret­ical sensitivity was part of his educational approach. In Germany, the prob­lem was different. He would address his classes in a different way and make these kinds of “real human connections” between highfalutin theories and what it takes for an individual to live decently and the political order to be satisfactory. So, he used different techniques.

A Varying Distance from Students

Q. Did he get along fairly well with female students, and with women in general?

robert b. heilman: I think so, yes. He was a very courtly man. To which they would respond favorably, even though they knew there was no prospective seducer in there.

Q. And what about young men? Did they see him as a typical, aloof German authority?

heilman: They certainly didn’t think of him as having a folksy manner, as many faculty do, you know. This “Atta boys, call me Charlie, I’m just as dumb as you are” sort of style–this he didn’t have. I think there was very great respect for his learning and, indeed, for his gentlemanly style. But there was often also a complete puzzlement faced with some unknown–which, as you know, is a response that has been felt elsewhere as well.

Q. Oh, yes. Was he willing to explain himself in words that his students could more easily comprehend?

heilman: He would try. But I also think that his sense of very limited recep­tivities was deficient. He might have been doing his level best to get it across, but still, he was unconsciously speaking at several levels above what they were used to taking in at times.

Q. When you and your contemporaries took courses from him, were you aware that you were in the presence of somebody whose reputation was growing and whose work was gaining in importance?

steintrager: I think we probably were aware of that. Yes, we were probably aware of that, but we were young and probably did our share of making good fun of things like the “immanentization of the eschaton” and the accent. And we’d write notes on the board about the “immanentization” and that sort of thing. But we took him seriously, too; I think we were aware. There was a lit­tle awe there. He was a demanding teacher, but he was not an unreasonable person, so you felt very comfortable taking his classes.

In other words, you weren’t scared off because you were afraid you weren’t going to do well. He was very approachable, and he really wanted you to understand what he was trying to teach you. So, except for the seminars–from which I was excluded–there was time for questions in the lectures. He was always friendly, always helpful in terms of advice about where you might want to go to graduate school, or that sort of thing. You never did feel like he was unapproachable.

Q. Do you think that his other students would also have been devoted to him as well?

steintrager: I think he inspired loyalty among those students who really were interested in what he had to say. But I don’t think I felt the kind of affec­tion Jo Scurria felt. I mean, I liked him very much, but I didn’t know this side where he would write [letters about cat suit costumes] or that sort of thing. So, I wouldn’t call him a beloved teacher. I think people liked him and respected him and were sorry to see him go. Voegelin I liked, but I wouldn’t just go in and plop myself down and have a chat with him. And I wouldn’t have known this familiar side of his personality.

Then again, I don’t remember any of the professors were particularly friendly with the students. I don’t remember them being unfriendly, but you went in to them only when you needed something. They were teachers, and you were not on the same level. Today it’s an entirely different thing. That probably came in the ‘6os, when all the students started carrying on. I can remember my poor husband, with students coming in and threatening sui­cide, and he would have go to the infirmary with them, and all that kind of stuff. You wouldn’t go to your professor if you felt like you were going to commit suicide back in the ’50s!

sandoz: He was never one for small talk, at all. We had the sense that you just didn’t go in to see Professor Voegelin, sit down, and shoot the breeze with him for a while, which I did with a number of other professors I had as an undergraduate, and which my students do with me, for that matter. You went in with the idea that there was a clock ticking and that Voegelin’s minutes were important. He wasn’t just gassing around. He was concerned to do work, and to work constantly.

Away from Academics

scurria: Somebody told me that Dr. Voegelin said that he would never go to a Marilyn Monroe movie because he had a one-track mind and his mind would get off the tracks if he went to a Marilyn Monroe movie. I thought that was very unconventional–you wouldn’t think of him saying something like that! But then, too, he would go down and get his paper at the drugstore–of course he walked everywhere he went when he was living in Baton Rouge–and then go back home with his paper under his arm. And somebody said that he could be found at the local drugstore working the pinball machine. It’s just hard to picture him doing things like that. That’s a different side of Dr. Voegelin again.

Q. Did you ever attend a football game?

l. voegelin: We did in the first weeks when we were in Alabama. Eric said, “We have to go to a football game. Everybody’s going, so we have to go too.” And we dressed really nicely for the game, and we went, but there were not too many people there. It turned out not to be absolutely necessary, so we didn’t go again.

carengella: And neither of you really knew who was winning.

l. voegelin: Yes, that’s right. As we were leaving, Eric said, “Do you know who won?” I said, “I don’t know.”

walters: We all had great respect for Voegelin. But because we had such respect for the man, we sometimes made fun of him, too. At that time there were no computer chips, so the game for college students and high school students was pinball. Now, this did not happen, but some guy made it up: “I think if Eric Voegelin came in now, he would bend over the pinball machine and say ‘Vat is ze problem?'” We all loved that, because it kind of typified his attitude. Voegelin was always looking at things in terms of problems.

Now, the girl who talked me into taking a course from Voegelin was Dorothy-Ann Mitchell Doyle, who is the wife of James F. Doyle, who was a childhood friend of mine and who is now teaching at the U[niversity] of Missouri in St. Louis. She is extraordinarily intelligent, and she went on to do graduate work at Yale.

Arrogance or Superiority?

walters: Dorothy-Ann Mitchell was also very fond of Voegelin, but one of the things she questioned me about was, “Why is Voegelin so arro­gant? He was a very arrogant man. In fact, his wife was too.” I said I didn’t know. And she said, “Well, we have a lot of excellent teachers at Yale, but none of them have the arrogance that Voegelin does.” I said, “All I can say is, I can’t refute anything he says, so I just accept the arrogance and go along with it!”

Q. I can see how he might have seemed very formal to his American students.

walters: Well, I don’t think he was formal, he was just kind of haughty. And–Ellis would jump all over me if he knew I said this, because he knew Mrs. Voegelin much better than I did–but almost every time I’d talk with her, she looked as if she’d just eaten a raw persimmon and basically was wondering what in the Dickens I was doing around Voegelin.

Q. Do you know if he was generally viewed by his colleagues in other departments or in his own as being arrogant?

lewis p. simpson: I suspect so. I remember that the first time I ever saw him, he was pointed out to me. He was striding across the lounge puffing a cigar, and I thought, “My God, a Prussian!” He had that air, you know, of sort of an arro­gance. He made that impression on people until they got to know him. I don’t think he necessarily intended to, but he had that sort of air.

pascal: I didn’t mind his arrogance at all. I think that he had to deal with a lot of people who simply were not as learned as he. I can remember how we were both in an informal faculty organization here at LSU known as the Monograph Club. We had professors from different faculties throughout the university.

We’d meet once a month, and somebody would read a paper–perhaps a preliminary draft of something he was writing–and try to talk about it with his colleagues from the university-wide group, and things of that nature. I do remember that Voegelin had very little time for the very pompous head of our philosophy department, Peter Carmichael, who was a logical positivist. Once, Peter Carmichael said to Voegelin, “I know what I am saying; I am a professor of philosophy.” Voegelin said, “Perhaps so, but I am a philosopher.”

The arguments were intense at the Monograph Club. Voegelin stopped going, finally. I guess he just didn’t want to put up with people like Peter Carmichael.

Q. The purpose of the Monograph Club was to discuss philosophical questions?

pascal: It always turned out to be that, but frequently the subject matter started out as being purely scientific. A discussion in science might suddenly come to be a discussion of whether it was possible to ascertain cause at any time, or something like that. Inevitably, the discussion moved from whatever it was–literature, or science–into philosophy.

Voegelin’s Artist Friend

Q. There was a man who did a painting of Voegelin named Conrad Abruzzio. Did you know him as well?

heilman: I knew him quite well. As a matter of fact, I have a picture of his that we brought along from Baton Rouge.

Q. There is a fresco in the train station. . .

heilman: In New Orleans, yes. That was Conrad’s great contract type of thing.

Q. And one of the figures in it is Eric. It’s recognizably him: he’s at a lectern, and I think his hand is up in the air or something like that. Eric got along well with Conrad, and he seemed also to have been a sort of confessor to him. There were some very personal letters that Conrad wrote to Eric.

heilman: Conrad revered Eric.

Q. We talked yesterday about Conrad Abruzzio. How did Eric meet him?

 l. voegelin: Well, I think he was a professor at the art department at Baton Rouge. He was a colleague.

Q. I see. From the letters, it wasn’t clear. Is he still alive?

l. voegelin: No, he died many years ago. We met him once when we visited Baton Rouge from Munich, and he was already living in a home for old peo­ple. And I remember that the family was a very rich couple, he was a lawyer, a beautiful house, and it was armed. And they gave a large party for us. We were already there when Conrad came in. When he saw Eric, he fell upon him and said, “Oh Eric, I love you so much!”

Q. Oh, dear.

l. voegelin: They liked each other a great deal.

Contributors

james bolner sr. (interviewed May 6, 1996, in Baton Rouge) attended Voegelin’s lectures as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University. Inspired to pursue graduate studies by Voegelin’s example, he taught in LSU’s department of political science until his retirement in 1999. He now resides in Baton Rouge.

paul caringella (interviewed May 23,1995, in Mountain View, California) became Voegelin’s assistant in 1978 and provided Voegelin both scholarly and personal support until his death in 1985. Now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Caringella is director of the Eric Voegelin Archive there. He lives in San Francisco.

robert b. heilman (interviewed July 27,1995, in Seattle) was Voegelin’s colleague and friend during his tenure at Louisiana State University. As a member of LSU’s English department, Heilman not only sponsored Voegelin’s naturalization as an American citizen but also frequently assisted Voegelin with his English. In 1948, Heilman accepted a position at the University of Washington, where he taught and wrote until his retirement in 1984. A prolific literary scholar, he remained active in his profession until his death in 2004.

lucille mcdowell (interviewed May 4,1996, in Baton Rouge) was one of Voegelin’s first students at Louisiana State University. Formerly a producer for Louisiana Public Broadcasting and the coordinator of Louisiana’s “Literacy and Learning” program, she is retired and lives in Baton Rouge.

robert pascal (interviewed May 6, 1996, in Baton Rouge) was Voegelin’s colleague at Louisiana State University, where he taught Civil and Anglo-American Legal Science and Voegelin taught the Philosophy of Law to first-year students. Now an emeritus professor of law, Pascal lives in Baton Rouge.

ellis sandoz (interviewed October i and 2,1995, in Calgary and November 4,1995, in Indianapolis) met Voegelin as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, completed his M.A. there with him, then wrote his doctorate under him at the University of Munich. A prominent Voegelin scholar and promoter of Voegelin studies in America, Sandoz teaches political science at Louisiana State University, where he also leads the Eric Voegelin Institute. He lives in Baton Rouge.

jo scurria (interviewed May 4,1996, in Baton Rouge) was the administrative assistant at the department of government throughout Voegelin’s time at Louisiana State University. One of the few expert interpreters of Voegelin’s handwriting, she estimates that she typed more than five thousand pages of his manuscripts. Scurria is retired and lives in Baton Rouge.

lewis p. simpson (interviewed May 5,1996, in Baton Rouge) was a professor of English literature when he met Voegelin at Louisiana State University. Also a Boyd professor, Simpson co-edited the Southern Review from 1964 to his retirement in 1987. He died in April 2005.

marianne steintrager (interviewed May 4,1996, in Baton Rouge) studied under Voegelin as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, then did graduate work under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. She lives in Baton Rouge.

lissy voegelin (interviewed May 28 and 29, 1995, in Palo Alto) was Eric Voegelin’s wife from 1932 until his death in 1985. His lifelong companion, constant support, and frequent adviser, Lissy joined him in exile after the Anschluss and accompanied him in all relocations up to their final move to Palo Alto in 1969. Lissy Voegelin remained in Palo Alto until her death in 1996.

ernest J. walters (interviewed November 4, 1995, in Indianapolis) knew Voegelin as an undergraduate and M.A. student at Louisiana State University. After completing his doctorate under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Walters joined the political science department at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He taught there until his death in January 1997.

This excerpt is from Voegelin Recollected: Conversations of a Life (University of Missouri Press, 2007). It is the second of three parts, with parts one and three available; also see “Voegelin at Notre Dame,” “Voegelin in Munich,” “Voegelin and his Contemporaries,” and “Voegelin Recollected.”

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