In his personal letters, Eric Voegelin not only mocked Russell Kirk and conservatism, but he also freely admitted that he cynically accepted funding from conservative sources, even though he had no sympathy with conservatism. And yet he was a genius, one of the single finest thinkers of the 20th century, and perhaps the single finest scholar when it came to dissecting ideologies.
In some strange and mysterious way—or ways in which I could never fully understand or comprehend—the ideas of the Austrian-Lutheran political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) have hovered over my entire adult professional career.
When I was in college, I first encountered Voegelin through the works and praise of Russell Kirk, but gave little thought to him. In graduate school, through Bernard Sheehan and Fran Flavin, I encountered and devoured Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections. I gave considerable thought to this, especially the story of Voegelin convincing the arresting SS officer—his former beloved student—to give him 24 hours to get his affairs in order. As both men knew he would, Voegelin used that extra day to escape the Nazis. When I earned my PhD, Fran gave me Ted McAllister’s masterful book comparing Voegelin to Strauss. It is still one of my most prized books.
Then, through Don Lutz and Gleaves Whitney and Winston Elliott’s American Ideas Seminars, I came to know Voegelin’s 1952 Walgreen Lectures, The New Science of Politics, sometime in the very late 1990s, just as I was arriving at Hillsdale. Again, I simply swallowed this book whole!
At Hillsdale, I dove into Order and History as well as into his History of Political Ideas. Humorously, I found Aurel Kolnai—who knew Voegelin in the Mises Circle in Vienna—and his unflattering assessment of Voegelin as a “fascist savant of rare acumen and coolness,” but later recanted his statement.[*]
My great friend, Barbara Elliott, again around 1999, loved quoting Voegelin and his followers, “Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton.”
By 2003, I had read so much Voegelin that I decided—through the grace and encouragement of my department chair, Mark Kalthoff—to teach a three-credit, semester-long course comparing Christopher Dawson to Eric Voegelin. Over the two decades since, that class has slowly morphed into “Christian Humanism,” and Voegelin gets less and less real estate each time I teach it, but only because he get crowded out by others such as T.S. Eliot and Willa Cather.
And, so here I am, nearly 37 years after first encountering him, wondering exactly what he has meant to my own ideas and my own view of the world.
Let me admit this, before I go on, and I trust this is obvious if you’ve had the chance to read anything else I’ve written here at The Imaginative Conservative or elsewhere…. I really, really, really like my heroes to be fully heroic. That is, if I’m going to spend any serious time with any person, I want that person to be exemplary. J.R.R. Tolkien fought nobly in World War I and used every bit of his creativity and imagination to defend Western Civilization in his Middle-earth mythology. C.S. Lewis did the same with his many writings. Christopher Dawson battled depression all his life, overcoming it by thinking penetratingly about every topic imaginable. Russell Kirk, that fierce romantic, espoused every good cause imaginable in his life, while also giving away almost every cent he ever made to charity. Willa Cather, Ray Bradbury, Thomas Merton…. To be sure, I romanticize everything, including my mom, my brothers, my wife, my children, and all my closest friends. I firmly believe that we are to look at our neighbors as God sees us—with His light radiating in our unworthy souls.
On a personal and biographical level, though, Voegelin gives me pause and, perhaps for a lack of charity on my part, I can’t see him as a hero. Why, for example, could he not keep an academic job after fleeing from Europe? Perhaps this was just circumstance, but it strikes as more that he was a difficult person. He shifted from Louisiana State University to Harvard to Bennington to the University of Alabama. Why did he, especially toward the end of his life, reject orthodox Christianity, bizarrely claiming that St. Paul was tainted with Gnosticism? Again, trying to understand this positively, I can say that he was simply living up to his desire for academic integrity, but, in so doing, he thwarted years of finely honed tradition. Most importantly, though, in his personal letters, he not only mocked Russell Kirk and conservatism, but he freely admitted that he cynically accepted funding from conservative sources even though he had no sympathy with either the conservative or conservatism. One student remembered Voegelin’s brutality:
I once saw Russell Kirk at Stanford. Lissy [Voegelin] called me up and said, “You have to come over, because I’ve scratched myself bloody in the back of my head. Here you have these two idiots, my husband and Russell Kirk, staring at each other and mumbling one-sentence statements and then falling silent again.” I thought she was making it up, but I went over there around nine o’clock in the evening and it was exactly like that: Eric Voegelin and Russell Kirk were sitting at opposite ends of the room, both smoking cigars and emitting phrases and then falling silent. They had nothing to say to each other. Russell Kirk was a little bit more willing to add maybe a sentence or two to the original sentence, but Voegelin was totally out of it. He hoped that Russell Kirk would go away! When we drove him to the hotel, I had to go with them; I was not allowed to drive home. Voegelin said “No, we have to talk about this experience.” So, we drove Kirk to the hotel, then we came back and talked about him and the idiocy of American conservatism.
Disappointing, to be sure.
And, yet, I would be fool to reject Voegelin simply because of his quirks of character. He was, I am certain, a genius, one of the single finest thinkers of the 20th century, perhaps the single finest scholar when it came to dissecting ideologies.
If you don’t mind, though, I’ll get to all of that in the next essay.
__________
[*] Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 447.
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It seems to me that Voegelin was hostile to all ideology, as such, right or left, including American conservatism.
I first discovered Voegelin in 1987 when I came upon a copy of the newly published Order and History V. Although there was much that I didn’t understand, I was driven to read more, and so I did for years and decades. His work was eye-opening as few other thinkers have been to me. Yet, I have been troubled at reading the accounts of what seemed to be little more than his arrogance toward others. If someone reads Voegelin and attempts to apply his thought in a fashion that is not up to his standards, should we call them ideologues?
This outstanding post needs clarification. The social and institutional background of both Voegelin and Kirk masks, obscures more than it reveals. John Lukacs’ work examining the theological, moral deficits underwriting US Conservatism throughout the mid-20th century should be standard reading for anyone interested in understanding profound differences in Voegelin & Kirk. The WASP ascendancy animating US social, governing institutions has ended in a dominant secularism eclipsing reason itself, leaving Orthodox Catholics capable of addressing the very intellectual (moral) deficits hampering both renewal and traction against social degeneration. Any those shaped within the sacramental realism of the Church possess a framework to handle the very dissolution that has become the crisis of the West.
Voegelin & Kirk remain allies forever, but with serious caveats. Voegelin would remain forever outside formal institutional comforts that marked Kirk socially. Kirk would forever be associated as an Oxbridge Don in a lovely home surrounded by students and professional accolades in government (think Harry Jaffa’s coterie throughout D.C.) That mix never arrived for Voegelin. To make matters worse, the greatest Catholic theologians of the mid-20th century (John Paul II, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac) all cited Voegelin extensively. Not Kirk. The irony isn’t lost of St. John Henry Newman, who openly met the spawned Germanic challenge of secular militancy born from the Reformation, Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; only to be denied an audience throughout Germany. Alone, Voegelin was championed by those unread and unhoused. Kirk’s own social ambit was constrained, but the scale was smaller. The snide atmosphere in the car between the two men should be examined in a theatre of contrasts: a Catholic Berlin Junker having to grasp, acknowledge the superior social trappings of ensconced gentry in a culturally, ideologically bereft conservatism, in a backward frontier.
Only a fox like Shakespeare could resolve that encounter.
Best, William Holland
WJHolland.wordpress.com.
@WilliamHolland