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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The featured image is “Back and Forth Across It We Went,” by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.