With Aristotle, Gerhart Niemeyer saw art as being closer to philosophy than to history. Like philosophy, art begins and ends in wonder—it promotes a deeper sense of the mystery that bounds our experience. In the great works of art and literature, the relationship between art and religion is that of a seamless garment, and not [...]
The misery will have to become more sharply unbearable, the suffering personal and yet wide-spread, before people begin to run after a real teacher, seize him by the hem of his overcoat, and beg him to take charge of their children. Let us not say that then it will be too late. It may be [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Gerhart Niemeyer as he explores the role and nature of ideology as applied to politics, through the lens of Russell Kirk. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Russell Kirk “Philosophy”—love of wisdom—is a word first used by Heraclitus. “Sophia” as listed [...]
A warning may be in order that our civilization is not in good shape, furthermore, that awareness of this fact and analysis of the disorder are among the foremost obligations of intellectual leadership. Both require a return to basic questions, such questions as are usually answered at the beginning of things. A thinking person should [...]
Brad Birzer was thinking, the other day, about intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany and other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe during the years leading up to and including World War II. He asked me if I knew Gerhart Niemeyer’s story. I told him that I do, from Gerhart’s son Paul’s loving and very competent biography of [...]
Eric Voegelin Nearly two decades ago there appeared the first three volumes of Eric Voegelin’s exemplary quest for a theoretically intelligible order of history (Vol. I, Israel and Revelation; Vol. II, The World of the Polis; Vol. III, Plato and Aristotle). The plan projected three more volumes: Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries, and The Crisis [...]
Gerhart Niemeyer In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers–Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz–who sought to clear the ideological rubble in the modern academia so students could study the true, the beautiful, and the good. In his accessible lectures about complicated philosophical topics, Eric [...]
“Philosophy”—love of wisdom—is a word first used by Heraclitus. “Sophia” as listed in the dictionary means “perfect scientific knowledge, wisdom,” but a “sophist” is “a quibbler, a cheat.” And Plato made a sharp distinction between sophistes, philosophos, and the sophos, the sophistes being a person who, claiming that he possesses wisdom, takes money for teaching it. The philosophos, by contrast, knowing [...]
What can a student today rightfully demand from a “liberal arts education”? A diploma that translates into a better-paid job? Such a certificate calls for vocational training. A smattering of a wide range of various disciplines? That would hardly make him a more useful citizen. “Liber” is the Latin word for “free.” A “liberal” education [...]