Eat Pray Western Civ

Michael Sugrue, a supremely gifted educator who taught Western civilization to two generations of students at institutions including Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Ave Maria University, passed away in January after many years with cancer. He was 66. In an age where academics are expected to be published researchers, he taught. After retiring from Ave Maria in 2021, he turned his attentions online, starting YouTube and Spotify channels where his audience has grown to the hundreds of thousands. Plato, Dickens, John Coltrane, Marcus Aurelius, Burke, Machiavelli, Cormac McCarthy — if it was Western culture, he was willing to teach it. He gave his last lecture, on how archaeological discoveries at Göbekli Tepe and elsewhere should put to rest overly materialist and economic understandings of prehistory, a week before he died.

Even just a few years ago, it appeared that Sugrue would be remembered as the favorite professor of several hundred very lucky students, one of those long-suffering individuals who share the joy of knowledge in this world and receive their just deserts only in heaven. Two things have changed since. One is that Sugrue was becoming, before death, something of an internet celebrity — a fact all the more impressive because he had been touted by no one. The million-plus views on his Marcus Aurelius lecture have come because people like it and recommend it to others. His afterlife may well just be beginning. Second is that the university world has seen a rapid collapse of all its humanities programs, making the future of the teaching that Sugrue specialized in — finding “big ideas” in Shakespeare or Molière or Nietzsche — look rather unpromising. During Sugrue’s career, academics considered him — a mere highly intelligent, highly entertaining teacher capable of inspiring students to read and think and engage with ideas — beneath their notice. Now he seems like someone all those who love the humanities need to learn from.

Sugrue’s YouTube channel is called simply “Michael Sugrue.” It consists mostly of 50-minute introductions to various great thinkers. The lectures’ online success clearly indicates that there is a need for lucid, eloquent, entertaining big-idea discussions of great authors, and they give a sense of Sugrue’s oratorical style. They have proven popular, and are worth studying for that very reason — what gets people, for no credit, to listen to a stranger talking for 50 minutes about Kierkegaard? Notably, however, the recorded lectures do not represent Sugrue’s actual teaching method, which was truly astonishing — unlike anything I have ever seen — and deserves to be more widely known. There is much we can learn from it.

I had the Sugrue experience beginning in 1995, at Princeton University. Bearing a Ph.D. in a subject (American history) he did not strongly desire to teach, he had been hired as a lecturer by the Humanities Council — a nondepartmental academic entity without power to grant tenure — on a short-term contract. Interdisciplinary humanities was where Sugrue wanted to be. He taught a course called “The Bible in Western Culture,” which was Bible highlights plus Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Beethoven, A Clockwork Orange, John Coltrane, and more. He also taught a three-semester sequence covering 3,000 years of the Western tradition, from Homer to Habermas. All this was amazing. Even more so was that he ran every 90-minute class — and at times he had over 150 students — as a discussion class and seminar. He would get to class a half hour early and cover eight blackboards with cryptic, abbreviated notes. He would then sit on the desk at the front of the lecture hall and name the previous week’s reading assignment. He would then ask, “What did you learn that you didn’t know before?”

What did you learn that you didn’t know before. We knew the question was coming but, even so, there was usually an initial silence as our brains cleared their throats. He would wait. The initiative belonged with the student. When we had shown where we were, he would come meet us there. His job was to assess and then shape, deepen, and organize. Finally a student would raise a hand, and the discussion began. When we read Robinson Crusoe, a student commented that Crusoe seemed to be attempting to re-create on his desert island the civilized life he had known. Sugrue pointed to his blackboard. “Yes,” he said. “You see here where it says, ‘ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY’? The life story of the individual is a restatement of the life story of the group. Did you know that in utero you once had gills? And lived in amniotic fluid? Because you evolved from a creature that lived in water. Same with Crusoe. Did you notice he first lives up in a tree? Then he comes down from the trees and lives in a cave? Then he builds himself a house? Crusoe is recreating the human story on this island.”

After getting that idea across, a related idea would be brought up — “Do you remember when Plato in the Republic said that the city is just the individual writ large? In Robinson Crusoe we have the individual. It’s the city writ small.” When someone noted that Augustine’s attack on the nature of little babies seemed rather severe, he pointed to the blackboard, “PLATO CORRECTED BY PAUL.” “Plato says ‘get ’em young, teach them virtue before they’re corrupted by the poets,’ but Augustine says the babies are already corrupted by something. It’s Romans 7 all over again — the human being’s potential is limited by sin. This is Plato corrected by Paul.” Sugrue would get through almost all his blackboard notes every class, proceeding entirely on audience initiative. What is more, when he had classes divided into two discussion sections, we would sometimes compare notes as to how the discussions had gone — and discover that both sections had basically made the same comments in both classes. Sugrue could steer classroom discussions — with a truly unseen hand — to lead us to the conclusions he wanted us to reach. We were flabbergasted by it week in and week out.

“During graduate school,” Sugrue explained to me, “I worked as a security guard at Madison Square Garden. I would watch the same rock shows every night, and I saw that the crowd reacted completely predictably. Burst of light, they all cheer. Dim the lights, cut the guitar, they get quiet. You can do that in a lecture too.” Sugrue used no music or lighting — just words — but he could still do it. He had a great advantage in that survey courses gave students a working cultural vocabulary to which he could return again and again: He knew that his Robinson Crusoe students had read the Republic, because they had read it with him. He knew the books inside and out because he taught the same ones year after year, seemingly never tiring of them. He was also often familiar with his students — by the time my class got to the modern books in our Western-civilization sequence, we had been together for over a year. He knew which students would attack certain ideas and which would defend them; sometimes a mere glance in the right direction would get the conversation cooking. The sequencing of readings had an effect too: We didn’t really need to point out that Alex in A Clockwork Orange was a Nietzschean hero — he came just a week after reading Beyond Good and Evil — but we did anyway.

“Teaching,” Sugrue said, “is a performing art. It is Dionysus in the service of Apollo.” Since Sugrue used words to achieve his effects, he looked for books that would give him a good working vocabulary. We read Hard Times, Dickens’s attack on industrialism both economic and educational. The children get in trouble because they go to see a circus dog named Merrylegs when they should be doing homework. Dickens notes that the students had to learn “metallurgy.” “Merrylegs” vs. “metallurgy” became Sugruvian catchphrases to describe different conceptions of education and the human soul. Other times Sugrue would retell — with great relish — his favorite parts of books. “Kierkegaard says the world is a stage, and a fire breaks out backstage. So who comes out to warn everyone? A clown. The clown comes out and says, ‘Everybody get out, the theater’s on fire!’ And everyone just laughs. He says, ‘No, no, there’s really a fire, I’m leaving, everyone get out!’ And the people just laugh all the harder.” Sugrue had gone through the books looking for the best parts to perform — an actor adapting a book for a stage. That was how he saw it: He looked forward to teaching Pascal or Hume the way he might look forward to a great role. He would give them laugh lines (Hume would say “I don’t care what you think, just don’t step on my gouty toes”) and at times reduce them to caricatures. Facts-based writers wanted to “talk about tables and chairs.” The mystics would respond, “Yeah, but what about the depth of the self?” Sugrue was intelligent and his caricatures were always basically sound; but most importantly, they worked. We were engaged. We were entertained. We read. We thought. We fell in love with ideas. “Capable students,” wrote Sugrue, “driven by an impulse that they neither control nor understand, are easily whipped into an Apollonian rather than a Dionysian frenzy, because unbeknownst to them they desire Something Else more than they desire air.”

One can hear in this the echo of Sugrue’s teacher Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and Love and Friendship. Sugrue told one particular story about Bloom. Bloom thought rock music meant death for the West. Sugrue had grown up with rock as his key means of experiencing transcendence, listening to records in ecstasy in his room: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones. Sugrue showed up at Bloom’s office with a boom box and a cassette tape of the Sex Pistols. “I knew he wasn’t going to like it, but oh my. He exploded. He was just shaking with rage. He was screaming at me to turn it off. I thought about that a lot. Why is it you have one generation that is so enthralled by an experience that the previous generation tries as hard as it can to close itself off to? You can understand why I went into history.” Bloom’s resistance to something great led to the development of one of Sugrue’s maxims: “Every insight is partial blindness.” The entire Western tradition was a sequence of blindness-inducing insights, which fired the next generation to its polar opposite: Faith swings to reason, classicism to Romanticism, Athens to Jerusalem, peace to war, and back again.

As a teacher, Sugrue believed he needed to present the case for each insight with all his powers. He shied away from disclosing his true opinions. But there was always an Unspeakable, an Ineffable, a Transcendent around which his soul circled like a moth round a candle. Plato — the one who does not disclose his opinion — was his touchstone. Job was the heart of his Bible course. He added Meister Eckhart, Pascal, Beethoven, Kierkegaard, and Coltrane to the great-books sequence. They were prophets of the unspeakable. Aquinas, on the other hand, was too systematic, at least in his scholastic writings. “Theology,” Sugrue said, “is like shining a flashlight at the sun.”

In part for this reason, Sugrue met death with hope. When he went for chemotherapy, he would joke with his nurses, “Give me the hemlock! Give me some more.” As with any man of ideas, or any Catholic — he said, “I’m a Catholic, plain and simple” — the world was something of a disappointment. “Philosophers,” he said, “are lovers of death.” Along with his teaching, this comfort with death becomes now part of his inspiration. Those of us who were his students, however, we cannot forget the great joy in life we had with him — the excitement of being young and alive and learning, the empowerment he gave us when we saw that one author really was responding to another, that knowledge of the antecedents could lead to understanding of the consequents, that there was to the past a coherence that was infinitely discoverable. And we remember that for 90 minutes at a time, two times a week, we were with him and there was nowhere else we wanted to be.