Tonsor: Introduction: First Call -- To hone one mind against the gritty stone of another

This book by George Nash is the history
of the movement in which
Stephen J. Tonsor played a central role.
On the dust jacket of the first edition (1976),
Tonsor's photograph is in the lower left corner.  

My first conversation with Stephen Tonsor occurred on a mid-April morning in 1987. I was living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and had recently received the acceptance letter to study history at the University of Michigan. So I was eager to introduce myself to the man who was to be my graduate advisor for the next five years plus. With some nervousness I placed a long-distance call to his home from my crowded kitchen table: nervous not just because of the anxiety produced by a major life transition, but also because of what my colleague Gregory Wolfe said about the Michigan professor. “Tonsor,” he warned, “is old-school German. He can be a mite prickly and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Remind me to tell you what he said at the Philadelphia Society last year.”

Although I had braced myself for possible unpleasantness during this initial phone call, the conversation with Tonsor went well. The handshaking over the phone soon done with, I told Tonsor that I had received a Weaver Fellowship and was honored to be in a position to study under his direction. I'd be moving to Ann Arbor in the late summer. 

He had enthusiastic words for my future home. "I occasionally spend a few weeks away from home, and I must say that rediscovering Ann Arbor after a short stay elsewhere is always a very pleasant experience for me. It really is a marvelous and unique community. It is so manageable. I am able to walk nearly everywhere I wish to go. It is vibrant and filled with elegant shops and restaurants. Even the bookstores continue to proliferate. I have the feeling sometimes that Ann Arbor is like Athens must have been in the years between Aristotle and the closing of the pagan schools by Justinian. Great university towns always have a very special character."[1]

After this happy thought, I asked Tonsor who the most influential historian in his life was. His answer made me appreciate his way with words, his way of seeing things.

“To hone one mind against the gritty stone of another,” Tonsor observed, “is the surest path to intellectual excellence.[2] It’s against the gritty stone of Lord Acton, Tocqueville, Parkman, Burckhardt, and sometimes Dawson that I’ve learned the most.

Lord Acton: a giant in intellectual history

“It was in graduate school, under the wise direction of my dissertation advisor, that I discovered Lord Acton.[3] It may sound funny to put it this way, but I had an experience similar to that of Marx, who locked himself in a dank room and refused to come out until he had read everything Hegel had written. After three weeks he emerged into the light, rubbed his eyes, and proclaimed, ‘I am a Hegelian.’[4] More than a century later, I retrieved material from the Anderson Room at Cambridge, read Lord Acton for days on end, and emerged an apprentice of Acton’s thought. I liked the cut of his jib compared to that of most historians who are over-educated stamp collectors.”

Tonsor gave a deep-throated chuckle – it was the first time I heard him laugh. “You probably do not know this,” he said, “but Lord Acton’s family on his mother’s side claimed they were related to Jesus. Apparently there was a Semitic ancestor of the Dalbergs who became a Roman soldier and was stationed on the Rhine.[5] If you are going to fabricate a lineage, you might as well start with the Father Almighty. But tell me, Mr. Whitney, what have you read of Acton?”

Trying to ingratiate myself in this first conversation, I replied that I’d found it difficult to lay hands on Acton’s books. (That’s because he didn’t write books, but I didn’t know it yet.) I noted, nevertheless, that I had looked up one of Tonsor's articles about Acton in The Journal of the History of Ideas, and that it was at the top of my "to read" stack by my desk.

“That article is not very good,” Tonsor said. “But Acton, on the other hand, Acton I hope will soon be in your ‘re-read’ stack. Recur to his essays often and he will repay you generously. He is one of the most important Liberal historians and moralists you will encounter, indispensible today because he was the first great modern thinker to aim his firepower at statism. Acton’s resistance to Leviathan did not discriminate. He was opposed equally to authoritarian, socialist, and democratic regimes[6] – anywhere the state had become a ravenous, ungovernable beast. Nor was he a friend of nationalism which, in his day, was everywhere coopting the state and leading Europe down the road to ruin. The nation, said Acton, is responsible to Heaven itself for the evil acts of the state.”[7]

In these opening words on Acton, I was processing two things that didn’t square. First was Tonsor’s dismissal of his own early article. Was it false modesty or did he mean it? Second was a word that Tonsor used; it seemed incongruous for a conservative to lavish high praise on his “Liberal” idol. I asked for clarification.

Making a stand for the right to follow one's conscience.

“Acton,” said Tonsor, “was a Liberal in the most original and meaningful sense of the term: that of upholding the individual’s right to follow his conscience. A Liberal in Acton’s mold believes that the claims of conscience are superior to those of the state. This philosophical principle is derived from our Judeo-Christian heritage and it informs the Liberal’s politics. Political rights, he taught, proceed directly from religious duties, and these are the true basis of Liberalism.[8] Hardly a liberal today professes it anymore, at least not in the U.S. where all the liberals have become statists, but in Victorian England it was a commonplace, a Whig’s article of faith.

“In addition to his intellectual significance, Acton was one of the most fascinating human beings of the last century. As one of his biographers, Gertrude Himmelfarb observed, he was an anomaly in many worlds – a Catholic in poor standing with the hierarchy, a politician without portfolio, an historian who didn’t write books, and for most of his adult life a scholar without academic rank.”[9]

I took note that Tonsor used the old-fashioned “an historian.”

“Like every giant he aroused the envy of lesser men who were eager to pick the meat off his ribs. Nevertheless, he remains a colossus of intellectual history and cultural criticism. It’s been said of Acton that he knew everyone worth knowing and read everything worth reading.[10] Even those who suffered harsh treatment at his hands climbed atop his shoulders to declare his genius.”[11]

“Intellectual achievement and social skills,” I offered. “A rare combination in the academy.”

“Nothing illustrates your point better,” said Tonsor, “than his conversational style. At the dinner table Acton could speak with his children in English, with his wife in German, with his sister-in-law in French, and with his mother-in-law in Italian.[12] He was said to possess the most powerful memory of his generation. A friend reported that he could retain two octavos a day.”[13]

Two what? I asked myself. Since we weren’t speaking in person Tonsor couldn’t see me stretch the phone cord to the corner of the kitchen to grab my American Heritage dictionary and look up “octavo.” It means 16 pages. I had the feeling that urgent searches were going to be the new normal for the next few years at Michigan.

Eager to say something meaningful, I ventured that I wanted to find out what led up to Acton’s profound remark that “Power corrupts –”

            Before I could finish Tonsor interrupted. “Let’s get the quotation right, Mr. Whitney. What Acton said to Mandell Creighton was, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’[14] How right the pessimistic Acton was. Our weary old world has furnished innumerable examples of corruption, especially since Machiavelli released government from the restraint of law.[15]

Acton always looked for the cloven hoof.
            Pope Sylvester II and the Devil.

“Acton always looked for the cloven hoof. History, he said, is the disclosure of guilt and shame.[16] Because he had searched out the dark corners of man’s past, nothing surprised him. It was said that speaking with Acton was the nearest one could approach divine omniscience.”[17] Tonsor expressed mirth at this aperçu, and I heard him laugh in little gusts and voiceless puffs.

After a moment Tonsor interrupted the pause. “Small talk eludes me, Mr. Whitney. I loathe chitchat. What is more, too many academics drown their students in a deluge of verbiage and cant. But I hope you will come to visit regularly during office hours. As I said at the beginning of this phone call, conversation is one of the most important aspects of education. To hone one mind against the gritty stone of another is the surest path to intellectual excellence.”[18]

Thus the phone call ended and the teaching began. I found this unusual first conversation with my “prickly” advisor gritty enough. Already we were talking about a great nineteenth-century historian, the first principles of a European Liberal, and what it all meant to an American conservative. Scarcely did I realize how this brief sketch of Lord Acton would parallel much of what I would learn about Tonsor himself – a difficult man who was a contradiction to his age.

Stephen J. Tonsor about the time he was first studying Lord Acton.

---

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, pp. 2-3; letter in GW's possession courtesy of Alfred Regnery.
[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, The Legacy of an Education, by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper no. 11, 1997); Kindle edition, loc. 34.

[3] For the reference to Swain’s admiration for Acton, see Stephen J. Tonsor, “Joseph Ward Swain,” in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 313: “Swain was a devotee of Lord Acton.”

[4] The story is also told in Lloyd Kramer, lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx," in European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2001).

[5] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty); Kindle edition, Ch. 1, loc. 170. Himmelfarb's book was particularly helpful in reconstructing Tonsor's and my first conversations on Lord Acton.

[6] A. Walter James, “John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1^st Baron Acton,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, accessed August 26, 2016.

[7] This paraphrase of Acton is a slight modification of the direct quotation in James, “Acton,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, accessed August 26, 2016.

[8] This paraphrase of Acton is a slight modification of the direct quotation in James, “Acton,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, accessed August 26, 2016.

[9] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 8, loc. 3922.

[10] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 104

[11] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 8, loc. 3932.

[12] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 114.

[13] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 104.

[14] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 9, loc. 4880.

[15] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 8, loc. 4005.

[16] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 8, loc. 4138.

[17] Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 412; quoted by Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 8, loc. 3932.

[18] Tonsor, Introduction, Legacy, by James C. Holland, loc. 34.

*     *     *

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS SERIES ON STEPHEN J. TONSOR:

If you’ve not had a chance yet, please make sure you check out Gleaves Whitney’s series of essays, reminiscences, and vignettes regarding his graduate school advisor, Stephen Tonsor.

Though more or less forgotten now (as so many of the greats of the last century have been), Tonsor once stood rather high within conservative thought.

Whitney’s relationship with his mentor was not always calm, but it was certainly always sharp.  He is now on a long and fascinating journey exploring exactly what that relationship meant and what his advisor signified to him and to the republic.

Don’t miss this excellent series Whitney is writing.  There’s nothing he does that is not critically important, but, even by his always exacting standards, Whitney is producing some thing innovative, artistic, and moving.

~Bradley Birzer, professor of history, Hillsdale College; on his Stormfields blog, September 15, 2016

Gleaves, your reflections on Tonsor are what you were meant to write, I think. They are quite beautiful, sometimes disturbing, always interesting.

~John Willson, professor emeritus, Hillsdale College; in a Facebook post to GW, October 24, 2016.

I listened to a podcast where you spoke about Tonsor. I liked his fierce intellect before, but now I'm even more intrigued by his life and career.

~Seth Bartee; Ph.D. in intellectual history, Virginia Tech; in a Facebook message to GW, November 16, 2016.

Tonsor #4, part 1 -- Orientation in the Clements Library; a conversation on education and the tragedy of Ignaz von Döllinger

Actually I smelled him before I saw him. Making my way through a crowd of strangers, I smelled what vaguely reminded me of wood smoke that had escaped from a fireplace. A fire? In August? In a rare books library? As I scanned the ornate room for the hearth, I saw him standing nearby, a square block of a man, big-chested, with a headful of gray-white hair that made his black-rimmed glasses stand out all the more. As we shook hands I was reminded that Jeffrey Hart likened Tonsor to a pit bull. Or was it a Rottweiler?[1] All the more reason that I was surprised by the lack of a firm grip – he seemed dismissive of the formality. In those first moments of greeting, I put it together: It was he who was redolent of wood smoke. Even in late August, his tweed coat held smoke the way a sponge holds water. The effect was to make him seem out of place.

What Tonsor said next alerted me to the personality trait that made his conversation so engaging. He liked to drop something provocative, even outrageous, into his remarks, like a chef sprinkling habañeros onto a steak. “The timing of this morning’s orientation works well. My wife Caroline is off attending a family reunion. I was spared attendance, which is better for everyone concerned. Her family holds tenaciously to opinions which are vague, ill informed, and often wrong, but which are infinitely dilated upon. The thought of an afternoon of those views gives me a headache and makes me dizzy.”[2]

William L. Clements Library

Tonsor gestured to the rare books and manuscripts that filled the Clements Library. "I think Acton would have liked it here. He loved nothing better than the dust of crumbling paper."[3] 

We sat down to endure an hour of orientation. When one of the speakers approached the podium, Tonsor leaned toward me and said, “He is a good man but a ponderous speaker. Every word he utters weighs a pound."

The highlight of the morning was the presentation by the renowned labor historian, Sidney Fine, who spoke with some enthusiasm about the variety of archival resources in southeast Michigan. At the conclusion of the hour, Tonsor invited me to accompany him to his office in Haven Hall. He was echtes Deutsch, he explained, and preferred to walk everywhere.

Clements Library from South U.

Leaving the library, I put to Tonsor the first logical question that came to mind. “Since our two phone calls, I've been curious to know if you wrote either your master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation on Lord Acton?” 

“I wanted to. When I went back to school I was already a combat veteran and had seen things -- graduate school was not a caper. I shared Acton’s moral vision and wanted to write my dissertation about his projected history of liberty, but Gertrude Himmelfarb beat me to it.[4] I was at Illinois, and she was up the road at Chicago. After consulting my Doktorvater, Joseph Ward Swain, who happened to be a devotee of Acton,[5] I changed course and wrote about the next best thing, Acton’s remarkable teacher, Döllinger, and the Munich Circle that he led along with Baader and Görres.[6]

At these references I felt a bit helpless because I had never heard of this troika of German heavyweights – Döllinger, Baader, Görres – and didn’t know what to say except something that vaguely sounded like “Oh.”

Tonsor, ignoring his new student’s helplessness, continued: “It was one of the fortuitous accidents in Acton’s life that he was denied admission to three Cambridge colleges. They turned him away because he was Catholic. But filled with brilliance and promise, young Johnny Acton sought out university study abroad. Through the connections of his mother, Lady Granville, he landed on Fr. Döllinger’s doorstep."

Lord Acton, Lady Granville, Fr. Döllinger? It was starting to sound like an Agatha Christie novel.

“Acton and Döllinger would become one of the most famous mentor-protégé duos of the nineteenth century, not unlike Dr. Johnson and Boswell in the previous century. Acton would come to know Döllinger better than anyone else. He lived in Döllinger’s house for six years, regarded him as a father, and was closely associated with him for four decades. After Munich, Acton projected a multi-volume biography of his mentor and friend. Sadly, like all the other books in his head, it was never written.”[7]

Feeling a knot in my chest, I helplessly nodded, not knowing how best to carry the conversation forward in sync with our steps. I was not used to feeling insecure in intellectual company. For help I anxiously scanned the town-and-gown vista presented by South University Avenue.

Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890)

Tonsor, never slow on the uptake at such moments, veered to a related subject: “Education is under the best of circumstances a wise or fortuitous choice of masters. There can be no genuine education without the generous and dedicated master.[8] And Acton was extremely fortunate in his discovery of Döllinger. This, in spite of the fact that Döllinger was said to have the gloomiest face of any priest in a Good Friday procession!”[9] Tonsor waggled his head and laughed at this chestnut.

“Because Acton’s ideas were so closely identified with those of Döllinger, someday I should like to tell you more about their Munich Circle. We forget nowadays that, in the nineteenth century, Döllinger was the only Catholic historian who possessed a truly international reputation. Alas, his story has withered like dry grass. After he was accused of heresy, he chose to surrender his Catholicism rather than compromise his integrity as an historian. Posterity gives him little credit for falling on his sword. Few historians have been so widely influential in their lifetime yet so thoroughly forgotten after death as Döllinger.[10] He was a figure even more tragic than Acton.”

My curiosity piqued, my adventure launched, I made a mental note to create a simple outline of this neglected genealogy in intellectual history: 

Döllinger > Acton > Swain > Tonsor > ?

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[1] John J. Miller, “University of Michigan Professor Stephen Tonsor Has Died,” January 30, 2014; at URL www.heymiller.com/2014/01/tonsor-r-i-p/, accessed August 30, 2016.

[2] Stephen Tonsor, letter to Henry Regnery, June 28, 1987, p. 1.

[3] Stephen Tonsor, Foreword, Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton, 1910 edition republished by Liberty Fund (Indianapolis, 2000); Kindle edition, loc. 24.

[4] The book that grew out of the dissertation was Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Previous to that, in 1948, Himmelfarb also edited an collection of Acton's writings. Her work provided invaluable insights to Tonsor as he was doing graduate work on Acton and Döllinger. I am indebted to Himmelfarb for the early reconstructions of conversations with Tonsor. Much of his working knowledge of Lord Acton came from his reading Himmelfarb back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was in graduate school.

[5] Stephen J. Tonsor, “Joseph Ward Swain,” in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 313.

[6] Stephen J. Tonsor, “Ignaz von Döllinger: A Study in Catholic Historicism,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1955.

[7] James C. Holland, The Legacy of an Education (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 1997), Kindle edition, loc 99. See also Stephen J. Tonsor, “Lord Acton on Döllinger’s Historical Theology,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 20, no. 3 (June-September 1959), p. 329.

[8] Tonsor, Introduction, The Legacy of an Education by James C. Holland, loc. 35.

[9] URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_von_D%C3%B6llinger, accessed August 20, 2016.

[10] Tonsor, “Lord Acton,” Journal of the History of Ideas, pp. 329-30.