In Memoriam Gerard Ernest Caspary

The Department of History will hold a memorial gathering for our beloved Gerry Caspary on Sunday, June 22 in the Women's Faculty Club, beginning at 2:00 in the afternoon. All are welcome.

by Geoffrey Koziol, Professor of History, UC Berkeley

Told of Gerry Caspary's passing, a former student (herself a renowned historian) responded with the quickness we reserve for the obvious. "He was the real thing." And he was. For a long generation, he was our medievalists' secret weapon in producing a stream of remarkable graduate students, including one who just received a MacArthur award. People outside the program did not always know this. After all, he published only one book: Politics and Exegesis, on Origen's theory of the two swords. But it was quite a book, the product of twenty years' reading, learning, thinking, ruminating. Even so, the book he published was less than half of what he had written, the whole only a minuscule fraction of what he knew. His students had the benefit of being able to learn from the whole. A seminar with him was an experience of legend, for he could easily devote an entire semester to a single text, spinning complex histories out of every word and phrase. He lived ideas. For him, thinking provided its own reward.

Born in Frankfurt in 1929, Gerry grew up in Paris, where his family had fled in 1933. In 1942 his parents were arrested and deported, dying in Auschwitz. Gerry himself fled to southern France, where for the next three years a family gave him shelter. After the war he emigrated to the United States, receiving his BA from Swarthmore College in 1950 and his MA and PhD from Harvard University in 1952/1962. He taught at Smith College until 1970, when he came to Berkeley. His research and teaching ranged broadly across medieval intellectual history, especially patristics. His book on Origen (1979) highlighted the intersections and reciprocal influences of biblical exegesis, ecclesiology, and political ideology. Thereafter, he worked to understand the development of what he called "the grammar of Christian thought," that is, the deep semantic, conceptual, and ideological structures and dynamics that shaped Christian discourse in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, especially in the works of Augustine. No one knew more about these subjects than he did. For that matter, few knew more about the middle ages generally. In his prime (and before the current industrial-scale output of scholarship) it was hard to find a book on any aspect of medieval history he had not read and mastered. In a sense, he brought the the best of Swarthmore and Harvard to Berkeley: a liberal arts commitment to the power of ideas informed by the standards of rigorous scholarship. But he was also a Survivor - one of that fast-disappearing generation of intellectuals whose learning and experiences so deepened American educaton. Though those experiences never overtly appeared in his research, they were never far from his consciousness. They lie behind his passionate commitment to dispassionate research, and quickened his awareness of the power of ideas and the linkages between ideas and power. A few years before his retirement, quite by chance, he received a substantial collection of family correspondence written in the years before World War II. He used it to teach an undergraduate seminar on the Holocaust (recalling it as the best teaching experience of his career). In 2005 he completed a translation, edition, annotation of the most important letters, mixed with his personal memoir. He called the manuscript "From the Edge of the Holocaust."

Few historians have ranged so widely, with such depth of understanding, probably because so few are driven by such sheer love of ideas. That is why his student called him "the real thing." He was the purest of scholars, the gentlest of teachers, of people the most humane.