Voegelin at Notre Dame -Part 1

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science and has edited several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Jodi Bruhn is the editor of Vol 13 and also translator of Vols 8, 13, and 32 of The Collected Works. This essay appears as Chapter 4 in Voegelin Recollected–Conversations on a life,  University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2008. This is published with permission and  appears in three parts. Most of the interviews here were conducted by Barry Cooper. A list of the contributors and some information about them is found at the end of this article.

 The South Dining Hall 

JOHN ROOS: We would often watch out for Voegelin on campus. There was a professor named Anton-Hermann Chroust, a real character. He was a lawyer, philologist, and classicist who had written on various texts of Aristotle. He and Voegelin would hold court, so to speak, over in the South Dining Hall, in a place called the Oak Room. They both smoked cigars, and they would go over there in the mornings and have their coffee. They were both about the same age and had gone through some of the same experiences. Chroust had this line when he would go to class; he would tell Professor Voegelin (I still call him Professor Voegelin, this gives you an idea of the ambience at the time!) that he was going to cast real pearls before real swine.

JOHN KENNEDY: I recall a kind of tableau there in the South Dining Hall. Eric lived at the Morris Inn when he was here, but he generally went over to the South Dining Hall for dinner. And Tony Chroust inhabited the place. I can still see him and Tony and a couple of other faculty members at a table together. Their erudition was very impressive. Voegelin's in particular was really impressive.

Did you know that Voegelin would dine regularly with Professor Chroust?

JOHN GUEGUEN: I wasn't aware that Voegelin associated with him. Professor Chroust was an elderly law professor and extremely eccentric. He drove around in a flaming red convertible, this elderly man. He was more different, so to speak, than the people he associated with, yet he was trying to be as modern as he could.

Anton-Hermann Chroust 1961

DENNIS MORAN: Chroust would go off to Europe and buy a new car every year, a sports car, a very, very expensive one. He would drive it for one year, then he would come back, and ship it back in a boat. Sometimes he'd give Voegelin a lift home to the Morris Inn, even though it was only about a hundred yards.

I remember their lunches together. They were the salt of the earth, the two of them. Voegelin would sit there in the South Dining Hall in his brown tweed jacket and smoke his cigar. That was in the good old days when you were allowed to smoke, even in the cafeteria. Sometimes he would be by himself, but he was very often with dinner companions — usually, with Tony Chroust. Basically, Tony and Voegelin didn't give a damn that they were teaching in a Catholic university and they were both agnostics. One time I went into the cafeteria on a Saturday morning. The two of them were there having lunch, and I joined them.

We ended up arguing about Lucretius. Chroust was arguing about something Lucretius said, and I said, "Oh, I don't think you should believe anything he wrote! It was just an effort to convince people to think about what they think." Voegelin thought that this was humorous. Chroust was annoyed and said to me, "What do you know about Lucretius?" I said, "I read it." And he said, "Oh yeah, but you didn't read it in the original." I said, "No, I read it in the original." He just looked at me, then he turned to Voegelin and said, "Tell him he's wrong!" But Voegelin just smiled and said, "I can't because I agree with him." So, Voegelin laughed because he also thought that Lucretius didn't believe anything himself and was trying to say that you should avoid superstition.

Then we started talking about superstition, which involved the question of the significance of what Lucretius was doing. Voegelin liked to talk about that. I think he was fascinated with people who believed. I don't think Voegelin saw himself as a nonbeliever, but he wasn't a believer either. They used to joke about it. They loved just to scandalize us: in fact, that's pretty much what we were there for. But Voegelin, more than Chroust, was not just laughing about the Lucretius thing. He was genuinely concerned about people who were superstitious, who were overly devotional. I think that that was part of what he was really worried about: about people who go off the deep end.

So you would see these distinguished guys sitting there and you'd just go over?

MORAN: They'd usually invite you. That Saturday they said, "Hey, come sit down with us" — which probably meant that they were bored with each other and were going to devour this graduate student. As it turned out, Voegelin decided I wasn't so stupid after all. Although, I remember once — I can't remember in what context — Voegelin turned to me and said, "You're a Dummkopf." And I thought, "God, that's an honor." I must have slipped into whatever trap Chroust was trying to set for me and missed it altogether and made a fool of myself.

                              Did they have serious debates?

Eric Voegelin at ND in 1961

MORAN: They would argue, but Chroust was always irreverent. Voegelin would sit there; he would slightly lean back and smoke his cigar. And he used to have tweed jackets and kind of knit ties. He didn't always wear white shirts, but most of the time they were laundered, nice white shirts. He was a very stiff man. And Chroust was this rumpled-up person who probably hadn't had anything dry cleaned in months, and he would always smoke his pipe and would always be a mess. So, the two of them: Chroust, this rumpled-up character, and Voegelin, this wonderful — someone should make a bust of him. We always used to sit there and think, "Where's he going to put the ash?" Chroust was rumpled up with stains on his clothes and Voegelin would sit there with his cigar and you'd be waiting for the ash to fall. But he never spilled any on himself. He was always impeccable; it was delightful.

Sometimes they would get into current events. I think that Voegelin was like Cardinal Newman in certain ways; he was very interested in the angelism of humanity. Chroust was interested in the other side: he was interested in corruption. My impression was that they really defined each other: Chroust was a skeptic, whereas Voegelin was clearly not a skeptic, there was no cynicism about him at all. Chroust wanted to know everything; he wanted to know all the gossip about the university, especially about the priests. Voegelin was much more involved in bigger ideas and he liked to talk about bigger things. They would talk together about big things, too. They argued about the Republic, for example.

But at that time, we were all pretty amused to have these two people thrown together. Life could be very amusing! Voegelin was a Lutheran. And Tony was sort of a Catholic, sort of a Jew, sort of an agnostic. He saw everything as a mystery to be solved. He saw everything that was mystery as a detective story, whereas Voegelin's notion of mystery was cosmic. For Chroust, life was a back alley mystery novel! Chroust was always reducing things to the lowest common denominator, to money and women. You must also remember that he was spending his life trying to prove that Aristotle was a spy — on the basis of the lost works of Aristotle!

So their approaches to scholarship were antithetical?

MORAN: Right. They were on different ends of the telescope. I think what bound them together was that, for any expatriate types, this was the Café Roma of Notre Dame. And in general, they were both kind and generous. They would argue and it would be about something serious, but it wasn't textual. Ordinarily, I would be the unnamed interlocutor in the dialogue. You know, they would simply turn to me and say, "Was that Keats or Shelley?" And I would just say, "Shelley."