[Clark a Merrill] Strauss' Indictment of Christian Philosophy

Leo Strauss's Indictment of Christain PhilosophyAuthor(s): Clark A. MerrillSource: The Review of Politics, Vol. 62, No. 1, Christianity and Politics: Millennial Issue II(Winter, 2000), pp. 77-105Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf ofReview of PoliticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1408150 .

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Leo Strauss's Indictment of Christain Philosophy

Clark A. Merrill

Leo Strauss's writings reveal a subtle but consistent set of accusations against the influence of Christian thinkers on political philosophy. These accusations may be summarized in three charges. First, the attempt byAquinas and other Christian scholastics to synthesize faith and reason led later philosophers to eschew prudence in favor of a humane project to employ science to transform political life. The result was the destruction of the modus vivendi, safeguarded by classical political philosophy, between pious citizens and diffident but inwardly free philosophers. Second, the rationalization of political life implies that a universal regime is possible. But, unless all men become philosophers, this universal regime can be only a universal tyranny, ruled by means of perverted faith in the guise of a final

philosophy. Third, Christian thinkers must bear ultimate responsibility for

precipitating the early modern rejection of classical political philosophy. Without the Christian appropriation of Aristotle, there might never have been a Machiavelli or a Hobbes.

In 1959, Leo Strauss delivered a lecture at St. John's College in honor of his old friend, Jacob Klein. In addition to the lecture, Strauss wrote a prologue which he did not deliver. It was published only in 1978, five years after his death. To introduce the subject of Strauss's subtle indictment of Christian philosophy, I would like to quote an extensive passage from this prologue.1

A Fellowship from the Earhart Foundation supported work on the original version of this essay. The manuscript benefited from the careful reading of Charles Butterworth and Boynton Merrill

1. There is a case to be made that, by setting out clearly and publicly a criticism that Strauss intentionally left implicit, I am engaging in a morally suspect project. It is possible I am doing a disservice both to politically responsible Jewish and Christian believers and to political philosophers. George Grant, one of Strauss's most gifted Christian readers, declined to write publicly about Strauss's criticisms of Christian philosophy. See letter to Ed Andrew, 27 December 1983, in The George Grant Reader, ed. William Christian and Sheila Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 267. I have been encouraged to disregard Grant's judicious caution by the example of ThomasAquinas who was not afraid to set out objections to his own positions and even to orthodox belief, often stating those arguments with

greater clarity and force than the opponents who actually espoused them. The accusations set out below may be viewed as three extended objections opening an article headed "Whether There Is a Christian Philosophy?" As such, they invite an answer and replies from the heirs of St. Thomas.



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While everyone else in the younger generation who had ears to hear was either completely overwhelmed by Heidegger, or else, having been almost completely overwhelmed by him, engaged in well-intentioned but ineffective rearguard actions against him, Klein alone saw why Heidegger is truly important: by uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, he made it possible for the first time after many centuries-one hesitates to say how many-to see the roots of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know, what so many merely believe, that those roots are the only natural and healthy roots. Superficially or sociologically speaking, Heidegger was the first great German philosopher who was a Catholic by origin and by training; he thus had from the outset a premodern familiarity with Aristotle; he thus was protected against the danger of trying to modernize Aristotle. But as a philosopher Heidegger was not a Christian: he thus was not tempted to understand Aristotle in the light of Thomas Aquinas. Above all, his intention was to uproot Aristotle: he thus was compelled to disinter the roots, to bring them to light, to look at them with wonder.2

Let us probe Strauss's discussion of roots and uprooting, and his coyness about declaring how long these roots have been hidden. It seems clear that the tradition whose roots became obscured is the tradition of classical political philosophy or, more specifically, the works of Plato and Aristotle. Klein's own major scholarly work identified the fateful break with the classical

understanding of the world and man's relation to the world as

having occurred first and most decisively in the mathematical

thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If Strauss

agreed that the roots of the classical tradition first became obscured at the time of that break, why would he have employed such ostentatiously obscure language?

I think, rather, that the key to the mystery lies in Strauss's reference to Heidegger's early Catholic training. It would seem that this training was beneficial in that it conveyed a certain fa-

miliarity with the classical tradition; Catholic pedagogy did not

2. Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue," Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 450; also published in Interpretation 7, no. 3 (1978): 1-3. Cf. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 9.

3. Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans Eva Brann (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1968), pp. 78-79, 121-22, 123.



STRAUSS AND CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

try to make Aristotle into a modern philosopher. Yet Heidegger had to abandon his Catholic training before he could achieve an untrammeled view of Aristotle. Thus, the roots would still remain hidden as long as one was "tempted to understand Aristotle in the light of Thomas Aquinas." Can we not suppose, then, that Heidegger succeeded in uncovering the roots of the classical tradition, not for the first time in three centuries (back, say, to 1659), but for the first time in seven centuries (back to 1259, two or three years before Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa contra Gentiles, a work specifically intended to refute the opinions of certain Mus- lim philosophers "whose rationalism may furnish reasons to oppose revelation")?4 Here we have at least half of Strauss's quarrel with Christian philosophic thought in general and with Aquinas in particular. Aquinas did not break with the Aristote- lian tradition; he was not "modern"; but Aquinas so deformed that tradition (and his deformed version became so authoritative, even for those who rejected it) as to make a clear understanding of its roots unavailable to later thinkers until our own century.5

4. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), pp. 385-86.

5. One can find in numerous places in Strauss's writings a similar complaint against those who misunderstand classical philosophy because they make the mistake of reading it through the lens of Christian scholastic concepts. For one of the most extensive passages on this subject, see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 8-9. See also Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 73; and "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy," The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 221; and "On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political philosophy," Social Research 13, no. 3 (1946):328. Finally, there is a curious passage in a very early work where Strauss hails Nietzsche as the first modern thinker who drew aside the curtain of Christian thought to reveal a way back, not only to a clear vision of medieval Jewish philosophy, but also to a true reading of the ancients. Judaism, according to Strauss, can benefit from "the critique of culture by Nietzsche, who attempted to descend toward the pre-'Christian' depths of the Jewish spirit as well as of the Greco-European spirit." "Das Heilige," in Der Jude 7, no 4 (1923): 241, quoted and translated by Remi Brague, "Leo Strauss and Maimonides," in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement (Boulder and London: Lynne Riener, 1991), 104.

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Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law

There are four paragraphs in Persecution and the Art of Writing in which Strauss refers nine times to Islamic and Jewish philosophy and nine times to Christian scholasticism. Strauss did not use words casually. Clearly, he did not consider the Christian speculative thinkers to have been engaged in philosophy. It is also interesting to note that Strauss refers to Maimonides as the greatest Jewish thinker, while, in the same sentence, he says that Maimonides regarded Alfarabi as the greatest Islamic philosopher.6 What, nevertheless, decisively separates both the falasifa and Maimonides from Aquinas and the other Christian scholastics is that the latter accept the principle of faith in their speculative inquiries.7 Aquinas discusses what man, strictly by the use of his human or natural reason, can know about the law (i.e., about how he should live); but he embeds this discussion within a larger conceptual framework that assumes the validity of truths known only by faith. More precisely, Aquinas teaches the existence of a natural law: a code of rules that is natural, in the sense that it may be apprehended by unaided human reason, and also law, in the sense that it imposes the moral obligation of a command. How, then, does Aquinas's approach to law differ from one that makes absolutely no concession to faith?

The Muslim philosophers and Jewish thinkers reduced natural law to the minimal and flexible (not to say, opportunistic) code of rules needed to guide the practical, social intercourse of one whose life is directed toward contemplation. By contrast, the Thomistic doctrine of natural law is characterized by "definite-

6. Laurence Bers, who speaks from long personal acquaintance as Strauss's student and colleague, tells us that Strauss "insisted that strictly speaking there is no such thing as Jewish philosophy." Laurence Bems, "Leo Strauss 1899-1973," The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 2, first appeared in The College, January 1974 (a publication of St. John's College, Annapolis, MD). Cf. Leo Strauss, "How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed," in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. Shlomo Pines (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. xiv. Cf. Strauss, Persecution, pp. 19. 43, 104-105.

7. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 8-9. In the title of this essay, it seemed advisable to use the term Christian philosophy instead of Christian scholasticism to alert readers to the broad implications of Strauss's critique. In the text, I have followed Strauss's terminology.

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ness and noble simplicity."8 According to Aquinas, the habit of synderesis enables the human intellect to apprehend the first principles of practical reason; it is from this universal and incontrovertible foundation that all men are then able to deliberate concerning the application of these general principles to particular circumstances.9 Furthermore, the entire discussion of morality and law in Aquinas' writings occurs within a larger framework that presumes the creation of the universe by a provi- dential God.10 Therefore, the entire universe embodies a willed order, which Aquinas calls the eternal law; and it is a small part of this order-the first principles of practical reason apprehended by the human intellect through synderesis, together with the sec- ondary and tertiary principles derived from these-which Aquinas calls the natural law.11 For Aristotle nature specifies only an end for each kind of thing; the means to achieve that end vary with circumstance. For Aquinas all nature is a "normed creation." Some actions are themselves contrary to nature and thus always wrong. "The human agent orders himself (or others) to justice by virtue of participating in a received norm."12 Indeed, the entire First Part of the Summa Theologiae establishes a natural theology of God and creation, an account of the originating exitus or going out of all things from God as from a first principle; while the Sec- ond Part treats the movement of the rational creature back to God, the great reditus or returning of creation to God as to an end. "The doctrine of synderesis or of the conscience explains why the natural law can always be duly promulgated to all men and hence be universally obligatory."13 It is not surprising that Strauss doubts one could arrive at this doctrine without belief in biblical revelation. To make the grounds of his doubt more explicit, he presents what may, in contrast to Aquinas's, be called the philosopher's understanding of the natural law:

8. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 163.

9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 79, a. 12. 10. Ibid., I-II, Q. 90, introduction. 11. Ibid., I-II, Q. 91, a, 2; Q. 94, a. 1. 12. Russell Hittinger, "Natural Law as 'Law': Reflections on the Occasion of

'Veritatis Splendor,'" The American Journal of Jurisprudence 39 (1994): 14. 13. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 163.

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This doubt is strengthened by the following consideration: The natural law which is knowable to the unassisted human mind and which prescribes chiefly actions in the strict sense is related to, or founded upon, the natural end of man; that end is twofold: moral perfection and intellectual perfection; intellectual perfection is higher in dignity than moral perfection; but intellectual perfection or wisdom, as unassisted human reason knows it, does not require moral virtue.14

Except in their exoteric teaching, their prudent deployment of the kalam, the philosophers of Islam do not recognize the existence of any universal and morally obligatory rational laws.15 In contrast to this understanding of the natural law, which may be called "the philosophic view," one is compelled to describe "Thomas' interpretation as the view of the kalam or, perhaps, as the theological view."16

The philosopher's awareness of his own ignorance concerning the most vital questions about how to live convinces him that the highest and most urgent task for man is to seek knowledge. For a believer, however, the best life cannot consist in the quest for knowledge, a quest that assumes a lack of wisdom; rather, the most important things, including the best way of life, must be revealed; they cannot be known. Whatever topic the religious thinker takes up, he ends by referring it to God, in whom all that is origi- nates and to whom all things return. Scholasticism subordinated philosophy to doctrines accepted upon faith.

14. Ibid., 163-64. 15. Kalam refers to a kind of speculative or theoretical thought that does not

take theory as its chief goal but rather aims at the defense of religion. The term originally described the teachings of Muslim dialectical theologians who attempted to construct a rational defense of religion. One of the chief parts of this Islamic science or kaldm was a teaching known in the Christian tradition as natural law. The capacity of human reason to prescribe rational laws for the attainment of human happiness is incorporated, as in Plato's Laws, into a theology of divine providence, which lends the rational laws a weight of moral obligation that they would not otherwise possess. The theologians' science of kaldm elevates the rational laws to the status of rational commandments. Islamic philosophers, such as Alfarabi, however, adapted this theological apologetics and made it continue to perform its function of rational persuasion, but now in the service of philosophy. Thus, we must distinguish a philosophic kaliam from the original theological kalam. See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 10-13.

16. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 97-98. Cf. Leo Strauss, "Criticism: Sixteen Appraisals," What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 285.

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Aquinas, then, is simply not a philosopher in the same sense as Plato, Aristotle, or Alfarabi. Yet, he is also not a Christian thinker in the same sense that Halevi and Maimonides are Jew- ish thinkers. They took philosophy on the terms established by the philosophers, not to embrace but to oppose it or at least to buffer the city from philosophy's subversive effects.17 By contrast, Aquinas attempted to establish a synthesis of philosophy and revelation.

According to Strauss, the attempt to create such a synthesis threatens to destroy reason itself.18 Admittedly, Aquinas gave great weight to the role of custom in political life, and he never sup- posed that a thoroughly rationalized political order was possible.19 But, all too soon, the ambition to unify the life of theory and the life of action led other, less subtle and judicious thinkers to aspire to a rational ethics that could dispense with the prudent reticence of the classical political philosophers. Later philosophers would subject the opinions that form the foundation of civic friendship to public scrutiny. Thus, we discover a line connecting Thomas's synthesis to the philosophers of the modern enlightenment whom Lessing would rebuke for having "evaded the contradiction between wisdom and prudence by becoming much too wise to submit to the rule of prudence which had been observed by Leibniz and all the ancient philosophers."20 Eventually, the modus vivendi between pious citizens and diffident but inwardly free philosophers breaks down, to be replaced in our own time by bickering intellectuals, grim ideologues, hot-headed political en-

17. See Strauss, "The Law of Reason in the Kuzari," in Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 13941.

18. Strauss's thesis regarding Christian scholasticism's responsibility for modem philosophy's submission to popular opinion is summarized by Nasser Behnegar, "Leo Strauss's Confrontation with Max Weber: A Search for a Genuine Social Science," Review of Politics 59, no. 1 (1997): 118n56. "Strauss, therefore, suggests that the Scholastic synthesis of philosophy and Christian revelation was really an attempt to resolve the conflict in favor of revelation. It was on account of this attempted resolution that philosophy first lost its character as a way of life and became an instrument or a department, a view which has survived scholasticism and continues to obscure the conflict between philosophy and revelation." Behnegar also makes a useful distinction between a political philosophy that makes itself useful to politics and a political philosophy that becomes confused with politics.

19. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 97, a. 2, ad. 1; and a. 3, c., ad. 2. 20. Strauss, "The Problem of Socrates," Rebirth of Classial Political Rationalism, p. 70.

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thusiasts, and religious zealots, all claiming, like Plato's Euthyphron, to possess special insight into the truth.21

Those who would resist Strauss's insistence on the sharp distinction between knowledge and opinion, nature and convention, are the same as those who reject the implications of Plato's story of the cave. According to Plato, the multitude can never leave the cave; they can never see things in their true, natural light. It is crucial that anyone inquiring into politics understand that the city is the cave, is always the cave, can never be other than the cave. Any philosopher (or theologian) who would attempt to open the cave to the direct light of truth risks catastrophe. "For if even the best city stands or falls by a fundamental falsehood, albeit a noble falsehood, it can be expected that the opinions on which the imperfect cities rest or in which they believe will not be true, to say the least."22 In Judaism and Islam, the divine law-Torah and Shari'a-enjoined upon man is coterminous with the particular, earthly regime; the divine law does not point beyond the city in a way that makes the law ultimately incompatible with a closed city. The divine law is the law of the city. The New Testa- ment, on the other hand, provides no legal code; instead, it recounts events and presents propositions or dogmas which the faithful must believe. The Christian is called to embrace truths that transcend the customs and stand in judgment above every particular legal code. These truths known by faith provide the stamp of certainty to philosophical speculation, pronounce judgment where philosophers differ, and illuminate answers where the philosophers had known only questions. It was possible to proclaim Christianity as the true philosophy, in relation to which all preceding philosophies were imperfect precursors.

Strauss saw this assimilation of philosophy to faith as a fatal temptation. The attempt to synthesize philosophy, which takes its starting place from the quest for knowledge of the eternal, uncreated natures of things, and biblical faith, which takes its starting place from the mysterious will of an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, can only lead to the fracturing of reason itself and a return (discernible in Max Weber) to warring gods. From Strauss's perspective, the unredeemable error or indiscretion of

21. See Strauss, "On the Euthyphron," in Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. 22. Strauss, The City and Man, p. 125.

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Christian scholasticism was the attempt to unify faith and reason, the attempt to underpin morality with rational laws. Christian thinkers from the time of the Greek fathers have held that men may attain philosophic truths by nonphilosophic means. If one begins from faith, one will understandably suppose that reason needs faith, for without faith reason's road to truth will be longer and less certain; it will be liable to wrong turns leading to wrong conclusions; and, above all, without faith, reason will leave man short of his highest destination.23

Aquinas transformed classical natural right; or it might be more accurate to say that he accepted the exoteric teaching of the classical political philosophers as the true natural right teaching. Aquinas accepted the teaching that man's rational perfection and man's moral or political perfection are interdependent and, together, constitute man's natural end. No longer is man's ultimate, transpolitical end conceived to be the life of philosophy; rather, man's ultimate end transcends nature itself: our end is eternal beatitude.24

Also unlike the classical philosophers, who had never sup- posed that more than a minority of human beings could ever attain their final end, could become philosophers, Aquinas, true to the theological understanding of man, asserted that every human being has the potential to attain beatitude.25 In this, we see that scholasticism has discounted what for classical philosophy had been seen as the most crucial and ineradicable source of inequality among men-the natural capacity for rational, especially speculative, thinking. Scholasticism broke with the ancients by teaching that we are all equal with respect to the suprarational end of our actions; the moderns would transmute this same emphasis on equality by teaching that we are all equal with respect to the prerational or subrational passions that mo- tivate our action. In this, too, the moderns redirect a break with the ancients that had already occurred.

23. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 1, c.; Summa Contra Gentiles I, 4 For an excellent overview of Christian philosophy and for an elegant argument in favor of the very possibility of a Christian philosophy, see Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN, and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, first published 1936), esp. chapter two.

24. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III, 37,48,63; Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 2-5. 25. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, Q.1, a. 7; Q. 5, a. 1.

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Aquinas reconciles man's natural and supernatural ends, arguing that the same moral virtues useful or necessary for man's political end also serve as means, albeit insufficient means, to move man toward his ultimate end. Nothing is lost or redundant or contradictory between the moral virtues and the supernatural virtues. The way of life that leads to man's ultimate end is not in conflict with the political way of life; the straight line of action that leads man to his ultimate perfection passes through the point representing his political perfection.26 But to insist upon the linear correspondence of these two ends requires Aquinas to reinterpret the political or moral virtues as they are represented by Aristotle. Irregularities and awkward excrescences are pruned. Synthesis demands that the apparent political good be truly good only when it does not conflict with the higher good. In other words, Aquinas had already adopted what we have shown was to become the typically modern stance toward pre-philosophical phenomena: he takes a critical stance toward the pre-theoretical opinions about political life, and such a critical stance is possible only if one has claimed for oneself a higher insight into the nature of things than is available to common sense, an insight which gives one a privi- leged vantage point, a true perspective, from which to judge pre-theoretical opinions. In this way, we see that the modern perspective is not a return to the classical view but a reverse image of the scholastic view.27 Christian scholasticism viewed political life from above the natural horizon of the city; modern philosophy views political life from below the natural horizon of the city. Only Platonic political philosophy takes political life simply as it is in its own terms, admitting that its opinions cannot be conclusively denied (and, hence, admitting the possibility that the claims of political life, and especially its claim to rest upon a divinely revealed law, may simply be true), while, at the same time, insisting that the philosophical

26. The correspondence between man's mundane good, which can be known by natural reason, and his ultimate, supernatural end, which requires the supplement of revelation, is inherent in the relationship that Aquinas asserts between the natural law and the eternal law. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, Q. 91, a. 1 and 2; Q. 93, a. 3 and 6; Summa Contra Gentiles I, 7.

27. Cf. Strauss, "Restatement on Xenophon'sHiero," in On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 184.

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life represents a distinct alternative to the political life, with no possibility of a synthesis of the two.28

We may admire the beauty of Thomas's vast intellectual cel- ebration of the marriage of faith and reason, but how must these nuptials appear to a Platonic philosopher? From such a perspective, philosophy will be seen to have suffered at the hands of the Christian tradition a most insidious and perhaps ultimately mortal injury. From the perspective of a Platonic philosopher, the city will be seen to have captured philosophy; the opinions of the multitude will be seen to have put a harness on reason and, then, to have proceeded to drive reason like a hack up and down the by- ways of the imagination, wherever its new driver, the opinions of the multitude, wants it to go. No longer is theology the political arm, the ministerial art, serving ends known to philosophy; theology has now become the master and philosophy the valued but firmly indentured servant. Contrast this with the philosophical view, according to which philosophy is seen "not as a set of propositions, a teaching, or even a system, but as a way of life, a life animated by a peculiar passion, the philosophic desire, or eros."29

In the Shadow of Final Tyranny

Nor is Strauss's criticism of the scholastic misuse or misun- derstanding of the natural law doctrine the end of his misgivings about the influence of Christianity on philosophy and political philosophy. The synthesis of philosophy and the revealed truth results in (if, indeed, it is not actually motivated by) the assumption that decisive progress is possible for mankind as a whole. The synthesis of philosophy and the Bible promises that mankind or human nature is capable of improvement, capable of being

28. One must be careful not to confuse the judgment of Platonic political philosophy that political life and moral opinions constitute perhaps the most fascinating and urgent objects of philosophical investigation with any kind of admission, on the part of the philosopher, that his study of political life in any way implies that political life can be made philosophical or can be somehow reconciled or combined with philosophy.

29. Strauss, "Progress or Return," in Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 259. Section III of "Progress and Return," from which this quote is taken, appeared originally as "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy," The Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979): 111-18.

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raised to a higher level. Surely, one must assume that human nature is capable of undergoing such change for humanity to have been decisively transformed by the saving action of Jesus Christ. The scholastic synthesis of Plato and the prophets, of philosophy and the Bible, and the potential for progress which that synthesis presumes would ultimately result in an outlook that Strauss calls the typically modern view. According to this view, truth is still to be sought through sober reason or science, but now science itself is conceived to be not an end but an instrument serving a larger, higher good, the good of humanity. Given the malleability of human nature and the availability of an instrumental social science, man himself becomes capable of engineering an improved, perhaps even a perfect, society.30

But how does this characteristically modem understanding of man derive from Christian scholasticism's synthesis of faith and philosophy? To understand this connection, one needs to recall the classical assumption that even the best possible city would be a closed community revering its own particular customs, ob- serving its own laws, and worshipping its own gods. The polis is, in the most important respect, an education in particular virtues. In contrast, a universal society based upon strictly rational, universal rules of social conduct could embody only the most rudimentary moral education, boasting no higher virtue or dignity than a gang of robbers.31 For any society to enjoy a higher, more noble way of life, it must embrace a law that goes beyond what reason alone can dictate. Such a law would be the heritage of one people, one regime. Others could adopt this law only if they somehow came to believe (they could not possibly know) that that particular law was the best law.

Civil society, or the city as the classics conceived of it, is a closed society and is, in addition, what today would be called a "small society." ... [In contrast,] an open or all-comprehensive society would consist of many societies which are on vastly different levels of political maturity, and the chances are overwhelming that the lower societies would drag

30. Leo Strauss, "Jerusalem andAthens," Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 167-68. See also Leo Strauss, "Liberal Education and Responsibility," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca and London: Comell University Press), pp. 19-20.

31. See Strauss, "The Law of Reason in the Kuzari," in Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 127.

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down the higher ones. An open or all-comprehensive society will exist on a lower level of humanity than a closed society, which, through generations, has made a supreme effort toward human perfection.32

According to the philosophical view, then, natural right is political right; ethics cannot be separated from politics; any discussion of the happiness of all men (to be distinguished from the happiness available only to philosophers) must necessarily be political.33 Indeed, we may say that the capacity of all men to know and attain true human happiness is the pivot on which turns the deci- sion for or against classical versus modern philosophy.

Christianity, however, does not understand man to be, before all else, a citizen. Christianity's view of human life does not take as its starting place the perspective of the citizen. The Christian natural law doctrine holds out the possibility that the best regime need not be a closed regime.34

Christianity proclaims a suprapolitical truth: the brotherhood of all men.35 The irony is that this Christian teaching actually re- produces a conclusion to which our reason also leads but which it must prudently deny in practice. In fact, the "fraternity of all men" is the natural truth that Plato's noble lie intentionally ob- scures. "The particular or closed political society conflicts with the natural fraternity of all men. Political society in one way or another draws an arbitrary line between man and man."36 Arbi- trary deliniations are necessary for political life because speech or rational persuasion is severely limited in its capacity to govern

32. Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 130-32. Cf. letter to Karl Lowith (15 August 1946) in "Correspondence Concerning Modernity: Karl L6with and Leo Strauss," The Independent Journal of Philosophy 4 (1983): 107.

33. See Strauss, "Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi," trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation 18, no 1 (Fall 1990): 9. Christian scholasticism did not heed what both Plato's and Xenophon's Socrates learned about the "limitation of reason and of speech generally." The scholastics did not understand the political necessity for Socrates to become friends with

Thrasymachus. See Strauss, "The Problem of Socrates," inRebirth of Classical Political Philosophy, p. 159. The Christian understanding of man tends to be apolitical.

34. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p.144. 35. See, for example, Ephesians 2:11-16. 36. Strauss, "The Problem of Socrates," in Rebirth of Classical Political

Rationalism, pp. 158-59. Strauss specifically states that the deliberate cultivation of patriotism (love of the patria) is part of the noble lie. Strauss, The City and Man, p. 102. Ronald Beiner argues that awareness of this apparent contradiction present in

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men: gentlemen may be amenable to speeches that appeal to their spiritedness; the base must be made to fear punishment, eternal as well as temporal; neither will be satisfied or converted by the love of rational inquiry.

The ancient Jews were a nation, the Chosen People of God, the twelve tribes of Israel; the later prophets referred to the corpo- rate existence of the people by the name of their city-a real, earthly city-Jerusalem. According to the Old Testament vision, the perfect realization of God's plan for His people would remain this actual city, with walls of stone, with a law and a king, and with smoke rising from temple sacrifices. Christianity removed the hopes of the people of God to a heavenly Jerusalem, the Com- munion of Saints, the mystical body of Christ, the Church. Politics was largely extraneous to the achievement of this end.37

Consider what it means to say that man is a political animal. (Not a social animal! A social animal could be a creature driven by instinctual necessities, only with speech and calculating reason added to the teeth, claws, fur, and other attributes animals may employ to obtain the objects of their natural desires. For Locke, man is, to some extent, a social animal. But to say that man is a political animal is to say that man is neither a god who perfectly knows the good nor an animal whose good is the object of a natural or necessary desire.) A political animal must achieve his natural perfection through participation in the public life of his city, a life whose contours consist of opinion about the good, the noble, and the beautiful. Christianity placed the goal of man's life, the object of his hope, beyond politics. "For here we have no lasting city; we are seeking one which is to come."38

To say that a universal society embracing all men can become an attainable ideal is to say that every human being is capable of becoming wise. "The most relevant difference among human beings must have practically disappeared."39 It is not entirely misleading to see a Hegelian aspect to Christianity (or, more in

Christianity, between a rational (or, at least, a humane) truth and bad politics, dominates book four, chapter 8, of Rousseau's Social Contract. "Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau on Civil Religion," Review of Politics 55, no. 4 (1993): 637.

37. See Ernest Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers," Interpretation 12, no. 2-3 (1984): 351.

38. Hebrews 13: 14. 39. Leo Strauss, "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero," in On Tyranny, p. 210.

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keeping with chronology, to see a strong element of Christianity in Hegel) in that it proposes the possibility, even the historical necessity, of transforming the philosophical quest into the actual possession of complete wisdom. And as with Hegel, Christianity's claim of access to wisdom presupposes a degree of freedom from both nature and law that neither Platonic philosophy nor Jewish law would ever have countenanced. If, however, "the most relevant difference among human beings" cannot be overcome, if only a few can live by reason while most will always cling to various opinions, then only a very few men could ever be happy in a universal society. Only those few devoted to the quest for knowledge could live happily in a city whose legal and moral code was reduced to the minimal rules needed to govern the social intercourse of the wise, who would be unlikely to exhibit any greater patriotism or solidarity than a gang of thieves or any greater passion for beautiful and noble things than a city of pigs.40

Of course, given the actual, nonphilosophical nature of the vast majority of human beings, a universal society such as the wise might design and inhabit could never exist. In reality, a universal society, like any other society, would be peopled by the ignorant and ruled by the unwise. How then could an ignorant humanity be united into a universal society? Only by a final, absolutely enforced, and universally persuasive dogma, a teaching that claimed to have superseded every other teaching, an authoritative opinion to which reason must forevermore bend the knee. In other words, a universal society could, in reality, be nothing but another iteration of the age-old phenomenon of tyranny, but now become a final, perfected tyranny in which the universal aspirations of Christendom will have been armed with the appa- ratus of scientific technique and made infinitely more persuasive by the rhetoric of progress, equality, and self-interest.

To retain his power, [the Final Tyrant] will be forced to suppress every activity which might lead people into doubt of the essential soundness of the universal and homogeneous state: he must suppress philosophy as an attempt to corrupt the young. In particular, he must in the interest of the homogeneity of his universal state forbid every teaching, every

40. See Glaucon's objection to Socrates' description of the rudimentary city according to the natural or necessary requirements for human beings to enjoy peace and health. Republic 372c-d.

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suggestion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men which cannot be abolished or neutralized by progressing scientific technology.41

Law wishes to rule, and law wishes to be intellect, though the philosopher recognizes that law is very far from being intellect and cannot, of itself, justify its own right to rule. Intellect, on the other hand, wishes to know the whole, but it has no desire to rule. If, however, one were to synthesize law and intellect by making intellect directly responsible for law, one would thereby set up a dynamic that would lead toward cosmopolis, the final, universal tyranny42

The passage just quoted is part of Strauss's argument against the French Hegelian,Alexandre Kojeve, who taught that the movement of history was, even now, at the point of being completed by the establishment of a final, universal society. The same para- graph continues with a passage whose clear implication reveals to us what is perhaps Strauss's most uncompromising and harsh pronouncement on the true nature of all revealed religions, at least from the perspective of the philosophers. The "Final Tyrant," as we have seen, must rule by manipulating the opinions of the multitude. In this, he is no different than tyrants of past ages, and philosophers too will defend themselves as before by attempting to influence the tyrant with their speeches.

Everything seems to be a re-enactment of the age-old drama. But this time, the cause of philosophy is lost from the start. For the Final Tyrant presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy. He claims therefore that he persecutes not philosophy but false philosophies. The experience is not altogether new for philosophers. If philosophers were confronted with claims of this kind in former ages, philosophy went underground. It accommodated itself in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believed they knew things which they did not know. Yet its very exoteric teaching undermined the

41. Strauss, "Restatement," in On Tyranny, p. 211. Harry V. Jaffa testifies to Strauss's antipathy toward any promotion of universal opinions. See "Political Philosophy and Honor: The Leo Strauss DissertationAward," Modern Age 21, no. 4 (1997): 388.

42. See Joshua Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's Laws (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 75.

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STRAUSS AND CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY 93

commands or dogmas of the rulers in such a way as to guide the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems. And since there was no universal state in existence, the philosophers could escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant's dominions.43

The passage ends with the foreboding prediction that, unlike in the past, philosophy might prove unable to survive or escape the universal tyrant and that "the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth." Yet, for our purposes, I want to focus on the characterization of the ruler- any ruler-who claims to rule in the name of the one truth. What Strauss implies is clear and pointed: any prophet, armed or otherwise, any caliph or imam, any pope or patriarch, any Holy Roman Emperor, any king ruling as defender of the faith must be (cannot be other than) a tyrant: one who has seized the power to rule over men (in this case, over their minds and thoughts as well as their actions) who might otherwise be capable of living as free men. In this image of the Final Tyrant, conjured by Alexandre Kojeve's announcement of the arrival of the Hegelian world-state, Strauss gives us not the Antichrist but an Antisocrates; not the natural rule of prephilosophical custom or unphilosophical opinion, but the usurpation of an antiphilosophy. And which kind of revealed religion would one expect to make the more effective antiphilosophy? One that primarily took the form of a divine law to be followed, or one that primarily took the form of a faith to be believed?44

The precarious status of philosophy in Judaism as well as in Islam was not in every respect a misfortune for philosophy. The official recognition of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to

43. Strauss, "Restatement," in On Tyranny, p. 211. 44. See PaulA. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modem, Volume I: The Ancien Rigime

in Classical Greece (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 212-13. Dante Germino seems in no doubt that Strauss truly entertained the indictment of Christianity here set forth: "For Strauss, the attempted Christian abolition of esotericism meant the attempted abolition of philosophy itself. Medieval Christianity's attempt to subordinate philosophy to revelation was for Strauss but another name for the attempt to destroy philosophy--despite the fact thatAquinas promulgated the principlegratia non tollit naturam sed perficit" ("Leo Strauss Versus Eric Voegelin on Faith and Political Philosophy," The Political Science Reviewer 24 [1995]: 264).



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94 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

ecclesiastical supervision. The precarious position of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world guaranteed its private character and therewith its inner freedom from supervision. The status of philosophy in the Islamic- Jewish world resembled in this respect its status in classical Greece.45

Not that the world-enthralling rhetoric of a final tyranny would be anything recognizable as the Christian faith, but the implication is that ideology is the natural child of Christianity, not Judaism or Islam. Only Christianity adopted the mantle of a Platonism for the people. The intimate embrace of faith and philosophy countenanced by Christian scholasticism may, in the end, prove fatal to both partners.

The Origin of Modernity as Antitheological Polemic

The generally accepted view is that Strauss, while "not un- equivocally sympathetic" with Aquinas, was nonetheless deeply respectful toward the greatest Christian philosopher.46 Admittedly,

45. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 21. Platonic political philosophy always takes as its primary reference, not the city, but the life of the individual; not the life of moral and political action, but the life of contemplation. Cf. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 139-40.

46. For an example of the uncontroversial reading of Strauss vis-a-visAquinas, see Douglas Kries, "On Leo Strauss's Understanding of the Natural Law Theory of Thomas Aquinas," The Thomist 57, no. 2 (1993): 216. Laurence Berns also does not see Strauss as blaming Christianity for the modem break with the classical tradition. See "The Relation Between Philosophy and Religion: Reflections on Leo Strauss's Suggestion Concerning the Source and Sources of Modern Philosophy," Interpretation 19, no. 1 (1991): 52-53. According to Bems, Strauss believed that the motive behind the moder rebellion against medieval philosophy arose from impatience with the "mutual irrefutability of philosophy and revelation" and the moderns' "wish to supersede the tension arising from their mutual irrefutability." Only by making the knowledge of the world that is available to every man "the ultimate source of meaning for humanity's understanding of the world" can man then avoid the tension between the mutually irrefutable claims of philosophy and revelation. According to this view, medieval Christian thought, far from being imprudent, merely adapted the wisdom of ancient political philosophy to the new conditions of revealed religion and continued to maintain the classical tension between the legitimate claims of the city's authoritative opinions and philosophy's call for a life of unrestricted inquiry. But, if I am right, Strauss goes further than this, implying that the modern rebellion was a moral reaction triggered by Christianity's prior attempt to resolve the tension between opinion and philosophy by subordinating philosophy to a peculiarly unpolitical opinion.



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Aquinas introduced non-Aristotelian elements into the classical natural right teaching, but the decisive break with the classical tradition did not occur until Machiavelli. In addition, Strauss is critical of neo-Thomists who (often carelessly or unknowingly) introduce elements of modern thought into their work that are antithetical to the essentially classical core of true Thomism.

I would challenge this picture of respect qualified by mild disagreement. Anyone who has read Strauss's writings knows that he was at pains to make Western scholars aware that thinkers such as Alfarabi and Maimonides were not simply Muslim and Jewish equivalents to Aquinas. It has perhaps not been sufficiently no- ticed that one may reverse Strauss's dictum: We should not read Aquinas as though he were the Christian equivalent of Alfarabi or Maimonides. I believe that if one adds together his scattered and subtle remarks, it gradually becomes apparent that Strauss held Christian scholasticism responsible for having precipitated the early modern rejection of classical philosophy and the problematic (and perhaps ultimately calamitous) turn toward modernity.47 Indeed, in one place, in a context well protected from casual readers, Strauss actually writes: "And modern philosophy emerged by way of transformation of, if in opposition to, Latin or Christian scholasticism."48 At the risk of being somewhat reck-

47. Strauss argued that "all modem political philosophies belong together because they have a fundamental principle in common. This principle can best be stated negatively: rejection of the classical scheme as unrealistic." Strauss goes on to elucidate why Machiavelli deemed the classical scheme unrealistic: "[T]here is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualization is highly improbable" Strauss, "What Is Political Philosophy?" in What Is Political Philosophy?, pp. 40-41. Strauss implies, however, that Machiavelli himself was sympathetic to theAverroistic tradition of classical political philosophy which justified the pursuit of the philosophic life in terms of the natural needs of the city. Thus, it appears likely that it was its Christian interpreters who had made classical philosophy appear excessively "unrealistic." James Schall touched on this oblique charge against Christianity: "Strauss implied that the elevation of human expectations due to charity 'caused,' indirectly at least, a sort of fanaticism in modernity....In this analysis, Strauss seemed to imply a remote Christian, not ideologically anti- Christian, origin for modernity in the worst sense of that term as Strauss used it" (Schall, "A Latitude for Statesmanship? Strauss on St. Thomas," Review of Politics 53, no. 1 [1991]: 141).

48. Strauss, "Preface to Isaac Husik, Philosophical Essays," in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 252.

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less, I will hazard to say plainly what I think Strauss implied: namely, that without Aquinas (or, at least, without the scholastic fusion of faith and philosophy) there need never have been a Machiavelli or a Hobbes.

It is likely that Machiavelli could have been a goodAverroist.49 He might have reconciled himself to expounding a loyal exoteric teaching under a regime ruled by the law of Moses or Mohammad. What he could not stomach was Jesus.50 For the Averroist, the city is a wild animal: a reasonable man may influence it, moderate it, but never tame it, never make it safe. Reason cannot domesticate the city, like a cow or sheep, and by means of overt husbandry or science direct the city toward an end superior to its natural end. According to Machiavelli, however, Christianity attempted just such a domestication or emasculation of politics.

[Machiavelli] goes on to explain why, or by virtue of what, Christianity has led the world into weakness. By showing the truth or the true way, Christianity has lowered the esteem for 'the honor of the world,' whereas the pagans regarded that honor as the highest good and were therefore more ferocious or less weak in their actions."51

49. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 175 and 202. Paul Rahe disputes this interpretation of Machiavelli, arguing that "there is ample indication within his books that-at the deepest level-the enemy is not Christianity but the classical philosophy embedded within it" (Republics Ancient and Modern, Vol. 2: New Modes & Orders in Early Modem Political Thought [Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994], 328n7 and 343n67). Rahe does not explain whether it seems likely Machiavelli would have launched his radical critique of the ancients had he not seen ancient philosophy as the intellectual core of an ecclesiastical and theological order which, for the benefit of humanity, he felt compelled to overthrow and replace with a new order.

50. See Strauss, "Restatement of Xenophon's Hiero," in On Tyranny, p. 183. One of Strauss's extremely rare direct references to Jesus occurs in his description of Machiavelli's design to destroy Christianity not by armed might, the way of Moses, but by propaganda, the way of Jesus himself. See also Strauss, "What Is Political Philosophy? in What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 45. We should also make a distinction between classical philosophy's use of rhetoric in its relation to the city and modem philosophy's use of propaganda in its relation to the city. Propaganda, as used by both the Christian church and the moder philosophers, is intended to change the world, to make a new and better world. Rhetoric, in the classical sense, aims no higher than a modicum of justice, simply giving each his due. The medieval philosophical tradition (as opposed to the theologizing tradition) maintained the subtle art of rhetoric. See Strauss, On Tyranny, pp. 26-27.

51. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 178, and see 177-79.

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Machiavelli did not actually believe that Christianity showed men the way to truth but, rather, made reference to truth to call atten- tion to the transpolitical goal of the Christian teaching. Machiavelli goes on to contrast this truth with what he calls "the most perfect truth," a truth that "upholds the demand for the strength of the world." In this light, worldly strength becomes the badge of truth, weakness the sign of falsehood.52 Machiavelli and later thinkers who followed his new teaching rejected classical philosophy because it seemed to aim too high, attempting to make men good rather than teaching them how to be strong.53

Machiavelli was driven to reinvent political philosophy by what Strauss called, in one place, an "anti-theological ire," and, in another, "an antitheological passion."54

When antitheological passion induced a thinker to take the extreme step of questioning the supremacy of contemplation, political philosophy broke with the classical tradition, and especially with

52. Ibid., p. 178. 53. Regarding the charge made against the classical philosophers for a lack of

sufficient realism, see Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 15; Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I; Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, letter of dedication; Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, Preface, and The Advancement of Learning, Book 2; Benedict Spinoza, Political Treatise, chapter 1, Introduction.

54. Strauss, "What Is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy?, p. 44; and "Marsilius of Padua," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 201. Cf. Michael Platt, "Leo Strauss: Three Quarrels, Three Questions, One Life," in The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective, ed. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Softer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 20. "Is not Machiavelli's animus against ancient ideal republics really an animus against an excessive and unpolitical understanding of virtue, which flows from Christian teaching? Machiavelli allows anger at God to become anger at the good. In this want of discrimination Strauss saw a failure of philosophy to be philosophic." Classical virtue had remained moderate and realistically political in that it had never denied the necessity to cultivate the virtues required for war. Even the philosophers, despite their transpolitical aspirations, acknowledged the binding authority of the law, whose end was the unity and preservation of the particular, earthly city. Christianity openly taught a doctrine that diminished men's respect and awe of the particular law of their earthly city; it exposed to the multitude the merely provisional character of human law and thereby sowed the seeds of public contumacy. Between the religious fear of those who believe they know the ways of God and the scientific pride of those who claim to know and control the ways of nature (and who, therefore, claim to be able to make or re-make nature, including human nature), lies the modest wonder of the Platonic philosopher.



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Aristotle, and took on an entirely new character. The thinker in question was Machiavelli. 55

These are the concluding lines from an essay on the Christian Averroist, Marsilius of Padua. In opposition to Aquinas, Marsilius employed the pagan political philosophy of Aristotle to condemn the political pretensions of the Church. But in at- tacking the Church, Marsilius's Averroism ultimately constituted an attack against the idea that law is rooted in revelation, an idea whichAverroes himself had been at great pains to accommodate. Later writers motivated by the same antitheological passion as Marsilius would conclude that the orthodox scholastics had been too successful in their attempt to harmonize Aristotle with Christian theology and that a new beginning was needed, a beginning that would entail the rejection of Aristotle and the entire classical tradition.56

Strauss clearly condemned the reprehensible character of Machiavelli's teaching and was aware of its baneful influence on the entire course of modern philosophy;57 yet it seems likely that he quietly agreed with Machiavelli's criticism of Chris- tian scholasticism for having openly promulgated a teaching that denigrated the political nature of man and that led men to aspire to transcend their need for law, their need for closed polities, in the expectation of attaining for themselves a vision of the light beyond the cave. Christianity seduced many of those inclined toward philosophical speculation (as well as many who were capable only of inflammatory rhetoric) to for- get the moderation of Platonic political philosophy, a moderation that can be summed up thus:

Philosophy transcends the city, and the worth of the city depends ultimately on its openness, or deference, to philosophy. Yet the city cannot fulfill its function if it is not closed to philosophy as well as open to it; the city is necessarily the cave.58

55. Strauss, "Marsilius of Padua," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 201. 56. On the distinction between the LatinAverroist and Machiavellian critiques

of religion, see Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 2: 7, 18, and 334-35n58. 57. See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Introduction. 58. Ibid., p. 296.

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And what of Hobbes? If Machiavelli's motive was a kind of antitheological anger, Hobbes's motive was a kind of antitheological fear. To understand the basis for this fear, it is useful to recall Socrates' conversation with Euthyphron. Euthyphron justified his own rejection of traditional piety by claiming special, personal insight into the divine things. Socrates warned that, unless we seek a higher, rational principle available to man simply as man, the appeal from received tradition to divine knowledge can only lead to confusion, anarchy, and faction, with each faction following its own god. In Hobbes's view, Christianity (at least since the Reformation), by proclaiming a higher standard of justice than mere obedience to the law, gave unparalleled scope to latter-day Euthyphrons, making them far more dangerous than the harmless butt of Socratic irony (though perhaps even Euthyphron was not so harmless to his father).59 The doctrines of grace and individual conscience gave an unparalleled license to zealots, ideologues, and well-intentioned priests, to conjure men out of their customary allegiances with visions of a higher, more perfect, trans-political life.60 For Hobbes, this proclivity, which he saw as being inherent in Christianity, finally burst apart the bonds of the natural (i.e., the conventional) city during the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion.61 Like Machiavelli, Hobbes's

59. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, VI, 11, note. 60. See Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 92. 61. Laurence Lampert paints a forceful picture of the antitheological motive

at work in Bacon's rejection of classical philosophy. "Bacon's characteristic opposition to Plato is required by the times: Plato most effectively brought together what Bacon was forced to separate, philosophy and theology. Bacon forbids natural theology, one of the principle parts of Platonism for the people, because it no longer serves philosophy's purpose to allege that it has access to the gods, that it can serve the city by restoring the power of gods gone dead. Bacon's times are not marked by a death of the gods but by a God grown all-powerful, dominating even philosophy, a God whose religion is now rent by discords that threaten European civilization" (Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993], 124). We may question, in passing, whether Strauss actually reads the history of philosophy in quite the same way as Lampert. If he did, then we might suppose that Strauss chose to defend religion in the mid-twentieth century, albeit in his typically paradoxical manner, because he saw that we are once more confronted, like Socrates, with the death of the gods, and because he lacked confidence in Nietzsche's joyous science-the embracing of immanent and eternally recurring nature-as a popular alternative to religion as a foundation for political order. In

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solution was to reassert the prerogatives of politics against a theology-intoxicated Christian philosophy.

Hobbes and other early moderns, such as Spinoza, therefore, shared the same motive as the ancient Epicureans: fear of religion. A proper understanding of this motive places the Enlightenment in an unfamiliar light: we see that the Enlightenment's attack on religion did not initially result from these thinkers' newly found self-confidence in man's capacity to plumb the secrets of nature and institute an earthly utopia. Quite the opposite! Religion came to be perceived as such a mortal threat to individual security and civil peace that men who felt a commitment to the welfare of humanity were moved to seek a refuge from the battering winds of confessional strife. These early moderns embraced the Epicurean "mechanical worldview" as a "consoling truth." Modern science turned to the necessary, con- tinuous processes of natural causality in order to exclude and replace the view of the world that begins from the unpredictable, arbitrary, and unfathomable divine will. It is in light of this motive that we can understand why the refutation of the possibility of miracles should have been one of the decisive aims of the early modern philosophers.62

Strauss would probably have had no quarrel with Machiavelli and Hobbes had they been good Averroists or good Epicureans, but they were not. Averroes acknowledged that philosophy must recognize the claims of the city and its laws, must bow to the natural exigencies of politics; yet, at the same time, he was uncompromising in holding that philosophy remain inwardly unconstrained by the opinions of the city. The ancient Epicureans dismissed all opinions, the consoling as well as the frightful, preferring to withdraw from the natural concerns of humanity in favor of the enjoyment of an imper-

this sense, Strauss's attitude would be that which Gibbon attributed to the magistrates of ancient Rome: "[T]he various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosophers, as equally false; and by the magistrates, as equally useful" (Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 2). For an example of such a Roman magistrate, see the account of Scipio Africanus in Polybius, The Histories, Book 10, 2.

62. See Gerhard Kriiger, "Review of Leo Strauss' Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage Seiner Bibelwissenschaft," The Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1979): 174.

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turbable calm flowing from the acceptance of what is. Epicurean cour- age in the face of the implacable processes of an unprovidential nature "is not in need of support by belief in social progress between now and the death of the world or by other beliefs."63

Machiavelli and Hobbes and the modern philosophers who came after them rejected the claims made by Christian faith upon reason. To that extent, they agreed with Averroes, though they abandoned his exoteric attitude of loyal submission to the divine law in favor of a more open confrontation. The moderns broke decisively with the Averroist tradition, however, by replacing philosophy's attachment to the religious opinions of the city, not by a reaffirmation of philosophy's intrinsic freedom, but by tying philosophy to the opinions of the city in a new way. Likewise, the early moderns broke decisively with the Epicurean tradition, ap- pealing to nature as an antidote to unsettling opinions about the divine, not in favor of a disengaged equanimity, but in order to impose man's own will on events through the mastery of nature. From the viewpoint of the classical philosopher, the one thing philosophy must avoid is to accept "the ends of the demos as beyond appeal." Yet it was precisely such an inward submission that Christianity demanded of those who would engage in philosophical speculation, a submission Strauss notes by consistently calling these faithful Christian thinkers scholastics rather than philosophers. The early modern philosophers rejected orthodoxy only to attach their philosophizing to the ends of the demos in a new way; rather than teaching men how to attain heaven, the modern philosophers would teach men how to live on earth.64

Reacting against a scholasticism that had directed man toward an end above the grasp of human reason, philosophy would now take as its guide what is below reason. From being the handmaiden of a faith that had promised to confirm and aug- ment reason's grasp of the eternal truth, philosophy would now become an accessory to the basest passions and appetites shared by all men.65 The moderns cut the cord that had tethered philoso-

63. Strauss, "Notes on Lucretius," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 135. 64. Strauss, "Liberal Education and Responsibility," in Liberalism Ancient and

Modern, p. 19. 65. See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, pp. 207 and 296. Philosophy, in the

Socratic sense of quest for everlasting truth, tends to be thrown out along with Biblical religion.



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phy to the city's theological opinions only to tie it more firmly than ever to a host of new opinions: political glory (Machiavelli), the pre-political individual's fear of death (Hobbes), acquisitive- ness (Locke), equality (Rousseau), until, finally, with Heidegger, we find philosophy embracing indiscriminately whatever may happen to be the dominant opinion among the Volk. Philosophy has become Weltanschauungsphilosophie.66

The crisis of modem natural right or modem political philosophy could become a crisis of philosophy as such only because in the modem centuries philosophy as such had become thoroughly politicized. Originally, philosophy had been the humanizing quest for the eternal order, and hence it had been a pure source of humane inspiration and aspiration. Since the seventeenth century, philosophy has become a weapon, and hence an instrument.67

In this way, Strauss traces the crisis of modern rationalism to early modern philosophy's dedication to an eminently practical and popular purpose: the improvement of man's earthly estate. The stage was set for the eventual reduction of reason to will. In order to become the masters of nature through science, the early modern philosophers laid a new foundation of mathematical physics, pointedly rejecting the earlier basis for philosophical inquiry, the common sense (or, at least, pre-theoretical) opinions based on the immediate experience of the world. If man possesses the rudiments of knowledge about the true nature of things prior to theorizing, prior to the application of scientific method, then reason itself must acknowledge the existence of a natural order, knowledge of which becomes philosophy's own raison d'etre. The early modern philosophers rejected pre-theoretical opinion as the proper starting point for scientific investigations because it pro- vided a point of entry through which religion and the entire kingdom of darkness and ignorance could continue to make moral claims upon society and intellectual claims upon science. But the rejection of this natural horizon as the ultimate source of knowledge entails the rejection of any external source of order upon which man could feel an obligation to model himself. Virtue floats

66. Strauss, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy," in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 36.

67. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 34.

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free of any mooring in the natural order. Reason loses its ordina- tion to rule the lower faculties of the human soul. Deliberation ceases to be considered a function of the practical reason by which one weighs various means for achieving an end which one's reason already apprehends as good; instead, deliberation is considered merely "the whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes and fears" preceding an act of will, which is itself merely "the last appetite, or aversion immediately adhering to the action."68 In the absence of all knowledge of a natural order by which he might measure his actions, man is free to create himself. Yet, the reduction of practical reason to a mere instrument of the will destroys every basis for moral or political order; it destroys the very notion of progress (what would constitute progress?); and it destroys even the basis for preferring the rational over the irrational, knowledge over ignorance, truth over illusion.

Simply put, modern reason in the process of freeing itself from theology and the divine will has destroyed itself as reason by eventually reducing itself to human will. It is revealed by Strauss to be motivated not by pure love of wisdom, which would compel it to encounter theology as a serious and worthy opponent (if not as a teacher), but to be motivated by "atheism," or by "antitheological ire," or-with certain modern revisions-by Epicureanism.69

We now begin to see, however, that Strauss did not simply understand the problematic course of modern rationalism to have begun with a fateful, moral commitment by certain early moderns, such as Machiavelli and Hobbes. The early modern dedication of philosophy to the improvement of the human condition was itself a reaction against a prior entanglement of philosophy and opinion-the entanglement perpetrated by Christian scholasticism. Philosophy became a weapon, and philosophers became polemicists; contemplation gave way to action, approbation of leisure made way for encomiums to industry, and the philoso-

68. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), I, 6, pp. 53-54.

69. Green, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 19. Green refers to the following passages in works by Strauss: Philosophy and Law, p. 12,15- 19; Natural Right and History, p. 167-70,178nll, 188-89; "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion," p. 29-31.



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phers' own conception of the best life was transformed from the disinterested quest for knowledge to the discovery of means (techne) for the improvement of the human estate.70

Thus, for one who has become dissatisfied with the late-modern situation and whose gaze turns back to review the long course of rational inquiry, seeking an alternative enlightenment that may be proof against the same breakdown of confidence, the same crisis of rationalism, as the modern enlightenment, Strauss would deny that the enlightenment offered by the Chris- tian scholastics could possibly provide a satisfactory destination.71

For there is a profound agreement between Jewish and Muslim thought on the one hand and ancient thought on the other: it is not the Bible and the Koran, but perhaps the New Testament, and certainly the Reformation and modern philosophy, which brought about the break with ancient thought.72

That is why, as a possible cure for our modern perplexity, Strauss directs us instead to the medieval Muslim and Jewish enlightenment and, perhaps above all, to the Jewish thought (or political philosophy) of Maimonides.73 Whether, for Strauss, that

70. Strauss goes so far as to condemn the modem political society brought about through technological mastery of nature as unnatural; and its very success has made the return to a more natural political society almost impossible. See letter to Karl L6with (15August 1946), in "Correspondence Concerning Modernity," Independent Journal of Philosophy, 107-108. "I know very well that today [the small

city state] cannot be restored; but the famous atomic bombs-not to mention at all cities with a million inhabitants, gadgets, funeral homes, 'ideologies'-show that the contemporary solution, that is, the completely moder solution, is contra naturam."

71. Strauss at least seems to have had considerable respect for the philosophical acuity of ThomasAquinas. One thinks of Strauss's numerous citations ofAquinas's works in Natural Right and History, especially in chapter 4. Strauss accuses contemporary writers who attempt to interpret and make use ofAquinas's doctrines of having been misled by moder assumptions. See Leo Strauss, "On a New

Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy," in Social Research, 347n24. And as for neo-Thomism, Strauss's attitude is clearly dismissive. See Strauss, "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 29, 34.

72. Strauss, "Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi," pp. 4-5.

73. See Strauss, "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion," inLiberalism Ancient and Modern, pp. 257: "I began therefore to wonder whether the self-destruction of

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medieval enlightenment actually represents the summit or is, instead, a way station on the path that ultimately leads back to Socrates must remain a question for another day.

reason was not the inevitable outcome of modem rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and its classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation." Maimonides exercised immense care in veiling the inquiries of speculative reason. He was aware that, in providing the necessary setting for the moral or political life, religion meets philosophy at the level of divine law. But what will happen if religion itself becomes a source of political instability? In that case, religion will no longer serve the best interests of either the political or the philosophical life. May we not suppose that, as with Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, potential philosophers also constituted Spinoza's primary intended audience? But Spinoza's circumstances had changed; he could no longer employ a respectful rhetoric concerning the ruling opinions of his day. Those ruling opinions had become a source of disorder rather than order. Spinoza did not so much declare a revolution as decamp from a city already in the grip of sectarian strife. Can we even perhaps say that Spinoza attempted to rescue a rationalism that was one of the highest fruits of Judaism from the self-destruction of the city of faith? Surely, any speculation on Spinoza's actual judgment of the relative merit of the two testaments must take into account his condemnation of the "dualism of spiritual and temporal power, and therewith for perpetual civil discord"-a dualism that is far more apparent in the New Testament than in the Old. Strauss, "How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise," in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 205.



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[Clark a Merrill] Strauss' Indictment of Christian Philosophy