Read an Excerpt

Christians as Political Animals

ISI BOOKS

Chapter One

Leo Strauss did more than any other twentieth-century thinker to reinvigorate serious interest in the theologico-political question. A German-Jewish émigré, Strauss came to the United States in 1937. After briefly holding a teaching post at the New School for Social Research in New York, he eventually became the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Strauss, the author of a wide range of unconventional and highly detailed interpretations of classical, medieval, and modern political works, does not initially come to sight as a political philosopher preoccupied with the relationship between reason and revelation. Rather, he conspicuously presents himself first and foremost as a historian of political philosophy.

But, looking back in 1964 at the trajectory of his thought since his mid-twenties, Strauss stated in a rare autobiographical remark that the "reawakening of theology, which is for me epitomized by the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenweig, seemed to make it necessary for one to study the extent to which the critique of orthodox-Jewish and Christian-theology deserved to be victorious.... The theologico-political problem has since remained the theme of my studies."

Strauss turned to the history of political philosophy not out of antiquarian interest, but to come to grips with what he viewed as the fundamental "crisis of our time." That crisis manifested itself most visibly in the twentieth century in the nagging doubts that modern Western societies harbored about their survival and legitimacy. Such doubts, for Strauss, were practical symptoms of a far deeper and more formidable theoretical crisis. In Strauss's view, the West was most threatened by an internal intellectual and spiritual loss of purpose and not by the external political challenges posed by the twentieth-century experience of fascism and communism. No longer certain about the credibility and the sustainability of modernity's founding premises, late modern thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, had radicalized these very same premises and gradually embraced a form of historicism that itself was a type of nihilism.

In an effort to see whether such an embrace was either warranted or inevitable, Strauss came to the surprising conclusion "that the case between the moderns and the ancients must be reopened ... to consider seriously, i.e., detachedly, the possibility that Swift was right when he compared the modern world to Lilliput and the ancient world to Brobdingnag." Strauss's historical studies were nonhistoricist in spirit or intent. Indeed, as a result of his particular approach to the history of political philosophy, Leo Strauss was able to demonstrate that the obscurantist conclusions of historicism were built on questionable premises.

Strauss repeatedly emphasized that "the question quid sit deus" is "coeval with philosophy." Paradoxically, Strauss at the same time went out of his way to emphasize that the classical political philosophers did "not frequently pronounce" this "all-important question." Unlike their modern counterparts, the classical political philosophers tended to approach the question cautiously, raising it only indirectly through dialectical inquiries into the "roots" of the city's allegedly authoritative divine law. Strauss appreciated that quid sit deus is as much a moral and political question as it is a theological or philosophical one. As he succinctly put it, "the fundamental question, therefore, is whether men can acquire knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided effort of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance." It is not surprising, then, that Strauss identified the theologico-political problem as the overarching theme of his studies.

Strauss did not formulate his understanding of the nature and scope of the theologico-political problem all at once. It took form gradually and was deepened by his sustained investigations into the ways in which that problem was articulated and debated by modern, medieval, and classical political philosophers. Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1930) contains Strauss's first sustained treatment of the theologico-political problem. That work examined the role that Spinoza's bold treatment of the essential relation of philosophy, religion, and politics played in modernity's original argument in favor of liberal democracy. Looking back at his argument in that work some thirty-two years later, Strauss concluded that he "understood Spinoza too literally because I did not read him literally enough." In part because Strauss had yet to discover exoteric writing and to think through the implications of that "peculiar technique," he had not broken free from the characteristically late modern "premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to premodern philosophy"-or, for that matter, to traditional Biblical faith-is impossible.

The premise that ostensibly precluded any return to premodern thought, argued Strauss, had its roots in and was "expressed ... in its simplest and strongest form, in Descartes' resolve to doubt everything in order to free himself once and for all from all prejudice." Allegedly "erected on foundations" that were "absolutely certain," modern rationalism asserted that it "no longer left any place for doubt." It claimed to be able to liberate reason and mankind from the realm of ungrounded opinion and superstitious darkness that resulted from man's prescientific adherence to the moral and doctrinal tenets of Biblical faith. Spinoza proclaimed in the preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) that his overarching aim in that work was to overcome the "obstacle to others who would philosophize more freely if this one thing did not stand in their way: they deem that reason has to serve as handmaiden to theology." Because it did not dialectically question but instead radically doubted the claims of common opinion, modern rationalism-in contrast to premodern or Socratic philosophy-dared to conceive of "philosophy ... as [a] completed system." According to its proponents, the adoption of such a system and the inevitability of consequent scientific progress would show that modern rationalism, not the God of the Bible, was the true benefactor of man.

From the beginning, Leo Strauss understood modern rationalism to be "caused, or at least facilitated, by anti-theological ire." In his view, modern philosophy was essentially Epicurean in its intention. But whereas ancient Epicureanism sought to liberate individual men of "good natures" from the tyranny of the gods and religion, modern Epicureanism expressly sought to free men and political societies from revealed religion and its fearful and tyrannical invocation of what Hobbes rather bluntly called "powers invisible." Beginning with Machiavelli, early modern philosophers labored to bring into existence a new form of rationalism and republicanism. To this end, they advanced rationalistic critiques of Biblical faith and formulated arguments that were designed to show that modern reason could provide the true grounds of civil society. As Strauss pointed out, "political atheism is a distinctively modern phenomenon."

Strauss gradually came to see that the purported solution that modern rationalism offered in place of "theology" was equally opposed to the claims of Socratic philosophy. To begin with, like Biblical faith, Socratic philosophy emphasized the indispensability and nonconstructed nature of morality in general and justice in particular. Moreover, each affirmed that morality must be tethered to, and grounded in, a transcendent order. Lastly and most importantly for Strauss, both the Bible and Socratic philosophy, in their own ways, claim that man is incapable of comprehending the whole. Modern rationalism's attack on Biblical faith was therefore equally an attack on the foundations of Socratic philosophy. To the extent that it was successful in discrediting the grounds of Biblical faith, it was also successful in discrediting the foundations-and therewith the very possibility-of Socratic philosophy.

Strauss consequently began to see that the only way in which an authentic "return" to Orthodoxy, and by extension to Socratic philosophy, could be justified was to show that, contrary to its claims, modern philosophy had not proven that "the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God." At the very least, this argument required one to show that modern rationalism and science were not in possession of a complete and coherent philosophic system. Put somewhat differently, Strauss recognized that a return to the shared ground of either Orthodoxy or Socratic philosophy was truly impossible only if modern philosophy had in fact succeeded in its effort to formulate "a philosophic system" in which "man has to show himself theoretically and practically as the master of the world and the master of life; the merely given world must be replaced by the world created by man theoretically and practically." Absent a systematic-i.e., a complete rationalistic-account of the universe, modern rationalism's alleged victory over Orthodoxy was unwarranted on its own terms.

Strauss understood Spinoza to be the modern philosopher who made the grandest attempt to articulate a philosophical system that would definitively disprove the notion of revelation and the existence of the Biblical God. Yet his attempt to formulate "a clear and distinct account of everything," Strauss concluded, ultimately rested on premises that remained "fundamentally hypothetical." The "cognitive status" of the philosophic system he constructed remained in the decisive respect no different from the theoretical grounds of the Orthodox position it originally set out to overcome. Strauss understood each to be grounded in "an act of the will." Despite their efforts first to argue and later to "mock" Orthodoxy out of existence, modern rationalism and modern science could not "legitimately deny the possibility of revelation." Strauss concluded from this that the modern "antagonism" between Spinoza and Judaism, "between unbelief and belief, is ultimately not theoretical but moral."

At the same time, Strauss recognized that modern rationalism "still had a highly consequential and positive result." He wrote, "The quarrel between Enlightenment and Orthodoxy made clearer and better known that the presuppositions of Orthodoxy (the reality of Creation, Miracles, and Revelation) are not known (philosophically or historically) but are only believed and thus lack the peculiarly obligatory character of the known."

Having shed light on the basic presuppositions of the life of Biblical faith, modern rationalism's polemical attack and attempted refutation of Orthodoxy eventually paved the way-through the progressive radicalization of the modern desire for certainty in philosophers like Kant and Hegel-for the emergence of what Strauss calls "the atheism from intellectual probity." This form of atheism represented the ultimate consequence of modern rationalism's critique of revealed religion and Biblical faith. Unlike the early modern critique, it did not attempt polemically to disprove the possibility of divine revelation. Rather, on the grounds of "intellectual honesty," it limited itself to assuming that the proof of such things as miracles and God's revelation could not be scientifically' established according to criteria that would be acceptable to the "positive mind."

Strauss rejected the argument from intellectual probity. It represented neither the vindication of modern rationalism nor that of Jewish Orthodoxy, since it reduced the cognitive grounds of every revealed religion-indeed every particular claim to truth-to a matter of willful belief[ In grounding all claims to truth in the act of "probity" or intellectual honesty, such a reduction proves "fatal to any philosophy." Srauss argued that when the founding premises of modern rationalism were followed to their logical conclusions-as they' ultimately were in Nietzsche's intransigent insistence on the requirements of "probity" and his teaching on the "will to power"-they resulted in the self-destruction of reason. His studies in the early modern attempts to resolve the theologico-political problem led Strauss to conclude that "'irrationalism' is only a variety, of modern rationalism." In its dogged pursuit of absolute certainty and ruthless efforts to overcome the very grounds of Biblical faith, modern rationalism sowed the theoretical seeds for the self-destruction of reason and the eventual emergence of radical historicism or nihilism. Put somewhat differently, Strauss concluded that modern rationalism-and not rationalism or Socratic philosophy per se-provided the moral and intellectual foundations of the present-day "crisis of the West."

Strauss's study of the early modern political philosophers led him to discover that the modern Enlightenment had been preceded by a medieval Enlightenment, or what he, in Philosophy and Law (1935), provisionally called the "Enlightenment of Maimonides." Unlike its modern counterpart, that Enlightenment was not rooted in a fatally exaggerated conception of the limitless powers of reason. Nor did it believe in the inevitability of moral, political, and scientific progress. Yet it was simultaneously more daring in its thought and more sober in its expectations than the modern Enlightenment. Medieval rationalism neither dogmatically truncated the scope of philosophic inquiry nor imprudently lost sight of the fact that philosophy necessarily poses a "grave danger" to the political order. Resting on "classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundations," it did not seek to recreate the whole of social and political life along the lines of philosophic knowledge. Over and against the modern Enlightenment's insistence on the public dissemination of knowledge, it emphasized the "duty to keep rationally recognized truths secret from the unchosen many."

Contrary to many of his contemporaries, who interpreted medieval thought to be chiefly concerned with reconciling Biblical revelation with the natural science and cosmology of Aristotle, Strauss recognized that that conventional approach wittingly or unwittingly proceeded from the prior assumption that philosophy was a legitimate activity for the man of Biblical faith. Taking the thought of medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers on its own terms, he questioned the validity of that assumption. According to Strauss, divine law-a revealed law that spoke directly to all aspects of man's religious, moral, and political life-provided the necessary point of departure for medieval rationalism.

Through its emphasis on the centrality of law, medieval rationalism represented "the first, and certainly the first adequate, discussion ... between the way of life based on faith and obedience and a way of life based on free insight, on human wisdom, alone." That discussion required philosophy to justify itself before the tribunal of an all-encompassing, perfect law. Whereas modern rationalism took the legitimacy, indeed the practical necessity, of philosophy for granted, medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers recognized that faced with an authoritative divine law, philosophy had to justify its own legitimacy. Medieval Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides and Halevi-to say nothing of Islamic thinkers like Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes-"took it for granted being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive. For this reason, Strauss understood the issue of traditional Judaism versus philosophy [to be] identical with the issue of Jerusalem and Athens."

Medieval Islam and Judaism typically viewed philosophy differently than Christianity traditionally did. Religion for the Christian, unlike the Jew or Muslim, is primarily "a faith formulated in dogmas." Given the nature of Christian revelation, the religion eventually came to see philosophy as a legitimate science that could be used to clarify and defend the revealed teachings of the faith. The Jew and the Muslim, on the other hand, principally encountered revelation and hence religion as a matter of law, that is, as a divinely revealed "code" that regulated all aspects of human life, individually and collectively. The divine law was distinguished from human laws inasmuch as it aimed not merely at the well-being of the body but "above all at the well-being of the soul." There was or appeared to be no need for philosophy in this scheme, and many saw philosophy as unjustified in that light.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Christians as Political Animals by Marc D. Guerra Copyright © 2010 by Marc D. Guerra. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---