## 1. Life and Work



Strauss was born on September 20, 1899 in Kirchhain, a small, rural
town in Germany. He was raised in an orthodox Jewish home and also
studied at a Gymnasium in nearby Marburg where he received a broad
humanistic education. At the age of seventeen Strauss became a devoted
advocate of political Zionism. He spent a year in Belgium as an
interpreter for the military after which he began his studies at the
University of Marburg, where the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher,
Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) had established a thriving school of
neo-Kantianism. In 1921, Strauss completed his dissertation,
"The problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F.H.
Jacobi," under the direction of Cohen's student, Ernst
Cassirer (1874-1945). Strauss's dissertation considered
the implications of Jacobi's notion of revelation for the
problem of knowledge. Although Strauss would come to regard his
dissertation as "a disgraceful performance," the question
of the meaning and status of divine revelation would continue to
occupy him throughout his life.



Strauss spent 1922 in Freiburg where he attended Edmund
Husserl's lectures on phenomenology. Like a number of others,
who would soon become famous philosophers in their own right, such as
Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Lowith, and Hannah
Arendt, Strauss was quickly taken with Husserl's student, Martin
Heidegger, who, he later wrote, impressed him as no other contemporary
thinker had. The following year Strauss began lecturing in Frankfurt
under the auspices of a center for adult education, the *Freies
Judische Lehrhaus*, founded by Franz Rosenzweig
(1886-1929). In 1925, Julius Guttmann (1880-1950) invited
Strauss to Berlin to edit the jubilee edition of Moses
Mendelssohn's work for the Academy of the Science of Judaism. In
1930, Strauss published his first book, *Spinoza's Critique
of Religion*, dedicated to Rosenzweig's memory, in which he
argued that nineteenth and twentieth-century readers of Spinoza could
see him as a "God intoxicated man" only because they had
ceased to take the possibility of divine revelation seriously.



In 1932, Strauss wrote a review of Carl Schmitt's recently
published book *The Concept of the Political*, in which he
argued that, despite Schmitt's attempts to do otherwise, Schmitt
still remained within the horizon of modern liberalism because he was
unable to offer reasons for his normative commitment to what he called
"the political." Many of Strauss's subsequent
critics have interpreted his claim that Schmitt remained a liberal as
proof of what they consider Strauss's anti-liberal ire. However,
Strauss's critique of Schmitt is perhaps better understood as
evidence of what would be Strauss's life long worry about modern
liberalism's ability to justify its normative commitment to
liberal ideals in the face of moral skepticism, relativism and what
Strauss also called "philistinism," all of which say "in effect that
one does not have to think about the reasons why those things [of
liberalism] are good" (WPP, 21). If the modern liberal state is
impartial to questions of value, how then does the liberal state
justify its own value? Schmitt would state that no one had understood
him as Strauss had, and Strauss would later claim that reading Schmitt
changed his own orientation toward the question of the relation
between philosophy and politics.



In 1932, due to the financial problems of the Academy for the Science
of Judaism, Strauss found himself without a job. With a letter of
recommendation from Schmitt, he received a fellowship from the
Rockefeller Foundation to begin work, in France, on a study of Hobbes.
In Paris, Strauss attended seminars on Hegel led by Alexandre
Koyre (1892-1964) and Alexandre Kojeve
(1902-1968). The next year, he received an extension on his
Rockefeller grant to work in London and Cambridge on his book on
Hobbes.



Strauss's work on Hobbes coincided with Hitler's rise to
power. Strauss thus turned his attention to Hobbes, whom he took to be
the founding theorist of the liberal state, just as the idea of the
German liberal state seemed to be collapsing. Strauss's third
book, *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its
Genesis* was published in 1936. Linking his newly found attention
to the relation between philosophy and politics with his previous work
on what he regarded as Spinoza's critique of religion, the book
concerns what Strauss claimed was the intimate tie between modern
liberalism and its critique of religion.



In 1935 Strauss had published his second book, *Philosophy and Law:
Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and his
Predecessors*. Here too the political realities within which he
was living overlapped with his scholarly pursuits. At the urging of
Gershom Scholem, Strauss turned three separate essays on Maimonides
into a book. Scholem and Strauss hoped that the publication of
*Philosophy and Law* would help Strauss to get a position in
medieval Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Strauss did not receive the position, which went instead to Julius
Guttmann, Strauss's supervisor at the Academy for the Science of
Judaism and a primary target of critique in *Philosophy and
Law*.



Much of *Philosophy and Law* is an attack on Guttmann's
assumption that the central problem for medieval Jewish philosophy was
epistemological in nature. According to Guttmann, the fundamental
question in studying medieval Jewish philosophy was how medieval
Jewish philosophers, and Maimonides in particular, understood the
relation between reason and revelation as sources of knowledge.
Strauss argued, in contrast, that Maimonides' basic concern was
not epistemological but instead political. Before any questions about
the basis of knowledge can be asked, the question of what it means to
philosophize in the framework of the authority of the law must be
answered. Strauss argued that philosophy can clarify the meaning of
the law, but philosophy cannot derive the law itself. Instead, the law
is the pre-philosophical context of and framework for philosophy. It
was also within the context of *Philosophy and Law* that
Strauss began to consider something he had up until then thought
impossible: a return to pre-modern philosophy.



In 1937 Strauss accepted a visiting lectureship in history from
Columbia University. The following year Strauss became a visiting
researcher at the New School for Social Research, home to many
European emigres. Strauss's position at the New
School became permanent, and he remained there for ten years.



The decade that Strauss spent at the New School was arguably the most
productive, and certainly the most pivotal, of his intellectual
career. In his first years at the New School, Strauss published the
seminal essays that would become the book *Persecution and the Art
of Writing*, published in 1952. In these essays, Strauss argued
that, when reading certain pre-modern thinkers, it is necessary to
read between the lines. The possibility of persecution gives rise to a
certain type of writing that allows one set of the readers, the
majority, to receive one message while allowing a second set of
readers, the philosophical elite, to take away another message. While
this type of writing is often referred to as "esoteric,"
it is more properly understood as "exoteric," that is,
writing that outwardly veils a secret teaching of some sort. For
Strauss, Maimonides, Judah Halevi, and Spinoza were all exoteric
writers. Despite the profound differences between them, Maimonides and
Spinoza both outwardly teach that philosophy and revelation are
reconcilable with one another. Yet, according to Strauss, the careful
reader will notice that their respective arguments actually suggest
the opposite: that philosophy and revelation are in fact
irreconcilable. Halevi, on the other hand, outwardly teaches that
philosophy and revelation are irreconcilable. But whereas
Halevi's dismissal of philosophy in the face of revelation seems
to suggest that philosophy is not a challenge for revelation, Strauss
argues that the careful reader will notice that Halevi's
argument in fact suggests the opposite: that philosophy is not just a
challenge for revelation but a supremely dangerous one.



During his New School years, Strauss also delved more deeply into
ancient philosophy to explore the themes of persecution and writing.
Strauss's fourth book, *On Tyranny: An Interpretation of
Xenophon's "Hiero,"* was published in 1948.
Whereas the dominant reading of Plato's *Republic* understands
Plato to be advocating that philosophers should rule, Strauss argues
that Plato actually viewed such a situation as untenable since it
would require the consent of non-philosophers, the unwise. 
*On Tyranny* concerns itself with what Strauss claims is the
necessary condition for the rule of the wise which is that
*only* the wise alone can secure justice for the city (OT,
193). In this study, Strauss offers a close reading of the
rhetoric of Xenophon's dialogue, which highlights, for Strauss,
the tension between the philosophical quest for truth and the
requirements of society.



Strauss accepted a position at the University of Chicago in 1949,
where he would teach until his retirement in 1967. Upon joining
Chicago's faculty, Strauss gave a series of lectures on
"Natural Right and History," which would be published in
1953 under the same title. *Natural Right and History* remains
Strauss's best-known American work but its basic worry is an
extension of his early doubts about the ability of twentieth-century
philosophy to respond to the challenges of political and moral
relativism. In the United States, and in the department of political
science at Chicago, Strauss criticized what he took to be the moral
relativism upon which the social sciences rested. He begins the book
with an analysis of Max Weber, one of the principle founders of the
academic discipline of social science, and attempts to show a direct
line leading from Weber's positivism to historicism, which
Strauss defines as the view that "all human thoughts or beliefs
are historical" (NRH, p. 25). He then contrasts modern
conceptions of natural right, beginning with Hobbes, with ancient
conceptions, beginning with Plato. The former, argues Strauss, ends in
historicist relativism, in which there are no moral, political, or
scientific standards beyond particular historical contexts.
*Natural Right and History* asks, though does not answer, the
question of whether it is possible to return to some concept of nature
for understanding who we are as human beings and therefore to some
notion of absolute moral standards.



Strauss published two other books and many essays in his later years.
In 1958 he published what is likely his most controversial study,
*Thoughts on Machiavelli,* in which he pronounced
Machiavelli's "anti-theological ire" the source of
modernity. After retiring from Chicago, Strauss taught at Claremont
Men's College in California for a year and then joined his old
friend Jacob Klein (1899-1978) at St. John's College in
Annapolis as a scholar in residence. Strauss died in 1973. *The
Argument and Action of Plato's "Laws"* was
published posthumously in 1975. At the time of his death, Strauss had
also been at work on studies of Nietzsche, Thucydides, and Xenophon. A
number of important collections of Strauss's essays have since
been edited and published by some of his former students.


## 2. Controversies



A number of controversies surround Strauss and his work. First, in
recent years, Strauss has been accused of being the intellectual
godfather of the neo-conservative political movement and thus of being
the intellectual force behind the Bush administration's plan to
invade of Iraq. Second, no aspect of Strauss's work is as hotly
contested as his claims about esotericism. Interpretations of
Strauss's view of esotericism include: that Strauss advocates
clandestine cabals with secrets imparted from teacher to disciple;
that Strauss's writings are themselves esoteric documents; that
Strauss thinks that all thinkers write esoterically; that Strauss
claims to know a secret; that, Strauss promoted mass deception and
perpetual war; and that, in one particularly crude rendering, Strauss
used his esoteric methods to hide his fascist sympathies, if not his
secret Nazism. After exploring the broad themes and context of
Strauss's work, this article will return to reconsider these
varying claims about Strauss.


## 3. Esotericism



Strauss's claims about esotericism ought to be understood within
the broader trajectory of his life's work. Such an approach is
in fact in keeping with Strauss's own recommendation for how to
read philosophical texts, esoteric or otherwise. According to Strauss,
an interpretation of a given text must begin "from an exact
consideration of the explicit statements of an author." However,
"The context in which a statement occurs...must be
perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can
reasonably claim to be adequate or even correct" (PAW, p. 130).
Turning to the context of Strauss's claims about esotericism
helps to unravel a number of other important themes in his work,
including what he calls the "theologico-political predicament of
modernity," the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,
and the relation between revelation and philosophy (what Strauss also
calls "Jerusalem and Athens").



In his first published contention that Maimonides is an esoteric
writer, Strauss self-consciously examines what it means to *write
about* an esoteric text. Clearly referring to himself, Strauss
writes:



> 
> No historian who has a sense of decency and therefore a sense of
> respect for a superior man such as Maimonides will disregard
> light-heartedly the latter's emphatic entreaty not to explain
> the secret teaching of the *Guide*. It may fairly be said that
> an interpreter who does not feel pangs of conscience when attempting
> to explain that secret teaching and perhaps when perceiving for the
> first time its existence and bearing lacks that closeness to the
> subject which is indispensable for the true understanding of any book.
> Thus the question of adequate interpretation of the *Guide* is
> primarily a moral one. (PAW, p. 55)
> 



Strauss maintains that before attempting to answer the question of
whether a secret teaching, only hinted at in the text, can be grasped
with confidence and precision, it is necessary to consider the moral
implications as well as the moral impetus of a writer willing to write
about such a secret. In making this claim, Strauss aligns his own
dilemma with Maimonides' dilemma and by so doing he points to
the basic motivation that directs his own claims about esotericism.
The question is thus twofold: why did Maimonides *write* the
*Guide* in the first place and why does Strauss write about
esoteric writing? In answering the first question, Strauss notes that
the literary form of the *Guide* is a letter to
Maimonides' gifted student Joseph, who, like many Jews of
Maimonides' time, was traveling in far and distant lands:
"Joseph's departure was a consequence of his being a Jew
in the Diaspora. Not a private need but only an urgent necessity of
nation-wide bearing can have driven Maimonides to transgress an
explicit prohibition [to write about esoteric matters]. Only the
necessity of saving the law can have caused him to break the
law" (PAW, p. 49).



If this is Maimonides' reason, what is Strauss's? Strauss
is willing to make the seemingly immoral and indecent move of
revealing the secrets of an esoteric text in order to save those
secrets. The secret that Strauss seeks to save is insight into the
political, philosophical, and theological meaning of what he calls
"a forgotten type of writing." But why does Strauss care
about this forgotten type of writing? We can only answer this question
by looking to Strauss's published work as a whole and to the
place of *Persecution and the Art of Writing* within this whole
and to do so it is necessary to understand Strauss's most basic
question, which concerns what he calls the "theologico-political
predicament of modernity."



## 4. The Theologico-Political Predicament of Modernity



In the 1965 preface to the English translation of *Spinoza's
Critique of Religion,* Strauss describes the beginnings of his
intellectual journey by stating that "This study of
Spinoza's *Theologico-Political Treatise* was written
during the years 1925-28 in Germany. The author was a young Jew
born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the
theologico-political predicament" (SCR, p. 1). Also in 1965
Strauss's *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* was
published, with a new preface by the author, for the first time in
German. There Strauss refers to the "theologico-political
problem," deeming it "*the* theme of my
studies" (GS 3, p. 8).



Strauss employs the term "theological-political
predicament," to diagnose what he contends are the devastating
philosophical, theological, and political consequences of the early
modern attempt to separate theology from politics. However, Strauss in
no way favors a return to theocracy or, like his contemporary Carl
Schmitt, a turn toward political theology. Instead, Strauss attempts
to recover classical political philosophy not to return to the
political structures of the past but to reconsider ways in which
pre-modern thinkers thought it necessary to grapple and live with the
tensions, if not contradictions that, by definition, arise from human
society. For Strauss, a recognition, and not a resolution, of the
tensions and contradictions that define human society is the necessary
starting point for philosophically reconstructing a philosophy,
theology, and politics of moderation, all of which, he claims, the
twentieth-century desperately needs.


## 5. Philosophy and Revelation



In describing the "theological-political predicament"
Strauss continually returns to the questions of the epistemological
and political status of revelation vis-a-vis philosophy. He
criticizes the modern critique of religion beginning in the
17th century for advancing the idea that revelation and
philosophy should answer to the same scientific criteria, maintaining
that this notion brings meaningful talk of revelation to an end,
either in the form of banishing revelation from conversation or in the
form of so-called modern defenses of religion which only internalize
this banishment. Strauss's early musings on the
theologico-political predicament led him to a theme upon which he
would insist again and again: the irreconcilability of revelation and
philosophy (or the irreconcilability of what he would call elsewhere
Jerusalem and Athens or the Bible and Greek philosophy). Strauss
maintains that because belief in revelation by definition does not
claim to be self-evident knowledge, philosophy can neither refute nor
confirm revelation:



> 
> The genuine refutation of orthodoxy would require the proof that the
> world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption
> of a mysterious God; it would require at least the success of the
> philosophical system: man has to show himself theoretically and
> practically as the master of the world and the master of his life; the
> merely given must be replaced by the world created by man
> theoretically and practically (SCR, p. 29).
> 



Because a completed system is not possible, or at least not yet
possible, modern philosophy, despite its self-understanding to the
contrary, has not refuted the possibility of revelation.



On Strauss's reading, the Enlightenment's so-called
critique of religion ultimately also brought with it, unbeknownst to
its proponents, modern rationalism's self-destruction. Strauss
does not reject modern science, but he does object to the
philosophical conclusion that "scientific knowledge is the
highest form of knowledge" because this "implies a
depreciation of pre-scientific knowledge." As he put it,
"Science is the successful part of modern philosophy or science,
and philosophy is the unsuccessful part--the rump" (JPCM,
p. 99). Strauss reads the history of modern philosophy as beginning
with the elevation of all knowledge to science, or theory, and as
concluding with the devaluation of all knowledge to history, or
practice. In Strauss's words: "the root of all modern
darkness from the seventeenth century on is the obscuring of the
difference between theory and praxis, an obscuring that first leads to
a reduction of praxis to theory (this is the meaning of so-called
[modern] rationalism) and then, in retaliation, to the rejection of
theory in the name of praxis that is no longer intelligible as
praxis" (FPP, p. 66). Whereas in the seventeenth-century,
Hobbes, like Spinoza after him, depreciates pre-scientific knowledge
in the name of science, Heidegger, in the twentieth-century,
depreciates scientific knowledge in the name of historicity. While
many philosophers (including Heidegger) have understood
Heidegger's philosophy as breaking with modern rationalism,
Strauss views Heidegger's philosophy as a logical outcome of
that same rationalism. According to Strauss, modern rationalism
implodes upon itself: what starts as a modern quest for delineating
scientific standards in the name of certain knowledge leads to the
conclusion that there are neither such standards nor such truths.



Strauss argues that just as modern philosophy begins with an
over-inflated sense of reason that privileges theory over practice and
ends with a radical historicism that denies any meaning to reason
outside of history, so too, modern *political philosophy*
begins with the attempt to make the human being part of nature as
defined by science and ends by denying any notion of nature all
together. For Strauss, these trajectories come together in the
coincidence of Heidegger's philosophy and his political
misadventures:



> 
> The crucial issue concerns the status of those permanent
> characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble
> and the base.... It was the contempt for these permanencies which
> permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather
> to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise
> and least moderate part of his nation... The biggest event of
> 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary,
> that man cannot abandon the question of the good society....
> (WPP, pp. 26-27).
> 



Strauss does not mean to imply that National Socialism was inevitable.
Rather he means to investigate why there was no adequate *rational,
moral* response to the rise of National Socialism. It is here that
the modern crises of philosophy and theology meet in the modern crisis
of politics. Neither modern political philosophy nor theology nor
philosophy had the critical resources to respond to the disintegration
of the liberal state, the very political structure that was touted as
"the opposite of... 'the kingdom of darkness,'
i.e., of medieval society" (SCR, p. 3).



It would become the mature Strauss's task to consider how
philosophy, theology, and political philosophy could each once again
have the critical resources to make the most basic distinction between
the noble and the base. To do so, Strauss would have to overcome what
he called the "powerful prejudice, that a return to pre-modern
philosophy is impossible" (SCR, p. 31).


## 6. Esotericism Revisited



We are now in a position to reconsider Strauss's claims about
esotericism. In a 1936 essay on the political science of Maimonides
and Farabi, Strauss returns to the meaning of prophecy for Maimonides.
While most interpreters, including Strauss in *Spinoza's
Critique of Religion* and in parts but not all of *Philosophy
and Law*, viewed Maimonides' conception of prophecy in
epistemological terms, Strauss argues that Maimonides'
innovation was to think of prophecy in political terms. According to
Strauss, "Maimonides neither wished nor was able, nor had any
need, to lift the veil which conceals the origins of the Torah, the
foundation of the perfect nation" (RPSMF, pp. 15-16). Yet,
Strauss maintains, the attentive reader will notice that Maimonides
distinguishes between Moses, the lawgiver, and all other prophets.
Maimonides stresses Moses' exalted status, argues Strauss,
because for Maimonides Moses is the Platonic philosopher-legislator.
The emphasis on the uniqueness of Moses as the ideal prophet and ideal
ruler is the core of Maimonides' political philosophy because
"Not the mystery of its [the Torah's] origin, the search
for which leads either to theosophy or 'Epicureanism,' but
its end, the comprehension of which guarantees obedience to the Torah,
is accessible to human reason" (RPSMF, p. 16).



Obedience to the law and the philosophical meaning of the law are two
different matters that are reflected in what Strauss argues is
Maimonides' dual conception of law. The exterior, literal
meaning of the law serves to sustain the political community in which
certain forms of behavior and belief are required, while the ideal
meaning of the law is a matter of philosophical speculation only for
those who are capable of such speculation. This dual conception of law
parallels the dual character of Maimonides' writing, which
offers what Strauss calls a "moderate" reading meant for
the masses and what he calls a "radical" reading meant for
the philosophical reader. As Strauss would elaborate just two years
later in greater detail, this dialectical tension lies at the heart of
Maimonides' style of writing and argumentation.



According to Strauss, Maimonides is able to properly balance the
relation between praxis, obedience to the law, and theory, the mystery
of the law's origins, not by conflating them but by keeping them
in continual dialectical tension. For Strauss, Maimonides'
refusal to resolve the tension between law and philosophy (between
praxis and theory) expresses Maimonides' moderate claims both
for what philosophy can produce on its own (it cannot produce the law)
and for what revelation can claim to know absolutely (it cannot
provide certain knowledge of the mystery of its origin).
Strauss's attention to esotericism is rooted in a philosophical
interest in "a golden mean which is neither a compromise nor a
synthesis, which is hence not based on the two opposed positions, but
which suppresses them both, uproots them by a prior, more profound
question, by raising a fundamental problem, the work of a truly
critical philosophy" (RPSMF, p. 4).



For Strauss, the work of a truly critical philosophy is to grasp
problems, and not to provide solutions. What is the absolute problem
at the heart of esotericism, according to Strauss? The problem
concerns the self-sufficiency of reason or, put another way, the
inescapable and necessary tension between theory and practice. The
theological-political predicament of modernity stems from the modern
commitment to the self-sufficiency of reason that, Strauss argues,
results in reason's self-destruction. Esotericism is a means
toward preserving the limits of philosophy and revelation (or law)
vis-a-vis one another. The law comes up against its own
limitations in the quest to articulate the philosophical foundations
of the law. But at the same time, philosophy comes up against its own
limits in recognizing that the philosopher is always already within
society (or the law) and for this reason dependent upon the law.
Strauss thus makes the seemingly immoral move of revealing
Maimonides' art of writing for the sake of saving the
possibility of both revelation and philosophy.


## 7. The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns



Another recurrent theme in Strauss's work is what he calls
"the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns." Most
specifically, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns for
Strauss is about the excesses of modern claims for the authoritative
claims of reason and the philosophical moderation of the ancients. As
we saw above, according to Strauss, the trajectory of modern
philosophy's demise begins with the belief that modern
philosophy has refuted revelation once and for all. This false belief
is based on an overreaching view of what philosophical reason alone
can accomplish and it leads to the equally false belief that there are
no rational standards because reason is always imbedded within and
determined by history. Strauss contrasts Socrates' moderation
with the excess of modern philosophers. Socrates' moderation is
not merely a political concession, according to Strauss, but bears
upon the question of how we come to truth: "Socrates implied
that disregarding the opinions about the nature of things would amount
to abandoning the most important access to reality which we have, or
the most important vestiges of truth which are within our reach"
(NRH, p. 124). But even though truth is within our reach, philosophy
begins and ends with the *quest* for truth: "philosophy
is meant--and that is the decisive point--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*; it is not understood as an instrument or a department
of human self-realization" (NRH, p. 122). As a way of life,
"the problems are always more evident than the solutions. All
solutions are questionable... Therefore, the right way of life
cannot be established metaphysically except by a completed
metaphysics, and therefore the right way of life remains
questionable" (NRH, pp. 122-123).


## 8. Philosophy and Revelation Revisited



That the right way of life remains questionable and hence the claim
for philosophy's modesty regarding its own capabilities brings
us back to philosophy's relation to revelation. Without a
completed metaphysics, philosophy cannot refute revelation. This
inability to refute revelation has serious consequences for
philosophy's self-understanding. As Strauss puts it in
*Natural Right and History,* in what is probably his most well
known statement on the topic:



> 
> Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. But to grant that
> revelation is possible means to grant that the philosophic life is not
> necessarily, not evidently, *the* right life. Philosophy, the
> life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as
> man, would rest on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision. This
> would merely confirm the thesis of faith, that there is no possibility
> of consistency, of a consistent and thoroughly sincere life, without
> belief in revelation. The mere fact that philosophy and revelation
> cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy
> by revelation. (NRH, p. 75)
> 



Here we see that, for Strauss, the tension between revelation and
philosophy is not one between irrationality and rationality but
between fundamentally irreconcilable criteria for what constitutes the
*rational starting point* of truth. Philosophy begins and ends
for Strauss with the philosopher's sense of wonder, while
revealed religion begins and ends with adherence to the divine law.
Yet as Strauss suggests, this situation puts philosophy at a
disadvantage and revelation at an advantage. Never claiming to rest on
evident knowledge, revelation can rationally approach its truth
claims, not to prove them but to understand them. But philosophy,
which values reason first and foremost, is led to the unpleasant truth
that it is in fact predicated on something that is and remains
unevident: that the human question for knowledge is the right
life.



Strauss's simultaneous criticism of the self-sufficiency of
reason and defense of the rational plausibility (though not the
certainty) of revelation bears an important affinity to arguments of
contemporary Christian philosophers of religion, such as Alvin
Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who point out that philosophers
and others take many things for granted for which we do not have
certain evidence, such as sense perception, memory, or the inner lives
of other people. Like Strauss, these philosophers of religion
criticize the hubris of Enlightenment attempts to define knowledge
only in terms of scientific evidence. Once we dispense with modern
philosophy's overreaching claims for reason, the fact that
revelation cannot be proven definitively does not rule out the
possibility of making rational arguments about God's revelation.
Such arguments become impossible only when absolute proof for
God's existence is the prerequisite for reasoning about
revelation.



However, unlike Plantinga and Wolterstorff, Strauss's project is
not to make rational arguments for God's revelation but only to
suggest that such arguments are in theory possible. Because Strauss
clearly is not interested in offering a constructive theology, some
interpreters have concluded that, despite appearances to the contrary,
he did not really take the possibility of revelation seriously.
Perhaps most notably, the eminent Strauss scholar, Heinrich Meier,
maintains that Strauss purposely overstates the problem posed by
revelation for philosophy in order to inspire philosophical readers in
their quest for the philosophical life. Meier further understands the
theologico-political problem in terms of what he claims is
Strauss's life-long effort to create a philosophical school.
Meier's basic contention is that the quarrel between revelation
and philosophy as Strauss describes it leaves the careful reader many
opportunities to consider whether revelation really does constitute
the refutation of philosophy and to realize that philosophy does in
fact have philosophical and moral resources from which to respond to
revelation.



It is true that some of Strauss's sketches of revelation do not
make revelation compelling from a philosophical point of view. If the
question about the relation between revelation and philosophy pertains
to a decision for faith or philosophy, Strauss's conception of
revelation sounds very much like Kierkegaard's conception
according to which a leap of faith defines revelation. This
theological vantage point is similar to Strauss's description of
Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth's reawakening of theology. Yet
Strauss explicitly rejects this sort of theological decisionism
because, he argues, this position amounts to a "farewell to
reason." By mistakenly assuming that Strauss defines revelation
as blind faith, many of Strauss's interpreters have concluded
that he does not in the end take revelation seriously from a
philosophical point of view. In support of this position, Meier in
fact quotes Julius Guttmann's critical response to Strauss,
which is that Strauss shows an "indifference towards the content
of revelation... Whether Jewish or Christian revelation is of
concern makes no difference whatsoever" (as quoted in Meier
2006, p. 20). For Guttmann, this supposed indifference to
revelation's content means that Strauss gets medieval Jewish
rationalism wrong. For Meier, this supposed indifference means that
despite what seems to be Strauss's defense of revelation's
capacity to criticize philosophy, revelation is in the end for Strauss
a straw man. As Meier puts it, "What appears to the believer to
be 'indifference' proves on closer inspection to be a
conscious dissociation and ultimately a rejection" (Meier 2006,
p. 20, note 25). 



Yet Strauss was not indifferent to the content of revelation and
certainly not to the difference between Jewish and Christian notions
of revelation. In fact, Strauss strongly criticizes what he regards as
a particularly Christian view of revelation not in order to banish
revelation from intellectual conversation once and for all but to
suggest that modernity's intellectual ills stem in large part
from the legacy of Christian theology. In a 1952 letter to Gershom
Scholem, Strauss rejects his early reading of Maimonides in
*Philosophy and Law* as the "Jewish equivalence of Thomas
Aquinas." Describing the development of his views on Maimonides,
Strauss writes to Scholem that he has "moved, so to speak, contrary to
G.'s [Guttmann's] moderate rationalism...to
'radical' rationalism" (GS 3, 728). Strikingly, it was on
the basis of the Islamic, as opposed to the Christian, reception of
classical political philosophy that Strauss turned to the possiblity
of "radical rationalism" by reconsidering the meanings of philosophy,
revelation, and politics. Strauss's very attempt to move beyond
modern philosophy is predicated on a distinction between the Jewish
and Islamic conception of revelation on the one hand, and the
Christian conception, on the other hand:



> 
> For the Christian, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the
> Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily the
> legal interpretation of the Divine Law (*talmud* or
> *fiqh*). The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has, to say
> the least, much less in common with philosophy than the sacred
> doctrine in the former sense. It is ultimately for this reason that
> the status of philosophy was, as a matter of principle, much more
> precarious in Judaism and in Islam than in Christianity: in
> Christianity philosophy became an integral part of the officially
> recognized and even required training of the student of the sacred
> doctrine....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. (PAW, pp. 18-19, 21)
> 



Strauss problematizes the Christian view of revelation as doctrinal
knowledge that must be believed. From his early to his mature
writings, Strauss contends that the making of revelation into
knowledge in scholastic theology ultimately led to modern
philosophy's far too over-reaching claims. As Strauss puts it
rather succinctly, "On the *querelle des anciens et des
modernes*: I do not deny, but assert, that modern philosophy has
much that is essential in common with Christian medieval philosophy;
but that means that the *attack* of the moderns is directed
decisively against *ancient* philosophy" (CCM, p. 106).
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, "modern philosophy emerged by way
of transformation of, if in opposition to, Latin or Christian
scholasticism" (JPCM, p. 252).



Strauss's distinction between Judaism and Islam, on the one
hand, and Christianity, on the other, is decisive for understanding
his conception of the relation between Jerusalem and Athens as well as
for appreciating his conception of the theologico-political problem,
as a diagnosis of modernity's philosophical, theological, and
political ills. On an epistemological level, philosophy may well have
good arguments to make in response to revelation. Strauss explicitly
criticizes what he regards as Rosenzweig's and Karl
Barth's decisionist conception of revelation, i.e. revelation as
a leap of faith, which, he maintains, holds no promise of rationalism.
From an epistemological point of view, philosophy understood as a way
of life, concerned with problems and unconvinced of promises of
absolute solutions, will appear more rational to potential
philosophers.



Yet for Strauss the serious argument with which revelation challenges
philosophy is not epistemological but moral. This is not to deny the
importance of the pursuit of truth for Strauss, but it is to return to
his criticism of the modern depreciation of pre-scientific or
pre-philosophical knowledge. Again, Strauss is a critic of the
Enlightenment's view of the self-sufficiency of reason. If
philosophy is to have critical potential, argues Strauss, philosophy
must be skeptical even of itself. This means that philosophers should
not only tolerate religion for their own instrumental purposes but
that philosophy is challenged by revelation, understood as law and not
as knowledge, on *moral* grounds.


## 9. Strauss's Moral Argument for Revelation



Strauss argues, both in his early work on medieval Jewish rationalism
and in his mature American work, that only revelation, and not
philosophy, can provide the basis of a universal morality. To be sure,
this universal morality is based on faith and not certain knowledge.
Nevertheless, it does underscore a moral weakness in the philosophical
position. Nowhere does Strauss highlight this point more than in his
seminal 1943 essay on the medieval Jewish thinker Judah Halevi. This
essay became an integral part of *Persecution and the Art of
Writing* and far from an obscure relic of an interest in things
Jewish and medieval, Strauss's reference to this essay forms a
decisive part of his argument in *Natural Right and
History*.



Strauss's reading of Halevi centers on the question of what
Halevi, in his *Kuzari*, could have meant by the "law of
reason." Through a detailed analysis of the Halevi's
*Kuzari*, Strauss concludes, "the *iura naturalia*
are really not more than the indispensable and unchangeable minimum of
morality required for the bare existence of any society." But as
Strauss points out, the unchangeable minimum of morality is in fact,
from a moral point of view, not very much after all. In explicating
Halevi's position, Strauss elaborates on Halevi's comment
in the *Kuzari* that "Even a gang of robbers must have a
kind of justice among them if their confederacy is to last,"
(the analogy refers to, without mentioning, Plato's parable of
the robbers in *Republic*, Book 1, 342b-d). Strauss writes:



> 
> he [the philosopher in Halevi's *Kuzari*] mentions among
> the governmental laws of the Divine code the prohibition against
> murder, e.g. while he does not mention it among the governmental and
> rational nomoi which are known independently of revelation; this again
> is easily understandable considering that the Bible prohibits murder
> absolutely, whereas a gang of robbers, e.g., would merely have to
> prohibit the murder of other members of the gang. (PAW, p. 132)
> 



Strauss concludes his study of Halevi by suggesting that "by
going so far with the philosophers...he [Halevi] discover[s] the
fundamental weakness of the philosophic position and the deepest
reason why philosophy is enormously dangerous" (PAW, p. 140). On
Strauss's reading of Halevi, philosophy leads to the dangerous
denial of an absolute morality that is not contingent upon allegiance
to a specific group.



In *Natural Right and History* Strauss does not deny that we
can know right and wrong, but he does question strongly whether
philosophy in and of itself can defend a universal morality beyond
that of a closed city or society. Significantly, Strauss alludes to
Halevi's analogy of a gang of robbers when he writes:



> 
> But it is unfortunate for the defenders of justice that it is also
> required for the preservation of a gang of robbers: the gang could not
> last a single day if its members did not refrain from hurting one
> another, if they did not help one another, or if each member did not
> subordinate his own good to the good of the gang (NRH, p. 105).
> 



Strauss's allusion to Halevi is made all the stronger by a
reference to his essay on Halevi in a note to the following sentence:
"There exists an alternative medieval interpretation of
Aristotle's doctrine [of natural right], namely, the Averroistic
view or, more adequately stated, the view characteristic of the
falasia, as well as of the Jewish Aristotelians" (NRH, p.
158). The context of this comment and note is Strauss's
distinction between the Aristotelian view of natural right and the
Socratic-Platonic view. For Aristotle, Strauss writes, "there is
no fundamental disproportion between natural right and the
requirements of political society" (NRH, p. 156). In contrast,
Strauss maintains, the Platonic-Socratic view of natural right
recognizes a fundamental discrepancy between the justice of natural
right, which is independent of law, and the justice of the city, which
is of necessity dependent on law. The Platonic-Socratic view of
natural right points to the philosopher's lack of inner
attachment to the laws of society.



For Strauss, the "Averroistic view" that is "an
alternative medieval interpretation of Aristotle's
doctrine" is based on the Islamic reception of Plato's
*Laws* and hence is Platonic in a way that the Christian
reading of Aristotle is not. Plato and the "Jewish
Aristotelians," Strauss insists, recognize a fundamental tension
between philosophy and law, which is also the tension between
philosophy and "the city." As Strauss makes clear in
*Natural Right and History*, it is the Christian interpretation
of Aristotle, and particularly Thomas Aquinas' notion of natural
law, that denies this tension: "The Thomistic doctrine of
natural right or, more generally expressed, of natural law is free
from the hesitations and ambiguities which are characteristic of the
teachings, not only of Plato and Cicero, but of Aristotle as
well.... No doubt is left..." (NRH, p. 163). We have
seen that for Strauss, leaving doubt behind is the intellectual error
that led to the theologico-political predicament of the early
twentieth-century, with ultimately terrible consequences for reason,
morality, and politics.



By repeatedly emphasizing his doubts about philosophy's ability
to ground a universal morality, Strauss suggests that revelation
remains and must remain a continual moral challenge for philosophy
(see also JPCM; NRH, pp. 106-107; PAW, p. 140). To be sure,
Strauss's is *not* an argument for revelation. And
Strauss himself was not a believer. But Strauss's arguments
about revelation do offer the believer intellectual resources with
which to challenge the philosopher and for this reason Strauss is
neither indifferent to nor does he reject revelation. As Strauss
concludes his essay on Halevi, "One has not to be naturally
pious, he has merely to have a passionate interest in genuine morality
in order to long with all his heart for revelation: moral man as such
is the potential believer" (PAW, p. 140, emphasis added).



Of course, revelation's challenge to philosophy is but a
challenge and never a victory. At the same time, philosophy always
remains a challenge to revelation's ability to make claims about
conclusive *evidence* for revelation's truth. This mutual
challenge is ultimately a form of moderation. 



While many scholars still see Strauss as clearly siding with Athens
(Meier 2006; Velkley 2011; Lampert 2013), recent scholarship has
continued to debate which side of the divide Strauss finds most
convincing. Some argue that Strauss uncovers "Plato as the
fundamental philosophical ally of the standpoint of Jerusalem, which
rejects the project of a philosophical or scientific foundation of
ethics in favor of its foundsion in divine revelation as law" (Vatter,
p. 206). Others contend that Strauss's "engagement with
Jersualem is itself an aspect of philosophy as a contemplative way of
life" (Bernstein, p. xxii). And still others maintain that
Strauss shared with Maimonides "The struggle to bring about a grerater
amount of harmony through a fertile tension [between philosophy and
the life of Torah], in individual human beings and thus in collective
human affairs" (Green 2013, p. 87). 


## 10. Controversies Revisited



Let us return to the controversies surrounding Strauss and his work,
mentioned above. The claim that Strauss is in some way responsible for
the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq has little
merit. As should be clear from the above, Strauss's work does
not concern policy issues of any sort. If others have adapted his
philosophical ideas in the pursuit of policy questions, they
themselves are responsible for those policy decisions, not Strauss.
Morever, few, if any, real arguments have been advanced that conclude
Bush administration policy makers who studied with Strauss's
students ever consciously applied his ideas when making decisions
concerning the war in Iraq. In the context of such claims about
Strauss's influence on the Bush administration's policies
on Iraq and the Middle East more generally, there is an irony, namely,
that Strauss himself was devoted to revitalizing Islamic philosophy,
as opposed to Christian thought, for the very sake of the future of
western civilization.



Appreciating the centrality of Strauss's concern with the
theologico-political predicament allows us also to reconsider claims
about his purported sympathy for fascism. In recent years, much has
been made of a letter that the young Strauss wrote to his friend Karl
Lowith in 1933. Writing from Paris and reflecting on
Hitler's rise to power, Strauss wrote that it was only possible
to "protest against the shabby abomination" of Nazi
Germany "from the principles of the right, that is from fascist,
authoritarian, and imperial principles" (GS 3, pp.
624-625). A number of Strauss's severest critics refer to
this letter as evidence of Strauss's fascism, if not Nazism.
Yet, as Robert Howse has concisely pointed out, "It requires
only a little care, and remembering the context of the letter, to
understand that Strauss is not here affirming as true 'the
principles of the right' but rather he is suggesting that they
are the only effective basis on which Hitler ('the shabby
abomination') could be opposed in the present
circumstances" (Howse 2012). Rather than an expression of
sympathy for the fascist, imperial right of Hitler's Germany,
Strauss's letter to Lowith is further evidence of his life
long moral worry about liberal democracy's ability to offer a
coherent account of its own normative commitments. It may even
reflect Strauss's fundamental commitment to peace (Howse, 2014).



The variety of claims about Strauss's view of esotericism,
mentioned above, is also fundamentally problematic. First, we have
seen that a crucial, if usually overlooked, presupposition of
Strauss's view of esotericism is his concern with
*written* texts. From the perspective of his own claims about
esotericism, what may or may not have been Strauss's own views
are irrelevant to interpreting his work.



Second, there is no reason to conclude, as many do, that Strauss
himself wrote esoterically. For instance, Laurence Lampert's
view that "It is reasonable to suspect that a partisan of
esoteric philosophy [i.e. Strauss] would himself write
esoterically" (Lampert 2009, p. 63) simply does not follow from
Strauss's own claims. In Strauss's words, "The only
presentations of an author's views which can be accepted as true
are those ultimately borne out by his own explicit statements"
(PAW, pp. 26-27). While Maimonides announces in the introduction
to the *Guide* that he will write esoterically, Strauss makes
no such statement. So too, in Strauss's words, "the
problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of
things, is the heart of things" (TM, p. 13). Strauss tells us
that the theologico-political predicament is his focal issue. Why
should we, on the basis of Strauss's own terms, think
otherwise?



Third, suggestions that Strauss reads a multitude of authors
esoterically simply do not hold up. Strauss only uses the term
"esotericism" in *Persecution and the Art of
Writing* and hence only in connection with Halevi, Spinoza, and
Maimonides.



And fourth, Strauss never claims to have discovered any secret in
Maimonides or anyone else, but rather an understanding of the
necessity and limits of philosophy as it relates to revelation and
politics. Indeed, as Strauss put it to Guttmann in 1949, "the
problem in principle of esotericism" is "the relationship between
thought and society" (as quoted in Meier, 24n32). 



All of these issues aside, the most persistent and serious
misunderstanding of Strauss is that he promotes mass deception. On
this reading, Strauss suggests that the masses simply cannot handle
the truth and are in need of a class of political elites who, while
themselves pursuing the truth, support the noble lies necessary for
any society to function. If this was Strauss's view then, as
Moshe Halbertal has recently and rightly noted, Strauss or "the
Straussians are...naive in believing that genuine elites can
be trusted. Trusting the existence of a selected group of wise men who
are devoted to the collective good, and who are freed from ambition
and self-interest because of their pursuit of truth, is as crude as
the belief in a society where masses disappear and deliberation and
reason control human's political choices" (CR, p. 163).
Halbertal calls Strauss's conception of esotericism
"instrumental" because it "focuses on the harmful
results of the dissemination" [of the truth] (CR, p. 149).



Yet if we understand Strauss's rather minimal claims about
esotericism as an antidote to what he called the theologico-political
predicament of modernity, then this reading of Strauss (regardless of
what various Straussians claim) is not quite right. As we have seen,
Strauss develops his conception of esotericism in an attempt to
rethink the relation between theory and praxis. Esotericism is not
merely a political, or instrumental, tool for Strauss but also
concerns the very nature of truth. Esotericism points to what Strauss
regards as the critical problem of philosophy, which concerns the
self-sufficiency of reason. Halbertal is right that "Humans,
even those who devote themselves to truth, are always embedded within
the boundaries of the human condition" (CR, p. 163). But this
should not be a criticism of Strauss but is better understood as
describing the very impetus for the dialogical structure of
Strauss's account of esotericism.



Although he does not apply it to Strauss, Halbertal provides a more
helpful rubric under which we may better understand Strauss's
conception of esotericism. Strauss's view of esotericism is not
"instrumental" but instead "essential," which
means that, to quote Halbertal, esotericism "is not the result
of a strategy adopted by philosophy in its relation toward society,
but is part of the essence of the philosophical realm" (CR, p.
57). As Halbertal notes, this position leads to a skeptical position
that Shlomo Pines (a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem from 1952-1990 and the translator of
Maimonides' *Guide of the Perplexed* into English for
which Strauss provided the introduction) attributed to Maimonides (in
an article which, incidentally, he published after Strauss's
death). While Pines' concern was specifically with
Maimonides' account of language, Strauss saw esotericism as a
more generalized form of philosophical skepticism. To return to
Strauss's abiding interest in the relation between theory and
practice, Strauss's skepticism was also skeptical of itself in
recognizing the limits, political, moral, and philosophical, of
skepticism. This recognition, for Strauss, is the work of a truly
critical philosophy.


## 11. Remaining Problems with Strauss's Philosophy



Leaving aside legitimate debate about the intellectual history of
western civilization that Strauss sketches, problems remain with many
of his philosophical contentions. Strauss certainly cannot be said to
have offered definitive arguments against historicism, definitive
arguments for or against revelation, or definitive arguments for a
return to "nature." Rather, in all these cases, one might
argue, Strauss has merely begged the question. Strauss historicizes
philosophy in order to make an argument for timeless truth. His
rational defenses of both the possibility of revelation and
philosophical rationalism are made on the basis of a critique of
reason's self-sufficiency. Finally, Strauss's claims about
a return to "nature" rest not upon arguments for
"nature" but rather upon arguments about the consequences
of not having a conception of "nature."



In the end, how one evaluates the circular nature of Strauss's
questions and answers will depend upon how seriously one takes
Strauss's diagnosis of the "theologico-political
predicament of modernity." If one does not think Strauss has
made a serious case for the dire intellectual and political
implications of this predicament, then one will not be persuaded that
Strauss has done much more than creatively re-read some pre-modern
philosophers, for better or for worse. If on the other hand, one finds
Strauss's diagnosis of the "theologico-political
predicament" persuasive, one might think that Strauss has
accomplished quite a lot by raising the questions of truth,
revelation, and nature anew in a day and age in which discussion of
these matters seems to have been deemed moot.