Here’s an email I got on Jim’s path-breaking article. I’ve added, very quickly, a couple of my own comments:
It seems the one main lacuna in his argument is that he has no conception of heresy. So, for example, the intrusion of Hegelian ideas in the Social Gospel imperialists is read as the intrusion of philosophy into religion—-but Hegel is not understood, as he should be, as a Christian heretic (which is clear when you read his early theological writings). For that matter, of course, from a Catholic perspective, the whole Puritan problem is that it also is heretical.
The Straussian limitations also show in one place: when he observes that the re-centering of divine providence on the nation, away from the Church, happens first in England (see: Milton). In fact, Milton comes at the end of a century of French Huguenot theological writing that does just that for France. Milton (“the philosopher”) is the capstone to the (heretical) entirely theological development.
MY ADDITION: Tocqueville explains that the Puritans weren’t Christian enough. They legislated on the basis of the Old Testament, and so they criminalize sin in ways never sanctioned by the teaching of Jesus. But there still was something Christian about their egalitarian political idealism. And Tocqueville even adds that there understanding of political institutions was free of prejudice.
MY ADDITION NO. 2: From Stauss’s view, aren’t both Locke and Hegel both Christian heretics in the sense of philosophizing on the basis of nonself-evident Christian premises about personal or individual significance, in Locke’s case, and about historical significance, in Hegel’s sense? From the ancient view, national or political significance or mission is based on the lie of civil theology. But, after Christianity, civil theology is impossible, and so there can be no sophisticated dispensing with thought about the truth of theological and political claims. So we have to ask whether America is REALLY exceptional.
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