Leo Strauss for Believers

These thoughts are offered as an addendum and complement (mostly) to Peter Lawler’s recent  “Leo Strauss and Postmodern Conservatism.”

Whatever Leo Strauss’ personal disposition on the question
of Biblical religion (and he certainly seems not to have been a believer in any
familiar sense), he remains an indispensable thinker for believers because of
his unrivaled deconstruction of the faith of modernity. The modern rationalist critique of religion
is itself based, he shows, on an unexamined faith in the mastery of nature as
the end of knowledge. This critique is
invaluable to all who would resist the blind colossus of modern rationalism,
whatever we think of the alternative Strauss proposed—i.e., the alleged
self-sufficient goodness of philosophic inquiry itself. And this proposed Straussian solution appears
much more nuanced and deliberately political, I believe, on close
examination.

Leo Strauss offers the most perspicacious critique of modern
rationalism because he never loses sight of the question of the good of
thinking, and therefore of the problem of the relation between theory and
practice. The moderns deny the linchpin
of classical thought, the intrinsic good of philosophizing, and thus make
knowing instrumental to power. Power in
turn can only be interpreted according to the most “natural,” that is,
universal, human needs and appetites (at least until Nietzsche’s attempt to
liberate the will to power from this democratic conception of nature).

Leo Strauss understands that the modern critique of the
intrinsic good of philosophy is derivative of the Christian critique of pagan
pride. Modern materialistic universalism
is both directed against and borrowed from the hopes of Christian spiritual
universalism. The collapse of the
Christian synthesis of Greek reason and Jewish revelation produces the modern
project of a new, secular synthesis.

Strauss does not publicize the affinities or parallels
between the Christian and modern syntheses, because he values a practical
alliance with Christian natural law, and because he prefers to hold the
founders of modernity rationally accountable. Only if we consider the rise of modern universalistic hopes as a
rational project can we hold modernity rationally responsible, and thus hold
open the possibility of a more responsible view of reason. It is thus on eminently practical grounds
that Strauss resists portraying modernity as the “secularization” of
Christianity (as in Voegelin’s “immanentization of the eschaton,” for
example).

The alternative Strauss presents to blind modern “rationalism”
is classical natural right, which amounts to the rule of the wise, where
wisdom is grounded in the alleged self-sufficiency of the goodness of
philosophizing. Strauss knows full well
that this assertion of self-sufficiency is a prolongation of aristocratic
pride, and he’s for it precisely for that reason. The nobility of philosophy serves him as the
anchor of virtue and excellence more generally. Thus a moral-political concern lies at the esoteric heart of Strauss’s
recovery of “political philosophy,” and the political is much more than an
exoteric front or a ladder that is finally kicked away.

Strauss is very aware of the one-sidedness of this grounding
of morality and politics. He is aware
that his aristocratic strategy gives short shrift to another dimension of
morality and indeed of the meaning of human existence. This is the dimension he refers to, as it
were in passing, when he asserts quite flatly that humanity is unthinkable
without reference to “sacred restraints.” We are subject to mysteriously grounded limits, divine commands that
cannot be accounted for from the perspective of the nobility of aristocratic
self-sufficiency. These commands issuing
from a divinity beyond the reach of reason connect us with the universality of
humanity and with common human hopes for the redemption of what is dearest to
us as simple human beings. This is to
say, the reference to an author of mysterious “sacred restraints” connect us
with personal love.

But Strauss judges it best not to get philosophy mixed up in
the articulation of personal love or hopes of universal salvation associated
with love; instead he prefers to keep sacred law separate from the nobility of
philosophy, Jerusalem (i.e., Judaism) separate from Athens. Reason on the one hand, and divine law on the
other—and never the twain must meet.

Strauss must know that this strategy is quixotic, since as
soon as he says we must be open to the excellence of philosophy and to the
obedience of the pious, he has made it impossible not to wonder how these dispositions
can be integrated, or at least held together in the same soul. But Strauss suppresses any such integration
because he abominates the modern synthesis, which binds philosophic excellence
to the project of universal salvation.

One might say that Strauss believes that Hegel is not simply
wrong when he presents the culmination of rational universalism as the
fulfillment of Christian revelation. And
I do not believe Strauss is simply wrong in his resistance to the Christian quest
for synthesis, for the attempt to combine reason with love does indeed tend in
the direction of modern rational universalism—of universal “recognition” and “satisfaction”
in a homogenous state.

In other words, Christianity is vulnerable to co-optation by
“social justice,” since its Jewish humility undermines aristocratic
pretensions, and its Hellenism undermines the particularity of Jewish
commandments. To be sure, Christians will appeal to “conscience,”
and to the mediating authority of the Church—but can these avoid borrowing content from Jerusalem and Athens, from
sacred commands and from the pride of human nature?

The only brakes on the secular appropriation of Christian
humility and universalism are Jewish law and pagan honor.

Postmodern conservatism is postmodern because it aspires to
no final synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens that would provide wholly rational
foundations for morality and politics. It is conservative because it sees the truth
in both Jerusalem and Athens, and therefore the partial and dangerous truth in the
drive to synthesize them.

None of this would be possible without Leo Strauss. He reminds us that Christians are not exempt
from the deeply political responsibility of reason.