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6 - Leo Strauss and theUniqueness of the West
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6 Leo Strauss and the Uniqueness of the West In the introduction to The City and Man, Strauss explains why the recovery of political philosophy in the context of the Cold War is so important. The “crisis of the West,” which is ultimately a battle of ideas, cannot be addressed by the authority of religion alone. “It is not sufficient for everyone to obey and to listen to the Divine Message of the City of Righteousness, the Faithful City.” The dangers of relativism, historicism, and communism, all of which threaten the liberal democracies of the West, must be countered by solid, rational argument. “Man” must understand his relation to the City (the good regime of democracy) through “the proper exercise of his own powers.” It is more urgent to reestablish political philosophy as the “rightful queen of the social sciences” than to obey faith and show “that political philosophy is the indispensable handmaid of theology.” In an increasingly secular age, it seems antiquated to Strauss to return to religion as the solution to the challenges of modernity. As he puts it, “even the highest lawcourt in the land is more likely to defer to the contentions of social science than to the Ten Commandments as the words of the Living God.”1 154 LEO STRAUSS and ANGLO-AMERICAN DEMOCRACY This oft-quoted passage gives the impression that Strauss takes little interest in the enduring influence of biblical revelation on Western civilization . Even a sympathetic reader like George Grant, late in life, concluded that Eric Voegelin wrote more profoundly than Strauss about the relation between reason and revelation, as we have seen. Nevertheless, it is too hasty to conclude that Strauss has nothing to teach about the biblical tradition and its relation to the West. We have already seen how Strauss’s privileging of Athens over Jerusalem does not allow him or his students to escape successfully from the influence of biblical revelation. On a few occasions , however, Strauss offers some instructive lessons on what the Bible can teach to our secular age. Strauss’s appreciation of the distinctive features of Scripture may even help the present age understand how the Bible inevitably shapes the politics of our time. In this concluding chapter I do not intend to revise my overall view in this study that Strauss and his students generally seek to downplay the influence of Christianity on Western political philosophy . However, I do intend to extract a lesson from Strauss’s major essays on the Bible that will help us comprehend why the Anglo-American West, now more than ever, needs to understand its biblical (Christian) origins. Admittedly,ithasnotalwaysbeenobvioustomanyreadersthatStrauss offers important insights on the Bible. Ernest Fortin, one of his most prominent Catholic students, once openly wondered why so few Christian theologians have appreciated or even taken seriously the ideas of the master. Fortin lamented this situation, as he insisted that his teacher “may have performed as great a service for theology as he has for philosophy.” Furthermore, he assured Christians that they have much to learn from Strauss, whose ideas could help them regain some of the “lost credibility” that Christian theologians have suffered in the modern age.2 Although Fortin was mainly addressing his fellow Catholics, I believe his invitation to learn from Strauss should be taken up by anyone who takes biblical religion seriously. Despite the undeniable fact that Strauss wrote very little about the Christian influence on political philosophy, focused exclusively on the Old Testament on those rare occasions that he turned to the Bible, and usually accused medieval and modern authors of manifesting less than sincere respect for faith in their works, I believe that Strauss’s understanding of what he famously calls the “theologico-political problem” teaches a hard lesson about the relation between religion, politics, and morality that is instructive for the present age. Strauss’s pivotal distinction between Athens and Jerusalem, which he brilliantly defends in a few essays, contains this lesson. In his most impor- [3.139.81.58] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:51 GMT) Leo Strauss and the Uniqueness of the West 155 tant essays on this subject, Strauss contends that Greek political philosophy and biblical revelation are fundamentally different from—and even opposed to—each other. The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem is an “antagonism” that breathes a special vitality into the civilization of the West.3 One might also add that Strauss is describing a unique feature of the West that, despite its pretensions to...