Susan Orr: Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 24, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.

 

For many students, the political philosophizing of Leo Strauss first comes to sight in the opposition between natural right and historicism, or perhaps in the opposition between ancient and modern. But for Strauss himself, according to his account in the Preface to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, political philosophy came to sight when, as “a young Jew born and raised in Germany,” he “found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament” (New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 1). Understood in light of the high rather than the low, this predicament resolves into the opposition or apparent opposition between revelation and reason. Strauss very nearly begins his account of the results of his investigation by admitting that unassisted human reason—thought unaided by divine revelation and governed by the principle of non-contradiction—cannot refute the testimony of the Bible. Aware of the political dangers of this admission, which becomes even more acute when Biblical motifs are ‘secularized,’ Strauss, famously turns to an investigation of premodern political philosophy, wandering far from Jerusalem, but without ever forgetting what Jerusalem stands for.

Susan Orr has written a commentary on “Jerusalem and Athens,” an essay that is in some sense central to Strauss’s Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Concerned that some of Strauss’s students have wandered altogether too far from what Jerusalem, Orr seeks to remind them, and all students of Strauss, of what Jerusalem stands for in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. At the end of her introduction she frames the question this way: Leo Strauss, “cautious nihilist” or “reluctant believer” (18)? Thus, in good Straussian fashion, she compels us to ask if Strauss might have been a reluctant nihilist or a cautious believer, or perhaps neither a nihilist nor a believer, but something else (for example, a Platonic political philosopher).

Orr’s introduction is the first of seven chapters. In Chapter 2, “Preliminary Reflections,” she observes that Athens and Jerusalem represent “the two great traditions of philosophy and faith” (22), of human guidance, freedom, contemplation, and progress as distinguished from divine guidance, obedience, and return. She thereby compels us to consider whether philosophy and faith are equally traditions, or if both are traditions. She goes on to present an elegant and accurate outline of Strauss’s essay, commenting that the central section is devoted to “Greek counterparts” of the Biblical account of genesis, of God’s creation, and that the central paragraph of the essay “deals with the curse of Canaan, the excellence of Nimrod, and the Tower of Babel—a paragraph which, “according to Strauss, contains the biblical understanding of the beginning of man as a political animal” (32). This observation compels us to consider that the phrase “political animal” most immediately calls to mind the political thought of Aristotle, a student of Plato.

Chapter 3 contains an ingenious argument concerning one aspect of the theme of beginning or genesis. Strauss observes that for “Jerusalem” the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, whereas for “Athens” the beginning of wisdom is wonder. Orr asks, Is not Biblical awe akin to Greek wonder? (She thus draws our attention to Strauss’s own denial, in another place, that awe is akin to wonder.) Orr continues: By emphasizing fear, not awe, Strauss artfully conceals “the compelling rationality of Jerusalem”; he does this because he is “lulling the atheists to sleep” (49). Why would sing this lullaby of Broadway? Because in his time and place the reigning opinion was atheistic. To be a man of faith in the modern world is to blaspheme against a militant and powerful atheism, an atheism that will confine the scholar of religious faith to some academic ghetto.

In singing this song, Strauss partakes of an art common to Jerusalem and Athens, Orr argues. Strauss prepares dogmatic atheists to awaken to what will be for them a new, reasoned consideration of “Jerusalem” (56). In the essay itself, of course, Strauss contrasts ‘scientific’ Biblical criticism not with the Bible itself but with natural theology. Strauss remarks that he will begin on the surface of the Bible, where both orthodox believers and ‘scientific’ historians begin.

In her central chapter, Orr writes that Strauss describes Jewish and Islamic revelation as perfect law, not dogma, as rational systems, even if revealed through a mere human being, a prophet. She is artfully silent on Strauss’s description of the “loyal philosophers” or falasifa as non-orthodox. Orr observes that Strauss’s emphasis on the coherence, rather than the divine inspiration of the Biblical account of genesis once again softens the dogmatism of atheists, who will now admire that coherence without bristling prematurely at the question of its source. Neither Strauss, nor Orr following Strauss, shirks the question of the Bible’s source. Orr writes that Strauss “says that man shares with God” not so much reason as an “ability to change his ways” (69). If God is “unpredictable,” then philosophy, governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “cannot touch” Him (69). It might be added that philosophy, then, cannot touch man either, that political philosophy is impossible, and that Heidegger is right. If the “seeming contradictions” of God in the Bible demonstrate the ability of God to change His ways, this does admit “the possibility that the Bible is inspired” (73), but it leaves open whether the Bible was inspired by God or by (equally changeable) men. In pointing to “the fundamental inscrutability of God” (86), one might suspect that Strauss invites us to wonder rather than to fear. But if one wonders rather than fears, one need not engage in either early-Heideggerian assertiveness or late-Heideggerian passivity.

According to the Bible, human life is not originally political. God intended man to be an apolitical being of childlike innocence governed by God. Man was not intended to know the good, morally or intellectually. “The difference between the Bible’s first discussion of politics and, for instance, Aristotle’s assertion that man is political by nature is astonishing” (83), Orr rightly comments. Strauss’s central paragraph describes “political life… as we know it now” (90): The human, Nimrodian attempt to united mankind by force fails when God destroys the Tower of Babel and confuses the tongues of the inhabitants, scattering human beings to the ends of the earth. This prevents “a worldwide kingdom” (90). One might add to Orr’s account that in this paragraph Strauss sides with the Biblical teaching against not only Nimrod but Hegel, (most immediately) Kojève, and all who would commit the sin against the Holy Spirit by replacing the Holy Spirit with the Absolute Spirit. By doing so, Strauss does not necessarily commit himself fully to Biblical conviction, but rather challenges us to see why ‘universalizing’ reason does not commit us to universal or worldwide government.

Perhaps these wonderings about God, including his wonderings about God’s justice in the story of Abraham and Isaac, lead Strauss to shift his attention from Genesis to Exodus, specifically, to the teaching on God’s name. Here Strauss says “I believe,” not “I know,” and translates the Tetragrammaton not as “I am that I am” but “I shall be what I shall be.” This reemphasizes the changeability of God, even as it emphasizes the covenants, the promises of God. Covenants require predictability, one might note. Following Strauss, Orr argues that “I am that I am” is too metaphysical to fit Biblical thought, too Being-oriented. “[O]ne can even go further” and “say that it is difficult even to speak abstractly in Hebrew” (93). God ‘is,’ so to speak, pure willing, not pure thought thinking itself; God is a person, not an ‘it.’ This tends to make the God of the Bible very close to Allah of the Koran—possibly too close. If God is pure willing, pure, arbitrary, “I shall be what I shall be,” then why does He exhibit such remarkable consistency throughout the Hebrew Scriptures? It is true that He ‘changes His mind’ from time to time, but only in response to the words and actions of men, themselves created with the capacity for free will.

In her fifth chapter, Orr discusses Strauss’s account of the “Greek counterparts” of Genesis, centrally, the account handed down by Hesiod. Now that he has atheists thinking rather than merely disbelieving, Strauss here admits that the Torah is not a coherent whole, but a compilation. Strauss uncompromisingly prefers the Biblical God, who is wise, and whose jealousy of man’s love stems “not out of need, but out of concern for us” (103), to Hesiod’s Zeus, who is jealous of Metis because Metis has wisdom Zeus lacks. Aristotle reflects “Greek” presuppositions in asking “whether it is prudent to call a man happy until after he is dead so as not to provoke the envy of the gods” (103). (Elsewhere, we know, Strauss in effect questions the piety of Aristotle, by noticing that the classical political philosophers, including Aristotle, exhibit the ancient city more as a natural not as a holy city [The City and Man, 240-241]. This may mean that the Philosopher feared human envy more than divine.) At any rate, the gods of Greece are ruled by fate, by a force; the ultimate power in the Greek universe is impersonal, ‘beyond good and evil.’ Aristotle’s god, not to be confused with fate, is pure thought thinking itself. Pure thought thinking itself transcends justice and injustice, although it does not transcend goodness. Be that as it may, Aristotle’s god is not a jealous god, any more than the God of the Bible is an envious one. To reflect upon the differences and similarities between envious, jealous, and neither envious nor jealous gods is to reflect upon the theme of ‘Jerusalem and Athens’—though not, to be sure, to exhaust it. Plato’s god is closer to the Biblical God than Aristotle’s. Orr notes that Plato’s theology, with its talk of providence, is both the closest “Greek” thing to the Biblical account of God and likely to be a noble lie (114).

In the sixth chapter, Orr turns to the second, much shorter, part of Strauss’s essay. In “On Socrates and the Prophets,” Strauss shows how not to bring the Bible and Plato together. He sets up a contrast between himself and the Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. The diverge on the issue of historicism. “By combining the social ideals of Plato and the prophets, [Cohen] envisioned a world of the future in which there would be no suffering, and no distinctions among men” (128). Orr thereby points us to the reflection that historicism is that part of philosophic thought that most closely imitates Biblical providence. Has philosophy corrupted religion, or vice-versa? (Or has each corrupted the other?) Perhaps this is the reason why Strauss distinguishes reason from revelation, even when he takes pains to defend revelation from charges of irrationality.

The problem of historicism, and of the politics historicism spawns, raises the problem of false prophets. In one of her most insightful passages, Orr remarks that Strauss does not “make the traditional arguments for distinguishing false from true prophets”; that false prophets are those who contradict Mosaic law; that true prophets “demonstrate the veracity of their calling through miracles” (136). Rather, in Strauss’s words, “false prophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is the temple in Jerusalem, the promised land, nay, the chosen people itself, nay, God’s promise to the chosen people if that promise is taken to be an unconditional promise and not part of a Covenant” (136). This attack on materialism is indeed a kind of Platonism and stands in opposition to all prophecy-of-the-flesh, whether it be dialectical materialism or the dialectical immaterialism of the Absolute Spirit. This stance comports with Strauss’s opinion that Socrates is “by Strauss’s definition, a pious man” (140), one “who investigates the human things and leaves divine things alone” (141). Moreover, “[f]rom Socrates and therefore philosophy’s perspective, the prophets have a beneficial purpose” (143); philosophy “lacks teeth” (144), but prophets, as orators, do not, and (one might add) philosophers might influence the thought of prophets. That it is not a good thing for prophets’ impulses to rule philosophers may be seen in the history of historicism.

In her concluding chapter, Orr accurately asserts that Socrates, unlike Nietzsche, does not hold it possible to unite Jerusalem and Athens, to synthesize reason and revelation. Strauss thereby establishes himself as “the new guide”—a better guide than Nietzsche—for perplexed moderns.

A gentle but firm guide to the perplexed reader of Strauss, Orr proceeds with careful judgment, slowing down impatient souls who want to the philosopher to ‘get to the point.’ She knows that a philosopher wants his student to be the one who gets to the point, and none too hastily. The impulse to get to the point too hastily yields an undue agitation for eschatological relief.

It makes sense to suppose that philosophy requires a way of life. Any ‘ruling passion’ must orient the actions of the one ruled by it. There might well be a characteristic life-pattern, a regime of sorts, of those ruled by the love of wisdom, philo-sophia. The pattern might be indistinct, susceptible to enormous variations, even as the love of money might animate an athlete, a financier, or a killer for hire. Still, the difference between a wisdom-love and a money-lover (assuming that wisdom does not culminate in the love of money) must play out inactions as well as states of soul insofar as he loves money, a man will converse about no general topics, unless conversing about general topic brings in money. And even then, the money-loving talker will likely tailor his speech to attract a large, paying audience; he will prefer to tell them of that wisdom they will desire and accept as wisdom. There would then be no distinction between the life of the philosopher and the life of the sophist.

What Richard Schusterman describes as “professional philosophy” must then be no philosophy at all, or some extraordinarily fortunate philosophy. [1] In its good fortune, it may not be fully aware of the condition of its flourishing: some political regime that encourages (or at least does not seriously discourage) citizens to pay to listen to philosophers. Insofar as philosophers are unaware of the conditions of their own existence, they are at risk. Insofar as they are unaware, they are also unphilosophical. Perhaps fortunately, it has become increasingly difficult for even “professional philosophy” to remain unphilosophical in this way, given the radical and disruptive challenges to the very conditions of academic ‘professionalism’ seen in the past several decades. Unfortunately, these challenges also tempt or intimidate the professional profs into capitulation.

Schusterman would meet this challenge with a particular form of philosophy, pragmatism, especially as conceived by the first-generation American pragmatist, John Dewey. Dewey blends theoria and technē while avoiding the ‘aristocratic’/’vanguard’ consequences of both Hegelian/Marxist thought on one side and l’art pour l’art estheticism on the other. Dewey wants a democratic, meliorist fusion of theory and practice; “philosophy for everyone” may not be Socratic, as Schusterman claims, but it is a characteristic motif of American pragmatism.

It is not clear that philosophy as conceived by pragmatists can finally distinguish itself from any other practical activity. Fuse theory and practice, and what is the wisdom a philosopher loves? How does philosophy differ from pounding a nail, making a layup, sawing on a fiddle (assuming that Rome isn’t burning)? How does a pragmatic philosopher distinguish himself from a pragmatic politician, a successful commodities trader, a happy hooker? Pragmatism in philosophy may bring for a dark night in the city of pigs where all sows are black. At one point, Dewey tries to distinguish a good man in his ‘growth’ from a criminal in his professional growth, with embarrassing implausibility. [2]  It isn’t clear that Schusterman can do any better.

Martha C. Nussbaum ‘feminizes’ pragmatism. [3] Philosophy is to be not only “practical” but “compassionate.” Unlike Dewey, she looks not to Francis Bacon and his modern project, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, but to the Hellenistic philosophers. The Hellenistic “combination of logic with compassion” attracts her, as long as it can be supplemented with Aristotle’s political sense.

But will not an ambition to formulate a politics of compassion not land the philosopher somewhere in the orbit whose apogee is Rousseau and whose perigee is Marx, with all the concomitant secular-religiosities that that orbit traces? To put it another way: Dewey’s Baconianism has a thumoerotic Machiavellian core, of which Dewey himself may or may not be aware. (Bacon was.) Machiaville and Baconsburg (more grandly, the New Atlantis) are fundamentally towns without pity, although the latter can make quite a show of pity. To be effective in the real world, pity needs power; absent an omnipotent and providential God, it needs self-empower and thumoerotic Man. Rousseauian compassion, replacing Christian charity, has recourse neither to prayer nor to technological power; the Hegelian and Marxist attempts to find a secular replacement for the all-powerful God who has disappeared—the eschatology of ‘historical’ dialectic—have simply failed. Why would recourse to the philosophers of antiquity, who were not especially compassionate or ‘constructive’ in the modern sense, rescue the mission?

Michel Foucault traces what appears at first to be the progressive moralization of philosophy, but turns out to be philosophy’s progressive accommodation to despotism. [4] Socratic philosophy is already ‘moralizing’ and ‘politicizing,’ at least in contrast with the natural philosophy that preceded it. Politics means ruling oneself and others and being ruled by others. The Stoics under the Roman Empire and the Christians, also under an empire, shift the emphasis to ‘being ruled.’

‘Being ruled’ means writing more, talking less. Laws are written. Bureaucratic regulations are written. The vast bureaucratic empire of Rome evidently produced a philosophy of rules and regulations. Ruling ‘by the rules’ must attend to the body, inasmuch as the body is more easily ‘accessible’ to rule by rules than is the soul. But this does not prevent attempts to rule the soul by rules, to make the soul assay itself in accordance with a network of rules laid down by a pedagogue-king to respectfully silent students, their souls treated as if they were passive bodies waiting to be pierced and tattooed.

Rule-bound philosophy risks losing the ascent from the cave, perhaps the most distinctive feature of Socratic philosophizing. In Foucault’s words, “Alēthia becomes ethos.” But if truth simply becomes ethos, one has a sort of pre-modern version of Enlightenment, a triumph of the sophists, of soi-disant knowers over philosophers.

Thus Foucault’s Stoics are distinguished from Christians primarily because their rules come from nature and not from a personal God. The personal God, not unlike the worldly king, requires self-revelation and submission. The personal God kindly requires submission for the sake of human salvation, whereas the worldly king, if he is a tyrant, will have no such charity at heart. In the monastery, “obedience is complete control of behavior by the master, not a final autonomous state,” ultimately because in a created world there is no autonomous state. “The self must constitute itself through obedience” because it does not finally constitute itself at all; God constitutes the human soul, which, to survive, must return in fear and trembling to its Maker.

Foucault additionally claims that the emphasis on ‘being ruled’ reflects a shift from caring for oneself to knowing oneself. this implies that Plato’s Socrates, that first of all self-knowers, was more despotic than anyone, a claim that goes badly with his dialogic disposition. “In Greco-Roman culture,” Foucault writes, “knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes that fundamental principle.” Yes, but only in the sense that knowledge, including self-knowledge, is conceived as power—a Baconian not a Platonic notion. Foucault here is Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean.

Thus, in his commentary on Alcibiades I, Foucault remarks that “the intersection of political ambition and philosophical love is ‘the care of the self,'” but fails to remark that this intersection fails, that Alcibiades careens to political disaster and Socrates must flee or drink hemlock. Theory and practice, self-knowledge and politics, do not so easily unite, and Plato’s dialogues tell us that in a rich variety of ways. Theory and practice are related, but their unity is not more easy to effect than a polis ruled by philosopher-kings. Foucault’s own attempt to united theory and practice non-rationally, ‘experientially,’ in the “limit experience”—a pragmatism for anti-Enlighteners—replaces the Nietzschean “yes to life” with “yes to death,” and thereby cancels itself.

Unlike the pragmatists and Foucault, Pierre Hadot claims neither philosophic nor ‘anti-philosophic’ status for himself. [5]  He present himself as a scholar. Perhaps because he doesn’t try to make something of the philosophers he reads, he recovers the character of the old philosophers intact. Philosophers are “strange,” foreigners in their native countries; Socrates is “unclassifiable” to the men of this world, the political men (when they do not mistake him for a sophist). This means conflict, not meliorism, and the philosopher had better watch his step. Hadot sees that the Hellenistic rules exist not for themselves but for the instrumental purpose of getting the philosopher through the day, a day full of numerous unphilosophic dangers. The zeteticism of Ulysses needs the prudence of Ulysses. But the arête of Ulysses is not “inner freedom”—here Hadot Rousseauizes—but the alliance of prudence and courage symbolized by Athena. (Unless the alliance of prudence and courage is what Hadot means by “inner freedom.”) Better is his Georges Friedmann citation from that year of bad events, 1942, exhorting us to strive to become worthy of the revolution rather than to revolutionize too directly. To become worthy of the revolution might bring forth a real revolution. (Or, as someone observed, the real American Revolution took place in the minds and hearts of Americans.) A real revolution might or might not turn out to be a political revolution. Why else found a city in speech?

 

Notes

1. Richard Schusterman: Practical Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophic Life. New York: Routledge, 1997.
2. John Dewey: Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1968 [1916].
3. Martha C. Nussbaum: Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
4. Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. Alan Sheridan translation. New York: Vintage Books, 1977 [1975].
5. Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercise from Socrates to Foucault.  Michael Chase translation. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

Eyeing death, Montaigne negotiates with his reader over the terms of his immortality. He begins by distinguishing the useful from the honorable. The emperor Tiberius said, “The Roman people were accustomed to take vengeance on their enemies by open means, arms in hand, not by fraud or surreptitiously.” But Tiberius was an “imposter.” Montaigne proceeds somewhat differently. He is no Roman, no man of war. He is a peace negotiator. He too claims to proceed unsurreptitously. “I have an open way that easily insinuates itself and gains credit on first acquaintance. Pure naturalness and truth”—he adds, a touch sententiously—”in whatever age, still find their time and their place.” Indeed they do, but not quite in the seeming sense of Montaigne, here.

Is Montaigne too an imposter? Perish the thought, he exclaims. Those who so suspect “make my subtlety too subtle.” “There is no rule” in any “school” that could do what Montaigne does in his negotiations with the armed prophets of the French civil war. One might even say that great philosophers have been “too enslaved to exhibit reverence for the laws.” One should not “call dishonorable and foul” certain “natural actions that are not only useful but necessary.” A prince should “attribute” the necessity for certain actions to God’s action, “a blow from the divine rod.” After all, “no private utility is worthy of our doing… violence to our conscience.” Yes, but: When it is a matter of “the public utility,” and “when it is very apparent and very important”—well, that is another matter. With Montaigne as for Machiavelli, utility quietly replaces honor as the quintessential public virtue.

Certain actions, even if supremely useful, might impel a conscientious man to repentance. But as Montaigne looks at himself in old age he can only sigh, resignedly, “Now it is done.” And besides, he says immediately, he is being remade from one minute to the next. Somehow he is both irremediable and perpetually malleable, undeserving of legal chastisement and unable to conform to any rule. As an author he plays no role—grammarian, poet, jurist. He is himself, he is every man. That is, he plays all the roles. He basks in no glory. His immortality is in his universality, not his distinction. “I do not teach”—the people will not call to him, ‘Rabbi, Rabbi’—but he is a prophet without honor in his own country. Unlike the most honored prophet, he will not find honor or reverent obedience in some other country. Seeking honor can get you crucified; reverent obedience is unproductive. Montaigne is rather a sort of Socrates, leading the life of man “in conformity with its natural condition.” With Montaigne, nature replaces God as the source of ‘prophecy.’

To reach higher is to fail. “Those who in my time have tried to correct the world’s morals by new ideas, reform the superficial vices; the essential ones”—those useful and necessary?—”they leave as them they were, if they do not increase them; and increase is to be feared.” Montaigne says “Pythagoreans” but means Christians in criticizing those who “believe that they feel great regret and remorse within; but of amendment or correction, or interruption, they show us no sign.” There can be no radical conversion, no ‘new man.’ “Repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power.” What Nietzsche says thunderously Montaigne says quietly: Love our own piece of fatum, will the eternal return. “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived.” that is a spear in the side of Christian renewal.

As for the philosophical life, like Jesus Socrates arranged his own death, but not out of martyrdom, not to save or transform human beings. Socrates arranged his own death because nature was turning out the lights. A philosopher will adapt to the circumstance, whether it be advancing age or the currently regnant folly that is public opinion. He will know that “the fairest souls are those that have the most variety and adaptability,” and that “life is uneven, irregular, and multiform movement.” The Montaignian Socrates does not point ‘up’ to unchanging forms but ‘around’ to changing ones. That goes for himself, too. “I would rather fashion my mind than furnish it.” Invoking God and Socrates, Montaigne praises useful knowledge.

Of the three kinds of association—with men, with women, with books—women are pleasant if beautiful and well-bred; men are pleasant and useful if they are of that “rarest type among us” who know how to converse. But books are neither so susceptible to aging as women nor so rare as the rarest men. Montaigne retires to his library, where he can read and pace. (This is no nihilistic Flaubert who thinks sitting down, to be caught by some sharp-eyed wanderer of the future.) But finally in his most private moments Montaigne is alone, unmoveable, enthroned. The admirer of Contr’un is secretly solitary, a monarch, a man alone, like Machiavelli’s prince, and even more like Machiavelli himself—in retirement, teaching the princes (he who denies he teaches), an unmoved mover in a skin that always changes its colors to math its background. Christianity presents the miracle of God in a human body. Montaigne presents the greater miracle of a god in the shape of the most inconspicuous reptile, not even so worrisome as a serpent.

How can such a weak, lowly chameleon achieve immortality, even rule generations to come more effectively than Jesus? Because Jesus’ followers have a secret weakness. They avert their eyes from death and look to Heaven. They seek vengeance upon atheists who do not aver their eyes; they fix their eyes vengefully upon atheists and other criminals, killing them because to the pious death is a frightening evil. They can be diverted by “the beauty of a contrary picture,” a picture of clemency and kindness winning honor, favor and good will. Political men can always be so diverted. as for the people, they can be diverted by some silly spectacle. Just be sure not to fall in love with your own diversion, as women sometimes do.

The free spirits can look at death without averting their eyes. For them there is la gaya scienza. La gaya scienza teaches that mind and body are really one. La gaya scienza will prefer health as the real good of human being. La gaya scienza will pursue a discreet policy of sexual liberation., recognizing that love and marriage are a dysfunctional couple. Montaigne here attacks fidelity, perhaps fidelity tout court. The key to many a Montaignian essay is to convert the images to their theological equivalents and then prepare to think unfaithful thoughts. Fidelity is itself a policy of diversion—specifically, of sublimation. But sublimation only rechannels natural passions, making them more powerful, converting them into fanaticism, violence. Montaigne diverts the diverted and perverts the perverted. La gaya scienza is never solemn, because men are such fools. “Our delights and our excrements have been lodged together pell-mell, and… the supreme sensual pleasure is attended, like pain, with faintness and moaning.” What god created such animals? And young M. Foucault, I see what you see, feel what you feel, but are you not altogether too serious, too much in earnest, about all these passions, exquisite limit-pleasures, and bondages? Are you sufficiently gay, mon ami?

When it comes to God, the judge of men’s follies, Montaigne mounts not the divine chariot but a down-to-earth coach. When tutoring a prince, “it is all too easy to impress liberality on a man who has the means to practice it all he wants at the expense of others.” Liberality in a prince goes as well with tyranny as with royalty. The real royal virtue is justice. Montaigne always tempers his justice not with mercy but with toleration. Central to Book III is chapter seven, “Of the disadvantage of greatness.” The advantage to being a king is that, like a preacher, you address the people, “an inexact judge, easy to dupe, easy to satisfy.” The disadvantage of kingly greatness is that you never really know yourself, know the truth—never can measure exactly your real abilities against those of others. Your real identity is consumed by your royalty. As solitary as a king but, unlike one, obscure, Montaigne knows himself and thereby has the advantage over kings, human and divine. His spirit someday will permeate the world.

Not that anyone should imitate him. He publishes his imperfections out of caritas, so that others can avoid them. But it is Montaigne’s courage and intelligence in debate that emerge here, not his weakness. Debating “in a small group and for my own sake,” he indulges in “a friendship that delights in the sharpness and rigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.” This is the advantage of ‘polytheism.’ On the Montaignian throne, there can still be dialogue, if not with rare friends then with good books, if not with good books than with one of the monarch’s many selves. This is Montaigne’s solution to the Machiavellian problem: How can the lone prince know? (Machiavelli’s, too? As when he retired to his chamber to dine on his true food?)

Turning from theological to philosophic dealings, then, “I am no philosopher.” No philosopher-king, at any rate, seeking to revolutionize the polis. Stay out of it. Leave it alone. Revolution only brings some worse tyranny. I am universal, no political philosopher at all—a cosmopolitan, a world unto myself. I do not cling to my own, including my own life. (Mirabile dictu, I am a survivor, though, am I not? Just lucky, I guess.) Facing death as I am, allow me to offer you my confession. You may notice that I change themes abruptly, use false essay titles, and so forth. But really “my ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.” The “more casual and accidental” my remarks “seem,” the more beautiful they are. “It is my inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.” I confess, but you are the one to do penance. Go back and read my essays again—the most exquisitely pleasurable penance one could endure.

You really must learn to husband your will. “I keep myself to myself.” As a result—to my astonishment—I am a political philosopher: “I have been able to take part in public affairs without departing a nail’s breadth from myself, and to give myself to others without taking myself from myself.” Now there is the true divine liberality. This divinity is entirely natural. “The laws of Nature teach us what we rightly need”; those who know them “distinguish subtly between the desires that come from her and those that come from the disorder of my imagination.” To be politic, don’t be partisan. My administration “passed without a mark or a trace.” My “gliding, obscure, and quiet life” rules people without their knowing it.

How can Montaigne do that? First he philosophizes without claiming knowledge of causes, at least of ultimate causes. What is a miracle? How would you know one if you saw one? Nature is as obscure as God. You can work wonders, quietly and over time, if you win people’s trust rather than insisting on their fidelity, if you confess your ignorance rather than your sins, if you do not try to explain too much. Be the Montaignian Socrates, not soaring to the good but pulling everything down to earth, “his own original and natural level.” Unlike Jesus, Socrates can be known: “He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do for itself,” not, like Jesus, how much God has done for human nature. “I do not think it becomes us well to let ourselves be taught by a pagan”—Plato—”how great an impiety it is to expect no help from God that is simply his own and without our cooperation.” Or, as Algernon Sidney puts it, God helps those who help themselves. Good men have “nothing to fear from the gods,” Montaigne’s Socrates says. “We naturalists” know: To survive and to triumph, put on an open and useful-looking face. That way, everyone will want you to live, perhaps forever, and everyone will take your advice. Benjamin Franklin will read this, considering it carefully.

“We naturalists” know how to deal with the feverish disease of religious fanaticism. Let nature take its course. Gradually, the fire will burn out. Meanwhile, the prudent man will live, judging naturally, physically, by his own sensations, not by passionate beliefs or overwrought reasonings. (Machiavelli is even more precise: Do not hear, do not look, but touch.) “The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.” Without Jesus or (the Platonic) Socrates.

Montaigne points back to Machiavelli, ahead to Nietzsche. Like them, he opposes the imaginary republics, religious or philosophic. Like those philosophers, he is alone (except for them, one dead, the other far in the future, and a few others). But he proceeds differently. Unlike Machiavelli, Montaigne finds Christians not weakly self-divided but fanatical, leonine—even if they are at the core cowardly lions. He therefore uses the fox much more than the lion, staying in his den; when he ventures out, he pretends he’s just a lazy dog. Unlike Nietzsche, he doesn’t find Christianity in a state of decadence, ready to collapse after a few strong kicks. This Anti-Christ stays at home, never marching toward Jerusalem. The time is not right.

But the times may be ripening. Religion can be diverted, philosophy seized, with an image of a new, multiform, various, ever-changing sort of beauty. Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Montesquieu: Where would these gods of the new Olympus be, without Montaigne’s example? Montaigne’s conclusion is practically a beginning.