Hancock on Strauss

Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity and the Human Good. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2026.

Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève: On Tyranny. “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero.” Originally published in 1954.Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 

Leo Strauss: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. E. M. Sinclair translation. Preface to the English Translation. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.

 

In considering Strauss, Hancock initially structures his account in accordance with the philosopher’s dichotomy between ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem,’ reason or philosophy and revelation or religion. He offers interpretations of Strauss’s “Restatement” of his argument against his Hegelian contemporary, Alexandre Kojève, and of the “Preface” to his book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.

Hancock begins with philosophy. “Following Hegel,” Hancock writes, “Kojève understands modern secular rationalism as a transformation and fulfillment of Christian universality and subjectivity.” In Kojève’s view, both Christianity and especially its secular rationalist progeny “released the energy of human labor for the service of human needs” by their egalitarian undermining and eventual demolition of aristocracy, of the few who prided themselves on not-working. The mediation of the few between the one and the many disappeared—in this, Christianity might be said to have followed from late-Roman monarchy—and “a universal society of equal recognition”—the first, of all human beings under God, the second, of all human beings in mutually dependent commercial societies—came forward. Hancock finds Kojève to be more sober than Badiou (no high bar, there) and more realistic than Siedentop (ditto) because the egalitarian revolution has and will continue to be ‘low,’ a matter of satisfying “the most ordinary desires of the most ordinary human beings,” and, in the future, there will be no communism but a universal and homogenous state, a “coercive apparatus” that will never ‘wither away.’ Humanity’s “collective life” will be “supported by total technological mastery, the absolute victory of a final, rational tyranny, a prosaic life in which all poetic projections have been banished along with the cruelty of history.” Nietzsche had already decried the ‘last man’ and called for resistance by holding up the possibility of the ‘super-man,’ the rule of a ‘planetary aristocracy,’ universal but radically undemocratic. By Kojève and Strauss’s time, after two of the world wars Nietzsche had predicted and the rule of the leveling tyrant, Stalin, in the Soviet Union and the rule of the leveling administrative state in the United States, the prospects for a Nietzschean aristocracy seemed very poor, indeed. “Resistance to this pincer movement of the one and the all against the natural and limited space of human existence was, I propose, the central purpose of Leo Strauss’s philosophical career.” 

Strauss concurs with Hegel, Siedentop, Baliou (and Tocqueville) in tracing modern egalitarianism to Christianity although, unlike the first three, he does not celebrate it. The Christian promise of freedom (from sin, in God’s regime on a new heaven and a new earth) has become an “all-too-human project [that] has necessarily degenerated into a rational and technological tyranny”; the apparent freedom of universality, of no-limits, can only be countered by recovering “an appreciation of the permanent contours and, therefore, the permanent limits of the human condition,” by recovering the contours of “necessity”—the necessary limits of human wisdom and the necessary limits of politics, of reciprocal ruling and being ruled in small political communities. Both of these limitations are eschewed by the advocates of “absolute transcendence” (the metaphysics of historicism, with its promise of human conquest of natural necessity) and of “formal universality” (the universal and homogenous state, produce and final agent of that conquest). This is the sense in which Strauss valorizes the “realm of necessity.” Hancock claims that this “idea of an eternal realm of pure, impersonal necessity untouched by human concerns is the projection of a very human claim to rule, the mostly implicit horizon of an essentially aristocratic assertion of human meaning.” But is Strauss actually making an assertion, pure and simple? Is his call to a return to nature and to natural right, as against the illusory freedom of worldwide rule, evidence of a sort of ‘will to power’?

Hancock argues that Strauss “tips his hand more than once to reveal the human and political springs of the philosophic idea of a ‘realm of necessity” while encouraging “the pride of philosophers who would not wish to be reminded of their dependence on common moral and political sources of meaning,” appealing to “the pride of philosophers even as he defines philosophy as beyond human pride,” resorting “shamelessly to argument by high-minded presumption or by peremptory definition,” as when he claims that “we must assume that philosophers do not desire to rule” and that they have no concern for the Hegelian-Kojèvian struggle for “recognition.” And while he concedes that a transhistorical conception of philosophy “depends upon the thesis of eternal, immutable being”—above and beyond history defined as the ever-changing course of events—Strauss finally admits that this conception is “altogether questionable.” Moreover, Strauss also concedes that reasoning cannot achieve “subjective certainty,” that “all knowledge is embedded in a social-political context.” He only disagrees with Kojève in upholding “the superiority of an aristocratic over a democratic-universalist social and political frame” for this embeddedness. The aristocratic character of Straussian philosophy makes honor, the aristocratic passion, its engine, while the modern philosopher is “conditioned by an original motive of ‘love’ for human beings,” an egalitarian passion derivative of Christianity.

At this point, it may be helpful to pause and reexamine how Strauss himself presents his argument. In both of these essays, he begins with a specific circumstance in which he lives or has lived. In the Kojève essay, he begins by alluding to the condition of social science in contemporary universities located in the liberal-democratic regimes of the Cold War of the 1950s. That condition is poor. Social scientists cannot distinguish between, for example, kingships and tyrannies because social science is supposed to be ‘value-free,’ entirely descriptive. The rule of the one is the rule of the one; ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are scientifically meaningless terms. Social science is quantitative, not ‘qualitative.’ More, contemporary social science partakes not only of moral but also of historical relativism. Its proponents claim that classical political science, centered on the polis, cannot comprehend the regimes that have arisen since Christianity and modern science appeared; in particular, they cannot understand the modern state.

Strauss demurs. The classical framework may well enable a political scientist to understand present-day tyranny, and not only that it is tyranny, not kingship. Caesarism can be just if it is a punishment for corruption or misdeeds; tyranny is always unjust. It is true that the modern “notion” of philosophy or science, aspiring to the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, is not the classical understanding, but that doesn’t mean that the classics knew nothing of such a notion. They knew of it and rejected it as unnatural. Nature sets limits on human endeavor. It is the realm of necessity, a constraint on human action. This means that “there is no adequate solution to the problem of virtue or happiness on the political or social plane”—not the modern state governed in accordance with the science of administration or a world state that prevents international wars. Regimes may be good or bad, but their goodness often depends on their legitimacy, the presence of the rule of law; law is imperfect, so the best real states will be imperfectly good.

The distinction between naturally good and unnaturally bad regimes declined under the influence of Machiavelli’s thought. “Machiavelli separates wisdom from moderation,” lauding virtuosity, adjuring the prince to learn how not to be good. Kojève follows in the Machiavellian line. Like Machiavelli, he is a philosopher; he knows how to think and he loves to think. But this begs the questions, ‘What does he think?’ In political science, in political philosophy, virtuosity and love may not suffice. The existence of Stalin in the contemporary world, a tyrant who claimed supreme authority founded on an assertion of scientific knowledge, means that a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, must love Stalin—or else. Tyrants generally view philosophers with suspicion, regarding a philosopher as “a most dangerous competitor for tyrannical rule,” a person too smart for the tyrant’s own good. If classical political science can understand tyrants as such, not only the tyrants they saw in their own time, then a consideration of Xenophon’s dialogue between the Syracusan tyrant Hiero and Simonides, called one of the seven wise men of the classical world, might illuminate the condition of the modern world, in which tyranny hasn’t disappeared but social scientists have prevented themselves from understanding it, blocking themselves from full knowledge, handicapping their quest for wisdom. 

“A wise man does not attempt futile things.” Any attempt by Simonides to moderate Hiero’s regime by transferring his support from the mercenary soldiers to the citizens would be futile, as mercenaries are too dangerous to be demoted. Kojève sees Simonides’ caution as unnecessary because while the wise man understands the honor-loving Master, and might understand the citizens, he does not understand the morality of the slaves, the workers. Masters have their morality; slaves have theirs. Kojève follows Hegel, and to some extent Marx, by maintaining that an alliance between the one and the many can be effected if a wise man brings about a ‘synthesis’ of the two moralities subsequent to their dialectical clash. To this, Strauss replies that Simonides himself is no honor-loving Master who cannot see beyond his own morality but a wise man, the “highest human type.” The philosopher Socrates, for example, is just, not “manly,” honor-loving, ultimately tyrannical, blind to the good of the political community and even to the good of his own soul. And philosophic Socrates is not the only just human type: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.” This affirms Hancock’s notice of the underlying homology between reason and revelation while it disputes the Hegelian synthesis of Socrates and Machiavelli, the claim that a Machiavellian tyrant can be truly wise. Hegel, following Machiavelli and his English disciple, Thomas Hobbes, “construct[s] human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire of recognition.” For his part, Kojève “apparently thinks” that force or terror, the threat of imprisonment and death (the king of terrors), “are indispensable in every regime,” including aristocracies, defined by the classics as the rule of the best, the genuinely virtuous; to him, only the “universal and homogenous state” can be just because it alone can minimize (if not eliminate) rule by force by eliminating war among peoples. This regime claim is based, Strauss writes, on an assumption that is untrue. By contrast, the “assumption” that Hancock flags, that “the wise do not desire to rule,” is not necessarily false. Those who are wise do not aspire to rule because that would mean they were ruling the unwise, who will not consent to be ruled by the wise, and the wise do not attempt the impossible. “What pretends to be the absolute rule of the wise will in fact be absolute rule of unwise men”—members of the Communist Party, armed with Marxian pseudoscience, for example. Further, the universal and homogenous state at least seems impossible because it would require “universal agreement regarding the fundamentals,” an implausible condition. Faiths that make universalist claims provoke counter-faiths that make the same claim, leading not to universal rule over a homogenous population but to continued wars. The classical political philosophers deemed it is better, wiser, to limit the rule of the unwise by the unwise with the rule of law as interpreted by “equitable” men, the gentlemen who derived their incomes from landed estates but lived in cities—urbane lives in urban settings.

As for the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, his “only demand on the political men is that they leave him alone.” But, as Kojève sees, “the philosopher cannot lead an absolutely solitary life” because isolation in the quest for wisdom, the quest for “subjective certainty,” might be indistinguishable from madness. Kojève insists that “genuine certainty must be ‘intersubjective.'” Strauss replies that “the classics were fully aware of the essential weakness of the mind of the individual.” Philosophers need friends, but not just any friends. “The friends must be competent men: they must themselves be actual or potential philosophers,” of whom there are few. This is something along the lines of what Thomas Jefferson, no enemy of democracy, called the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent. Since “friendship presupposes a measure of conscious agreement,” and “the things regarding which the philosophic friends must agree cannot be known or evident truths” (philosophy being “not wisdom but the quest for wisdom”), a variety of philosophic ‘schools’ or ‘sects’ will arise, given the diversity of opinions among philosophers. Therefore, even philosophic friendship does not suffice for the philosopher. Like Socrates, “he must go out to the market place,” where “the conflict with the political men cannot be avoided.” He must be a political philosopher, not simply a gazer at the cosmos. This is what has come to be called the ‘Socratic turn’ from previous philosophy. “The whole history of philosophy testifies that the danger eloquently described by Kojève is inevitable.” Inevitability is a form of necessity. 

Kojève is mistaken, however, in his secular-Christian, Machiavellian/Hobbesian/Cartesian/Hegelian expectation of subjective certainty, of a ‘science of wisdom.’ On the contrary, “philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance”; that is the one “objective truth” of which everyone, even a philosopher, can be subjectively certain. “What Pascal said with anti-philosophic intent about the impotence of both dogmatism and skepticism, is the only possible justification of philosophy which as such is neither dogmatic nor skeptic, and still less ‘decisionist,’ but zetetic” or “skeptic in the original sense of the term.” Philosophy “as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” The philosopher who persuades himself of having comprehended some certain truth about the fundamental and comprehensive problems is no longer a philosopher but a sectarian. Socrates “never belonged to a sect and never founded one.” He is not depicted in Leonardo’s “School of Athens.” 

Hancock acknowledges the zetetic character of philosophy as described by Strauss while relegating it to the status of an exoteric teaching. Zeteticism, Hancock argues, is “addressed precisely to the pride of philosophers who aspire to transcend pride.” He is addressing modern philosophers, the Kojèves, who claim to have overcome the “fundamental alternatives” with a “powerful synthesis of the radicalized alternatives, aristocratic and democratic, Greek and biblical, the absolute and the universal, the one and the all,” a synthesis originally proposed by the Christian Paul, who averred that for him there was no longer Greek or Jew but Christ crucified. Why, then, attach resistance to such a grand but now ‘secularized’ and dangerous synthesis to an appeal to ‘aristocratic’ prejudice? Because the distinction between the few and the many, the wise or at least questers for wisdom and the unwise slaves to prevailing opinion goes deeper than all the other now (supposedly) synthesized antimonies. To reestablish that distinction is indispensable, fundamental, indeed a necessity if human beings, who by nature are the thinking animals, may continue to exhibit their humanity. 

Hancock argues that Strauss’s defense of an aristocratic quest, the quest of the few who love wisdom and seek it, “seems to culminate in the metaphysical idea of an ‘eternal order’ but finally acknowledges, for the attentive reader, that the taste for such an order is rooted in a practical hierarchy,” in what Strauss calls “the immediate pleasure which we observe when we observe signs of human nobility.” Such an order “anchor[s] his aristocratic pride” in the cosmos itself and requires a defense of that order by philosophers against the conquest of nature, the supposed “realm of freedom,” and especially against that conquest as formulated in the historicist doctrine (indeed dogma) that imagines the universal and homogenous state as the framework of the realm of freedom. On the contrary, all evidence from regimes animated by historicist doctrines point away from freedom, whether political, philosophic, or religious. “In the absence” of the “vertical orientation,” the aristocratic orientation, “the activity of reason cannot avoid being drawn into the horizontal field of universalization and technology,” the realm not really of freedom but of comprehensive unwisdom, of ideological tyranny.

Returning to Strauss, one notices that cites Xenophon as “indicat[ing]” that the philosopher does indeed want honor but only from a small minority or even only from himself. This is aristocratic, to a moderate degree. The difference between the philosopher and the political man is that the political man wants honor from everyone. Kojève claims that the philosopher is no different, motivated by the desire for recognition, honor, not love of wisdom. Xenophon instead observes that the universal desire is not recognition but satisfaction, happiness. The philosopher, however, finds satisfaction only in “the desire for truth, i.e., for knowledge of the eternal order, or the order of the whole.” That makes the philosopher, not the political man, not even the tyrant, the only truly ambitious man. “The political man must reject this way altogether.” He cannot depreciate other men because he seeks their recognition; he therefore must care for human beings as such; to rule them is to serve them. The ruler loves and desires to be loved, by the many, regardless of the quality of the many. Strauss leaves unspoken the obvious fact that the Christian God is precisely a ruler, a lover of men who commands them to love Him. 

Strauss then catches Kojève in an act of rhetorical overreach. Kojève had compared the supposed love of the ruler of the universal and homogenous state for his subjects to the love of a philosopher for truth. A mother “loves her son in spite of all his faults,” and the universal tyrants loves his subjects and the truth that he embodies in spite of all the faults of his subjects and all the unloveliness of many truths. But a mother’s love for her children, Strauss ripostes, is no universal love; it is the love of her own. “The philosopher on the other hand is concerned with what can never become private or exclusive property.” At the same time, “the philosopher cannot help living as a human being who as such cannot be dead to human concerns, although his soul will not be in those concerns”; he has a body and his body has needs, including the need of services of others. But the needs of the body are limited by nature, by necessity. Accordingly, the philosopher will not hurt anyone, nor does he “expect salvation or satisfaction from the establishment of the simply best social order.” Unlike the would-be tyrant, he seeks no revolution. He will offer advice to his city or indeed to foreign rulers (as Simonides does) as a political philosopher, but he does not expect and will hardly demand that his advice be followed. 

In entering the marketplace, the philosopher especially seeks the company of those who exhibit “well-ordered souls.” They resemble the “eternal order” that he seeks to understand, and may someday assist in his quest for understanding that order, unlike “the chaotic souls.” The philosopher seeks those souls not because they serve him but “simply because they are what they are,” unlike the mother, whose love Kojève confuses with mother-love. “The good order of the soul is philosophizing,” and the philosopher would “educate potential philosophers simply because he cannot help loving well-ordered souls,” not because he craves recognition. The ruler, by contrast, is not motivated by the Socratic eros “because he does not know what a well-ordered soul is,” craving recognition indiscriminately, ‘democratically,’ from all his subjects out of “an unqualified attachment to human things as such.” The philosopher does not want to associate with disorderly souls; if he did, he would be a sophist, pretendedly wise. That is, the ‘aristocratic’ character of the philosopher is not simply an appeal to pride. It is based upon a true perception of human nature, which features human beings of varying kinds and degrees of competence and of incompetence, of virtue and of vice. The order of nature is not merely ‘diverse’ in the egalitarian, ‘woke’ sense, but differentiated in the ‘aristocratic’ sense, and every university professor, including Professor Hancock, has seen that, time and again. This means, as Strauss says, that a philosopher’s self-admiration or self-recognition is akin if not identical to “good conscience”—inner ‘science’ or self-knowledge.

Jesus invites the fishermen to become fishers of men. So, too, does the philosopher “go to the market place to fish for potential philosophers,” individuals of well-ordered souls, which he loves. He “must” do so out of philosophic necessity, cognizant not of a need for social recognition but a need for understanding the nature of men. He does not need the best regime in order to philosophize, only the relative freedom of the marketplace, where talk is cheap, even if nothing else is. The rulers, and many of their subjects, regard such talk not only as cheap but as dangerous, at best a distraction from serious business and at worst subversive of what the regime regards as right conduct and belief. “In what then does philosophic politics consist? In satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens.” This “defense of philosophy…was required always and everywhere, whatever the regime might have been.” Notable successes were achieved by Plato, Cicero, Fārābi, and Maimonides. (Strauss does not here name a notable success by a philosopher among Christians.) But Kojève “fails to distinguish between philosophic politics and that political action which the philosopher might undertake with a view to establishing the best regime or to the improvement of the actual order,” instead describing the philosopher as one fighting “a tragic conflict” between his desire to rule and his reluctance to rule. But “for the classics, the conflict between philosophy and city is as little tragic as the death of Socrates.” 

Kojève looks not to the dialectics of discussion but to “the higher dialectics of History” for the solution to the tragic dilemma he thinks he sees. The end of History will be the universal and homogenous state wherein all are recognized, all satisfied. Strauss doubts that the subjects of the universal and homogenous state will be equally recognized or equally satisfied. “Does Kojève not underestimate the power of the passions?” That is, there are two kinds of inevitability at play in the dialogue between Strauss and Kojève. For Kojève, as for Hegel, the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, culminating in the universal and homogenous state is inevitable, and will end the tension between the philosopher and the city. For Strauss, the tension itself is inevitable because there are necessary natural limits, including the limits of human nature. This is why he parodies the language of the Communist Manifesto, the historicist call to action par excellence: “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of ‘the realm of freedom.’ Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, ‘the realm of necessity'”—that is, nature, the limits nature necessitates, limits that militate against attempts to institute a universal and homogenous state. It is the observation of nature which suggests that “perhaps it is not war nor work but thinking that constitutes of the humanity of man”—thinking, whose purpose is wisdom, not the ‘end of History.’ To instantiate the universal and homogeneous state, everyone will need to become wise. But given the observable limits of human nature, that won’t happen. Even Kojève more or less acknowledges that, as the state that rules at the end of History will, he admits, be a state, a coercive institution, not a seamless ‘classless society’ that remains after the state has ‘withered away.’ 

Seeing “the weakness or dependence of human nature,” the classics thought “universal happiness” impossible. The “best regime” might be established, somewhere, but that would be a long shot, although good regimes were possible; Aristotle considered the ‘mixed’ regime, combining elements of oligarchy and democracy, the best practicable regime if not the best regime simply. In order to make the establishment of the ‘ideal’ regime possible, the moderns had “to lower the goal of man.” This meant that the best regime needed no standard of excellence ‘above’ it; it embodied the moderns’ lowered order of excellence, capable of being ruled by an unwise man, “the Universal and Final Tyrant” who (as if to prove his unwisdom) “presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy.” (To put the matter in Christian terms, for Kojève, the Universal and Final Tyrant is the philosophic equivalent of the Christ, but for Strauss he is the Anti-Christ.) In “former ages,” when “claims of this kind” were advanced (Strauss is thinking of Christian and Muslim rulers), “philosophy went underground,” accommodating itself “in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believe they knew things which they did not know,” in contrast with real philosophers, who best know that they do not know. Also, in former ages and even in the contemporary world, a philosopher could still “escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant’s dominions”—as Strauss himself had done, prudently keeping one step ahead of Nazi attacks, moving from Germany to France to Britain and finally to America (and indeed then from New York, along the Atlantic coast, to Chicago, in the middle of the continent). 

Human nature depends upon nature as a whole. “Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things,” presupposing “an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History,” that “any ‘realm of freedom’ is no more than a dependent province within ‘the realm of necessity.'” “Being” does not “create itself in the course of History,” as Kojève would have it. If that were true, then the historicists claim that “social change or fate affects being, if it is not identical with Being, and hence affects truth.” (A Marxist once titled his book, Let History Judge.) Strauss is not satisfied that History really judges anything. Human beings can judge, within the limits nature sets on even the most powerful human minds. If, Heidegger-like, we “lack the courage to face the issue of Tyranny,” if we pretend that Nazism had an “inner truth and greatness” despite Hitler’s genocidal depredations, we will be “forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because, like Heidegger, we “did nothing but talk of Being.” In this final observation, Strauss returns to the theme of the beginning of his essay, when he criticized contemporary social science for failing to understand tyranny. What they did, trivially, Heidegger did, grandly, and neither did adequately. Strauss undertook something along the lines of the Socratic turn away from philosophy as ‘natural science,’ urging philosophers and potential philosophers to join with him.

So, Athens. What of Jerusalem? As Hancock rightly observes, “the fundamentally moral-political bearing of Leo Strauss’s defense of classical philosophy indeed lies deeper than his formal openness to the perennial questions of the Western tradition.” In his preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss again situates himself in contemporary life, this time even more ‘personally’ than he did when alluding to the failings of the social ‘scientists’ who surrounded him at the University of Chicago. In Germany in the years 1925-28, when he wrote this book, Strauss, by his own account was “a young Jew living born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grips of the theologico-political predicament.” The regime of liberal democracy in Germany was new and weak. It had been founded after the failure of the monarchic regime established after Bismarck had united the 37 German states under one Reich. The Weimar Republic took its bearings from an unsteady compromise between “the principles of 1789” and “the highest German tradition,” the medieval tradition stemming from the long-lost Holy Roman Empire, which had been dominated by Germans. The weakness of the Weimar Republic was easily seen: it was “unable to use the sword,” it could not defend justice against the rival gangs of Nazis and Communists that attacked one another in the streets. Liberal democracy itself was discredited when the liberal democracies betrayed their own principles by imposing the Treaty of Versailles, with its punitive measures that struck the German people themselves, not only the monarchy. In the struggle with the Communists, the Nazis won for the same reason Lenin’s Bolsheviks had taken Russia: their leader was stronger-willed, more ruthless and daring, and exerted more power over his followers than his enemies. 

There is a broader explanation for all this, and Strauss avails himself of it on the grounds that “it is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low” because to understand the high in the light of the low,” to engage in ‘reductionism,’ “necessarily distorts the high,” whereas to understand the low in the light of the high “does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is.” The name ‘Weimar’ “refers one to the greatest epoch of German thought and letters, to the epoch extending from the last third of the eighteenth century to the first third of the nineteenth century”—the epoch whose most distinguished man was Goethe. This epoch had been initiated by Germans’ enthusiasm for Rousseau. As “the first modern critic of the fundamental modern project,” the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, Rousseau “laid the foundation for the distinction, so fateful for German thought, between civilization”—the realm of Enlightenment rationalism, modern science—and “culture”—the realm of moral and esthetic sentiments. “The radicalization and deepening of Rousseau’s thought by classical German philosophy culminating in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” legitimated under German circumstances not Rousseauian republicanism but a constitutional monarchy “in the hands of highly educated civil servants appointed by a hereditary king.” Elsewhere, Strauss remarks that Rousseau’s claim that human nature is malleable tends to undermine his affirmation of natural right, to make it open to thoroughgoing revision, indeed to the abandonment of natural right for ‘historical right.’ Here, however, he is content to point to another effect of Rousseau’s thought, which issued “prepared not only the French Revolution and classical German philosophy but also that extreme reaction to the French Revolution which is German romanticism” (as seen in young Goethe’s “Young Werther,” later deplored by the mature Goethe). German Romanticism fostered a “longing for the Middle Ages” that “began in Germany in the same moment in which the actual Middle Ages—the Holy Roman Empire ruled by a German—ended, in what was then thought to be the moment of Germany’s deepest humiliation.” The stubbornness of this political nostalgia not only militated against modern, natural-rights republicanism, it “explains why the situation of the indigenous Jews” like Strauss and his family “was more precarious in Germany than in any other Western country.” Medieval Europe was a place where Jews suffered sporadic assaults, pogroms, in the name of theologico-political sentiments fostered by the Catholic Church. “According to liberal democracy, the bond of society is universal human morality, whereas religion (positive religion) is a private affair; in the Middle Ages religion, that is, Catholic Christianity, was the bond of society.” Romanticism held out not Catholic Christianity but nationalism as the social bond; nationalism comports with statism, Bismarck’s project of political unification. German Jews “owed their emancipation” not to the Church but “to the French Revolution or to its effects” in Germany. And it was not until the Weimar Republic that Jews were “given full political rights” there. The Nazi regime founded upon a backlash against German liberal democracy was also “the only regime that ever was anywhere which had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews”—not, to be sure, in the name of Catholic Christianity but in the name of biological pseudoscience pretending to prove that certain ‘races,’ first and foremost ‘the Jews,’ were by nature not only unequal, inferior, but evil, worthy only of eradication.

Crucially, German Jews themselves had made themselves vulnerable at the time of their emancipation by “becom[ing] open to the influx of German thought,” which was not universalist (whether rationalist or Catholic) but “German essentially.” This made German Jews politically and even spiritually dependent upon Germans who were, however, still unfavorable to Jews, now on nationalist instead of religious grounds. “The German-Jewish problem was never solved,” not even by liberalism. The turn to political Zionism, a Jewish nationalism mirroring German nationalism in its secular/humanist orientation, continued to make assimilation impossible. The subsequent compromise, cultural Zionism, emphasized not the quest for a Jewish homeland but respect for the “Jewish heritage”; it “fell between the sternness of nationalism and the sternness of divine revelation,” in a way paralleling the eventual weakness of the Weimar Republic. 

Admittedly, “human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions,” whatever historicists may say. “To realize that the Jewish problem is insoluble means never to forget the truth proclaimed by Zionism regarding the limitations of liberalism.” Liberalism distinguishes between the state and society, recognizing a legally protected “private sphere” into which it places religion. But religions distinguish sharply between insiders and outsiders, the faithful and the heretical. If the state cannot intervene powerfully in the private sphere, it cannot protect society from religious antagonisms; yet insofar as the state curtails privacy it curtails liberalism. In reaction to this dilemma, Jewish thinkers, most prominently Franz Rosenzweig, attempted a return to Judaism, not on the basis of tradition, which modern rationalism had so seriously wounded, but on the basis of a “present experience” of God which “every human being can have if he does not refuse himself to it,” the experience of the ‘Thou’ by the ‘I,’ as Martin Buber put it, following Rosenzweig. 

But this too led to a problem. The ‘I-Thou’ experience presents itself as beyond reason. But so does late-modern philosophy, also beginning with Rousseau but intensifying with Nietzsche and culminating in Heidegger. Heidegger rejects the God of the Bible, more or less on Nietzschean grounds. The God of the Bible is a providential god, promising security to His people. In the Bible, God’s grace redeems and perfects nature, including human nature. Heidegger denies that we have any such security. Human life is ‘existential’ precisely because the human soul is “essentially historical,” always changing, without any “unchangeable essence or limits.” For Nietzsche, this can only be answered by the coming not of Christ but of the Superman, the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ, the synthesis of Rome, which subsumed Athens politically by means of military conquest, and Jerusalem, which subsumed Judaism by means of Christianity. The philosophy of the future is “the outcome of a will,” a superhuman will that is not the God of the Christian Bible. Heidegger urges a similar notion, but with a more decidedly Christian spin: his ‘existentialism’ emphasizes not triumphalism but anguish, guilt, even as it continues to uphold what Heidegger supposed “the inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, namely, its rejection of modern rationalism.

The seduction of German Jews by German thought did not in the end make them seem more German to the Germans but instead made them hesitant to return to Judaism either by the path of Tradition or the path of direct, present experience of God. This is where Spinoza comes in. “Orthodoxy could be returned to only if Spinoza was wrong in every respect.” As a Jew, Spinoza defended not Judaism but modern philosophy and its “new understanding of ‘nature'” as an object to be conquered. That is, he “restored the dignity of speculation” against revelation but on the new, Machiavellian/Baconian/Hobbesian foundation. With the Bible, “he understands all things as proceeding from, not made or created by, a single being or origin,” but entirely unlike the Bible, he “no longer regards this process as a descent or decay, but as an ascent or unfolding: the end is higher than the origin.” ‘God’ is no longer the Creator-God of the Bible but an immanent energy in all things, the god of pantheism. Therefore, the “highest form of knowledge” is not knowledge of the originating One but of the resulting Many. In the central passage of Strauss’s “Preface,” he writes that Spinoza at least “appears to originate the kind of philosophic system which views the fundamental processus as progress,” thereby preparing the ground for German ‘idealism.’ “God’s might is his right, and therefore the power of every being is as such its right; Spinoza lifts Machiavellianism to theological heights,” beyond good and evil.

And this metaphysical stance, Spinoza’s contention that the Many are superior to the One, also favors liberal democracy; “he was the philosopher who founded liberal democracy, a specifically modern regime,” influencing in turn Rousseau and in Germany Kant. He is still a natural-rights thinker of a sort, but one who has abandoned the “strictness and austerity which classical political philosophy shares with ancient law,” including Jewish law, a thinker “free from the classical aversion to commercialism” and from the “traditional demand for sumptuary laws,” giving “the passions much greater freedom” and counting “much less on the power of reason than the polity of the classics” did. This flows from his pantheism. “For whereas for the classics the life of passion is a life against nature, for Spinoza everything that is, is natural.” If nature is to be conquered, then freedom from it consists of the adoption of the new science, the new sort of reason, which will rule against nature. “He thus decisively prepares the modern notion of the ‘ideal’ as a work of the human mind or as a human project, as distinguished from an end imposed on man by nature”—the triumph of ‘freedom’ so conceived, overcoming the limits of necessity. 

Without the Biblical God, there is no need for Biblically-inspired priests. Philosophers and artists can take their place; in this, one sees the origin of ‘cultural’ Zionism and before it, German Kultur. With the pantheistic god and the philosophers and artists who align themselves with It (no longer a ‘Him,’ a Person), “the millennial antagonism between Judaism and Christianity was about to disappear,” as “the new Church would transform Jews and Christians into human beings,” into “cultured human beings” who, “because they possessed science and art, did not need religion in addition.” Freedom, emancipation of Jews could follow from this in a “secular redemption” of mutual assimilation. The new Church requires a new catechism, which Spinoza provides in the form of “seven dogmas which are the indispensable fundamentals of the faith.” These dogmas “do not contain anything specifically Christian nor anything specifically Jewish,” instead undergirding “a society of which Jews and Christians can be equally members, of which Jews and Christians can be equal members.” 

Spinozism differs from the Hegelianism which eventually prevailed, after the several iterations and alterations that philosophers effected prior to Hegel. The constructivist, ‘synthesizing’ dialectical logic of change Hegel introduced was not Spinoza’s logic, which remained rooted in the classical understanding of the principle of non-contradiction, a principle that maintains natural limits to things and does not fire an ambition to manipulate them in accordance with human will or ‘freedom’ as conceived by the moderns. In terms of Judaism as distinct from philosophy, Orthodox Judaism cannot contest Spinozism on its own grounds, which preclude miracles and divine revelation as the Bible presents them. “But the case is entirely different if orthodoxy limits itself to the assertion that it believes the aforementioned things” but does not know them. “For all the assertions of orthodoxy rest on the irrefutable premise that the omnipotent God, whose will is unfathomable, whose ways are not our ways, who has decided to dwell in the thick darkness, may exist.” To believe that he does is to open one’s mind to the possibility of miracles and of the necessity of divine revelation of truths which our intellect cannot reach high enough to grasp. On that foundation, “the orthodox premise cannot be refuted by experience nor by recourse to the principle of contradiction.” This is why Spinoza and the Enlightenment writers who followed him attacked orthodoxy with “laughter and mockery.” But mockery isn’t refutation. “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.” Such a refutation would require the establishment of a comprehensive “philosophic system” whereby man “show[s] himself theoretically and practically as the master of the world and the master of his life,” replacing “the merely given world” with a “world created by man theoretically and practically”—a new heaven and a new earth, to borrow a phrase from the New Testament. Neither Spinoza, nor Hegel, nor Marx, nor anyone else has succeeded in producing such a system, much less in substantiating it in practice. This means that “philosophy, the quest for evident and necessary knowledge, rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of the will, just as faith.” The “antagonism between Spinoza and Judaism, between unbelief and belief, is ultimately not theoretical but moral.”

In Jewish terms, this moral antagonism fundamentally involves a choice between the austere commands of God and the lax materialism of Epicureanism, an Epicureanism not necessarily made more plausible by investing matter with divinity, by invoking pantheism, by making Epicureanism “bold and active” with commerce, secular republicanism, and the scientific conquest of nature, with modern ‘idealism.’ For himself, in terms of morality, Strauss points not to metaphysics, to speculative origins of Being, but to the real, practical results of the modern project. “In proportion as the systematic effort to liberate man completely from all nonhuman bonds seems to succeed, the doubt increases of whether the goal is not fantastic—whether man has not become smaller and more miserable in proportion as the systematic civilization progresses.” The “belief that by pushing even farther back the ‘natural limits’ man will advance to ever greater freedom, that he can subjugate nature and prescribe to it his laws, begins to wither away,” more surely than the modern state withers away, as Marx and Lenin had promised in their attempts to further the project of freeing man from nature. So far, the philosophic response has been ‘existentialism’—Heideggerianism. But the practical result of Heideggerianism was Nazism, the attempt to destroy Jews (and not only Jews). Mass murder by Nazis and Communists aimed at liberating humanity from the shackles imposed by ‘inferior races’ or ‘class enemies,’ respectively, did not succeed even in their own terms, let alone the terms of any other morality, religious or philosophic. The will to power “was said to be a fact,” beyond good and evil. But that alleged fact led to consequences confirming for Strauss “that it would be unwise to say farewell to reason.” Accordingly, “I began to wonder”—wonder being the initial impetus to philosophizing—whether “the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and it classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation.” And as for revelation, the command to obey God’s laws and judgments, the initial impetus to such obedience being not wonder but fear of God, this had been seen as the Israelites’ “wisdom and understanding” by the Gentiles themselves, who called the Israelites “a wise and understanding people.” 

In considering Strauss’s “Preface,” Hancock gets right to the heart of the argument. Strauss intends to recover “the primordial unity of Athens and Jerusalem, that he often leaves all but unspoken,” a unity that “now depends upon respecting their difference, even their incommensurability.” Judaism’s “honorable pretensions” to “rationalism,” to the work of classical philosophy, “led it to throw in its lot with modern rationalism, which turns out to be fundamentally irrational because it has tried to provide its own ground and thus has flouted the limits of human nature.” In retreating from the mistaken venture of “modern irrational rationalism,” Judaism has fallen into modern irrationalism, leaving it vulnerable to Heidegger, “who reveals the dark depths of the rejection of the philosophical tradition, the fall into an abyss of death and nothingness,” existentialism. Strauss draws back from all of this. In its stead, he “directs us…to a ground common to the Bible and to classical philosophy,” returning to classical political philosophy and to “the alternative Athens/Jerusalem.” That alternative is indeed a real alternative. Reason is not revelation; wonder is not fear. But the two approaches to wisdom can be seen to be congruent in Thomas Aquinas’ insight: “Grace perfects nature, it does not destroy nature.” That is, “the Bible and the classics agree…on the natural authority of nobility and justice: every noble person is concerned with finding transcendent support for justice.” “Biblical law and classical reason spring from a common root in the orientation toward an eternity that limits and defines humanity; he sees this natural, finite horizon as opposed to the Christian and modern destruction of a finite moral order in favor of the ‘spiritual’ teaching of a ‘transcendent’ or fully open possibility, whether Christian or ‘rationalist.'” His more obvious insistence on the sharp distinction between reason and revelation is “a staged showdown” in which he puts the rationalism of the earlier moderns against the irrationalism of the later moderns (as they prefer to call themselves) ‘postmoderns.’ For Strauss, Hancock remarks, ‘modern’ includes ‘Christian’; the Bible conveying God’s revelation is the ‘Old’ Testament. Christianity radicalized “Platonic transcendence” and thereby inaugurated modernity not only politically (with the seeds of ‘democracy’ or egalitarianism, as Tocqueville maintains) but philosophically, by severing the link between the Creator-God and the human beings he created, which was the Law, placing that link instead in faith in Christ, the new intermediary. But faith is a less firm bond than law. “Christian spirituality” desires “a synthesis of Greek philosophical transcendence with the mysterious God who gave law to the Jews,” and the results have never been good for Jews. Nor have they been good, long-term, for Gentiles, except in the material sense of prosperity, the pleasures of neo-Epicureanism, for those who have avoided ruin in modernity’s wars. Hancock considers “Strauss’s discreet but powerful critique of Christianity” as pertinent to this day, “as the residues of Christian ‘love’ are exploited in a movement of universalization with no content but liberation from law and virtue.”

Strauss’s own choice for the philosophic way, natural right in the classical rather than the modern sense, derives from his judgment that Orthodoxy is a less likely path for moderns seeking a rediscovery of “the rudimentary distinction between good and bad.” That rediscovery is urgent, given the enormities of the previous half-century and the persistence of historicist thought in its Communist form. Without the “horizon of eternity and its inherent recognition of the limits of human action, tyranny can claim the excuse of the highest ideals for the lowest deeds; humans can be tempted to do obviously bad things in the name of universal, transformative ends.” Practically speaking, this means liberal education, where the (very rough) counterparts of the gentlemen still taught the young, and the defense of “liberal democratic constitutionalism as the best possible approximation of a classical mixed regime.” 

Hancock deems this a “fragile strategy,” as indeed Strauss may well have done. Strauss nonetheless “offers the most perspicacious of all critiques 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 the goods of theory and practical goods.” “Serious Christians” should take note of the potential, and indeed long-realized dangers of their faith. But if a Christian “hold[s] on to the promise of a salvation beyond worldly limits while acknowledging the inescapability in this world of both pagan pride and coercive law,” of what Jacques Maritain calls “a tough mind”—one that is “firm and clear”—and “a tender heart”—one that is “soft and open” the beckoning of the Holy Spirit—then our “wrestling with this problem, both in theory and in practice, is not only a moral necessity but somehow an apprenticeship in our eternal freedom”—the spiritual warfare that prepares souls for a place in the regime of God.