Will Morrisey Reviews

Carlo Altini: Philosophy as Stranger Wisdom: A Leo Strauss Intellectual Biography. Albany: SUNY Press, 2022.

 

Plato’s Athenian Stranger is a stranger because he is a foreigner in Magnesia, where the dialogue of the Laws takes place. More generally, Altini writes, “due to his nature, the philosopher is a stranger at home” as well as abroad, “belong[ing] to the city without however completely identifying in the citizen,” an exile wherever he is. If one believes “that knowledge is provisional,” not settled, that “the foundations of human life are a mystery,” not revealed, and that “the complexity of the world is irreducible,” not fully manipulable by human beings, then he will find a home neither in the city of man, the city of God, nor the city of Utopia as conceived by modern philosophy. Philosophy is rather “search for, not control of, truth.” The Apostle Paul ridicules certain women, latter-day Eves led astray by evil men, as persons who are “forever learning, never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). Manly, soldier-like Paul—who finds no meaningful distinction between philosophy and sophistry because each demurs when confronted with the things of God—evidently finds the way of life of zetetic inquiry a Hell-bound way, a way of life animated by the wrong kind of love, erotic rather than agapic. Machiavelli would later concur, as regards the philosophy of Plato, while adding Christianity to the list of womanish preoccupations. In contrast, Leo Strauss, admiring Socrates, considered that “philosophy has an intrinsically edifying character, showing the primacy of contemplative life over practical life, of comprehension over engagement.” In this book, Altini traces the course of Strauss’s life, showing how each way of life he encountered, including those he considered for himself, raised questions leading to further inquiry. Philosophy is therefore “stranger wisdom,” the wisdom of those who turn their souls to “the search of the truth on being” and thus take a critical stance toward “any established authority, any normative habit, any political myth, any social custom, and any religious tradition.” But this stance is not often openly critical, scoffing, because the Platonic philosopher is politic, understanding that the philosophic way of life must be practiced within the political way of life, within whatever city of man and of God he finds himself. Altini suggests that “in Strauss’s thought, political conservatism is the other face of the coin of philosophical radicalism.” “Moderation is not a virtue of thought, since thought has to be radical. However, its public expression has to be moderate, due to the problems posed by persecution, social responsibility, and the necessities of material life.”

Strauss did not begin with that stance. Just the opposite. His furtive reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during his Gymnasium years showed him an alternative to the orderly regime of the Kaiser and “the traditionalist and nationalist” (i.e., German-nationalist, assimilationist) Jewish community of the Marburg region in Germany. Thus, although remaining confident in the prevailing hopes for the liberal humanism of German schools, he already knew the arguments of its critics, their animadversions against bourgeois dullness. And, as it happened, not only dullness: the Kaiserreich disintegrated in the Great War. In the war’s last year, Strauss served as a medical assistant; unlike many German civilians, who could not understand why Germany surrendered, he saw the results of carnage wreaked by modern battlefield technology. Nietzsche’s apocalyptic predictions were right; the Last Man was not only an imbecile but a dangerous, self-ruining imbecile. The modern liberal project of turning Jews into Last Men, of making them like all the other Germans, had also failed. He became attracted to political radicalism, but not to the radicalism of the Left, which “appeared to him a radicalization of liberal democracy.” And so, he turned to political Zionism, “convinced that the ideals of German humanism, which he had loved during his school years, were part of a glorious past, now dead and incapable of providing nourishment.” His university studies put him under the tutelage of the neo-Kantian thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen, themselves the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment-era Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. As Strauss later wrote, Cohen “belonged definitely to the pre-World War I world,” politically, and had no good answer to “the emergence and ever-increasing power of phenomenology,” of Husserl’s critique of modern rationalism. Neo-Kantianism was anything but vital, by then. Both political and philosophic modernism had failed. “Husserl had realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such a way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing,” Strauss wrote. Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics pushed Heidegger’s insight still further, showing that “our primary understanding of the world is not an understanding of things as objects but of what the Greeks indicated by pragmata, things which we handle and use.”

Meanwhile, in his political thought Strauss turned to the political Zionism of Vladimir (‘Ze’ev’) Jabotinsky, against Martin Buber’s softer cultural Zionism and Max Nordau’s spiritualist neo-Orthodoxy. Strauss wrote several articles for Zionist newspapers; while sympathetic, he did not conceal his misgivings about political Zionism’s lack of “cultural awareness and intellectual depth.” When he met Jabotinsky and attempted to steer the conversation toward the Bible, Jewish history, and political theory, “Jabotinsky abruptly interrupted him, asking him about his ability with guns”—a query very much in keeping with one of Jabotinsky’s most famous monitions, “Jewish youth, learn to shoot.” For his part, “Strauss did not show any interest for the practical and organizational aspect of Zionist policies,” and became increasingly impatient with political Zionism’s poorly conceived atheism, which substituted secular nationalism for Judaism. Against its own intention, political Zionism “strengthened the de-Judaizing tendencies of emancipation,” “being modern itself,” attempting to make Jews “a people like all the others” even as it rejected the assimilationist ambition to make Jews like all the other Germans, Jews, Englishmen, and so on. “Zionism considered emancipation at a community level, liberalism considered at the level of the single citizen’s rights,” but “the substance remained the same, a conception of “the Jewish issue as a purely human and social issue neglecting the essential aspect of Jewish tradition: faith.” For their part, his Zionist colleagues began to lose patience with the young man’s “sarcastic and aggressive tone” toward them.

Buber’s cultural Zionism was no better. Cultural Zionism “interprets the Jewish legacy a human and national culture.” But Judaism isn’t a culture, at all. It is “a divine gift and revelation, the meaning of which ends up being completely distorted once it is interpreted in the sense of ‘culture.'” While the founding of a modern state of Israel was a good thing, it cannot solve “the Jewish problem,” which is fundamentally unsolvable. “Human beings can only solve finite problems, not infinite ones, and, for this reason, they will never be able to create a society void of contradictions.” This holds true for Zionism, but also for Marxism, liberalism—all the ‘isms.’ As Strauss impishly put it, the Jews are indeed the Chosen People—the people “chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” And so, reading Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegelian ‘correction’ of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, and neo-Kantianism, Strauss immediately saw historicism with a Jewish inflection as yet another form of secularist modernism. Such a putative return to Judaism wasn’t authentically Jewish, and therefore no return at all. 

“All that the young Strauss was left with was orthodoxy, the sole legitimate representative of Jewish traditional faith” in sharp contrast to Jewish neo-Kantianism and Jewish neo-Hegelianism. “Still, an eminent obstacle weighed on orthodoxy: Spinoza.” Strauss asked a “simple and audacious” question: “did the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus—that is, modern Enlightenment—really refute Jewish orthodoxy?” 

“German Jews considered [Spinoza] the emblem of their emancipation.” Spinoza wanted the freedom to philosophize; he saw the path to that freedom in a kind of political freedom, namely, “the State’s freedom from ecclesiastical pretensions,” now called the separation of church and state, along with “the constitution of a liberal democracy” as distinguished from either a tyranny of one ruler or a tyranny of many rulers, ‘majority tyranny’ of the sort that inflicted the death penalty on Socrates. Spinoza wanted to guarantee freedom of inquiry, “rendering it independent from both temporal and ecclesiastical powers”; one element of that guarantee was “to show that the Scriptures cannot be an authority to limit freedom of research.” To do so, Spinoza needed to depart from Orthodox Judaism. Claims that liberalism can be derived from a continuous Judaic tradition cannot be true, instead evidencing what Strauss calls “the typical mistake of the conservative, which consists in concealing the fact that the continuous and changing tradition which he cherishes so greatly would never have come into being through conservatism.” Spinoza sees that “the foundation of the liberal State requires the abrogation of the limiting character of the Mosaic Law,” a law limiting Jews because it prevents their assimilation into any given state as rights-bearing individuals (liberalism) or within their own sovereign state among other states (nationalism). Indeed, Spinoza teaches that the foundation of the liberal State requires the abrogation of the limiting character of religious law generally, “against revealed religion in all forms, including Christianity.” Any “return to Judaism” would be possible only “after having completed a confutation of Spinoza, i.e., of modern rationalism.”

But was modern rationalism adequate to its purpose? In Berlin, where he and his wife lived between 1925 and 1932, Strauss continued and deepened his friendship with Jacob Klein. Klein, too, had studied Heidegger, taking his work to allow “a return to classical Greek philosophy and especially the possibility to make a radical distinction between ancient and modern,” especially between ancient and modern rationalism. Strauss, however, found Heidegger’s understanding of Plato and of ancient philosophy generally unpersuasive, “not a true return,” any more than Cohen and Rosenzweig had effected a true return to Judaism, but “a radicalization of modernity that abandoned the level of philosophical rationality” altogether. Heidegger extended and further radicalized Nietzsche, with whose writings Strauss had himself become, by his own account, intoxicated in the second half of the 1920s. With his characteristic themes of angst, resolution, and authenticity, Heidegger opposed modern rationalism, valorizing the will, ‘existentialism,’ decision, and the consequent abandonment of “the idea of truth,” the ancients’ quest for being. “While for the classics ‘being’ meant ‘being always,’ for Heidegger ‘being’ mean ‘existing,'” the things that change, ‘history.’ Existentialism opposes theory in the classical sense, “necessitat[ing] a radical criticism of contemplative life” in favor of the human freedom to create meaning, a freedom made possible by the recognition that being is nothing permanent. 

German liberalism was embodied by the weak and philosophically shallow Weimar Republic, with its mechanistic, modern rationalism already seen as potentially destructive in the Great War, its politics consisting of egalitarian homogenization and government by bureaucracy. Even at the university level, the regime never went beyond neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, both derived from Spinozian rationalism. These hardly sufficed when confronted with the irrationalism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. And if irrationalism gave rise to a radical Rightist politics likely to threat European Jews and Gentiles alike, what then? Strauss “began to sense that modern reason was not the sole model of rationality, since the querelle des anciens et des moderns precisely regarded two different models of rationality: the first, the pre-modern one, founded on moderate skepticism (which he later defined zetetic); the other, the modern one, based on a dogmatic skepticism.” Could the older model of rationality avoid the self-destruction suffered by modern rationalism? To address this question, he took “two different and complementary directions”: first, to study medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy “as bearer of a different model of rationalism” than that of the moderns; additionally, to deepen his study of modern rationalism by considering Hobbes, Spinoza’s precursor,” the philosopher “most representative of the modern conceptions of natural right.” Eventually, he would go behind the Jewish and Islamic philosophers to Plato, and behind Hobbes to Machiavelli. “The distinctive trait of Strauss’s thought,” even when preoccupied by theological and political concerns, remained “his substantially rational nature.”

In the early 1930s, Strauss considered Hobbes as the first philosopher to “determine the specific modern concept of culture, visible in the conception of the civil state as opposed to the natural state.”  By civilization, Hobbes mean “a rationally based cohabitation of humanity,” founded on a ‘social contract,’ “which works with the aid of scientific progress until it becomes a community of production and consumption,” a community designed to overcome the nature in which man initially finds itself, a nature hostile to his very survival. Critics of modern liberalism, contemptuous of “bourgeois individualism,” never really address the philosophic challenge Hobbes mounts both to ‘ancient’ reason and to revelation. They fail to see how Hobbes (and also Descartes) not only practice skepticism with regard to religion (which everyone who has eyes to see, sees) but replaces religious dogmatism with “scientific dogmatism,” a dogmatism animated by “the faith according to which the human being can progress towards every greater freedom by subduing nature,” a conquest that “ends in nihilism” in theory (Nietzsche) and in practice (the Great War). “Strauss’s confrontation with Hobbes was not the result of an occasional historical or philosophical choice, but rather of the necessity to confront the highest expression of the philosophical-political paradigm of modernity.”

The philosophic core of Hobbes’s theory consists of a critique of both Scripture and Aristotle. “Strauss identifies the moral —not scientific—basis that lies at the foundations of Hobbes’s political theory and of the entire modern political philosophy.” Before the age of forty, Hobbes had thought within a framework set by Scholasticism and Puritanism in religion, the Renaissance Humanists in philosophy, and “the aristocratic atmosphere in which he lived.” But the modern scientific project envisioned by Francis Bacon reoriented Hobbes away from the high-minded, ‘aristocratic’ conception of virtue upheld by Aristotle, toward the more ‘do-able’ task of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, and thus towards a morality of usefulness. In this, the Christian and especially Puritan critique of aristocratic honor—that it is only pride issuing in endless fighting, never in peace—holds firm. For Hobbes, however, there is no God who punishes the prideful. Men punish themselves; not fear of God but fear of men, and especially of men inflated with pride, suffices to sober them. In Strauss’s words, “the most important and most difficult task is then to show how the project of a mechanistic-deterministic account of nature arises from this new moral principle,” namely, the fear of violent death. That is, in Hobbes’s philosophy, the moral principle is rationally prior to the mechanistic science. The moral principle in question is “right as distinct from the ancient concept of law.” But law provides a standard, a criterion of moral judgment; fear of violent death is only a passion, not a reason; it provides civilization with no foundation “that has the stature of truth.” “Strauss identifies in Hobbes’s theory of passions the roots of liberalism and modern culture, because the individualistic character of natural right constitutes a turning point in respect to Platonic and Aristotelian theories of natural law.” Modern natural rights are, in Strauss’s words, “subjective claims, originating in the human will,” neither in the will of God (divine law and the Scholastics’ version of natural law) nor in the natural law of the ‘ancients,’ pervading the cosmos that envelops and pervades human nature. In this, Hobbes rejects Aristotelian teleology; nature has no purpose, human beings no perfection, the summum bonum having been replaced by the summum malum—again, the fear of violent death, an egalitarian passion, one shared by all human beings who are honest with themselves. This is the moral foundation not only of modern science but of modern liberalism: “If the State does not have the function of promoting virtue or good, but rather that of safeguarding the natural right of each human being, then the State’s power finds its limit in the individual natural right, unpassable and inviolable,” but only so long as one ignores the nihilism beneath the surface of scientific rationalism at the service of moral irrationalism. Reason serves the passions, looking for sensible ways of self-preservation, which Hobbes finds in the mighty Leviathan, monarchic because any other regime permits dissent, inevitably leading to factional dispute and ending in the return of the war of all against all, the ‘state of nature,’ and commercial because peaceful commerce re-channels human ambition into the more modest, ‘bourgeois’ intention to make a buck. “The passage from vanity to fear represents the passage from [warlike] aristocratic virtue to [peaceful] bourgeois virtue” whose objects are utility, peace, security. “Work and accumulation, commerce and industry, freedom and capital are the characteristics of the modern ideal of civilization.”

The moral basis of Hobbesian philosophy notwithstanding, “the clear awareness of the deep fracture with philosophic tradition that is implied in Hobbes’s new and revolutionary moral conception only surfaces with his discovery of Euclid.” To empower man, to make his conquest of hostile nature complete, one needs a political science of surpassing precision, as seen in geometric proofs. But why would Hobbes suppose that geometry, one of the most ‘abstract’ forms of reasoning there is, could account for the actions of a nature said to be exclusively material? He pointed to Galileo, who showed that the planets, material bodies, move in predictable geometric patterns. Strauss, however, identified a more troublesome problem, a problem for Hobbes’s political science: “exact passionless mathematics is indifferent to passions; exact passionless political philosophy is in conflict with the passions.” Unless political scientists can show that human passions act like planets, they won’t really be ‘doing science.’ This has indeed been a persistent attempt of, and a persistent difficulty for, political scientists and of ‘social science’ generally, for the past several centuries, a discipline that has achieved very mixed results.

Finally, Hobbes’s anthropology opens philosophy to Nietzsche’s ripostes. According to Galileo, nature has no purpose; it just goes around in circles (or ‘epicycles’). For political philosophy, this “requires the systematic elimination of the issue of the State’s purpose” in terms of a rationally discernible good, a move that “is clear in [Hobbes’s] subordination of natural law to natural right.” Human beings deploy reasoning as a means to ends proposed by the passions; morality becomes a matter of the impassioned will. As a result, people learn to be morally impressed by resolution. The crisis of nihilism awaits, inherent in modern moral and political philosophy from the outset.

Strauss thus began to wonder if the problem wasn’t rationalism itself (as Nietzsche proclaimed) but the modern use of reason. He had already been studying Maimonides on the theological-political question, in a successful attempt to get away from the superficial understanding of Jewishness seen in political Zionism and also to confront the serious challenge to philosophy posed by Orthodox Judaism. Central to Judaic claims to know is prophecy. In Maimonides, he saw for the first time that there was an older model of rationalism, one “capable of identifying a balance between philosophical radicalism and political conservativism, between the search for truth and the necessity to accept common opinions, between philosophy and the city, between Athens and Jerusalem.” In considering the claims of prophecy with Maimonides as his guide, he saw that revealed religion posited not so much a philosophic theory but a political regime. A regime is, among other things, a form of government that ‘channels’ citizens in a way of life towards one or more purposes. Forms, ways, and purposes are rationally discernible and possible to reinforce with laws. Strauss addresses these matters in one of his least known books, Philosophy and Law, published in 1936, a book “in which Strauss builds, through an original reading of medieval philosophy, a strong philosophical and political interpretation of modernity,” a book in which he “seriously takes into account the impossibility of an immediate return to orthodox Judaism (the theoretical foundations of which are undermined by Enlightenment), as well as the impossibility of accepting the relativism resulting from the transformation of modern rationalism into historicism, i.e., modern sophistry.” He “began to think” that not only Maimonides but the Islamic and Greek philosophers addressed “the idea of the divine Law intended as a unique and total law that was, at the same time, religious, political and moral law.” Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors in philosophy—especially al-Farabi—take as their “central theme” not “the opposition between faith and knowledge, but between philosophy and Law,” a “Law that aims at its own perfection as well as that of humankind.” And behind these philosophers stands Plato, author of The Laws, a book that “provides medieval thinkers the starting point whence they can philosophically understand revelation, thus expressing the philosophical, skeptical, foundation of faith in revelation.” Maimonides appreciated the need for “the legal foundation of philosophy, a justification of philosophy in front of revelation,” God’s revelation of His comprehensive Law, and hence His regime. But Maimonides went further, “consider[ing] the necessity of the philosophical foundation of the Law, because the practical usefulness of the revelation cannot disregard the supremacy of theoretical life over political life.” That is, prophetology is “the place where the Law becomes an object of philosophy.”

And because any philosophic foundation will unsettle unphilosophic minds, the overwhelming majority of minds in any city, philosophers who consider that foundation will need a measure of reticence when they speak and write. Prophets, Maimonides teaches, need to employ “a metaphorical and imaginative language” in justifying the law before the bar of public opinion. Unlike the philosophes of the modern Enlightenment, who attempt to bring philosophic truths to everyone but end up in oversimplifying philosophy, turning it into ‘ideology,’ “Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors are skeptical thinkers, rationalist philosophers who deal with the relationship between philosophy, politics, and religion in a perspective that is at the same time (privately) radical and (publicly moderate, clearly different from the moderns’ anti-religious radicalism.” This can be done ‘in good faith’ because “the purpose of the Law coincides with the purpose of philosophy: the happiness of the human being, rendered possible by knowledge of truth, gain through contemplative life.” This contrasts with modern rationalism, which takes human purposes as irrational, a matter of the passions, and so makes reason primarily practical, not contemplative-theoretical. Prophecy aims at establishing “good legislation and a rightful government” aimed at the “moral and spiritual perfection of the human being.” “The purpose of prophecy is essentially political because the prophet has the duty to establish a society inside which the human being may attain its supreme perfection: theoretical life.” That not all, or even many, human beings will do so at a given time in a given regime does not mean that ‘the few’ are out to injure ‘the many,’ inasmuch as their philosophic inquiries in no way exploit their fellow citizens by conceiving of themselves as masters and ‘the many’ as slaves. Following Maimonides’ guidance, Strauss leaves that sort of claim to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Genuinely politic, prudent philosophers know that “theory, not politics, is the greatest good,” but they also know that “politics, not theory, is the ‘first’ good, because the human being, as a political animal, can only live inside a society.”

Against the modern claims that civilization is man’s much-needed improvement of what nature gives him—a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—and that religion is a failed or at best inadequate claim, within this cultural-civilizational effort, to produce such improvement,  Strauss argues that “religion cannot be sufficiently understood inside the concept of culture, which expresses a way for the human spirit to produce, while religion is not a product of the human being, but it is given to it.” According to the prophets, speaking to ‘the many,’ religious revelation is given by God, the political regime given by God. According to the philosophers who lived before the modern philosophic project took hold, “religion and politics are the facts that transcend culture” because human beings are political animals by nature. Whether given by God or by nature or by God through nature, politics is a ‘given.’ Philosophers properly start their thinking with it and within it. 

What Altini calls “stranger wisdom” comes in practical-prudential as well as philosophic form. Strauss demonstrated it, repeatedly, during the 1930s, always staying two steps ahead of the Nazis—in France, where he moved a year before Hitler came to power (he made several interesting friends and acquaintances there, including the Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, while disliking the “disorderly Parisian way of life) and then in Great Britain (where he was pleased by the “measured political life,” “the sobriety of its literature”—especially the novels of Austen and Thackeray—and “the image of the gentleman,” but where he had no friends, except for Hans Jonas, and could find no secure academic appointment). He moved to the United States in 1937, an event Altini relates near the center of the book, as it did amount to a sort of hinge in his life, America being the place where he became a citizen, attracted students, and published his most important books. Many of his family members died in the Holocaust.

Teaching at the New School for Social Research throughout the war years, Strauss deepened his appreciation for al-Farabi. He had already understood that al-Farabi is no neo-Platonist doctrinaire, as some scholars had claimed, but “a skeptical philosopher,” alert to the “opposition between reason and revelation, philosophy and religion,” a man who effected “a fundamental turning point in the history of political philosophy,” decisively influencing both Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers by teaching them the Platonic dialectic “between esotericism” or philosophic inquiry and “exotericism” or “reticent” writing “that characterizes all pre-modern philosophical-political thought.” Studying the Farabian texts in more detail, now, Strauss now came to understand how radically skeptical the philosopher was, how he deserves the honor of being considered “the founder of philosophy in the context of revealed religion and as Plato’s ‘heir.'” This discovery, and others like it, “consolidated” his critique of historicism, as it showed that the outward conformity of philosophers to the prevailing opinions of their times and places scarcely served as evidence for the claim that they were ‘products’ of those times and places. Given the way in which al-Farabi learned from Plato, and subsequent philosophers learned from both, Strauss concluded that “the essence of classical philosophy (in particular of Platonic and Aristotelian politike episteme) was not Greek, but rather universal,” and quite capable of “radically contest[ing] the Cartesian subjectivist foundation” of modern rationalism and the geometric-materialist reductionism of Hobbesian morality and the political science derived from that morality.

Although Strauss had little doubt that Germany would lose the Second World War, he saw that German philosophy was “colonizing” other Western countries, including the United States. This was conspicuously the case at the New School, which had been founded twenty years earlier by John Dewey and others who had been influenced by Hegel, Marx, and other historicist thinkers, ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ Although German nihilism primarily occurred among philosophers of the ‘Right,’ German progressivism animated the ‘Left,’ which accounts for what Altini mistakenly calls “an internal contradiction of Straussian thought.” The supposed contradiction is that Strauss criticized “the political foundations of German culture that allowed the advent of Nazi barbarism” while criticizing “liberal and democratic modernity,” betraying “a certain sympathy towards the radicalism of right-wing thinkers against the domination of technique and economics that characterized Europe in the early twentieth century, in both its capitalist and communist version,” its “denunciation of mechanization and rationalization.” As Altini himself has already made clear, sympathy toward a radical critique of modernity does not mean the endorsement of such critiques in the forms they have actually taken—forms which, as Altini has noticed, often unwittingly partake of the ‘modern’ assumptions their authors intend to overturn.

Altini well describes Strauss’s main accomplishment during his years in America, his recovery of Platonic political philosophy by exegesis of Platonic writings themselves, unmediated by Maimonides and al-Farabi, although he continued to study both of the later philosophers throughout this period. In considering the Platonic dialogues, Strauss saw that Plato had found an answer to philosophy’s dilemma. While Socrates’ way of life, interrogating and thereby offending his fellow citizens with regard to their theological-political convictions, a way of life leading to his death, Plato saw that writing, particularly “reticent” writing, could enable a philosopher to continue his inquiries while staying alive. For his part, in best-known book, Natural Right and History, Strauss addresses his American fellow-citizens less in terms of divine or natural law, more in terms of natural right—that is, in terms Americans then revered. He distinguished, however, between modern and “classical” natural right, even as he had distinguished between “ancient” law and modern ‘rights.’ In this, he was aided by his discovery of the ‘modern’ who preceded even Hobbes and Descartes—Machiavelli, who does not dwell upon rights of any kind. The root of modern ‘rights’ in the unrighteous Florentine cleared the way for a critique of modern nihilism that does not depend upon the valorization of law as either divinely or naturally ordained, while providing a non-legalist and at the same time non-relativist criterion for moral and political thought and practice. 

During these years, Strauss was able to show how later ‘moderns’ transformed Machiavelli’s teaching without altering its core. This is the argument of his 1959 book, What Is Political Philosophy? in which he describes “the three waves of modernity” along with the several splashes each of those waves made. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke generated the first wave, undermining Christianity with a materialist naturalism that went beyond Epicureanism to claim that human efforts can conquer chance and nature itself. Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel, and Marx generated the second wave. “Rousseau takes the decisive step in the criticism of classical natural right by elaborating the concept of ‘general will,’ which begins to delineate the process of historicization” of human thought. Whereas Hobbes and Locke take natural right to hold as a standard after civil society arises, “Rousseau changes course, underlining the necessity that civil life be built with the purpose of making such an appeal completely unnecessary A civil society built precisely following natural law automatically produces the right positive law, exemplified by the general will, which replaces natural right. However, if the ultimate standard of justice becomes general will, then no standard external to will constitutes the reference point for justice and for law.” This clears the shore for the third wave, generated by Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger, who radicalize the historicism of Hegel and Marx. For radical historicists, “the human being experiences suffering and the abyss,” as “nature and eternity are by then two categories void of sense in front of an essentially irrational services of events, dominated by the will to power.” Previous historicists retained an esteem for reason, holding that there are rationally discernable ‘laws of history.’ But with the radical historicists claim that “truth is neither desirable nor edifying, but mortal.”

Since reason no longer counts for much, the distinction between the philosopher, hitherto considered the man of reason par excellence, and the citizen, whose reason is prudential at best, simply disappears. Marxist-Leninist tyrants, who clung to second-wave modernity, justified mass murder as the rationally valid means of hurrying historical progress to its end, its culmination in the fully rational, faction-free, communal society, prevailing worldwide. But “history is not the court of the world” because the supposed end of history, “the universal and homogeneous State” is a thing of questionable justice (here, Nietzsche’s animadversions about the ‘Last Man’ come into play), and the human assumption of Providential power and wisdom is equally questionable. “Political philosophy does not deal with salvific expectations or secularized anticipations of the afterlife, in the certainty of their forthcoming accomplishment.” As for radical historicism, Heidegger’s adherence to the supposed “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, even after real Nazism ended in catastrophe, confuses power, an instrumentality, with justice, an end.

As for the modern democracies, now in the grips of the milder historicism of Progressives, New Dealers, and their progeny, Strauss considered them very indirectly in his 1966 book, Socrates and Aristophanes. Aristophanes mocks the powerlessness of Socrates, of philosophers generally. They cannot “persuade the citizens that fill city squares and, therefore, [cannot] carry out a direct political power.” In this, the poets are their superiors. Yet, “Aristophanes expresses a sentiment which is midway between admiration and envy for Socrates, because the comic playwright knew” that the philosopher’s political impotence “is counterbalanced by a true advantage philosophy has over comedy”: the philosopher does not depend upon the applause of the crowd. Socrates enjoys “perfect freedom,” while the poet does not. The democratic politician acts under the same constraint, his rhetoric being a sort of political poetry. In Liberalism Ancient and Modern, published in 1968, Strauss contrasts modern, historicist liberalism, which cannot really liberate, with ancient or classical liberalism by means of a discussion of liberal education, by then under attack in America, the land of modern liberalism, from the New Left. “The concept of liberal education does not have success in the modern world, where the term ‘education implies a universal and popular education,” thanks to the regime of modern democracy and its “mass culture.” A genuinely liberal, liberating, education understands the “difference between philosophy and the city.” To learn to think along with a genuine philosopher, to read one of his books, requires sustained and intelligent attention to the particulars of that book, not the ‘quick takes’ that busy democratic citizens prefer. An introduction to philosophy requires time and patience, neither of which enjoy much esteem in democratic regimes. “What we call education today very often does not mean formation of the character,” moral or intellectual, “but rather instruction, training, and conditioning, which is a reduction of education to the leveling of consciences.” In democratic regimes, philosophers and their scholarly allies can nonetheless provide enclaves in which students are reminded, and thereby re-minded, “of the sense of human excellence, provid[ing] the antidote against conformism.”

In his last years, Strauss returned to the figure of Socrates as depicted in the writings of Xenophon. Under Strauss’s careful scrutiny, Xenophon may be seen as having distinguished the gentleman-citizen, the philosopher, and the tyrant. The citizen differs from the tyrant in his disinterestedness, his genuine concern for the good of his political community. Both differ from the philosopher. Part of the difference “resides in the different form of eros that animates the philosopher and the political man, which regards theoria in the first case, while in the second case it concerns popular recognition,” or, in “the worst cases, unbridled personal economic interest, ambition, or desire of power.” A philosopher, seeking wisdom, “wishes to be admired by a small minority, the political man wishes to be honored,” to be recognized, “by everyone.” One conceives of liberty as freedom from the need for popular applause, the other as the enjoyment of that applause. “The philosopher does not wish to govern”; “Xenophon does not mention courage or military virtue in his enumerations of Socratic virtues. This is because, strictly speaking, the philosopher is not part of the city. The only teachers that have a constitutive part in political society are priests.” In all of this, Xenophon takes a very different stance than Machiavelli, with whom he is sometimes compared. Machiavelli would have philosophers and the princes they instruct replace the priests, take control of chance, which by his time was labeled divine providence. Consequently, Strauss notes, Machiavelli cites none of Xenophon’s Socratic writings, confining his references to the histories. There is, nonetheless, one “important point of contact” between Xenophon and Machiavelli: neither “believes in the omnipotence of the word,” the claim of rhetoricians and sophists. In this, both men are philosophers of politics, thinking about what really is, not deceived by those who beckon us into wishful thinking. 

Strauss’s The Argument and the Action of Plato’s “Laws” appeared after his death. The book “not only represents the completion of Strauss’s long studies on Greek classics, but also an ideal spiritual testament.” Strauss regard the Laws as the most important of the dialogues concerning politics, Plato’s “political work par excellence.” He continues to read Plato’s work “through the interpretive key elaborated by al-Farabi.” Strauss “retrace[s] Plato’s text almost line by line and inserted his reflections as a reader in dialogue with the text, questioning its contradictions and obscurities, posing questions, problems, and solutions more explicitly (but not entirely explicitly) than they appear in Plato’s writing.” Altini prudently recommends that readers of Strauss’s book first read it “for itself,” then re-read it while comparing it to Plato’s dialogue, “in order to verify the variations that exist between the original and its copy, trying to understand the theoretical reasons behind these variations, inside a writing based on the models of ‘repetition’ and ‘imitation.'” 

There are two kinds of law. “The law is clearly the judgment of the city on the city’s business and therefore it is not physis, but nomos.” But conventional law requires justification; it is not self-justifying. In that sense, “the law aims to a higher judgment than the simple judgment of the city,” as “virtue is not limited to obedience to [conventional] laws.” Conventional laws, which “change from city to city, in an arbitrary way,” “must confront natural law,” “eternal and unchanging.” Natural law “indicates the limits of arbitrariness and shows the possibility of a good and just political order.” In his inquiries into nature, the philosopher must “elaborate strategies to preserve both freedom to philosophize and the possibility to live peacefully inside the city, respecting the requirements of political life.” As Strauss puts it, what is “first for us”—the law under which we live—is not “first in itself,” since nature precedes convention. To pursue the way of life that centers on inquiries into the natural law is to pursue a way of life unlikely to be entirely congruent with the “theological-political” way of life. “The philosopher is always a stranger, even at home, because he interprets the thaumazein,” wonder, “as a quest for knowledge, not as an original wisdom (be it revealed or traditional).” There is no “final solution” to this difficulty, only ways to lessen it.

 

Ludwig Feuerbach: Lectures on the Essence of Religion. Ralph Manheim translation. New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1846].

Ludwig Feuerbach: Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Manfred Vogel translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986 [1843].

 

Although he attended many lectures offered by G. W. F. Hegel at the University of Berlin, Feuerbach broke with his professor on the question of materialism, rejecting Hegel’s dialectical immanentism. He also firmly denied both the Creator-God of the Bible and any suggestion of philosophic dualism. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, although not a ‘dialectical materialist,’ like his younger contemporary, Karl Marx.

Students at the University of Heidelberg, where Feuerbach had attended classes before transferring to Berlin, invited him to deliver a series of thirty lectures on “the Essence of Religion,” which he published in 1846. Speaking shortly before the revolutionary year of 1848, Feuerbach began by observing that “today every man, even if he supposes himself to be supremely nonpartisan, is at least theoretically a partisan, though he may not know it or want to be,” since “today political interest engulfs all other interests and political events keep us in a state of constant turmoil.” Indeed, “today it is actually the duty—especially of us nonpolitical Germans—to forget everything for the sake of politics”; more, “mankind” itself “must at certain times forget all other tasks and activities for the sake of one particular task and activity if it wishes to achieve something complete and worthwhile.” Inasmuch as religion “is to be sure closely connected with politics,” and we now “demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter,” having become “as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism,” we are “determined to become political materialists.” Feuerbach’s critique of religion serves as the foundation of a republican politics, a ‘youth movement.’ At around the same time, Tocqueville would publish his book on the French Revolution, remarking that it was the political inexperience of the French revolutionaries that led to the Terror. Feuerbach does not consider that possibility, and neither would most Germans, for the next hundred years.

“Truly free, uncompromising, unconventional thinking, thinking that aspires to be fruitful, not to say decisive, requires an unconventional, free, and uncompromising life,” he tells his young listeners. “And anyone who wishes in his thinking to get to the bottom of human affairs must have his two feet physically, bodily on their foundation,” namely nature, “cast[ing] aside all extravagant, supernatural, and unnatural ideas and fantasies.” Readily seeing through the calculated ambiguities of Bacon and Hobbes (he had written a study of Bacon’s philosophy, published in the 1830s), he sees, adopts, and advocates their materialism, while reserving especial praise for Spinoza, “the only modern philosopher to have provided the first elements of a critique and explanation of religion and theology; the first to have offered a positive opposition to theology; the first to have stated, in terms that have become classical, that the world cannot be regarded as the work or product of a personal being acting in accordance with aims and purposes; the first to have brought out the all-importance of nature for the philosophy of religion.” In response to Spinoza, Leibniz is “the first modern German philosopher” to earn “the honor, or dishonor, of having once again tied philosophy to the apron strings of theology,” an effort Feuerbach ridicules as the philosophical equivalent of the astronomical contortions of Tycho Brahe, who vainly attempted to combine elements of the Copernican system with the system of Ptolemy that it had correctly replaced. To mix philosophy and theology, as Leibniz attempts, can result only in “a monstrosity” because theology holds only the sacred as true, “whereas to philosophy, only what it holds true is sacred.” “All my works have been written in opposition to a period when every effort was made to force mankind back into the darkness of bygone centuries,” the centuries before the modern Enlightenment. Even the pious philosophers of earlier centuries understood the need to separate philosophy and religion, “arguing that religion is grounded on divine wisdom and authority, while philosophy is grounded solely on human wisdom.” But “the most recent philosophers”—Leibniz but, more impressively, Hegel—stand for “the identity of philosophy and religion, at least as far as content and substance are concerned.” “I criticized the Hegelian philosophy,” with its dialectical immanentism, its ‘Absolute Spirit,’ “for regarding the essential as nonessential and the nonessential as essential in religion.” Against this, I, Feuerbach, declared the essence of religion to be “precisely what philosophy regards as mere form,” immaterial in both senses of the word. “I replaced the abstract, merely cogitated cosmic being known as God by the reality of the world, or nature,” while also replacing “the rational being deprived of his senses, which philosophy has extracted out of man, by the real, sensuous man endowed with reason.” There is, for example, no immortality of the individual human ‘soul.’ “Intellectual, ethical, or moral immortality is solely the immortality a man gains through his works,” and his soul, animating those works, is only “what he passionately loves, what he does with passion,” and “men’s souls are as diverse, as particular as men themselves.” Feuerbach thus full-throatedly endorses not only the materialism of the moderns but the individualism of the moderns and the ‘democracy’ of the moderns, their esteem for liberty defined as doing what one likes, passionately.

Accordingly, rightly understood, “theology is anthropology” because it “expresses nothing other than the deified essence of man”; that is what ‘revealed religion’ reveals. Overlying nature, convention skews man’s conception of himself and therefore his conception of the divine; “the pagan is a patriot,” his gods the gods of his polis, while “the Christian is a cosmopolitan” whose God is universal. Universalism thrives on the habit of generalization, abstraction, and sure enough, “Christianity is idealism, an edifice crowned by a natureless God or spirit who makes the world by merely thinking and willing, and apart from whose thinking and willing the world has no existence.” But, Feuerbach asserts, there is only nature—no ideals and no God or gods. The only difference between human nature and the rest of nature is human consciousness; he intends to awaken that consciousness to the emptiness of religious belief (in these lectures) and of philosophic idealism (in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), to “demonstrate that the powers which man worships and fears in his religious life, which he seeks to propitiate even with bloody human sacrifices, are merely creatures of his own unfree, fearful mind and of his ignorant unformed intelligence.” Morally and politically, this means that he wants “man, who is always unconsciously governed and determined by his own essence alone, may in future consciously take his own human essence as the law and determining ground, the aim and measure, of his ethical and political life.” No fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. This will begin the project “to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world, religious and political flunkeys of heavenly and earthly monarchs and lords into free, self-reliant citizens of the earth.” 

“Hear, O Israel.” Religious men hearken to nature’s terrifying thunder, a noise perceived through “the ear, the organ of terror”—the ear, which is “the womb of the gods.” Feuerbach goes so far as to claim that “if man had only eyes, hands and the senses of taste and smell, he would have no religion, for all these senses are organs of critique and skepticism.” The fear and love commended by religions are passions of dependency, not self-reliance. The ultimate sign of human helplessness is mortality: “If man did not die, if he lived forever, if there were no such thing as death, there would be no religion.” Belief in immortality is man’s defense against death (presumably including Feuerbach’s work, which he could only justify by saying that it is an effort to achieve the only possible form of immortality). Primitive man worships nature, which he deifies; Feuerbach calls this religion but not theism, a term he reserves for belief in a god or gods distinct from nature and man. “It is theism, theology, that has wrenched man out of his relationship with the world, isolated him, made him into an arrogant self-centered being who exalts himself above nature.” “In religion man projects his essence,” but primitive man (with unintended modesty) merely projected his sensations, having yet to develop the abstract thought that enables him to conceive of an abstract or spiritual god. Primitive man is entirely dependent upon nature; religion registers human dependency; primitive religion deifies nature because primitive man fears nature, divinizes it, hoping to propitiate the imagined divinities that are nothing more than aspects of nature. We should not make this mistake, return to paganism, “since man’s true culture and true task is to take things as they are, to make no more, but also no less of them than they are. Nature religion, pantheism, makes too much of nature”—the earth is indeed our mother, but we are now adults— while “conversely, idealism, theism Christian make too little of it, and indeed ignore it.”  Politically, this means that while we should understand but not follow the pagans in making “the nature in which they lived and breathed, to which alone they owed their individual character, in short, the nature of their country, [into] an object of religious worship,” modern man might still respect “the nature of this country,” his country, “for it is to this country alone that I owe my life and what I am.” “How untrue we Germans have become to our source, our mother, and how unlike her, thanks to Christianity which taught us that heaven is our home.”

Feuerbach further claims that egoism is the essence of religion, “the self-assertion of man in accordance with his nature and consequently of his reason.” Since “to man life is the supreme good,” man inclines to idolize, to deify, anything that protects or enhances his life. But these idols are in fact “dependent on man; they are gods only insofar as they serve his being, as they are useful, helpful, appropriate to it.” Christianity only replaced paganism when the idols were seen as useless, “because the pagan gods did not give them what they wanted,” whereas the Christian God is the “very essence and likeness” of man himself, who by now had begun to think abstractly, therefore seeking a universal, all-knowing, all-powerful deity. This enables ‘we moderns,’ we post-Christians, to discover the “ultimate subjective ground of religion in human egoism,” human desire. Aristotle’s god, the ‘god of the philosophers,’ gains no adherents among most people because it is neither a helpful nor a harmful god. It is useless. “In calling egoism the ground and essence of religion, I am not finding fault with religion,” which only reflects the nature, the essence of man in this regard. Rather, Feuerbach faults an ‘idealistic’ religion that holds man above nature, “tak[ing] an unboundedly egoistic, contemptuous attitude toward nature,” exhibiting an egoism no longer bounded by the limits of nature alone, as seen “in the Christian belief in miracles and immortality,” evidence of “an unnatural, supernatural, and chimerical egoism, exceeding the limits of necessary, natural egoism.”

But if religion expresses natural human egoism, why do so many religions commend self-abnegation? Because a man might be a fanatic, carrying his natural feelings too far. Or he might hope “to gain the favor of his gods, who grant him everything he desires”—a cunning, self-serving self-abnegation, “only a form, a means of self-affirmation, of self-love.” This is the psychology of religious sacrifice, whether the sacrifice of animals, or “bloody human sacrifice” seen among pagans, or Christian sacrifice, which partakes “of a different, namely, psychological, spiritual order,” a sacrifizio dell’intelleto. In the spirit of Machiavelli, Feuerbach alleges that “the Church has at all times advocated moral, spiritual, and mental self-emasculation.” Christians are communists, “but communists out of egoism”; their “generous, imposing sacrifices” do not differ in principle” from “foul and niggardly sacrifices.” It is true that any attempt to combat “human egoism in the highly developed sense” amounts to “sheer absurdity and madness,” since “the design underlying all human impulses, strivings, and actions, is to satisfy the needs of human nature, human egoism.” But only with full ‘consciousness’ of the grounding of self-interest in nature, with no supernatural confusion added.

It is noteworthy that in the first nine of this series of thirty lectures, Feuerbach makes no arguments. He asserts. It may be that his failure to philosophize serves a rhetorical strategy, saying atheistic things that will shock many among his young audience while encouraging those who already deny the existence of God. He begins his tenth lecture in much the same style. It is egoism, he claims, that makes dependency possible (“where there is no egoism, there is no feeling of dependency”) and it is egoism that revolts against dependency (“I love freedom of movement”). Human beings are dependent, but not upon God. “How untrue we Germans have become to our source, our mother, and how unlike her, thanks to Christianity which taught us that heaven is our home.” Be true to yourselves, young Germans; turn away from religion to nature and to Fatherland.

But now he begins to philosophize, taking aim at the “cosmological proof” of God’s existence, that there must be some ultimate Cause-of-causes, some First Mover of all subsequent movements in nature. Feuerbach dismisses this as proof only of human psychological neediness, not of the existence of God. “This need of mine to break off the endless series is no proof of a real break in the series of a real beginning and end.” “God” is only a name for our own inability to discern the true origin of things, or indeed if there was an origin at all, since the cosmos might be eternal. And “what is to prevent me from going beyond God?”—continuing the inquiry into what came before “In the beginning….” As far as we can see, “Nature has no beginning and no end”; politically (as it were) this means that “nature does not culminate in a monarchic summit; it is a republic.” Continuing to follow the evidence presented by his senses, Feuerbach says, “I cannot derive my body from my mind—for I have to eat or to be able to eat before I can think.” Reason presupposes my senses; my senses do not presuppose reason. “No more, or perhaps even less, can I derive nature from God.” That “the world of the senses is real” is an ineluctable truth in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Only the religions deny this, and neither do they, initially, since “Man’s first belief is his belief in the truth of the senses,” the foundation of “nature religion.” “The first beings of whom man had immediate certainty and consequently his first gods were sensuous objects”; more, “men’s senses were themselves his first gods.” He has no philosophic need for any others, inasmuch as “what a man does not know by his own lights, he does not know at all.”

What is nature? It is “the sum of all the sensuous forces, things, and beings which man distinguishes from himself as other than human.” Nature is no god but “a manifold, public, actual being which can be perceived with all the senses.” The physical attributes of the Biblical God—power, eternity, infinity—are all “rooted in nature.” His moral attributes are rooted in human nature, attributes that make Him useful to man. God’s moral and also his intellectual traits are nothing more than projections of natural human capacities upon an imaginary perfect being, proving that man is indeed egoistic. The infinity attributed to God only proves that man is “infinitely fond of himself,” ready to worship his own image. “In theology,” as distinguished from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, “things are not thought and willed because they exist, they exist because they are thought and willed.” It is a teaching that inverts “the order of nature,” an inversion that is in a sense natural to man, even if mistaken, because man is rational, a being that “sets the class or class concept before the species and individuals, the abstract before the concrete”; “this explains and resolves all the difficulties and contradictions arising from attempts to explain the world as God’s creation,” a something inexplicably created out of nothing. “God is nothing other than the sum of generic concepts,” concepts generated by the human mind’s natural inclination to think of such abstractions as time and space, then to assume that these exist prior to the real things, the material, sensually perceived things. That is, abstractions are concepts, constructed in the human mind, which constructs or ‘creates’ by its nature—still another godlike attribute of human nature that human beings naturally attribute to their gods. Language itself abstracts, unable to express the particular, and so takes over our minds, making our minds think abstractly. Those among us who don’t think too much, those “who are more concerned with life than with study, who spend more of their time out of doors than in libraries, whose occupations and temperaments lead them to observe real beings,” understand this better than bookish pedants and priests.

Feuerbach is careful not to dismiss abstractions entirely. “I do not deny the existence of wisdom, goodness, beauty; I deny only that these class concepts are independent beings, either as gods, or as attributes of God, or as Platonic Ideas, or as self-positing Hegelian concepts; I merely maintain that they exist only in wise, good, beautiful individuals” as their attributes, as “characteristics or determinations of individuality,” not as “beings in themselves.” In terms of physical nature, my form consists of the outer limits of my body; someone can trace the outline of my body if I lie down on a large piece of cardboard, but that outline abstracts from my body itself, having no reality beyond the ink or carbon left behind by the instrument that traced it.

Feuerbach next turns to a refutation of the teleological proof of God’s existence, often called the argument from design—the Apostle Paul’s testimony, that the perceivable order of the world implies an ‘orderer,’ God. Feuerbach rejoins that “what man interprets as the purposiveness of nature is in reality nothing other than the unity of the world, the harmony of its causes and effects, and in general the all-embracing order of things in nature,” one that “gives man the impression of wisdom and purposiveness in nature,” but does not prove it. Feuerbach equally denies that the world “owe[s] its existence to any accident,” the “patently irrational notion” that it derived from “the fortuitous clash of atoms,” a fantasy “tantamount to explaining the genesis of a literary work, the Annales of Ennius, for example, by a chance combination of letters.” The sum of things does not exist due to intention or to chance, as far as perceiving and reasoning man can know. Being is ‘because’ it is, not ‘in order for’ anything or by fortunate concatenation. We only know that the universe is, not how or why, and we know that it is thanks to our senses, our only means of knowing anything. 

And even if teleology were real, this wouldn’t prove the existence of God or gods. “God is merely the hypostasized and objectified essence of the human imagination.” We “can give no reason for a natural law,” even if “analogy leads us to the belief, or rather the certainty, that the law has a natural cause.” To infer the existence of God from the natural order is to confuse nature, which is a ‘republic’ in which all elements interplay, with a monarchic Being who acts miraculously, counter to nature, by fiat. There “is only one regime” in nature, a republic. In human nature, “my head may be the president of my life, but it is not an absolute monarch, king by divine right,” having the same substance “of flesh and blood” as the stomach, the heart, or any of the other organs. It rules but “does not differ from them in kind, in race,” exerting no “despotic power.” if it “tries to play the prince and make unnatural demands” on the other organs it will be “stripped of its command.” And “just as a republic, at least the democratic republic I have in mind, is governed not by princes but by representatives of the people, so nature is not governed by gods, but only by natural forces, natural laws, and natural elements or beings.” To posit the existence of God, an immaterial being, “breaks off this necessary connection” between physical things, between the physical senses and the physical objects they perceive. “Calvin says explicitly that God in the Old Testament created light before the sun, in order that men might see that the beneficent effects of light were not necessarily connected with the sun, that even without the sun God is capable of doing what He now, in the customary but by no means necessary course of nature, does by means of the sun.” But “if there is a God, why the world, why nature,” a being that cannot achieve the perfection of God? “It has often been said that the world is inexplicable without a God; but the exact opposite is true: if there is a God, the existence of a world becomes inexplicable; for then the world is utterly superfluous,” as “nothing follows from God; everything beside Him is superfluous, futile, meaningless.” Biblical religion is nihilism, its claim of something coming out of nothing utterly irrational not only in terms of efficient and material causation but in terms of teleological causation, since there is no rational purpose for a perfect Being to create an imperfect thing. Moslem theologians are more rigorously rational than their Christian counterparts, maintaining “quite correctly from the standpoint of theology” that all things are entirely dependent upon God’s will, that there is no nature that acts in any way independently of God. Fire could cool things, if God willed that. ‘Christian rationalism’ of the sort propounded by Aquinas is only “theism attenuated by atheism or naturalism or cosmism, in short, by elements opposed to theism”—a “limited, restricted, and incomplete atheism or naturalism.” A God “who acts only in accordance with natural laws” is “a God only in name.” “Only an unlimited, wonder-working God, bound by no laws, a God who, at least in man’s faith and imagination, can save us from all trouble and affliction, is truly a God,” but a God “who is no more powerful than doctors and medicines, is an utterly superfluous, unnecessary God,” an “absurdity.” The choice is stark: no monarchy or absolute monarchy, no God and “an absolute God like the God of our fathers.” Make up your minds, young Germans.

To think straight, “man starts from what is closest to him, from the present, and draws from it inferences concerning what is further away; this procedure is common to atheist and theist alike.” The difference is that theists are, paradoxically, anthropocentric, attributing human qualities to an imagined God and (especially in paganism) to a mythicized, ‘personalized’ cosmos, while atheists “takes nature as his starting point and goes on to the study of man” as one instance of the nature of which he is a part. “The atheist puts nature before art. The theist puts art before nature; in his view, nature is a product of God’s art, or, what amounts to the same thing, of divine art.” The theist mistakenly derives “the unconscious from consciousness, rather than consciousness from the unconscious.” But the mind is no disembodied spirit breathed into man by a disembodied God; the mind is an effect of brain activity. The German mystic Jacob Böhme tried to get around this by claiming that God is corporeal, working himself up into spirituality. This “supernatural naturalism” deifies matter and is merely a product of Bōhme’s fertile, or perhaps febrile, imagination. The claim lacks any evidence, not even Scriptural evidence. “Either God or nature! There is no third, middle term combining the two.” Luckily, “for all his extravagant faith, man is unable to repress or relinquish his natural human reason,” which enables him to pursue “independent activity, diligence, education, self-mastery, and effort”—all needed, since “nature throws man upon his own resources; it does not help him unless he helps himself; it lets him sink if he cannot swim,” as part of nature, which changes perpetually, discarding one aspect of itself in favor of another, then discarding that one. Feuerbach slashes at God with Ockham’s razor: “If there is an eye watching over me, why do I need an eye of my own, why should I look out for myself?” On the grounds of religious passivity, even a man who shaves his own beard rebels against the course of nature, God’s creation. 

As for that creation, Feuerbach dismisses creatio ex nihilo as “a mere evasion”: “Where did the spirit get the nonspiritual, material corporeal substances of which the world consists?” And if, with Hegel, one claims that “He created it out of Himself, out of spiritual matter,” “how does real matter issue from spiritual matter, from God?” “What makes the world world, what makes body body and matter matter, is something that cannot be theologically or philosophically deduced from anything else; it cannot be derived, but simply is, and can be understood only in terms of itself.” Religion is the realm of imagination, of poetry, of man making gods for himself to worship. “I should merely like man to stop setting his hear on things which are no longer in keeping with his nature and needs, and which he therefore can believe and worship only by coming into conflict with himself” as a rational being. Being a thing of the imagination, a thing of poetry, of making, religion permits a morality of man’s own making. “Russian prostitutes are…full of reverence for the saints. When they receive visitors, the first thing they do is to cover their icons and put out the candles.” No less ridiculously, in Feuerbach’s estimation, a Christian “need only hang the cloak of Christian love, of divine grace, over God’s punitive justice and proceed to do anything he pleases.” More comprehensively, man’s imagination, “molded by his nature,” makes God “in his image” and remakes nature, too, “into an image of man.” The imagination enables men to behave as despots over all. Only reason can discern the natural limits of man, who in reality lives within a cosmos that is “blind and deaf to the desires and complaints of man.” Not only does man not need religion for obtaining happiness, religion impedes his pursuit of it. But “as soon as man opens his eyes, as soon as he ceases to be beclouded by religious ideas and sees reality for what it is, his heart revolts against the notion of Providence…by the way in which it saves one man and lets another go to his doom, destines one man to happiness and prosperity and others to abject misery.” Only Enlightened materialism truly promises justice.

While “religion arises solely in the night of ignorance,” a night in which dreams, products of the imagination, rule human minds, it “also springs from man’s need of light, of culture, or at least of the products of culture,” being “the first, still crude and vulgar form of human culture.” This “why every epoch, every important stage in the history of human civilization, begins with religion.” It must not end there, however, since “religion merely suppresses the symptoms of evil, not its causes.” The “radical cure” of “bestiality and barbarism” comes “only where the actions of mankind flow from causes inherent in the nature of man,” in “harmony between principle and practice, cause and effect; only then can man be complete and whole.” The union of principle or theory and practice may be seen in modern science, which may be undertaken by the right kind of education. “All history down to our own times demonstrates that the greatest horrors are compatible with religion, but not with education,” an asseveration that begs the reply, ‘Just you wait!’ Be this as it may, Feuerbach points to the supposed impossibility of “progress” within the horizons of traditional religions. “A new era also requires a new view of the first elements and foundations of human existence; it requires—if we wish to retain the word—a new religion!” To establish this new religion, the old ones must be extirpated; mere religious toleration is not enough. In this new religion, work will replace prayer. Whereas “a Christian’s wishes exceed the limits of nature and of the world,” atheism “is a complete and thoroughgoing rationalism,” one that refuses the illusory promise of immortality the old religions offer, the appeal to wishful thinking, replacing it with the reality of the true God, the “unity and equality of the human race,” of which the false God of the religions is only the “personified” disembodiment. “Those human desires that are not imaginary and fantastic are fulfilled in the course of history, of the future,” desires that “will someday be fulfilled,” will “one day be reality.” “We must therefore modify our goals and exchange divinity, in which only man’s groundless and gratuitous desires are fulfilled, for the human race or human nature, religion for education, the hereafter in heaven for the hereafter on earth, that is, the historical future, the future of mankind.” And just as the old religions insist on a public presence, so should the new ‘religion of humanity.’ “The atheism that fears the light is an unworthy and hollow atheism,” the atheism or privately held, esoteric zeteticism of the old philosophers. “True atheism, the atheism that does not shun the light,” does not merely deny the existence of God but affirms “man’s true being.” True atheism is “liberal, openhanded, openminded,” joyful, life-affirming. “We must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion,” its task being “to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world, Christians, who, by their own profession and admission, are half animal, half angel, into men, into whole men.” 

And who shall be the evangelists of the religion of humanity? “I am not for eliminating the cultural aristocracy. Far from it.” You, my university students, can become the vanguard of human progress. The new aristocrats will be aristocrats of the intellect, but deploying intellect in a way that departs in some measure even from previous ‘moderns.’

To do so, they will need not only to reject religion as it has been, not only to plan the religion of the future, but to become the philosophers of the future. His Principles of the Philosophy of the Future provides the roadmap to this new way of life. The “task” of the philosophy of the future is to lead philosophy “from the realm of ‘departed souls’ back into the realm of embodied and living souls; of pulling philosophy down from the divine, self-sufficient bliss in the realm of ideas into human misery,” the “mud in which [man on earth] has been embedded.” That is, Platonic and even Hegelian philosophy (“the philosophy of the absolute”) levitate above human misery instead of helping to remedy it. In this, Feuerbach is not far from Marx’s preference for changing the world instead of attempting to understand it, and he regards the first task of the philosophy of the present, prelude to the philosophy of the future, to provide a “critique of human philosophy through the critique of divine philosophy”—a foreshadowing of the ‘critical thinking’ of Marx and his successors to this day.

The book consists of 65 numbered sections. The central, thirty-third section bears the number traditionally symbolizing Jesus Christ, Who is said to have died at age thirty-three. And the first step toward the philosophy of the future, according to Feuerbach, was taken by Christians, the Protestants who provided a “religious anthropology,” discoursing not so much on God ‘in himself’ but “what he is for man.” Philosophers took the next step, denying that God ‘in himself’ exists, instead claiming that God is “the essence of reason itself.” “That which is object in theism” became in philosophic hands the “subject in speculative philosophy,” with God now the “thinking ego” of man.” Feuerbach charges that “ordinary theology” presents a “self-contradictory” God, one who is human in all his thoughts and feelings yet “supposed to be a non-human and superhuman being,” an “abstracted being”—that is, a being human beings have abstracted from their own distinctive characteristics. The men Feuerbach calls “speculative” philosophers—Descartes and Leibniz, eventually followed by Hegel—rejected God as ” a being of fantasy, a far-removed, indefinite, and cloudy being,” making Him (really It) “a present and definite being,” not a holy but an absolute spirit. “Absolute idealism is nothing but the realized divine mind of Leibnizian theism; it is pure mind systematically elaborated,” as for example in Hegel’s Logic, wherein “the objects of thought are not distinguished from the essence of thought” because the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all of being; Hegelianism is a new form of pantheism, first proposed in modern philosophy by Spinoza. Feuerbach contends that pantheism is in fact “the naked truth of theism” because the things God created, according to the Bible, must have existed in God’s mind before he created them, so the mind of God does indeed comprise all things. That is, if God made matter, “how, why, and from what” did he make it” “To this, theism gives no answer” apart from mere fictions. Only pantheism gives a rationally consistent answer, if one remains within a theological framework.

It only remains for Feuerbach to reject that framework. In Hegelianism, modern science studies the material manifestations of the Absolute Spirit. “But if we were once to have no more objects and no world apart from God, so would we also have no more God—not only an ideal and imagine, but a real being—apart from this world”—a point, it should be said, that Spinoza and the rabbis who attacked him understood very well. “Pantheism connects…atheism with theism, the negation of God with God; God is a material or, in the language of Spinoza, an extended being.” “Matter is not God; it is, rather, the finite, the nondivine, the negation of God,” and pantheism amounts to “theological atheism or theological materialism.” Pantheism is “nothing other than the essence of the modern era elevated to a divine being and to a religiophilosophic principle.” 

Feuerbach dissents from pantheism on ‘Ockhamite’ grounds: If you say God is immanent in matter, why study God at all? You only need to study matter. Medieval scholars were poor scientists because they “had no interest in nature.” ‘We moderns’ no longer know much about God, devils, and angels because “mankind in the modern era lost the organism for the supernatural world and its secrets,” having lost “the disposition toward the supernatural world.” That is, knowledge follows not the head, not reason, but the heart. They were led to his heart-change by Spinoza, “the Moses of modern freethinkers and materialists”—a thought suggesting that Feuerbach conceives of himself as the Christ of such men. Spinoza has done the preliminary work of negating theoretical theology; Baconian empiricism negates practical theology by marking out experience, including experimental science, as a realm of ‘not-God.’ But empiricism by itself is sub-philosophical; modern philosophy must elevate it to theoretical status, and that is where Feuerbach comes in.

“Matter is an essential object of reason,” inasmuch as “if there were not matter, reason would have no stimulus and substance for thinking and thus no content.” In a sense, “God exists,” for moderns, but only as “a tabula rasa, an empty being, a mere idea,” a manifestation of “our ego, our mind, and our essence.” “Modern philosophy proceeded from theology; it is indeed nothing other than theology dissolved and transformed into philosophy,” from Descartes to Hegel. “The culmination of modern philosophy is the Hegelian philosophy,” a “pantheistic idealism.” This idealism must be purged from philosophy altogether by the philosophers of the future, following the lead of Feuerbach. “The historical necessity and justification of modern philosophy attaches itself…mainly to the critique of Hegel.”

The problem with Hegel: his Absolute Spirit, unfolding dialectically in time, amounts to God’s “self-liberation from matter,” albeit strictly within the human mind. Some of the previous philosophers had taught that philosophers, and philosophers alone, liberate themselves from matter, that this “self-liberation [is] the virtue of a human being,” but they didn’t posit anything like the Absolute Spirit, and so did not embrace historicism, the notion that all events up to Hegel’s metaphysics were ‘relative to’ and propaedeutic of the ‘end of History,’ the culmination of this eons-long process. In Hegel’s theory, “God is God only because he overcomes and negates matter,” which is the negation of God. “Only the negation of [this] negation is the true affirmation,” but as far as Feuerbach is concerned this returns us to “the point from which we started—in the bosom of God.” “The secret of the Hegelian dialectic lies, in the last analysis, only in the fact that it negates theology by philosophy and then, in turn, negates philosophy by theology,” resulting in “a self-contradictory, atheistic God.” This isn’t quite fair to Hegel, for whom God or the Absolute Spirit is not a ‘he’ but an ‘it’; it would be better to complain that this returns us to a sort of neo-Platonism, a triumph of mental force over brute matter—the victory of a form of energy over matter. [2] At any rate, Feuerbach alleges that the “speculative identity of mind and matter” seen in Hegel is “nothing more than the unfortunate contradiction of the modern era,” which cannot quite relinquish the divine. “Just as the divine essence is nothing other than the essence of man liberated from the limits of nature, so is the essence of absolute idealism nothing other than the essence of subjective idealism liberated from its limits, and, indeed, rational limits, of subjectivity, that is, from sensation or objectivity in general.” ‘Absolute’ theology, seen not only in Hegel but in such non- or pre-historicist idealists as Kant and Fichte, mistakenly attempts to ‘objectify’ the goings-on in the brain, thereby alienating man “from his own essence and activity.”

Such philosophers quite literally talk “nonsense”—non-sense—by rejecting the evidence of the senses or rather attempting to overcome sense-impressions with ideational illusions of various sorts. “The proof that something is has no other meaning that something is not only thought of.” Anything that is only thought of doesn’t really exist. Concretely, if “I have one hundred dollars only in the mind, but the other dollars in the hand,” the dollars in my mind “exist just for me” but the dollars in my hand “also exist for others” because “they can be felt and seen.” Feuerbach derives the thought of right from what would seem the unpromising soil of materialism by arguing that if I am merely an idea in the head of someone else, “I must put up with everything.” Other persons could “portray me in a way that would be a true caricature without my being able to protest against it,” whereas “when I am still really existing, then I can thwart him, then I can make him feel and prove to him that there is a vast difference between me as I am in his conception and me as I am in reality, namely, between me as his object and me as a subject.” As an abstraction, I am only “a being made up and invented, without the essence of being,” but as a material, sensually perceived object, “I am a liberal,” a man free of anyone else’s imagining and conceptualizing. To think ‘abstractly’ is to lose all sense of reality, of limits. Materialism is of the earth, earthy, and that is a very good thing because without limits “we would arrive at the negation of all rights, for rights are founded only on the reality of the difference between this and that,” difference sensually perceived. A real philosopher, a follower of the “new philosophy” of Feuerbach, sets material, sensually perceived limits on his thinking. “The reality of the idea is…sensation. But reality is the truth of the idea; thus, sensation is the truth of the idea”; “truth, reality, and sensation are identical.”

In the thirty-third, central section of the book, Feuerbach rejects the spiritualized love of Platonism, philosophic eros (what Marx would soon deride as “a passion of the head”) and the spiritual love of Christianity, caritas or agape. “Love is passion,” material passion, “and only passion is the hallmark of existence.” The lover distinguishes, sensually, this from that, who or what he loves from those persons or things he does not love. That is, the core of Feuerbach’s teaching makes the senses do the work of what rationalist philosophers and religious men had bestowed upon reasoning, with its eros for the truth, and/or divine inspiration, with its transformational and creative spiritual love, the love of a holy God, a God separate from His creation. It is “in feelings,” not in thoughts, that “the deepest and highest truths are concealed,” since “love is the true ontological proof of the existence of an object apart from our mind. “That object whose being affords you pleasure and whose nonbeing affords you pain—that alone exists.” “The new philosophy itself is basically nothing other than the essence of feeling elevated to consciousness; it only affirms in reason and with reason what every man—the real man—professes in his heart,” which “does not want abstract, metaphysical, or theological objects” but “real and sensuous objects and beings.” This is indeed a philosophy well designed to attract young men stuck in a university classroom.

“The secret of immediate knowledge is sensation.” This is Feuerbach’s version of Locke’s “self-evident truths,” rejected by the previous German Romantics and by subsequent German philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger) as English, all-too-English. But Feuerbach regards the English philosopher is the true philosopher of liberty.

Feuerbach nonetheless does not reject ideas as illusory, if they are rightly understood. If so understood, ideas are “refined” sense perceptions, as distinguished from “the vulgar and crude senses or through the eyes of the anatomists or chemists.” Such refinement comes about when we see that we cannot by ourselves distinguish between genuine sense impressions and illusions. “Only through communication and conversation between man and man do ideas arise. Not alone, but only with others, does one reach notions and reason in general” because “that which I alone perceive I doubt,” whereas “only that which the other also perceives is certain.” This doesn’t mean that truth is socially constructed, as some later thinkers will claim, but rather than it is socially confirmed. Genuine, “objective” ideas are those that are “acknowledged by another person apart from you for whom they are an object.” It is not clear why illusions might not also be shared, as they surely can be, and indeed as they must have been, up to this point, according to Feuerbach himself. At best, the requirement of ‘intersubjectivity’ might disqualify such ideas as cannot be shared; it cannot verify such ideas that can be shared and more, believed.

“Only now, in the modern era, has mankind arrived again—as once in Greece after the demise of the Oriental dream world—at the sensuous, that is, the unfalsified and objective perception of the sensuous, that is, of the real.” Contra the sham-modern Hegel, “not only is space not the negation of reason, it provides place for reason and the idea; space is the first sphere of reason,” since where there is no spatial being apart, there is also no logical being apart.” The distinction between one thing and another can only be perceived sensually if space exists between them. Logic, whether classical or Hegelian, collapses without it. This demonstrates that “the laws of reality are also the laws of thought,” not in the Hegelian sense but in the strictly material sense brought to us by the senses. Whereas Hegel supposes that contradictions are overcome by his ‘X plus not-X = X combined, ‘synthesized,’ with not-X, sensual perception enables time to unite such “opposing and contradicting determinations” by identifying the material reality underlying them, as when white paint and black paint combine to make grey paint, or when a human being can feel happy, then sad, form one intention, then the opposite one. 

“The new philosophy has…as its principle of cognition and as its subject, not the ego, the absolute, abstract mind, in short, not reason for itself alone, but the real and whole being of man,” who is not the measure of all things, which exist independently of him, but is instead “the measure of reason.” This leads Feuerbach to anticipate a bit of Nietzsche: “Do not think as a thinker, that is, with a faculty torn from the totality of the real human being and isolated for itself,” but “think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s ocean.” Only if you “think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent, superworldly God” can “you be sure that your ideas are unities of being and thought.” In another play on Christianity, Feuerbach affirms that “only the truth that became flesh and blood is the truth.” The difference between man and an animal is that human sense perceptions (rather than illusory ideals, which exist only in the mind) are generalizable, universalizable, even as the religious doctrines of Christianity are said, falsely, to be. Animals care only for smells that serve them as particular beings—things that they can eat or dangerous things they must avoid. Man’s sense of smell is ” a sense embracing all kinds of smell; hence it is a freer sense, a sense that can be elevated “to intellectual and scientific acts.” Human senses perceive not only other men but man as such. “Even in thinking and in being a philosopher, I am a man among men,” engaging in “a dialectic between I and thou.” As a result, Feuerbach shuns the “double truth,” the claims of philosophy on the one hand, religion on the other. The new philosophy unifies both in “the philosophy of man,” “tak[ing] the place of religion because it “has the essence of religion within itself.”

The problem with Feuerbach’s vigorously argued materialism is that it begins with the assertion that sense perceptions are all human beings have to begin with, then excludes all other mental phenomena that might not derive from sense perceptions. If human beings had no sense perceptions, would they have no thoughts? Not necessarily. They might be thinkers thinking themselves. This suggests that those who maintain that philosophy cannot refute religion any more than religion can refute philosophy have a point. By closing the minds of young Germans to God, Feuerbach left intelligent but politically inexperienced persons without firm guidance. This ended badly.

 

Notes

1. On the religion of humanity, see “Manent on the Religion of Humanity” on this cite under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. “To the neo-Platonic philosophers…matter—namely, the material and real world in general—is no longer an authority and a reality. Fatherland, family, worldly ties, and good in general, which the ancient peripatetic philosophy still counted as man’s bliss—all these are nothing for the neo-Platonic sage,” who is no longer capable of distinguishing imagination from perception. “That which is imagination and fantasy with the Neo-Platonists was merely rationalized and transformed by Hegel into concepts.” To Neo-Platonists, God is beyond being, beyond mind, beyond any determination; their imitatio Dei is an ecstasy or rapture; their God is in reality the objectification of this psychological state.” For them, “real man became also a mere abstraction without flesh and blood, an allegorical figure of the divine being. Plotinus, at least according to the report of his biographer, was ashamed to have a body.”

 

 

 

Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Questions on Truth. Question 11, Articles 3 and 4 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin, 1998.

 

Why raise the question of whether angels can teach? Augustine never mentions them in his dialogue on teaching. Why does Aquinas do so?

Unlike Augustine, Aquinas aspires to produce not only a comprehensive account of the creator-God and His creation, insofar as that is humanly possible, but a systematic account. Augustine is capable of writing a treatise (as André Malraux remarked, his Confessions end with a treatise on metaphysics), but he is no systematizer. Augustine is a ‘personalist’ avant la lettre. Aquinas seldom writes about himself or other particular human persons; his Disputations are disputes between arguments alone, impersonal, centered on logic with no concern for portraying human beings in dialogue with one another. When a commentator writes, “the objector argues….” he exercises poetic license.

But Aquinas is nonetheless supremely interested in the nature, the ‘species characteristics,’ of persons—the nature of human beings as such, the ‘nature’ of God as the Person sui generis, and the nature of angels, persons whose nature rests in between human nature and God. Further, angelic nature has a characteristic that is of considerable interest for teaching, discovery, and learning: angels are incorporeal by nature, purely intellectual creatures, with no knowledge that is derived from the senses—that is, both free of all physical characteristics and created, not creators. They can “assume” bodies, when that assists human beings, but they do not have them by nature. As incorporeal beings, they have no sensual knowledge of things; “they first and principally understand immaterial things.” They understand those things actually, not as we do, potentially. “The intellectual power of the angels extends to understanding all things: because the object of the intellectual is universal being or universal truth.” Unlike human beings, who must ‘get at’ universal being through sense perceptions of material things, ‘abstracting’ the universals from those particulars, laboriously reasoning toward noetic perception, angels receive knowledge of the species, forms, ideas directly from God, knowledge of events from God’s revelation. Thus, they are not gods; their intellects know because God endowed them with knowledge of the forms when He created them. God, by contrast, doesn’t receive knowledge from anyone or anything. He already knows all, by His “essence,” not having been created, caused by some prior being or beings.

Angels have self-knowledge and they know God. They know material things because they know the forms, the ideas of those things. But “the difference between heavenly and earthly bodies is this, that earthly bodies obtain their last perfection by change and movement: while heavenly bodies have their last perfection at once from their very nature.” Human beings discover and learn things they do not know; angels already know. Accordingly, in the Summa Theologica Aquinas devotes the first 49 questions to God, with the subsequent fifteen questions, devoted to angels. Although free of corporeal limitations, their intellects perfect, needing no teaching, they cannot fully comprehend the essence of God because they are still created intellects. “Nature does not transcend its limits”—an aphorism that expresses both the Aristotelianism and the Christianity of Aquinas. 

In the Summa‘s “Treatise on Angels,” Aquinas goes on to say that “all cognition takes place through an assimilation of the knower to the known” via the form, the idea, of the thing known. “Man knows things which he has not made only by means of forms received from things. The case is different with angels, however, because they have the forms of things given them from the moment of their creation.” Angels have “Morning Knowledge”—knowledge of the primordial being of things as spoken by the Word of God “in the Beginning.” They also have “Evening Knowledge”—knowledge of the being of the things created, as created being and the beings within it stand in their own nature, their forms or ideas, knowledge of all God created by the end of His sixth “day” of creation. They do not, however, know the future, nor do they know the will of man, which is free. God, being eternal, comprehends all the events of time at once, essentially.

So, although angels don’t know as much as God knows, they know a lot, more than we do. But can they teach any of that to us? This is the question Aquinas raises in the third Article of the Disputatio “On the Teacher.” What, if any, educational worth have angels? They are the second most important beings, the most important created beings, and the Bible shows them in their proper role as messengers between God and men, but can they teach us ‘in their own right’? 

Aquinas lists seventeen objections to any such claim. First, as he has stated in the first two Articles of Question 11, human beings can be taught “either inwardly or outwardly.” God alone teaches inwardly; human beings teach outwardly. If angels could teach us, the objector now argues, they would need to use “sensible signs” to do so, as human teachers do. But angels are not material beings, so if they did use “such signs,” they would need to perform a miracle, to appear before our senses, “which is outside the common course” of events—a miracle, “as it were.” In response to this, Aquinas locates angels midway between God and man, saying that they do teach us invisibly and inwardly “by comparison to man’s teaching,” but not as God does, by “infusing light” into the mind. Angelic teaching is therefore “reputed” to be outward. This less-than-illuminating reply might mean that angels teach by means of the imagination, a mode that does indeed lie between intellection and sense perception. But Aquinas has a more complex explanation, involving but not limited to the imagination, as he will show in subsequent answers.

The second objection hones in on the possibility that angels do teach by means of the imagination. “If it be said that the angels teach us in a certain way outwardly, insofar as they make an impression on our imagination,” this cannot be. “Species impressed on the imagination do not suffice for actual imagining, unless an intention be present,” but “an angel cannot induce an intention in us, since intention is an act of will, on which God alone can act.” In Thomistic vocabulary, an intention means a tendency toward something, some end. When we daydream, for example, we do so willingly. An angel cannot make us imagine. Aquinas concurs with the objector’s claim that intentions of the will cannot be forced, as human beings have free will, but “the intention of the sensitive part” of the soul can be forced, as when I feel the pain of a wound, which makes me tend toward tending to it. In this sense, an image presented to us by an angel impresses our senses and thereby impels us toward some end.

The third objection reinforces the claim that angels, although purely intellectual beings themselves, cannot communicate with us, and therefore cannot teach us, in an intellectual way. Only God can “give the natural light,” and only God can give us “the light of grace.” This reprises several objections in the first two Articles, which denied that human beings can teach because they cannot communicate with one another on a purely intellectual plane, with no sensible intermediaries, such as verbal or visual signs. And Aquinas answers similarly: While “the angel infuses neither the light of grace nor the light of nature,” he does “strengthen the light of nature which is divinely infused, as has been said.”

But to teach anything, the objector observes, “it is necessary that the learner see the concept of the teacher,” so that the student’s mind can move towards knowledge. “But a man cannot see the concept of an angel, for he neither sees [those concepts] in themselves, any more than he could those of another man,” if the teacher did not employ signs. Aquinas replies that human beings can be brought to understand the concepts angels have, but not in the same way angels understand them. “Man teaches man as a univocal agent, and in this way passes on to another the knowledge as he himself has it, namely by deducing from causes to the caused.” By “univocal” Aquinas mean a word that always means the same thing. If I say the sky is blue and the crab is blue, I mean the same thing (even if the sky and the crab are different shades of blue). This is why human teachers need to use signs, using words precisely, without equivocation. An equivocal word is a word that means different and indeed unrelated things. If I say ‘square’ in relation to a figure I’ve drawn on the blackboard I mean one thing; if (back in the 1950s) I called you a square, or (back in the 1940s) I praised a square deal, I would mean something entirely different in all three instances. Unlike a human teacher, an angel must teach “like an equivocal agent,” since he needs no reasoning to reach the truth, which is already implanted in him by God, naturally. To convey his knowledge to man, the angel needs to present it in a manner different from the manner in which the angel has it, not intuitively but via imagery or reasoning.

All right, but since “it is the prerogative of him who illumines every man coming in this world to teach” (as in Matthew 23:8) that there is only one Master, one Teacher, Christ, and angels are not Christ, angels are not Christ. This is at best a paradoxical argument, since it clearly states that beings other than Christ can teach. Aquinas addresses it simply by pointing out that Jesus was speaking of the mode of teaching God employs—direct, inward illumination of the intellect—not of teaching generally.

“But only God has causality over the truth, because truth is an intelligible light and a simple form,” produced only by creation.” “Angels are not creators,” and so “cannot teach.” Aquinas answers, easily, that teaching doesn’t cause truth; it “causes knowledge of the truth, in the learner.” And “truth does not depend on our knowledge, but on the existence of things,” which pre-exist our knowledge of them.

The objector accordingly shifts from the object known to the light by which it is known. “An unfailing illumination can only come from an unfailing light because, when the light is taken away, the subject is no longer illumined”; since “science is of the necessary which always is,” it requires “some unfailing light” to illumine it. Since angelic light lasts only so long as God preserves it, it isn’t in principle unfailing and angels cannot teach. Aquinas answers by distinguishing the light by which a thing is illumined from the thing illumined, saying that while science is indeed of the necessary which always is, knowledge of it can fail, and so may the light that illumines it. The teacher or the student may forget what he knew, but that doesn’t change the truth of what he knew.

Returning to the Bible, the objector cites John 1:38, which, according to Jerome’s Gloss, demonstrates that “the merit of faith” consists in “confess[ing] Christ to be a divine person.” Since Christ is the Teacher, only God can teach. Aquinas offers his own Gloss on this passage, not contradicting Jerome but pointing to the context. Initially, some of Christ’s disciples “venerated him as a wise man and teacher,” (rather as Thomas Jefferson did, centuries later), recognizing him as “God teaching” only later on. This means that one can learn from a person who does not seem to you to be God. Aquinas doesn’t the claim that only God can teach; he has already refuted this claim, repeatedly.

This brings Aquinas’ reader to the ninth, central objection. “Whoever teaches must manifest the truth”—which, being “an intelligible light,” is more known to human beings, reasoners, than to angels, who simply intuit it. In this argument, the objector temporarily gives up his acknowledgement of the superiority of angelic knowledge by claiming we know better than they do, since we can not only know the truth but how to get to it when we don’t know it. But Aquinas sees that if angels can intuit the truth, they can intuit the truth about human beings and the way they discover and learn. Therefore, they can teach them in the way humans attain knowledge, either by reasoning with them or “by strengthening the light of intellect” in them. Human beings do not learn from angels in the sense that they somehow become conjoined to them, partaking of their nature. They remain inferior to them in the sense that they do not consist of pure intellect. They can nonetheless be taught by them.

The objector appeals to the authority of Augustine in On the Trinity, where he writes that the human mind is formed by God without any intermediary. Since angels are intermediary creatures, they cannot teach human beings. Aquinas clarifies Augustine’s meaning, which isn’t that human minds are formed by angels but that both human beings and angels know and find their happiness when “conjoined by God.” This does not preclude angelic teaching of their natural inferiors, men.

Recurring to a variation on the second objection, the objector contends that since God forms our will by the infusion of grace, with “no angel mediating,” so he forms our intellect. Aquinas answers in much the same way he did before: The will is not the intellect, and while human will is free, influenced only by divine grace, “both man and angel can, in a certain way, act on intellect, by representing objects by which the intellect is forced” to acknowledge, by logic.

“All teaching is through some species,” the objector remarks. That is, we learn when we know the form, the idea of a thing, as biologists do when they ‘classify’ animals and plants. There are two ways of doing this: either by “creating the species” (one knows what one creates) or by illuminating, ‘shedding light’ on an existing species which exists potentially in the human intellect in the form of a “phantasm”—an image acquired through the external senses, then lodged in the imagination, which is one of the internal senses. Angels don’t create anything, nor can their pure intellects shed light on phantasms for the benefit of the duller, plodding human intellect, which operates by the more ponderous process of reasoning about sense perceptions and phantasms. Aquinas of course agrees that angels are not creators and is willing to go so far as to say that angels cannot illuminate the “phantasms” or images they conceive directly within the human intellect. But they can establish a continuity between the light of their intellects and the light of human intellects by means of those phantasms, which the human mind then perceives through its imagination and can reason about, once they are perceived.

But “there is a greater difference between the intellect of the angel and man’s intellect than between man’s intellect and his imagination.” Since imagination gives us only particular forms, whereas intellect gives us general forms, ideas, there is little communication between the two. “Therefore, much less is the human intellect capable of what is in the angelic mind,” and angels can teach us nothing. On the contrary, Aquinas replies. True, human intellect and human imagination are similar in that they are both characteristics of the human soul, intellect as such, whether human or angelic, is univocal, different in operation but not so absolutely different as to make the knowledge of angels incommunicable to humans. The human mind “can grasp what is in the angelic intellect, in its own way.”

Isn’t the difference in kind between angels and men still too great? Any light by which a thing is illumined “must be proportioned to what is illumined, as bodily light to colors.” But any phantasm produced by an angelic intellect would be purely spiritual, “not proportioned to phantasms which are in a way corporeal,” in the sense that they can be “contained in a bodily organ,” such as the human eye. Aquinas disagrees, saying that “there is nothing to prevent the spiritual from being proportionate” to human sense perception, since in general “nothing prevents the inferior from being acted on by the superior.”

Yet, the difference is still too great, in another way. We know things “either through its essence or its likeness.” Angels cannot teach essences to human beings because that would require them to enter into the human mind, which is impossible for any created being. Aquinas concurs. But he dissents from the objector’s claim that angels cannot teach likenesses to human beings because the angel “causes the likenesses of things in the mind, either by moving the imagination or by strengthening the light of intellect,” as mentioned before.

The objector then observes that a farmer is no creator but a person who “incites nature to natural effects.” By analogy, then, “neither can angels be called teachers and masters.” Aquinas rejects the analogy, inasmuch as teaching isn’t creation but rather the natural ‘incitement’ to a natural effect, namely, the perfection of the intellect. Indeed, as he states later on, “inferior spirits, that is, the human, achieve the perfection of science by the causality of superior spirits, that is, the angels”—angelic intellects being “more actual than the human intellect.”

The final objection in effect responds to Aquinas’ immediately preceding refutation. Angels are superior to man and therefore their teaching “must excel human teaching.” But if angels are only teaching man about “definite causes in nature,” then they aren’t doing anything more excellent than what human teachers do. The problem with this argument is that although angels do indeed teach the same kind of knowledge man can teach man, they know more. And they teach “in a more noble manner,” as well.

Aquinas takes this last point from the Christian Platonist Dionysius the Areopagite in his book On Celestial Hierarchy. Dionysius writes, “I see that the divine mystery of Christ’s humanity was first taught to the angels and then through the grace of knowledge descends to us.” As our superiors in intellect, angels “can do more and more nobly” than we can do, when it comes to teaching; their knowledge is broader and higher than ours, and so is their ability to teach. Aquinas adds Augustine’s observation in On the Good of Perseverance, that there is not only a hierarchy in divine teaching but a certain diversity, inasmuch as (as Aquinas summarizes) “some receive the teaching of salvation immediately from God, some from an angel, some from men.” That is, genuine Christian teaching emanates from God, but God may choose any of those three pathways to convey it. Additionally, while the light of God’s truth enters the human intellect by God’s intention alone, angels and men “can remove an impediment to perceiving the light,” refute errors—an important task teachers perform. 

More generally, “an angel can act on man in two ways”: in the human manner, appearing to our senses visually or auditorily, just as human beings act upon one another; and in the angelic manner, invisibly. How do angels teach men in the angelic manner? 

As mentioned in Augustine’s answer to the twelfth objection in Article 1, intellect differs from bodily sight in that “sense is not a collating power.” The mind’s eye sees self-evident truths the way the eye sees an object, but it also compares, contrasts, thinks logically in order to arrive at truths that are not self-evident, which the intellect sees “only through others already seen,” whether self-evident or rational “habits” established previously by reasoning from the self-evident. Now, “God is the cause of man’s knowledge in the most excellent manner, because he both seals the soul itself with intellectual light and impresses on it knowledge of first principles which are as it were the seeds of the sciences, just as he impresses on natural things the seminal reasons for producing all their effects.” Human beings don’t teach that way, because they can’t; they cannot create their own intellect or implant self-evident truths in it. But they can teach one another “by bringing into actuality what is implicitly and in a certain manner potentially contained in the principles through certain sensible signs shown to exterior sense,” as Augustine and Aquinas agree. 

Located in the natural order between God and man, the angel, whose “intellectual light” is “more perfect than man’s,” can cause human beings to know in both ways, although he cannot do so as well as God can do it. He “cannot infuse intellectual light as God does,” as he is not a creator, but “he can strengthen the infused light for more perfect seeing” better than a human teacher can do, precisely because his intellect is purer, unimpeded by passions. Moreover, “the angel can also teach man, not indeed by conferring on him knowledge of these principles, as God does, nor by the deduction of conclusions from the principles by proposing sensible signs, as a man does, but by fashioning certain forms in the imagination which can be formed by the movement of the bodily organ.” “What the angels know is shown as conjoined with such images,” as Augustine teaches in his commentary on the Book of Genesis. There, Augustine suggests that the account of the six “days” of Creation is an accommodation to the human intellect, which thinks in temporal sequence. The paradox, famously, is that the Genesis account says that God separated light from darkness before creating the sun and stars that emit light. He explains this by arguing that God in fact created light and dark and the heavenly bodies all at once; the angels understand this as one act of God, not as a series of events in time. Their intellects have the power of “conjoining” what human intellects understand in segments.

In his fourth and final Article, Aquinas asks, “Is teaching an act of the active or contemplative life?”—politics or philosophy? The question is roughly analogous to the contrast between human beings and angels, inasmuch as angels, as persons of pure intellect, are better adapted to contemplation than humans are, and they do indeed teach. The question itself is a major theme of Plato’s dialogues. In Christianity, the matter is complicated by the fact that neither God nor the angels (who hold a similar place to that of the guardian daemon Socrates claims to have) take action as well as think. The Biblical God is not pure thought thinking itself and, indeed, is not an ‘it’ at all, but a three-Personed Person). 

The initial set of arguments, which Aquinas will refute, take the classical view of teaching, however, classifying it as an act of the contemplative life. First of all, since (to paraphrase Gregory the Great) “the active life fails when the body does” but “to teach does not fail with the body”—the teacher’s teachings may live on, in his students, after the teacher dies—and since angels teach but have no bodies, teaching goes with the contemplative life. Aquinas remarks that when Gregory writes of the active life, he means not politics but physical labor, “sweaty work,” whereas Dionysius refers to the “hierarchical action in the celestial spirit,” which is obviously “of a higher mode than the active life of which we are teaching.” Gregory also says that action in his sense precedes contemplation, whereas teaching follows contemplation, and therefore “to teach does not pertain to the active life.” But Gregory continues, Aquinas remarks, arguing that the soul can bring “what is drawn from” contemplation to activity, that “when the mind is kindled by the contemplative the active is more perfectly lived.” It all depends, Aquinas writes, on whether the action is indeed sweaty work, which might benefit from prudential reasoning but hardly from contemplation, or for an activity like teaching, which “must follow the contemplative.” In that case, theory precedes practice, but teaching is the practice.

The objector cites Gregory a third time, in remarking that the active life, preoccupied with sweaty work, “sees less” than a teacher does; at the same time, the teacher “sees more” than “one who simply contemplates.” Teaching therefore lies on the contemplative side. Against this, Aquinas concedes that “the vision of the teacher is the beginning of teaching,” and so contemplation precedes teaching, but “the teaching itself consists rather in the transmission of knowledge of the things seen than in the vision of them,” which makes it active. 

Nonetheless, the objector rejoins, just as fire passes the same heat as it progresses, so too does the perfection of the teacher’s mind perfect the mind of the student. Since “to be perfect in himself in the consideration of divine things pertains to the contemplative life,” so does teaching, as does heat from fire. Aquinas regards this argument as proof that “the contemplative life is the principle of teaching,” even as “heat is not the heating but the principle of heating.” Yet while contemplation proposes, teaching disposes; contemplation directs the active, which then acts in accordance with the results of discoveries contemplation reveals. 

For his last attempt, the objector rightly claims that “the active life turns on temporal things” whereas “teaching turns on the eternal, teaching about that which is more excellent and perfect.” But he draws the false conclusion that teaching does not “pertain” to the active life. But of course it does, Aquinas replies, even though one must contemplate before one teaches, just as one must more generally think (whether prudentially or theoretically) before one acts.

In his general remarks, Aquinas begins with a crucial point, quoting Gregory as saying that the active life gives bread to the hungry an teaches “the word of wisdom to those who do not know it,” that just as works of agapic love are works, are actions, so is teaching inasmuch as teaching is among the “spiritual alms.” For the philosophers of classical antiquity, discovery, learning, and teaching are the highest of erotic quests, a “passion of the head,” as Karl Marx (that scholar of things ‘ancient’) put it, albeit in mockery. It is highly unlikely that Plato (for example) expects the Ideas to be brought down to earth. Christian love is another sort of thing. Given the divine power behind divine wisdom, contemplation for Christians is animated by agape or caritas, charity—leading more directly and effectively to action than philosophic contemplation can (or should) do. It is the refusal of ancient philosophers to do that irritates Christians; it is the alleged failure of Christians to do effectively that irritates the moderns, beginning with Machiavelli. 

Aquinas meets Plato and Aristotle partway. Temporal things, the things “on which human acts bear,” pertain to the active life; “the matter of the contemplative,” by contrast, “is the notions of knowable things on which the contemplator dwells.” The active life and the contemplative life differ in their ends, a point that teleological Aristotle would also endorse. But for Aquinas the contemplator dwells not on created things, including nature, so much as “uncreated truth,” the things of God, “to the degree possible for the one contemplating.” Admittedly, human beings at best see uncreated truth imperfectly in this life and must wait for “the future life” to see them “perfectly.” This is why, Aquinas remarks, “Gregory also says that the contemplative life begins here, that it might be perfected in the heavenly fatherland.” Meanwhile, “the end of the active life,” in this life, “is action,” aiming at “usefulness to neighbors.” That is, in Christian terms, God’s love for human beings is active, agapic, man’s love for God erotic, contemplative, man’s love for man agapic, active. God need not contemplate man, since He already knows him; man must contemplate God, because he knows Him imperfectly, regarding Him with philosophic eros, not only with fear but with wonder; man knows another man as he knows himself, and therefore need not so much contemplate him as act to help him. In teaching, this act of man helping man needs contemplation as its background, as the teacher needs to know what he’s talking about. But teaching itself is an interaction (as later writers would say) between teacher and student. Teaching has this “double object,” first of learning by the teacher, contemplation of the topic to be taught, then of transmitting knowledge to the student. “By reason of the first matter, the act of teaching pertains to the contemplative life, but by reason of the second to the active.” Teaching in itself belongs to the active life, “although in a certain way [it] pertains to the contemplative life.”