Leo Strauss was one of the most insightful and consequential if not otherwise controversial, political philosophers and classicists of the last century. To his critics, Strauss is the bugaboo guy who is the dark mastermind of American imperialism and neoconservatism (notwithstanding, such conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked and dismissed in academic studies). To his students and his defenders, Strauss was a great exegete of the classics who brought Plato, Thucydides, Al-Farabi, and Machiavelli to life for a generation of political theorists who had been cut off from anything written prior to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss brought back into academic study and consideration the insights of the classical political tradition shunned by the modern political science of post-Hobbesianism.
Athens, Jerusalem, and all That
Part of Strauss’s fame was his elaboration on the Western dynamic caught up by two cities and the concepts they represented. For Strauss, the Western tradition cannot be lifted out of the indissoluble tension between rationalism and revelation, symbolized by Athens and Jerusalem. The Athenian rationalist tradition, for Strauss, was cut-throat, pragmatic, and suffered from a tension between hubris and realism. The Jerusalemite revelatory tradition, by contrast, was moralistic and zealous but also suffered the tension of hubris and realism, albeit for different reasons. One need only look at the long history of Jewish and Christian messianic movements for how faith could be as equally hubristic as an aspirational form of political apotheosis.
Strauss never believed that there was a peaceful coexistence between reason and revelation. Instead, reason and revelation were at war with each other. This violent dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem was mediated by the ascendant Catholic Church, but that mediation was eventually broken by Machiavelli and the Protestant Reformation—though that mediation was already facing problems with men like Marsilius of Padua and from within the Catholic tradition like with Augustine’s separation of the city of man (rationalism) and the city of God (revelation). Although Strauss does give attention to that Catholic mediation (namely in his short but important reflections on Saint Thomas Aquinas), this mediation is a betrayal of the real dynamic between the two: conflict not synthesis.
Read the rest of the essay at The Miskatonian, Getting Leo Strauss Right and Wrong, 19 April, 2024.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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