Leo Strauss’s “elevation” of the philosopher’s “eternity” is intended as a rhetorical counterweight to the dehumanizing power of technology. Christianity, by referring the meaning of morality to an authority beyond humanity, and by implicating man at heart of Eternity, is the ultimate target of this strategy.
The challenge of Christianity to the foundation of the classical perspective is always in play just beneath the classical surface of Strauss’s argument in the “Restatement” to Kojeve, in Natural Right and History, and elsewhere. By privileging the broadly aristocratic distinction between noble and base over the more common and Biblical distinction between right and wrong , he avoids consideration of a most troublesome possibility of which he is certainly aware, namely, that there are real human goods available to ordinary human beings that cannot be subsumed under any purely human or rational hierarchy.
It appears there are two main ways in which the immediate evidence of basic moral distinctions might be articulated within some larger context: either the moral is understood in the light of some humanly available end or architectonic purpose (in which case it is best construed in terms of the distinction noble/base), or it is understood as a response to the absolute authority of a personal God (and thus conceived dominantly in terms of right/wrong). Strauss’s aristocratic strategy requires that he privilege the first alternative. The cost of this strategy, we have seen, is in effect the suppression of the question of the rightness or purity of the aristocratic philosopher’s motive. Thus Strauss is willing to accept the substitution of human recognition in an aristocratic and thus implicit or indirect form for the infinitely rigorous Biblical demand of purity of heart as conceived under the eye of an omnipotent God. The Christian critique of the vanity of pagan nobility, including that of philosophers, is silently deflected.
For Strauss, any possible political salvation (or the rehabilitation of “natural right”) requires a recovery of the possibilityof philosophy understood as the best way of life . The salvation of philosophy depends in turn upon Strauss’s discretely excavating and embracing its political origins: the humanity, the naturalness of philosophy must be rooted in the practical, political, immediately hierarchical experience of the noble as above the base. (This is the deep purpose of Natural Right and History , an answer to Heidegger’s attempt to liberate philosophy from its political origins.)
But this experience competes with the experience of sacred moral restraints as flowing from the equal subjection of all human beings to a mysterious personal God, an experience in which is rooted the thirst for righteousness as universal justice (as already available in elementary premises of Bible). Christianity re-configured reason to espouse this thirst, thereby creating demands it could not satisfy. Machiavelli founded modernity by mobilizing the strategy of propaganda against its Christian source.
Strauss proposes to counter Machiavelli’s strategy by a return to classical political philosophy from a post-Christian perspective . The Biblical insight into equality and the concomitant demand for justice cannot be denied, but must be quarantined: contrary to the tendency of Christianity, Athens and Jerusalem must be considered as radically distinct alternatives (on the model of Athens/Mecca), so that philosophy can find (or claim, for political purposes, to find) perfect satisfaction in its own putatively satisfying “virtue” and not be driven to project meaning upon a universal humanity.
Strauss must know the cost to rigorous thinking and to authentic human existence of this compartmentalization of the two dominant figures of human transcendence; his opposition between Athens and Jerusalem is thus a very studied and deliberate practical choice in the face of “technology.” It follows that Strauss’s own thinking, or let us say his own existence as a thinking human being, can only lie beyond this simple opposition. The effectual truth of either/ or is neither/and: neither simply one or the other, and somehow both. This same would be true of any thinker who has understood what Strauss has understood.
