Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy

By Harry V. Jaffa

转自朝圣山之思

In January 1988 I received a remarkable letter from two younger scholars, Larry
Arnhart of Northern Illinois University, and Leonard Sorenson of Assumption College
(Massachusetts). The questions they addressed to me about God and man, the Bible and
philosophy, were more direct and comprehensive than any anyone had ever before asked
me--in a teaching career of some forty-five years--or than I had asked myself!

Their questions were prompted by an article of mine entitled "Crisis of the Strauss
Divided," which had been published in the Autumn 1987 issue of Social Research. That
article was the revised text of a lecture I had given at the New School for Social
Research earlier in 1987, as part of a symposium--sponsored by the School--on the
contributions of foreign born scholars to the understanding of the American
Constitution, whose bicentennial was being celebrated. I was asked to speak on the
contributions of Leo Strauss. (George Kateb of Amherst spoke on Hannah Arendt, and
Dante Germino of the University of Virginia spoke on Eric Voegelin.)

In my lecture I had taken my bearings in part from Strauss's assertions concerning
the insolubility of the opposition between revelation and reason--Jerusalem and
Athens--as to the highest principle of human life. I had also taken my bearings from
Strauss's assertion that, according to Aristotle, the ends of the city-- that is, of
political life as such--are the ends of the moral virtues.

And I had noted Strauss's pronouncement that notwithstanding their theoretical
disagreement as to the end or ends served by the moral virtues, revelation and
reason had agreed substantially on what in practice morality was. And I had taken my
bearings further from Strauss's assertion that the very life of western civilization
depended upon the continuing dialogue--the eternal dialogue--between revelation and
reason.

But both the continuity and the beneficence of this dialogue depended upon it
remaining theoretical, with neither side demanding--or being entrusted with--
political power with respect to the conduct of the dialogue between them. In the
post-classical world, government by sectarian religious authority--or by sectarian
philosophic authority (as in the case of Marxist-Leninist regimes)--were equally
tyrannical and equally abhorrent.

From this perspective, the intention of the American Founding, with its separation
of church and state, its guarantee of the free exercise of religion, and of freedom
of speech and of the press, could be seen, not as a lowering of the goals of
political life, but as an emancipation of man's highest aspirations for truth, from
the tyranny of the political passions. In this sense it could be seen as the best
regime of western civilization. However, this regime was endangered from the outset
(notably in the slavery controversy), and continues to be endangered, by the moral
relativism, culminating in nihilism, of modern philosophy.

Strauss's critique of modern philosophy, as it seemed to me, was directed above all
towards overcoming what he often called the self-destruction of reason, so that the
authority equally of classical philosophy and the Bible, with respect to virtue and
morality, might be restored. This restoration, I am convinced, is also nothing less
than the restoration of the perspective of the American Founding.

I should mention finally that, although I cite Leo Strauss repeatedly as the ground
of my assertions, I do not claim Strauss's authority for the conclusions I draw from
them. Other students of Leo Strauss draw very different conclusions--indeed, in some
cases opposite conclusions--from his writings than I have done. I only say here--as
elsewhere--what I believe to be true, and what in Strauss's writings has led me to
think as I do. Others must judge whether, in thinking as I do, I think truly.

Claremont, California
October 7, 1991

**********

February 13, 1989
Professor Leonard Sorenson
Professor Larry Arnhart
Assumption College
500 Salisbury Street
Worcester, Massachusetts 01609

Gentlemen:

In yours of January 27, 1988, you propounded a number of interrogatories (as Lincoln
would call them), to which I will now respond. You flattered me greatly by
addressing me as you did, but I am not so lost to all decency, not to say modesty,
as to think that my responses will constitute answers. I can only hope that I may
contribute something to your continuing discussion. (When I first received your
letter, I yelled to my wife, "Cancel the order for the pontoons." However, sobriety
soon returned.)

You ask "two general questions to which all our other questions are subordinated":

1.) What is the specific, substantive teaching that is novel or unique to biblical
revelation?

I reply first that it is the idea of the One God who is separate from the universe,
of which he is the Creator. As both separate and unique, God is unknowable. We can
properly be said to know only those things that have class characteristics that
identify them as members of species or genera. That is, if I say, "This is a chair,"
I imply that there is an infinite number of possible chairs, each different from
this, but each equally a chair. Reason means recognizing the idea of the chair in
the chair, and understanding thereby why the particular is different from the
universal. Once I understand what a chair is, I understand why there can be many
chairs besides this one.

Moreover, any particular which we experience by sense perception, however unique it
may be understood to be, immediately implies the possibility of the existence of
other particular objects of its class. This would be true for example of the first
electric light bulb, the first airplane, the first of anything. It would be true
also of any object which can be conceived by the imagination: for example, a
centaur, which is half man, half horse. I may never have experienced a centaur, but
by imagining one, I know that I can also imagine others that resemble this one and
yet are different.

But the God of the Bible is not only One, but the only possible One. As such, He
cannot become an object of knowledge. And He cannot be imagined. A god that can be
imagined would be a pagan deity (of which there always can be many), but not the One
of the Bible. This is why the second of the Ten Commandments forbids the making of
images; that is to say, it forbids any suggestion that God can become an object of
knowledge by being an object of sense perception. It is because He cannot become an
object of knowledge that He can--indeed must--be an object of faith.

There is therefore a clear and distinct epistemological reason why faith and not
reason has primacy. To summarize: I cannot know anything of which there is and can
be only one. If God is One, and if there can be no other God, there can be no idea
of God. God is unique in that in Him no distinction can be drawn between the
universal and the particular, which is the ground of all intelligibility within the
dispensation of unassisted human reason. God is therefore unknowable. This is the
fundamental premise of the Bible.

Since internal reflection, or reasoning, about human experience can never lead man
to the idea of the God of the Bible--since the God of the Bible is not an idea, and
He is not a cause within the order of nature--revelation as the form of
communication between God and man becomes "reasonable." Revelation is marked by
miracles, although creation itself is the primary miracle. This is shown by the
first sentence of Genesis, which reports something which only God could have known
or witnessed.

All other miracles are lesser miracles, but their reason for being is already
implied in the story of creation. God's reasons for communicating with man must be
subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of
the world--and man. If the highest things (God and the story of creation) are
unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.
In Aristotle, e.g., practical wisdom is in the service of theoretical wisdom. In the
Bible, theoretical wisdom is replaced by--or perhaps is constituted by-- the study
of God's speeches and deeds--of which the Bible (or Torah, or Law) is a record.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the
counsel of the wicked,
Nor stands in the way of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And on his law he meditates day and night...

************

2.) If biblical revelation poses an unanswerable challenge to philosophy and
therefore is--in Strauss's words--"the refutation of philosophy by revelation," then
why should one not reject philosophy?

"The refutation of philosophy by revelation" has some of the same ambiguity as "I
know that I know nothing." Strauss has placed this "refutation" in the mouth (so to
speak) of revelation in much the same way that Socrates put the argument of the laws
(the Torah of Athens!) into the mouth of the laws of Athens in the Crito.

There is an Aristotelian maxim that "When we have refuted all the errors, what
remains is the truth." Refutation is the method of philosophy rather than of
revelation. (The "method" of the Bible is found in such expressions as "Thou
shalt.../ or "I am...") Strauss's refutation of philosophy by revelation is a
Socratic elengthus. This however does not mean that it is not serious, or that it is
meant to subvert the argument for revelation by making it depend upon philosophy.
God did not create man without reason, or without making it obligatory upon him to
obey reason, in all those matters with respect to which reason can be a sufficient
guide. Philosophy, insofar as it is the perfection of human reason, is the
perfection of a God-given gift. Only the function of philosophy is differently
conceived, depending upon whether that function is understood as ultimately
ministerial to the teachings of divine revelation, or as identical with an intrinsic
rationality that is itself the most divine thing in human life.

The context of your quote from Natural Right and History is important. Strauss shows
how in Max Weber revelation has been transformed into "value judgments," the sublime
into the ridiculous! In restoring the dignity of revelation, Strauss shows why the
conflict between reason and revelation is not a ground for declaring reason
impotent. Because we may not be able to say which of two mountains, whose peaks are
covered by clouds, is higher, does not mean we cannot tell a mountain from a mole
hill!

The argument for revelation becomes in Strauss a defense of the common ground upon
which Socratic political philosophy and the Bible both stand. "I know that I know
nothing"--awareness of ignorance, of the need to know--itself leaves open the
question of whether satisfying this need depends primarily upon reason or upon
faith. Socratic progress in wisdom--such progress as may be said to result from
every Socratic conversation--always is accompanied by an increased awareness of what
we do not know. The mystery of the universe--the mystery of being--grows rather than
diminishes, as a result of Socratic progress in wisdom.

How can a Socratic know that his "progress" is in "wisdom" if the goal of philosophy
recedes with every supposed advance? Does not philosophy--confidence in the ultimate
significance of reason--depend upon an act of faith as much as belief in the God of
the Bible? Hence reason itself points to--and cannot reasonably deny--the
possibility that the mystery of being is impenetrable, because the author of the
universe is a mysterious God who--being separate from the universe he created--is
beyond being.

Modern rationalism comes to sight as the attempt to dispel the mystery of being by
so radicalizing skepticism as to abolish skepticism from philosophy. It attempted
(notably in Descartes, but also in Spinoza) to discover premises that could not be
doubted, and to proceed therefrom both inductively and deductively to conclusions
that could not be doubted--and that did not require any "faith in reason." In so
doing it believes in the possibility of the ultimate transformation of philosophy
into wisdom.

The consummation and transformation of philosophy--love of wisdom --into wisdom
itself, were it to succeed, would put an end to both Socratic skepticism and
biblical faith. For in such a case, there would be nothing left either for inquiry
or for faith. Strauss's critique of modern philosophy, more than any intellectual
event of our times, showed the impossibility of this enterprise. His demonstration
of the self-destruction of reason ending in nihilism proved the superiority both of
Socratic skepticism and of biblical faith to the modern attempts to supersede them.

Whatever opposition may be intrinsic to the differences between biblical faith and
Socratic skepticism, they stand as one in their dissimilarity to modern rationalism.
Both employ reason, whether as autonomous reason or as the handmaiden of revelation,
to make authoritative moral judgments. And while differing as to the ultimate
purpose of morality, they yet agree substantially as to what morality is.

In his autobiographical Preface, Strauss cites Deuteronomy 4:6:

Keep them and do them; for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the
sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say "Surely this
great nation is a wise and understanding people...." And what great nation is there,
that has statutes and ordinances so righteous as all this law which I set before you
this day?

Why were the "peoples," i.e., the Gentiles, expected to say of the Israelites, that
they were a "wise and understanding people?" What in them enabled them to recognize
wisdom and understanding (remember Meno's dilemma!), if no direct revelation had
been vouchsafed to them? And why did God expect that a comparison of the laws of
different nations would disclose--presumably to a wise and understanding judge-- the
superior righteousness of the laws of Moses?

Does not the Bible then presuppose that the recognition of wisdom is a human
potentiality, and that righteousness is an object of all law, and not only of the
Torah? Does it not thereby presuppose that the teachings of reason and of revelation
will not contradict each other, since both reason and revelation are God's gifts to
mankind?

Nothing in the proposition of the One unknowable God forbids our believing that
among His deeds was the creating us as reasonable beings, with access by our reason
to everything implied in the idea of "the laws of nature and of nature's God." While
Strauss is careful to say that the Old Testament does not have in it any word for
nature, he does emphasize (in part by the epigraphs chosen from the O.T. for Natural
Right and History) that the experience of justice and of injustice underlies all
human experience.

St. Paul declares:

When the Gentiles who have not the law do by nature
what the law requires, they are a law unto
themselves.... They show that what the law requires is
written on their hearts.... Romans 2:14, 15.

This passage parallels Deuteronomy 4, which implies something like natural law,
although it is not yet conceptualized as such.

From the point of view of the Bible, God's revealed Word and not autonomous human
reason is the source of the highest wisdom. But the role of reason--i.e. of
political philosophy or natural right, as distinct from metaphysics --is not thereby
negated or even diminished. Consider the following from Strauss's Introduction to
The City and Man:

It is not sufficient for everyone to obey and to listen to the Divine message of the
City of Righteousness, the Faithful City. In order to propagate that message among
the heathen, nay, in order to understand it as clearly and as fully as is humanly
possible, one must also consider to what extent man could discern the outlines of
that City if left to himself, to the proper exercise of his own powers.

But in our age it is much less urgent to show that political philosophy is the
indispensable handmaid of theology than to show that political philosophy is the
rightful queen of the social sciences.... [E]ven the highest lawcourt in the land is
more likely to defer to the contentions of social science than to the Ten
Commandments as the words of the living God.

Strauss here speaks of political philosophy as "the indispensable handmaid of
theology...." But it is much more urgent, he says, to show that it is "the rightful
queen of the social sciences." I would argue that establishing political philosophy
as the ruler of the social sciences has become a necessary condition for the very
survival in our times of biblical religion and morality.

Within the framework of historical modernity, the authority of revelation cannot and
ought not to be the ground of political authority. Since the moral teachings of
revelation are in great measure (as the Bible itself attests) also the teachings of
reason, political philosophy provides authority within a non-sectarian political
constitution for a moral teaching in agreement with revelation. In our time
revelation has become--as Strauss's chapter on Max Weber makes clear--confounded and
confused with "value judgments," or in an alternative jargon, "liberation
theology." The homosexual rights movement, for example, has made great strides in
persuading the main line churches that the injunction to "love your neighbor" is a
divine justification of sodomy and lesbianism.

In the wake of the transformation of modern philosophy, not into wisdom, but into
nihilism, the Bible itself has been interpreted to mean whatever is in accordance
with anyone's strongest passions. Passionate commitment has become identified with
revelation. The unrefutability of revelation has been confounded with the alleged
indemonstrability of all "value judgments"--and hence is held to be the
justification for rejecting all authoritative moral teaching.

But the authority of revelation, from the Bible's point of view, is not arbitrary--
as are "value judgments" and the appeal to the divine in liberation theology. It is
because God is, to repeat, both One and separate, that revelation is the necessary
means for communicating to man his true place in the universe and his relationship
to God. Revelation although miraculous in its origin and essence is not subjective--
God is an objective reality--and it does not authorize subjective moralities
inconsistent with the teachings of unassisted human reason.

The idea of authoritative traditions as the ground of human well-being is an idea
flexible enough to take into account the defects of fallible human minds as the
light of revelation is filtered through them. But genuine traditions, however they
may differ within themselves, as the traditions based upon the Bible do differ, must
not be confounded with arbitrariness. The idea of natural right and natural law can
be seen as the means by which genuine traditions can be distinguished from the many
false pretenders to that claim. We cannot suppose that revelation would authorize
moralities incompatible with what we know from reason.

It is clear from the foregoing, I believe, that Socratic skepticism and biblical
faith stand upon the same epistemological foundation. It is impossible to restore
the claims of the one without restoring the claims of the other. The transformation
of modern philosophy--modern rationalism--into nihilism, the rejection of all
rational standards for human thought or human action, lends credibility to
liberation theology. This it does because of a spurious resemblance of nihilism to
the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo--which the Bible itself genuinely and necessarily
teaches.

Modern nihilism culminates in each person being invited to create his own moral
universe. Nothing inhibits man--seen in the light of the nihilistic dispensation--
from himself laying claim to the attributes of God. Faith becomes then the
justification equally of anything--or nothing. In this situation, only the
refutation of modern rationalism and its mutation into nihilism can restore the
possibility of biblical faith in its genuine bearing on human life.

Let me just conclude this part of the discussion by observing that the attack on
reason and rationalism (and the natural law tradition) that is the hallmark of
modern political conservatism is, no less than modern political liberalism, in the
service of nihilism. On the surface, modern conservatism appears only as a rejection
of modern rationalism. It is in fact a vehicle of modern romanticism--of a
preference of the heart over the head.

Its preference for the heart however is vindicated by no systematic thought, such as
has informed all the great religious traditions of the West, whether it be the
Talmud or the Canon Law, whether it be the Summa Theologica or the Guide of the
Perplexed. However decent these conservative Christians or Jews may be, however,
they have no inner defense against the newer forms of religion grounded in
liberation theology. These embrace the morality of radical modernity simply because
it agrees with the passions--the passions unmodified or unmediated by reason.

************

I turn to what in the House of Commons would be called your supplementary questions.
They are in six paragraphs, the first being as follows:

You link biblical revelation to faith, law, monotheism, and divine omnipotence. Is
it the combination (or some combination) of these that is unique to biblical
revelation? Or is one of them more crucial than others? You emphasize faith, but it
is not yet clear to us what you mean by the content of faith. To speak of the
content of faith as the Bible as a whole, as obedient love of God, or as in God as
the source of the resolution of the very doubts that sustain the philosophic way of
life, leaves us in the dark about the unique content of biblical faith as opposed to
pagan religion.

I believe I have already answered the foregoing. I think it is clear not only that--
but why--faith (accompanied by the "obedient love of God") can be "the source of the
resolution of the very doubts that sustain the philosophic way of life...." Of
course, as Strauss says, it is also true that "man is so built that he can find his
satisfaction, his bliss, in free investigation, in articulating the riddle of
being." Whether one should live one's life "articulating the riddle of being,"
rather than "resolving" it by faith, remains a question. While biblical faith may be
said to offer an alternative to "free investigation," human freedom requires only
that one recognize either alternative as consistent with that freedom. Modern
rationalism--or the nihilism into which it self-destructs--represents an abandonment
(or denial) of human freedom.

You speak of "biblical faith as opposed to pagan religion." I think that in Plato's
Euthyphro we find a definitive confrontation between pagan religion and philosophy.
The issue is reduced to either the ideas or fighting gods. (The modern equivalent
would be "fighting values".) The gods can be made to stop fighting--that is, to
provide non-contradictory guidance to human life--only if they are reduced to a role
ministerial to the ideas.

In Plato (and still more in Aristotle) one can see the philosophers replacing the
poets (and/or the sophists)--and the gods of the poets (and/or the sophists)--as the
source of a non-contradictory moral instruction. Of course, the philosophers will
not rule directly but through the new breed of sophists and poets resulting from
their influence upon education; or, as in the case of Aristotle, through the
gentlemen whose education they will supervise. But the God of the Bible is immune to
Plato's critique of paganism, for reasons I have already (I think) made sufficiently
clear.

************

Your second set of "supplementaries" begins as follows:

You define and distinguish revelation as Jewish law and revelation as Christian
faith. Is the uniqueness of biblical revelation found in Christian faith as opposed
to Judaic law? If so does this mean that Judaic law is fundamentally closer to pagan
revelation and the ancient city?

What you call "Judaic law" was certainly originally the law of an ancient city.
Since all ancient cities (as represented by the beginning of Plato's Laws) claimed
their laws to be of divine origin, ancient Judaism may be said in that respect to
resemble other ancient cities. However, faith in God was the principle underlying
and informing every aspect of the laws of Moses, hence faith as such was never less
fundamental to Judaism than to Christianity.

In Judaism, however, obedience to the law was always regarded as the basic test of
fidelity. Absent this legalistic orientation, Christianity placed more reliance or
emphasis upon tenets of faith, apart from their consequences for conduct. In its
monotheism, ancient Israel was unlike any other ancient city. One effect of this
unlikeness was that the Jews did not cease to have God as their God, when Israel
ceased to be an ancient city, when the Torah was no longer their civil as well as
their divine law.

You continue:

You claim that the theme of Strauss’s life work was the reason/revelation issue
which you seem to distinguish from the theological-political problem, the latter of
which you proceed to call the "absolutely novel" problem which was caused by
Christianity. You then identify this problem as at the center of Strauss's life and
work, as "the theme of his investigations." Could you clarify what you take to be
the difference between these two issues and how both, if different, could be at the
core of one's work?

In my eulogy of Strauss in 1973, I quoted two sentences which I thought
characterized better than anything else, the thrust and purpose of Strauss's life
work:

It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in
the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas
in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself
fully as what it is.

That is writing of classic beauty and simplicity. It embodies Strauss's quiet
rejection of Machiavelli, while admitting--or rather insisting--that the full
revelation of the low is something that political philosophy and especially
statesmanship cannot afford to neglect. As we cannot too often repeat, Strauss never
forgot the claims of revelation, no less than of reason, to be the "high." But a
judgment with respect to these claims was ultimately dependent upon speculative
reason: which he did not think could in fact render any final decision. While human
freedom requires recognition of the philosophical and biblical alternatives there is
nothing to compel acquiescence in one more than the other. As Strauss wrote at the
end of "Progress and Return":

The very life of Western civilization is the life between two codes, a fundamental
tension. There is therefore no reason inherent in Western civilization itself, in
its fundamental constitution, why it should give up life.

I believe that Strauss devoted his life, above all else, to keeping Western
civilization from "giving up life." The self-destruction of reason in the
ultimate "wave" of modernity meant abandoning both philosophy and revelation, and
affirming the human will as the sole authority for what had been attributed either
to autonomous reason or to God.

Strauss's articulation of the differences between ancients and moderns I called
practical rather than theoretical. The heart of the modern experiment--which had its
origins in Machiavelli--was to transcend the differences between the two competing
views of the high. "Transcend" may be the wrong word however, since the human
problem was now to be addressed by lowering, not elevating further, the ends of
human life. The human problem was to be solved by the conquest of fortune.

This conquest, as it turned out, was to be accomplished by science. Science would
supply the goods that men wanted most--health, wealth, freedom--without any
requirement of virtue, either in their acquisition or in their enjoyment. Science
would give men here on earth what most men had hitherto expected only in heaven--the
effortless possession of boundless pleasure. Science would replace God. This new God
would be literally the Demiourgos--the slave of the people, and not their master.
The high would be in the service of the low.

Strauss's rejection of the modern principles rested not so much on the folly of the
optimistic assumption that the boundless power promised by science would be man's
servant and not his master. Machiavelli's quarrel was equally with classical
political philosophy and with Christianity. He accused them both of "utopianism."
What he meant by this, however, was not the difficulty inherent in the achievement
of the best regime. This was essentially a straw man in Machiavelli's argument. What
Machiavelli really objected to was the tyranny of moral virtue.

The subordination of the passions to reason--in the economy of human well-being--was
a doctrine common to both Athens and Jerusalem. Certainly in Aristotle, moral virtue
is always subject to the dictates of prudence. As such, it is anything but utopian.
Strauss thought that Machiavelli's turning away from moral virtue, as a necessary
ingredient of human well-being, was mistaken.

The emancipation of the passions of the body from the restraints of reason by the
conquest of nature (and fortune) was not a project that could succeed. Taking one's
bearings not by what men ought to be, but by what they are, or by lowering the goals
of political life in order to guarantee their actualization was doomed to fail. It
was doomed to failure because of its insufficient attention to--or its ignorance or
forgetting of--the ineluctable character of the human soul. The project of
subordinating the higher elements of the soul to the lower could only lead to a
tyranny greater than anything that had existed hitherto.

Machiavellian modernity meant reversing the classics by establishing the primacy of
practical over theoretical reason. Science would be in the service of man's estate--
but not of man himself. The idea that the passions could furnish more rational goals
for human life than reason itself was essentially absurd. What Strauss meant by
devoting his "investigations" to the "theological-political problem" was restoring
the authority of the moral order common to philosophy and the Bible, and restoring
with it the conviction that human life could be well lived only by devotion to
the "high." Recognition of what was truly the "high" moreover would engender modesty
and humility, and therewith moderation.

************

As we have said, the authority of revelation rests upon the proposition that the
universe is the creation of the One God who is separate from the universe He
created. Because God is separate, reasoning about the universe (going from effects
to causes) will not lead to the first cause. The authority of philosophy--or of
reason--arises from the perception (as for example affirmed in the first and tenth
books of the Nicomachean Ethics) that reason is the best or most divine thing in us,
and that the way of life devoted to its cultivation is the best way of life for man.

The establishment of Christianity in the fifth century is understandable in the
light of the fact that every ancient city had attributed its law to its God. When
Rome became the universal city, it was consistent with previous human experience
that men should now transfer their loyalty to a universal God. But experience
revealed that the universal city was not a city in the sense in which previous
cities had been cities.

A city qua city has to be particular, not universal. Different peoples require
different laws adapted to their different characters and circumstances. The
homogenization of the different regimes into a single regime can take place only by
means of despotism, against which human nature--a God-given human nature--must of
necessity rebel.

The universal city may however be understood in a way that does not contradict
nature--it may be understood as the City of God--the city which is the eternal home
of man, but not his mortal or terrestrial one. All the citizens of the different
mortal or terrestrial cities may become fellow citizens of the City of God, without
ceasing to be good--and different--citizens of their particular regimes in this
world. Moreover, the City of God may be understood within the dispensation of
philosophy as the best regime--the regime in speech, which is always and everywhere
best, although it may not exist in actuality or indeed, anywhere or ever.

Although the establishment of Christianity in the Fifth Century was--for reasons
given-- understandable, it was nevertheless inconsistent with both reason and
revelation. The vitality of Western civilization, of which Strauss spoke, was the
vitality arising from "arguments advanced by theologians on behalf of the Biblical
point of view and by philosophers on behalf of the philosophic point of view." The
very idea of religious establishment meant an attempt by political means--that is to
say, by practical reason--to resolve theoretical questions on the nature of faith
and its relationship to reason.

The essence of modernity, on the other hand, is the parallel attempt to transform
philosophy into wisdom (or by claiming to have transformed it, as in the persons of
Hitler and Stalin) also to resolve theory on the basis of practice. As the one led
to theological despotism the other leads to ideological despotism.

Political moderation is rooted in the refusal to resolve the mystery of human life
by political means. It is rooted in the recognition of human freedom as grounded in
the openness of the human soul to that mystery. It is rooted as well in the
recognition of a moral order, which understands human freedom not as the mere
absence of restraint, but as directed to living a human life in the light of its
transcendent ends, whether these are defined by reason or by revelation.

************

You write that Ernest Fortin

makes a distinction between proving that revelation is not impossible and proving
that it is possible and then claims that the latter would disprove the supernatural
character of revelation. Why is that so?

Suppose someone had argued once upon a time that airplanes, for example, were
impossible. Now, of course, if they could ever have properly been called impossible,
then flying would be a miracle. But long ago--at least since Leonardo--men have been
able to prove that flying is not impossible. That is to say, men have understood,
long before they knew how to fly, what causes could bring it about that men would
actually fly. By this fact, they knew that flying, when it happened, would not be
miraculous.

The essence of revealed truth--qua revealed--is that it comes from a God whom faith
tells us cannot be an object of knowledge. Hence we cannot know how God is a cause
of those things (e.g. creation) of which he is the unmediated cause. If we could
prove that revelation is possible then revelation would be like anything else that
we have reason to believe we can understand even if we have not yet understood it.

************

Since many of your other "supplementaries" traverse ground I think I have covered, I
will stop here. If you think there is anything else I should say on these topics
(not to mention things that I have wrongly said!), let me know.

P.S. I am not certain whether you have seen "The American Founding as the Best
Regime: The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty," which I enclose. I think it
sheds some light on some of the matters you ask about, which I may not have not
covered here.

Harry V. Jaffa is a Distinguished Fellow at The Claremont Institute.