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1 Thomas Meyer Leo Strauss's Religious Rhetoric Thomas Meyer Leo Strauss’s Religious Rhetoric (1924-1938) Although he had been regarded as shy and restrained since his period of study in Marburg, Strauss was a master of religious rhetoric in his letters and [published] texts. This rhetoric was, for him, neither a [form of] compensation [for insufficient argument], nor a superficial adornment. On the contrary, he deployed religious rhetoric in same way that he analysed [its function] in Plato and Aristotle, through Maimonides and Abravanel, into Spinoza and Hobbes, and up to Hermann Cohen and Julius Guttmann: as an expression of the complex contest between philosophy and religion. After his engagement with Hermann Cohen’s critique of Spinoza in 1924, religious rhetoric was, for Strauss, no longer a feature of Zionist debates alone. Instead, it was a constitutive element of a problematic that Strauss strikingly and provocatively dubbed the “querelle des anciens et des modernes.” In order to understand this change in the function of religious rhetoric [in Strauss’ work], I shall consider three stations of Strauss’ intellectual development. First of all, I shall present several articles that I found in the “Jewish Weekly for Cassel, Hessen, and Waldeck”, which have remained unknown to scholarship until now. Strauss published these articles between February 1925 and January 1928. If we connect these texts with Strauss’s conclusions regarding Spinoza, we can develop a stable account of his religious rhetoric up to about 1934. But [Strauss’s use of religious rhetoric in these texts] can be understood only if we consider it in light of Strauss’ translation of a different religious rhetoric [into the terms of his own thought]: namely, the way Strauss enriched his religious rhetoric through an understanding of, and in dialogue with, the most radical position in Protestant [thought]—that of the dialectical theologian Friedrich Gogarten. [This is the second point in Strauss’ development that I wish to consider]. Strauss maintained his views [on the role of religious rhetoric] until mid-1937, inclusive of the piece on Abravanel [that he wrote in August of that year]. At that point, several 1 years of study of the More Newuchim lay behind him. In letters to Nahum Glatzer and Ernst Simon, Strauss [surprisingly] announced that he had broken the seal of Maimonides’ book and stood at the gates of a totally new and—for a Jew—dangerous world. Strauss thus placed himself in the midst of a rhetorical set-piece that he had not used before and would not deploy again. [We get a hint abour the reason] in the essay on “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed”, which was published at the end of 1941 but already complete in July 1938. There, Strauss offers a totally new view of the constellation of the Ancients-Medievals-Moderns—in other words, a total revision of his previous understanding of reason and revelation. 1. The Cassel Contributions On several occasions—namely in Spring and Fall 1925 and in Spring 1927 and Winter 1927-1928—the Berlin Academy for the Science of Judaism appointed Strauss its course leader in Cassel. In consultation with Franz Rosenzweig, Strauss gave Hebrew seminars for both beginners and advanced students, for which he took the exercise texts exclusively from the Bible. In addition, Strauss organized so-called “working groups” whose members studied German-Jewish history, the modern critique of religion since Spinoza, and with the work of Maimonides. Strauss gave introductory lectures to these working groups, of which know only the titles or the summaries that appeared in the press. Furthermore, Strauss published an elaborate review of the “Jewish Writings” of Hermann Cohen, and took part in a debate about liberal Judaism in Cassel. We know all this from the “Jewish Weekly for Cassel, Hessen, and Waldeck”, which I found, entirely by accident, in Leipzig. The writings I discovered are significant for Strauss’ biography because we know almost nothing of his activities during these years. They are no less important in connection with his religious rhetoric. On the one hand, they give us a picture of Strauss as an [educational] practitioner long before he gave seminars in New York and, later, in Chicago. On the other hand, they allow us to observe how Strauss dealt in Cassel with themes and questions that he developed in [his earlier periods in] Marburg and Berlin. 2 [In order to knit these strands together,] let us now review his intellectual development up to 1935, including “Philosophy and Law”. As a first step [in his intellectual development,] Strauss tried to understand the basis of the criteria on which Cohen condemned Spinoza as an atheist and interpreted Maimonides as a rationalist. In Cassel, Strauss wrote the following on this issue: “If one considers that, according to Cohen, the system of philosophy is to accomplish the foundation [Begründung] of ‘culture,’ i.e. of European culture, and that the concept of God of Cohen’s ethics stands in explicit relation to the Jewish concept of God, as far as it is possible to speak of this on the basis of the critique of the most recent centuries, this path of Cohen’s already constitutes a ‘return’ from Europe to Judaism. When Cohen asks, what necessity of the system of philosophy leads to the idea of God, he implicitly asks: what European necessity demands the preservation and development of Judaism?” Strauss thus situates Cohen’s standpoint in terms of the [more fundamental] correlation Culture/God. [For Strauss], this correlation makes intelligible the reasons Cohen condemned Spinoza and regarded Maimonides as a rationalist: The former rejected revealed faith, while the latter sought reasons to attempt to understand God. Cohen, for his part, dignified Maimonides’ effort as an achievement of European culture [rather than a specifically Jewish project]. While in Kassel, Strauss would go so far as to assert that Spinoza, on the other hand, was not a Jew at all—something that could easily be gleaned from his reception by Socialists and Communists. As the second step [of his progress], Strauss tried to develop a positive understanding of Spinoza so as to come to grips his critique of religion and rejection of Maimonides. [In the year 1924], he returned from Cassel to Berlin and published “On the Bible Science of Spinoza and Precursors” in the journal of the Academy there. Despite Strauss’ efforts toward objectivity, the article is permeated by the tone of the Cassel years. What follows are some relevant examples of Strauss’ religious rhetoric. This time, they mimic Spinoza, as they had Cohen [in the text excerpted above]. Note particularly the manipulative interlocking of description and evaluation [in a statement 3 like]: “Although it is not his habit to uncover the errors of others, Spinoza makes an exhaustive effort to refute religion, because its claims are prejudices that can be obstruct the understanding of his proofs. The claims of religion are necessary errors, rooted in human nature, and are impossible to eradicate from the minds and hearts of most human beings.” After that, Spinoza is pitted against Maimonides—while Strauss takes them both on. [What I mean is that] when we read the relevant passages, we get the impression of a duel between Rambam and his critic, but it turns out that Strauss is pulling the strings. He drives the argument deeper into the recesses of the theories [under consideration]. He constantly and repeatedly writes that a certain question must be plumbed “more sharply”, “more radically”, or “intensively”. [Strauss’ procedure presumes that] a fog of illusory agreement obscures every conclusion and must be cleared away [to lay bare the concrete antitheses of each thinker’s position]. At the end, Strauss writes, verbally exhausted, “On the basis of theory, Spinoza argues against the possibility of harmonizing theory and Scripture. His critique aims at the separation of ‘philosophy’ from ‘theology’ and of theory from Scripture. What appears in this process is in part the inner difficulties of Maimonides’ position and in part its historically conditioned character. The primary condition for the possibility of harmonizing theory and Scripture proves to be the belief in the dependence of human reason on superhuman guidance for the achievement of the perfection of theory.” The function of religious rhetoric as an expression of Strauss’ systematic [procedure] is discernible here. [Rather than translating their thought into a modern philosophical idiom, Strauss uses] the protagonists’ own terminology so as to restore them to the appropriate context. This isn’t done out of doxographical interest. Strauss reconstructs texts as if they were the apparatus of a scientific experiment, because he wants to know how the thinkers came to their results. Strauss concludes from this procedure that even the “purest” theory cannot avoid recourse to religious rhetoric. He applies his own strategy of rhetorical transformation to 4 the very passages in which this recourse occurs. According to Strauss, the most authentic expressions [of writers’ thought] occur where the genre [of argument] shifts from the language of theory to the language of religion. [In his view, however,] this shift signifies the concealment of truth [rather than its revelation]. If that is so, [the] religious rhetoric [of the past] cannot be simply repeated, but must be amplified by the religious rhetoric of our own time, in order to restore the possibility of discovering the truth. This strategy can be said to have succeeded if a select few recognize that one and the same truth shines out from behind every religious rhetoric. That is the practice Strauss would adopt in his puzzle-books about Machiavelli and Aristophanes and Socrates. But we must proceed a few steps before we get there. In a third step, Strauss attempted recover the original position of Maimonides, which had hitherto been obscured by a superimposition of enlightenment and modern ideas that encouraged false valuation of the middle ages and their relation to antiquity.
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