Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides by Kenneth Hart Green

Author:Kenneth Hart Green [Green, Kenneth Hart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

The Maimonidean Revolution

Western Tradition as Reason and Revelation

OUR EFFORT TO MAKE EVIDENT THE CIVILIZATIONAL thrust of Strauss’s revolutionary project (scholarly-philosophic-political-theological) as it bears on Maimonides may be helped if we recur for a moment to the architectural metaphor. The new house built by Spinoza—i.e., modern Western liberal democracy, and the liberal forms of biblical religion which are rooted in the politics of Spinoza—continues to be threatened with a collapse of its own. Meanwhile, it is not always the shelter for reason that it promised to be, since this house invites the exaggerated or irrational faith in reason which he tended to foster on the tactical level, i.e., to abolish the old religion, even if he was not so convinced of its possible use to most people on the strategic level, i.e., since most people will still have need of faith, revelation, and scripture, even if only in the form of the new religion. So far as Strauss was concerned, the effort to save Spinoza’s construction project—whose habitable quality, so long as it did not collapse, Strauss readily acknowledged—required an unprejudiced study of the plans of the unadmitted architect of the old house in the original, unrenovated form (i.e., Maimonides) on which it was built, and whose materials, structure, and design it reused. Similarly, he thought that this same effort would benefit from a study of the surrounding grounds (i.e., ancient and medieval philosophy) on whose solidity it depended for support. Precisely in the effort—as Strauss conceived of it—to preserve the new house, this also required attaining a fresh grasp of the deeper history of the thought about human need, dwelling, and habitation that contributed to the design of the old house: what about its groundwork endured and what required correction. By doing just this, Strauss also discovered that the aim of Spinoza was to rebuild—albeit on the same essential ground used previously by the religious tradition, at least in its enlightened form, as conceived of by Maimonides—the political order whose moral framework was provided by scripture and by the God who “revealed” or, better, authorized it by acting as its supreme authority. And it was on just this ground that Maimonides had taken his stand, and on which he still gives us perhaps the most compelling account of how to preserve in a healthy state the two roots of our Western tradition, “Jerusalem and Athens.”

Indeed, Maimonides is, as Strauss can be recognized to have suggested, almost the unacknowledged legislator of the modern Western tradition, especially for Jews, but also just as much for Western Christians derived from Thomas Aquinas, by whose “method” we believe it is possible to “synthesize”—however, only in the sense of “harmonize” or “synchronize”—reason and revelation at the highest level. Spinoza’s approach may have been a merited “correction” of Maimonides, but his criticism of Maimonides to the contrary notwithstanding, it remained in a certain, very definite measure grounded in Maimonides, since Spinoza did not accept the full program of Machiavelli, as completed by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.

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