IVAN KENNEALLY is an assistant professor of political
science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
He is currently writing a book on the
dangers technocracy poses to democracy.
Tocqueville famously diagnosed American
consciousness as deeply affected
by an untutored Cartesianism; in his view,
our intellectual debt to Descartes was undiminished
by our ignorance of his bequest.
Likewise, many have surprisingly
judged the contemporary American political
scene as indelibly shaped by Leo Strauss’
philosophical legacy; in fact, Michael and
Catherine Zuckert recently remarked, “A
specter is haunting America, and that specter
is, strange to say, Leo Strauss.” The radical
tension between reason and revelation,
as Strauss depicts it, could be seen as analogous
to the communicative chasm that has
opened up between our nation’s religiously
inclined and its committed secularists; the
incompatibility of reason and revelation
fi nds its American expression in the political
and cultural conflict between Darwinians
and Evangelicals or, as Peter Lawler
has observed, between those who think
evolutionary Darwinism comprehensively
accounts for the whole of human experience
and those who think a full rendering
requires recourse to revelation.
While it is likely Strauss’s work is studied
even less than Descartes’s, the many variations
in American cultural discourse on
Strauss’s dichotomy are too numerous to
catalogue here. It is sufficient to point
out that the austere divide between the
God-directed and Darwin-directed is an
expression of the Straussian tension writ
large over our cultural topography; apparently,
our inability to see any hopes for a
synthesis between reason and revelation
means that we are all untutored Straussians
now.
Rémi Brague’s groundbreaking new
work, The Law of God: The Philosophical
History of an Idea, is also haunted by the
specter of Strauss even though Brague
only specifically mentions Strauss once
and in brief, parenthetical fashion. Still,
despite his obvious respect for Strauss’s
work, Brague presents a searching challenge
to the very core of Strauss’s philosophic
thought and ultimately to the
view of modernity he espoused. Strauss
famously declares the “theologico-political
problem” the “central theme” of his investigations—
he even describes himself as a
“young Jew born and raised in Germany
who found himself in the grip of the theologico-
political predicament.” For Strauss,
the irresolvable antithesis between reason
and revelation was the explosive catalyst
for the whole of the Western tradition and
expressed itself microcosmically at both
the political and individual level.
At the political level, the problem is
manifest in the fact that divine law presents
itself as the ultimate and comprehensive
arbiter of human experience, thereby
precluding any facile liberal attempt to
relegate religion to matters of individual
conscience. The claim of divine law to
extend to the whole of human experience
makes a mockery of the distinction
between public and private and its
constitutional offspring, the separation of
church and state. Furthermore, the incommensurability
of reason and revelation at
the level of individual choice means that
any attempt to confront seriously the two
available alternatives necessarily requires
an arbitrary determination.
For Strauss, then, when it comes to the
most important matter, we must choose
and must choose willfully—we are left
without any legitimate rational ground
to defend subsequently what amounts to
a primitive moral decision. If Evangelicals
and Darwinians in America find themselves
pitted against one other without
hopes of reconciliation it would seem to
be because they found the Straussian logic
to be inexorable on this score. Apparently,
Americans too are born in the grip of the
theologico-political predicament.
Brague announces his intention,
however, to “enlarge” the theologicopolitical
problem and even to “move
beyond its boundaries.” In the initial
movement of Brague’s argument he prefers
the formulation “theo-political” to theologico-
political since the term “theology”
already assumes the “project of a rational
elucidation of divinity” which is “specific
to Christianity.” While Strauss generally
has little to say about Christianity, presumably
because its attempt at a synthesis of
reason and revelation only obscures their
mutual exclusivity, Brague considers
the theologico-political problem to be a
product of Christian categories; in fact, the
term “theology” itself already presupposes
a “way for the divine to pass through the
prism of discourse (logos).”
While some sort of theological component
is detectable in the other two major
Western religious traditions, Islam and
Judaism, it is mostly due to the palpable
effect the development of Christianity
had on both of them. Ultimately, Brague
considers the term “theo-political” itself
inadequate and inferior to “theio-political,”
since the former term only specifi-
cally addresses the particular relationship
between politics and God versus the
more general mediation between politics
and the divine. Even the term “theiopolitical”
still only makes sense when
understood through the unique prism of
Christian interpretive paradigms. Christianity,
for Strauss, is an historically anomalous
tributary branching from the central
philosophical development of Western
consciousness. But Brague considers it to
be a “highly revolutionary event not to be
turned into something banal.” Therefore,
Strauss’s discovery of the theologico-political
problem is deeply suspect, according
to Brague: it excludes the transformative
impact of the Christianity actually responsible
for its birth.
In The Law of God, Brague’s “principal
interest” is not the theologico-political
problem but rather the “genesis of the
modern world in Western Europe.” These
are not disconnected subjects, though,
since in breaking from Strauss’s articulation
of the problem Brague also, by extension,
decisively breaks with Strauss’s portrayal
of modernity. Strauss famously dissects the
unfolding of the West into a philosophical
tug of war between the ancients and the
moderns and even attempts to reinvigorate
this contest for the sake of revisiting the
questionable victory of the Enlightenment
and, more specifically, the modern scientific
dismissal of classical philosophy. Hence,
in Strauss’s view, the birth of the modern
creates a fundamental rupture with antiquity
thereby reducing the Middle Ages to
“a time of latency between two summits.”
One is tempted to infer that Strauss largely
neglects the Middle Ages for reasons similar
to Hegel’s—that it achieved nothing other
than the philosophical systematization of
Christian doctrine, as if this in itself were
too unspectacular to deserve further scrutiny.
By way of contrast, Brague assigns a
special historical significance to the Middle
Ages—”certain key concepts” that “took
form in the ancient world” actually “peak
in the Middle Ages.” Even more importantly,
Brague contends that the “modern
age did little but draw the consequences
of decisions that been taken long before.”
The Middle Ages, in fact, constitute a
“watershed moment in many areas” and,
Brague explains, it can lay claim to be
the “apogee of divine law.” If the “theiopolitical
problem,” as Brague redefines it,
is merely a subset of the “theio-practical”
problem, or the problem of how the divine
intersects with the whole domain of practical
action, and the “divine law constitutes
precisely the theio-practical” idea par excellence,”
then the Middle Ages must provide
a unique portal into our understanding of
the “theio-practical.” For Brague, therefore,
the Middles Ages provides the frame
of reference we sorely need to understand
not only the nature of divine law, but also
its transformation out of the crucible that
forges modernity.
Leo Strauss memorably describes
modernity not only as a rejection of classical
philosophy but also as an intended
repudiation of the Christian Thomism
that had dominated the schools running
up to the dawn of the Enlightenment. In
this way, one could say that his reading is
decisively influenced by Machiavelli, who
in Strauss’s view saw Christianity as the
obstacle to be overcome in order to usher
in the new modes and orders of modernity.
However, Brague argues that the “claim
to have definitively left the Middle Ages”
fi rst appeared within Christianity and that
Christianity itself has in many ways made
our modern societies possible. The modern
project of comprehensive secularization, or
its mission to sunder the divine from law in
the service of individual autonomy, is “only
made possible, in the final analysis, by the
Christian experience of a divine without
a law.” In fact, Brague proposes that the
very notion of a modern state, or of citizenship,
or of the separation of church and
state, or our fundamental interpretation of
democracy, or the distinction between the
sacred and the profane, and even atheism
and the idea of secularization itself are all
ultimately inheritances of a Christianity
that modernity set out to reject, but instead
deeply but unwittingly absorbed. Modern
consciousness seems particularly colored
by what Nietzsche would have referred to
as resentiment, given that it owes its character
and existence to a patrimony it now
publicly denies.
In The Law of God, Brague never specifically
mentions American intellectual
discourse, but he does observe that generally
today there is “constant talk about the
distinction between the religious and the
political.” In an essay entitled “Are Non-
Theocratic Regimes Possible?” in the
Spring 2006 Intercollegiate Review, he does
directly speak of the “struggles that constitute
the contemporary American ‘culture
wars'” in this vein. There, Brague marshals
powerful evidence to demonstrate that our
central notions of individual conscience and
democracy are fundamentally Christian in
nature and that further, even our understanding
of political life is fundamentally
theocratic, if that is taken to mean that it
is based “upon assumptions that are theological
in character.” While Brague does
concede that within modernity the “idea
of a divine law did not totally disappear,”
the typical modern analysis “empties it of
all content, which is perhaps worse than
simply being forgotten.”
Our most divisive intellectual tensions
are peculiarly Straussian in form but no
longer particularly productive or philosophically
fecund, are borne out of selfdelusion
regarding the foundations of
modern political life, and may, to the
extent that such discourse blithely assumes
the possibility of a human society “with
no reference to the divine,” be a dangerous
species of “suicidal dialectics.” In other
words, Brague would argue that our feckless
debates between the God-directed
and the Darwin-directed are the residue
of a Straussian preoccupation which is “a
serious problem in appearance only.” Even
though Brague never mentions America in
The Law of God, our internecine disputes
turn out to be remarkably emblematic of
modernity as a whole. Anyone interested
in moving beyond the stilted parameters
of our own historically and philosophically
dubious expression of the theologico-
political problem should study this
powerful and profound work.
