Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:56:31.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Latitude for Statesmanship? Strauss on St. Thomas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

James V. Schulh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Leo Strauss often spoke of Jerusalem and Athens. He never spoke of Rome in the same context, never of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Western civilization, in his view, was fertilized by the dynamic tension between only two, not three, cities. This theoretically unresolvable stress between Jerusalem and Athens was what made this culture unique. Western civilization stood between reason and revelation. For Strauss, it seemed self-evident that this tension, which initially arose when the pious Jews encountered the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, was incapable of intellectual reconciliation but still it remained the font of its cultural vitality.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , Winter 1991 , pp. 126 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 164.Google Scholar

2. Strauss, Leo, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” Commentary 43 (1967): 43–57.Google Scholar

3. Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 3.Google Scholar

4. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 164.Google Scholar

5. Fortin, Ernest, “Between Lines: Was Leo Strauss a Secret Enemy of Truth?” Crisis 7 (12 1989): 25.Google Scholar

6. Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1973), p. 19.Google Scholar

7. Strauss, Leo, “How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy” The Rebirth of Classical Political Realism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Pangle, Thomas L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 222.Google Scholar

8. Schall, James V., “Revelation, Reason, and Politics: Catholic Reflections on Strauss,” Gregorianum 62 (1981): 2, 349–66; 3, 467–98Google Scholar; Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

9. Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).Google Scholar

10. Strauss, , “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Persecution, pp. 22–37.Google Scholar

11. See Pangle, Thomas L., “The Theological-Political Problem” in his Introduction to Leo, Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 18–23.Google Scholar

12. See Mclnerny, Ralph, St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 157–58Google Scholar; Schall, James V., “Aristotle on Friendship,” The Classical Bulletin 65 (1989): 83–88.Google Scholar

13. Strauss, Leo, “On the Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” Independent Journal of Philosophy (Vienna) 3 (1979): 111–18Google Scholar

14. E. B. F. Midgley at the University of Aberdeen is in the process of completing an important manuscript upon the philosophic integrity of St. Thomas's treatment of Aristotle.

15. See on this matter, Wilhelmsen, Frederick D., Christianity and Political Philosophy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 194–216Google Scholar; McCoy, Charles N. R., “On the Revival of Classical Political Philosophy,” On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy: Essays of Charles N. R. McCoy, ed. Schall, James V. and Schrems, John J. (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), pp. 131–49Google Scholar; Midgley, E. B. F., “Concerning the Modernist Subversion of Political Philosophy,” The New Scholasticism 53 (Spring 1979): 168–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See Schumacher, E. F., A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), pp. 27–39Google Scholar; also Schall, James V., “The Natural Law-Aristotle,” Vera Lex 7 (1987): 11–12, 26Google Scholar; “Nature and Finality in Aristotle,” Laval théologique etphilosophique 45 (1989): 73–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 164.Google Scholar

18. Jaffa, Harry V., “Leo Strauss: 1899–1973),” The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 6.Google Scholar

19. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 163Google Scholar. See McCoy, Charles N. R., The Structure of Political Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), chaps. 2, 4, and 5.Google Scholar

20. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 161.Google Scholar

21. Ibid.

22. Strauss, Leo, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1958), pp. 11–14.Google Scholar

23. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 164.Google Scholar

24. See Strauss, , Thoughts, pp. 254–56Google Scholar. See also the discussion of this same point in Maritain, Jacques, “The Problem of Means in a Regressive or Barbarous Society,” Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 71–79Google Scholar. For a comment on Strauss's view of statesmanship in extreme situations, see Schall, James V., “Christians and War: Playing God,” Hillsdale Review 7 (Fall 1985): 29–34.Google Scholar

25. See Schall, James V., “The Recovery of Metaphysics,” Divinitas 23 (1979): 200–219.Google Scholar

26. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 164.Google Scholar

27. Ibid, p. 163.

28. Ibid., pp. 163–64.

29. Ibid., p. 164.

30. Ibid., p. 164.

31. Strauss, , Thoughts, pp. 207–208.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., p. 221.

33. Fradkin, Hillel, “Leo Strauss and Contemporary Jewish Thought,” in Contemporary Jewish Writers, 1989, manuscript p. 22Google Scholar, forthcoming, B'nai B'rith. The citation in text is from Strauss, Leo, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 256.Google Scholar

34. Deuteronomy, 4:6 (italics added).Google Scholar

35. Fradkin, , “Leo Strauss and Contemporary Jewish Thought,” p. 39.Google Scholar

36. Strauss, , The City and Man, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

37. See the conclusion to “What Is Political Philosophy?” in Strauss, Leo, What Is Pblitical Philosophy and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1959), p. 55.Google Scholar

38. Strauss, , The City and Man, p. 1.Google Scholar

39. See Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).Google Scholar

40. Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy? p. 43.Google Scholar

41. Strauss, , Persecution, p. 19.Google Scholar

42. Voegelin, Eric made a similar argument, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery-Gateway, 1968), pp. 99–114.Google Scholar

43. Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy? p. 40 (italics added).Google Scholar

44. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 163.Google Scholar

45. Translations from St. Thomas are the author's.

46. Strauss, , Thoughts, p. 299.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., p. 208.

48. See Strauss, Leo, “Marsilius of Padua,” History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss, Leo and Joseph, Cropsey, 2nd ed. (New York: Rand-McNally, 1972), pp. 251–70.Google Scholar

49. Aquinatis, Sancti Thomae, In Octo Libros Politicorwn Aristotelis (Quebeci: Tremblay & Dion, 1940), Lectio IX, Liber VII, p. 378.Google Scholar

50. Strauss, , The City and Man, p. 49.Google Scholar