Correspondence
Correspondence LET'S IRON THINGS OUT IN HIS REVIEW of Leo Strauss, the Straussians and the Am^-rican Regime ("Strauss Among the Straussians," Aug. 28/Sept. 4), Steven Lenzner has a number of...
...Lenzner quotes Strauss: "By uprooting authority, philosophy recognizes nature as the standard...
...The great achievement of his student Harry Jaffa has been to explain how the natural right principles of the United States at once support and require morality and philosophy...
...Anyone who thinks, as I do, that here Strauss is speaking from the bottom of his heart and mind, will come to a different conclusion...
...But Lenzner does not give any example of these ironic beginnings or explain by what rule they are ironic...
...Nowhere else has the longing for justice and the just city filled the purest hearts and the loftiest souls with such zeal as on this sacred soil...
...Lenzner's Strauss is rather a philosopher who as such "cannot recognize authority as binding upon thought...
...This is what Strauss meant by the "theologico-political predicament...
...In this city, and in this land, the theme of political philos-ophy—"the city of righteousness, the faithful city"—has been taken more seriously than anywhere else on earth...
...The great achievement of Leo Strauss was to rescue nature, which is the ground of both morality and philosophy, from the clutches of modern historicism, positivism, relativism, and nihilism...
...The American Founders articulated principles based on individual natural rights and government by consent, but understood in the light of the obligatory "laws of nature and of nature's God...
...HARRY V JAFFA Claremont, CA STEVEN LENZNER'S "Strauss Among the Straussians" purports to be a review of a new book on Leo Strauss, but is really an attack on one of Strauss's students, Harry Jaffa...
...Fair enough, as far as it goes...
...This new ground was ultimately discovered not by philosophers, but by statesmen...
...Upon these principles they built a regime in which one can be simultaneously a good citizen, a good man, and a good Christian or Jew...
...Let me provide the reader with one of the most famous of these, the opening of What Is Political Philosophy?: It is a great honor, and at the same time a challenge to accept a task of particular difficulty, to be asked to speak about political philosophy in Jerusalem...
...According to Lenzner, when I quote from the beginning of Strauss's writings, I fail to take into account that these "are, as a rule, ironic...
...What Lenzner fails to understand is that in a regime which recognizes nature as the standard, the role of philosophy is not to uproot authority, but to defend it...
...Strauss indicated his profound respect for their solution when, near the center of his essay "On Classical Political Philosophy," he cites the republicanism of Thomas Jefferson as an example of what ancient philosophers meant by the "best regime...
...Surely so careful a reader as Lenzner should know that Strauss is here speaking of authority in its pre-1776 form, i.e., an authority divorced from nature and based on some claim of divinity...
...MICHAEL ANTON New York, NY...
...I shall even be compelled to lead you into a region where the dimmest recollection of that vision is on the point of vanishing altogether—where the Kingdom of God is derisively called an imagined principality—to say here nothing of the region which was never illumined by it...
...I know all too well that I am utterly unable to convey to you what in the best possible case, in the case of any man, would be no more than a faint reproduction or a weak imitation of our prophets' vision...
...But Lenzner quotes him anachronistically...
...I display a "marked indifference," he says, to "textual fidelity" in my interpretation of Strauss...
...But while being compelled, or compelling myself, to wander far away from our sacred heritage, or to be silent about it, I shall not for a moment forget what Jerusalem stands for...
...Anyone who, like Lenzner, finds in this an example of Strauss's irony, will quite properly accept all the negative things he has to say about me...
...Strauss recognized that, in the modern world, the link between the divine and the law—"so vital in the ancient world"— had been severed...
...Jaffa is wrong, writes Lenzner, to argue that "the essential purpose of Leo Strauss's life and work" was "to secure recognition . . . of the moral authority based upon the dignity of man, supported both by reason and revelation...
...Thus the most important challenge facing modern man was to find some ground of obligation upon which the law could stand, and which at the same time would not offend the piety of the faithful...
...But Lenzner misses a fundamental point in Strauss's analysis of modernity...
...4), Steven Lenzner has a number of things to say about my contribution, none of them flattering...
Vol. 6 • September 2000 • No. 1
