Leo Strauss greatly revived the study of political philosophy in the twentieth century and in the process reinvigorated discussion of the permanent questions of politics. Many Catholic thinkers who desired to engage modernity in its philosophical and political depths found in Strauss a worthy guide, in part because of the weaknesses of Catholic thought in addressing modern political and social conditions. This meeting of Strauss's mind and Catholic minds is worthy of consideration, for it led to significant questions and debates about faith and reason, the ancient and modern political worlds, the place of the philosopher, and the contest of natural right versus natural law, to name a few. Can the real differences between Strauss's oeuvre and the Catholic intellectual tradition be reconciled? If not, what do such divergences amount to for Catholic thinkers who have a certain lowercase piety for Strauss? The excellent volume of essays, Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, edited by Geoffrey M. Vaughan, considers these questions and more.
John Hittinger's essay “On the Catholic Audience” reports a direct appeal by Strauss to Catholics. Hittinger considers two lectures, “The Crisis of Our Time” and “The Crisis of Political Philosophy,” that Strauss gave in 1963 at the University of Detroit, a Catholic university. In them, Strauss argues that the crisis of the West is the crisis of political philosophy as launched by the moderns. Strauss then goes on to try to understand the moderns as they understood themselves, in order to critically appraise their founding premises. Hittinger informs us that in these lectures Strauss is trying to help Catholic scholars recover Aristotle and the classical body of political philosophy against the modernist revolution in political thinking. He wants them to read Aristotle in his original voice and not only through the lens of Thomas Aquinas. Strauss thus challenged Catholic thinkers “to read political philosophers in a fresh, nonderivative manner, [and that] may be one of the greatest benefits that Catholics received from Leo Strauss.”
Strauss further argues that the Catholic thinker who would articulate the intrinsic superiority of duty and of the natural law must confront the tendency of individual rights to reorient the political order around human appetites. Human happiness is the declared end of modern liberal regimes, but they also maintain that we cannot politically know the content of such happiness. This led Strauss to stress one of his signature concerns: “the crisis of the West consists in the West having become uncertain of its purpose.” But what is this purpose? Strauss notes in these lectures that political philosophy as a focus of study is almost exclusively carried in the modern West by the Catholic tradition. But I sense Strauss also asking in the Detroit lectures, “do you know the way to defend yourself and your civilization?”
Leo Strauss begins Natural Right and History (1953) by quoting from the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph, which he followed with two questions: “Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those ‘truths to be self-evident'?” Strauss's pointed question, one that parallels nicely with the University of Detroit lectures, compels re-engagement with the Western tradition of political thought. Strauss's appeal to the self-evident principles of the Declaration of Independence clarifies, though, as much as it might obscure political truth for the Catholic thinker. What is the foundation for the Declaration's natural rights? Is it the god of the philosophers? Is it Enlightenment reasoning and methodology? Is it rearticulation of Aristotelian political thought, one that takes into account John Locke?
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