Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985.

 

In the introduction to his translation of the De Amore, Sears Jayne provides a table relating the speeches Ficino has written for his friends to the speeches Plato wrote for the characters in the Symposium. The second and seventh of Ficino’s speakers do not mention the Symposium, Jayne remarks, “and in only one, the sixth, is there a sentence-by-sentence commentary on any part of Plato’s dialogue.” [1] This might lead the reader to suppose that Ficino neglects the Symposium even as he writes what is called a commentary on it. Such a reader would be mistaken. Each speaker in the De Amore tracks his counterpart in the Symposium, if obliquely. Both the tracking and the obliqueness of the tracking serve the purpose of defending the philosophic life in fifteenth-century Florence. Ficino is indeed “defend[ing] the propriety of personal love by showing that it is merely a natural part of a perfectly respectable cosmic process” (Jayne, 12-13). More pointedly, he is defending the propriety of philosophic love as a defensible part of a respectable Christian city.

Plato’s Symposium presents itself as Appolodorus’ account of Aristodemus’ account of the party celebrating the poet Agathon’s victory with his first tragedy (173a). Ficino’s De Amore recounts a party celebrating the traditional birthday of Plato, the author of an account of the untragic tragedy of the beloved (and hated) Socrates. Ficino writes centuries after the death of Socrates, the protagonist of the dialogue he has translated and now comments on. Unlike Plato’s protagonists, Ficino’s need not decide the question, Wine or Eros? They have already chosen to discourse on love, not to drink the night away. Further, between the untragic tragedy of Socrates and Ficino’s dialogue another—but very different—untragic tragedy has occurred: the death of Jesus of Nazareth. In Catholic Italy, any dialogue on amore must also keep an eye on that other kind of love, caritas. [2] Ficino finds himself in a circumstance differing from that of Socrates or Plato. In Ficino’s Italy both philosophy and Christianity are traditions, part of public opinion, whereas in ancient Athens philosophy was a novelty and Christianity of course was unknown. The De Amore shows how a philosopher can take account of this massive change, adapt to it, continue to philosophize with and against it. Philosophy in the Symposium is, famously, a kind of love; Ficino must write ‘de amore’ against the background of a tradition-ridden philosophy—a philosophy in which love has grown cold—and a religion that can at least be interpreted (by no less a figure than Augustine) as requiring a competing form of love.

Ficino replaces the twice-removed narrative structure of the Symposium with the removal of two—two old men, that is. The Bishop of Fiesola and Ficino’s father leave before the speeches begin, “the one for the care of souls, the other for the care of bodies” (36). The authoritative elders must leave before the middle-aged and young men can open their souls on (and to?) love, even as the pious old Cephalus must leave before his friends (and enemies) can begin a candid discussion of justice in the Republic. The Christian world has two authorities where the ancient world had one: fathers remain, but now there are also Fathers.

I. The Symposium‘s first speaker is Phaedrus, Plato’s rhapsodizing friend, familiar from the dialogue that bears his name. Phaedrus is a student of the sophist Hippias, whose primary teaching, ‘like loves like,’ supports ungenerative eros, e. g., pederasty and incest. Phaedrus is indeed ungenerative, a spouter of verses on love culled from “various authorities” (178b). In terms of the tripartite psychology of the Republic, Phaedrus is a man of logoi, words, but not of logos, reasons. He is a man of thumos—and a rather poor specimen at that, lacking any of the grandeur of Achilles or Odysseus. Phaedrus is passive, a receiver of authoritative teachings, neither hero nor lover.

Giovanni Cavalcanti, De Amore‘s first speaker, also presents Phaedrus as a follower—not of a sophist or a poet, but of Plato (37). To follow a philosopher, instead of philosophizing oneself, is to embrace a philosophic doctrine. Accordingly, Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus outlines a doctrine whereby ‘God’ is identical to ‘the Good.’ God has created three worlds: the Angelic Mind, stocked with the forms or ideas, a mind desirous of God, its creator; the World Soul; and the World Body. The forming of ideas in the Angelic Mind is the perfection of love; it is mind made beautiful. Idea-formation is, so to speak, the metaphysical equivalent of the ugly, old Socrates made young and beautiful. Love brings order out of chaos. Love is therefore old—the oldest and wisest of the gods—and supremely worthy of praise. Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus tactfully synthesizes the Platonic ‘Good’ and the Creator-God of the Bible. Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus, like Plato’s, presents a politically correct image of love, allowing for the radical change of political authority in the intervening centuries, a change mirrored in the shift from fathers to fathers and Fathers. The love of Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus does not threaten the laws of the city but instead harmonizes with them, making them effective (40, and cf. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, v. 13). “Every love is virtuous, and every lover is just” because love partakes of “a certain grace” in “avoiding evil and pursuing good” (40-41). Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus has ‘received’ the Gospel according to a Plato who has read the Gospels and knows the power of the Church.

II. The Symposium‘s second speaker is Pausanias, a student of the sophist Prodicus. Pausanias hopes that his listeners will assume—and perhaps he himself assumes—that if there are two Aphrodites there must be two ‘Loves’ or Cupids. One Cupid is heavenly, the other popular or vulgar. Both are pederasts, but only the first is noble. Pausanias calls for a law to prohibit infidelity among vulgar pederasts. He first claims that the laws of Athenian democracy are better than those of foreign, despotically-ruled cities (182d), but soon admit that “our Athenian law” gives “absolute license to the lover” (185c). Pausanias’ dubious division of love leads to self-contradiction in politics. Sophists generally and Prodicus in particular misunderstand both love and politics, on which they nonetheless profess to teach wisely.

After having spoken of Phaedrus, Giovanni Cavalcanti also speaks of Pausanias. Cavalcanti discusses not dualism but ternarism: God’s creation of all things; his attracting of all things to himself; his perfecting of all things (44). Cavalcanti transforms the Pausanian loves into a love generated by divine beauty for itself (46). The Pausanian contradiction becomes a harmonious circle. This genetic account of love comports with neo-Platonic metaphysics, whereby God rests in the center, surrounding by concentric circles—Mind, Soul, Nature, and Matter—and into which circles God (i.e., the Good) emanates its “rays” of beauty (51). Thus God is motionless insofar as ‘he’ is an indivisible point, while nonetheless being present in all things—some of which do move, thereby subsuming Pausanian dualism and contradiction.

All lovers really seek God, even vulgar lovers. “Some of the stupidest men are rendered more intelligent by loving” (53). The fear of God—the beginning of wisdom according to the Bible—serves as an analogue of the fear and trembling of a lover before the beloved. Cavalcanti thus synthesizes Biblical and Platonic love, putting what Pausanias would call popular or vulgar love on a continuum with heavenly love, and reconciling both with fear of the Lord.

Having said all this, Cavalcanti can then bring in Pausanias’ heavenly and vulgar loves explicitly, identifying the first with Mind and intelligence, the second with procreation. On the basis of his harmonizing metaphysics and harmonizing theology, Cavalcanti can make Pausanias’ two loves twins.

The only real dualism Cavalcanti admits is that of “simple” and “reciprocal” love. Simple love means unreciprocated love. Those who do not love a lover back are murderers; they draw another soul out but do not replace it with their own. They refuse to exchange sols, leaving the lover soulless, dead. Here the ‘homosexual’ theme of ‘like unto like’ recurs, in a form acceptable to Christians; lovers mirrors the souls of one another, the beauties of their souls becoming “virtuous, useful, and pleasant to both” (58).

III. Plato’s third speaker is Eryximachus, the lover of Phaedrus and likewise a student of Hippias. Eryximachus stands in for the hiccoughing Aristophanes—temporarily overcome, perhaps by Pausanian conceits. Eryximachus accepts Pausanias’ definition of love into two. But he regards sexual attraction as only one among many manifestations of love, which he identifies in “the bodies of all animals and all growths upon the earth” (186a). A physician, Eryximachus would make medicine and music the architectonic arts, displacing the products of poetic art that Phaedrus recites and the products of legislative art that Pausanias esteems, or claims to esteem. Eryximachus’ love—conceived as cosmic principle—might be described as a physical version of the Cavalcantian metaphysics introduced in the second speech of De Amore. In an ironic coda, by the end of Eryximachus’ speech Aristophanes’ hiccoughs have stopped, cured not by any of the physician’s recommended remedies but by a sneezing fit. Technique does not cure; nature restores its own balance. The scientific art par excellence does not work as advertised.

Cavalcanti’s account of Eryximachus remains characteristically silent with regard to pederasty. Instead, he emphasizes the generativity of love (64). He points to the comprehensiveness of love according to Eryximachus, “for who… will doubt that the love for all things is innate in all things?” (64) He ignores Eryximachus’ Empedoclean invocation of strife as a cosmic principle: “Fire does not flee water out of hatred of water,” Cavalcanti asserts, “but out of love for itself, lest it be extinguished by the coldness of the water” (68); this ‘like unto like’ account is again the only hint of the homosexual them that forms an important part of each of the Symposium‘s first three speeches.

Even more significantly, Cavalcanti carefully ignores the physical character of love according to Eryximachus, as well as his scientistic account of it. This materialism had certain repercussions for moral life. In Eryximachus’ account, it is far from clear by what principle all-comprehending love distinguishes good from bad, noble from base. His emphasis on art or technique leaves open the question, ‘To what end?’ By contrast, Cavalcanti regards love as the ruler of the arts. As seen in his previous speech, love is a ruler that imposes a distinct hierarchy of desires leading up and back to the Good, the origin and end of all.

In sum, the first three speeches of the Symposium feature students of sophists who are also pederasts. Plato more than hints that sophistry and pederasty are alike in their lack of generativity, the result of art or technique divorced from nature. In the first three speeches of De Amore, in contrast, ‘homoeroticism’ exists only in the metaphysical principle of love conceived as ‘like unto like.’ [3] Cavalcanti makes the first three speeches of the Symposium more edifying than they are, and more coherent—individually and collectively. There is no conflict, no tension, no hiccoughing and sneezing here. Structurally, Ficino has emphasized this harmony by giving his three speeches of the De Amore to one man instead of three different men, each trying to outdo the other in love-worthiness. The Platonic agon has been replaced by a Platonic or neo-Platonic doctrine. Plato’s interlocutors’ passivity forces them to preen themselves, present themselves as beauty queens. Ficino sees that ugly old Socrates, who never stoops to conquer, finally attracts more and better souls without primping but by interrogating, challenging, making himself unpopular with many while winning the few to his ‘regime,’ his way of life.

IV. Aristophanes explicitly announces a departure from the themes of the previous speakers (189d). (Indeed, the dialogue thus far might as well be a re-write of the Protagoras.) Love, he contends, is the misunderstood and unappreciated benefactor of the human race; it is not understood (he implies) by sophistic ‘science.’ This firm advocate of traditional religion nonetheless invents his own mythos about the origin of sexual love; under the pressure of the sophists’ scientific-technicist physicalism, Aristophanes formulates a poetic-technicist physicalism.

Science and poetry differ with respect to the gods. The sophists conspicuously slight the gods; the poets conspicuously admire the gods, teaching that men need gods to beat down human hybris, whereas gods need men to honor the gods. Reason—scientific or other—cannot govern hybristic humans, who will accept no restraints but those imposed ‘from above.’ Without such restraints, humanity will destroy itself.

In this central section of his dialogue, Ficino marks the transition from sophists to poets by introducing a new speaker: Ficino’s teacher, Cristoforo Landino. Landino is a poet and scholar devoted to Italy’s architectonic poet, Dante. Consistent with Aristophanes’ project, Landino speaks more piously than the others, emphasizing the pridefulness of Aristophanes’ circle-humans and the justice of their punishment by “God,” who replaces Zeus in the Landinian retelling. Crucially, Landino’s circle-humans are guilty of “turning to the inner light alone,” away from the divine light; “they fell immediately into bodies” (72). Landino suppresses Aristophanes’ anti-hybristic physicalism in favor of an anti-hybristic Neo-Platonism. We are no longer humbled by the claim to be no better than the rest of material nature, but by the claim that nature encompasses higher things than ourselves. The love experienced by the God-divided humans reminds them of their radical dependence upon God and upon one another, impelling them to seek wholeness. Landino relates this division to the Biblical account of the Fall (72). He ‘platonizes’ Aristophanes’ mythos by associating the three original sexes not with sexual practices—male and female homosexuality, heterosexuality—but with three of the four Platonic virtues: courage, temperance, justice. He omits wisdom; wisdom is less intimately connected to bodily concerns than the other three virtues.

In the Symposium, Aristophanes is Socrates’ opponent. In the De Amore they do not seem to contend, as Aristophanes has been ‘platonized,’ de-physicalized. The soul rules the body; the soul is truly man: “All the things that Man is said to do the soul itself does; the body merely suffers them” (75). Soul rules by perceiving both natural and divine light; the natural light alone would confine soul to the task of ministering to the body. This imagery doesn’t comport very well with the Aristophanean mythos, wherein physical, sexual longing for the ‘other half’ comes only after the division of the circle-humans, but that is the price the later, platonizing poet must pay in order to make poetry support the four Platonic virtues—all expressive of masculine and feminine traits in combination (77). Landino thus makes the recovery of androgyny respectable in a Christian-Platonic setting.

After presenting a religious version of the duty of reciprocity in love that Cavalcanti had set down with respect to human love (79), Landino concludes by listing the three benefits of love. Love restores us to the comprehensive whole, that of Heaven; love assigns us our just place within that whole and causes us just satisfaction in our place; love constantly renews the soul’s pleasure, so that the whole and our place within it never tire us (80). Landino’s ‘platonization’ of Aristophanes combines politics with pleasure in an origin myth—the Aristophanean enterprise, disembodied. In both myths, love closes a circle that had been sundered. But Landino makes the Aristophanean human comedy a Dantean divine comedy.

V. From the comic poet, Aristophanes, the Symposium moves to the tragic poet, Agathon. Agathon speaks not of the effects of Love on humans but (more ambitiously) of the god himself. Agathon does so in in order to use poetry to vindicate the old, the traditional, but to ‘make it new,’ to celebrate Love as youth. In this he is a more openly poetic technicist than Aristophanes, whose innovations are intended to defend ancient beliefs of Athenian countrymen against such urban novelties as sophistry and philosophy. Agathon is another student of a sophist: Gorgias. But he displays none of the cynicism of the other students of sophists. That is to say, he is a superior practitioner of their art.

Agathonian Love is soft, delicate, beautiful, peaceful, and young—a flower child. This god is endlessly self-delighted, entirely untragic. He defends himself only be being too comely to kill. Whereas Gorgias taught that might makes right, Agathonian Love mounts nothing more worrisome than a charm offensive. He is Freedom forever eluding grim Necessity. Agathon is a tragedian who doesn’t really believe in tragedy. Transported to the late nineteenth century, he would write not the Birth but the Death of Tragedy. He undermines his own artistic genre. To show how far superior he is to the others, to show how much better he has mastered their art, he undertakes to show himself far superior to his own art, the art for which he has just received high honor from the citizens of Athens.

Carlo Marsuppini, a student of Ficino’s, speaks of Agathon. Carlo preserves, even intensifies, the delicacy of Agathonian Love by emphasizing Love’s incorporeality.  Love is not merely untragic or ‘light’ in the adjectival sense. Love is light—the noun—”pentrat[ing] the body of air and water everywhere without obstruction… nowhere soiled when it is mixed with these filthy things” (91). Thus “all this beauty of the World, which is the third face of God, presents itself as incorporeal to the eyes through the incorporeal light of the sun” (91). We see beautiful things, but only as beautiful images, in our ‘mind’s eye.’ Physical, sexual penetration is trivial compared to the all-pervasive incorporeal power of true love.

Carlo accordingly replaces Landinian prudence or practical wisdom with wisdom tout court. In the higher realm that his mind inhabits there is no need for prudence. [4]  As with Agathon, Carlo’s love is a peacemaker, “sooth[ing] the minds of gods and men” (98). Carlo ascends quickly from the earth to the Angelic Mind, turning lovingly to the face of God (99). His Love is not only the youngest but also the oldest of the gods. God, through the Angelic Mind, lovingly created the Ideas (and so Love is older than they). But Love also animates the Ideas, renewing them eternally by keeping them oriented toward their Creator. Untragically, again agreeing with Agathon, Carlo ranks Love above Necessity. Love begins in God and is eternally free; Necessity begins in created things, degenerating with them. Carlo brings Platonic love as close as it can get to caritas.

VI. Socrates follows the charming Agathon by charmlessly calling all the previous speakers liars (“I was such a silly wretch as to think that one ought in each case to speak the truth about the person eulogized” [198d]). Aristophanes had distinguished poetry from sophistry; Socrates lumps them together as techniques for producing falsehoods. If true love is love of truth, Socrates must unseductively reject the pretty lies of sophists and poets. Poets and sophists cajole, flatter; they make Love a beautiful god. But love or desire implies want; if love desires beauty, it cannot itself be beautiful.

This does not mean that love is ugly. Love is non-beautiful, between beauty and ugliness. (Socrates ignores another possibility, that Love is beautiful but desires still more beauty; this would confirm the ‘like unto like’ claim of Cavalcanti’s Eryximachus. Socrates associates godliness with autarchia or self-sufficiency, and it is on this basis that he denies the divinity of Love.)  The gods are good and beautiful; love is not beautiful but desirous of beauty; ergo, Love is not a god. Love is a daimon, a being between men and gods; Love is the offspring of Poverty and Resource, i.e., of the desire for and the capacity to approach wisdom (203d). Love is the human soul’s daimonism; the human soul is not immortal, but wants immortality. “Love loves the good to be one’s own forever,” Diotima said to Socrates (206a).

Love’s resourcefulness woos the beautiful in order to beget upon it. More precisely, erotic souls are begotten upon by the beautiful. Moral beings can only become immortal by replacing themselves. Impregnated by a (necessarily brief) encounter with the beautiful, erotic souls generate poems, laws, and, best of all, “a plenteous crop of philosophy” (210d). The paradox—the reason for all the gender-bending in the Symposium, is that the aggressive, ‘male’ erotic soul is the one impregnated by the lady-in-waiting, the Beautiful. Like Romeo, the erotic soul climbs the ladder of love to the beautiful, but in Socrates’ account it isn’t Juliet who might give birth.

The soul, being mortal, must finally descend the ladder or (to recall another dialogue) reluctantly return to the cave that is the city. There political philosophy begins, but Diotima only mentions politics in passing. Socrates speaks of Diotima and beauty to these men, men who have shown more interest in beauty than in justice.

Tommaso Benci, Ficino’s contemporary and friend, speaks on Socrates’ speech. As Jayne notices, this longest speech of De Amore is also the one that most closely tracks its counterpart in the Symposium. Benci sees that Socratic love is not a god but an “emotion… halfway between the beautiful and the not beautiful,” an emotion Diotima calls a daimon (109). This ‘naturalizing’ of the ‘demonic’ or erotic comports with Ficino’s conversion of Thomas Aquinas’s seven gifts of the Holy Spirit into gifts of the seven planets (146 n. 22). Benci is markedly less poetic and pious than the Dantist Landino. Even the religious life, Benci notes, results from natural love (128). Platonism is an incorporeal naturalism, distinct from the corporeal naturalism of the sophists and the incorporeal supernaturalism of the Christians.

Accordingly, Benci emphasizes the illusionary character of love, how a lover imagines that the beloved is more beautiful than he really is, unwittingly transforming the image of the beloved’s mind into a copy of the lover’s beautiful soul (114). Benci thus echoes Socrates’ rude demand for truth-telling. Perhaps as a nod to pious sensibilities, Benci calls love neither mortal nor immortal, in contrast to Socrates, who firmly calls it mortal. But Benci soon notes that such ‘immortality’ as love may be said to have refers to the persistence of love during a human life (128). The ‘eternal’ life described by Benci is, as for Socrates, a matter of philosophic propagation (131). Philosophic propagation is the one way to make erotic activity among males generative (135).

In considering Diotima’s ladder, Benci explicitly identifies beauty with the light of the Sun (God, the Good), a move Diotima leaves implicit. Benci shares the Socratic insistence that the sophistic and poetic esteem for the body is narcissistic, a serious error many souls make. Unlike Socrates, however, Benci apparently does not see that the soul must come down the ladder, live in the world of politics, care for the body it inhabits. Benci does not full appreciate the implications of his own argument that the soul is not really immortal. [5] He follows Socrates in ranking intellectual virtues higher than moral virtues (although this terminology is Aristotelian, not Socratic) (143). But he classifies prudence as an intellectual virtue, simply, missing the link prudence supplies in Platonic (and Aristotelian) thought between the philosopher and the city.

In the nineteenth and final section of his speech, Benci speaks quite piously. Socrates of course under far less compulsion to do so, given his audience in the Symposium. On the other hand, Socrates was eventually required to drink hemlock, and neither Benci nor Ficino was. Perhaps they practiced more prudence, even if they talked about it less. Or perhaps they exercised prudence by talking about it less.

VII. Plato’s interlocutors descend from the ladder with a jolt when the drunken Alcibiades bursts in. Compelled to tell the truth about Socrates (in vino veritas?), Alcibiades calls him a satyr whose pipes are his lips, entrancing mankind wit logos. Socrates alone makes Alcibiades feel shame, for he compels Alcibiades to admit that “I neglect myself while I attend to the affairs of Athens” (216a). The theme of shame had first been broached by Phaedrus in the dialogue’s opening speech. Alcibiades is also a thumotic man, but his is an active, dominating soul, not a passive, Phaedrian one. The problem of Alcibiadian or aggressive thumos will lead Ficino’s commentator not to a discussion of Phaedrus but to a discussion of Socrates’ description of the soul in the Phaedrus.

In person and in speech, Alcibiades says, Socrates is ugly on the outside, beautiful within. [6]. The inner Socrates is a being of courage, moderation, and wisdom; Alcibiades cannot quite bring himself to say that the inner Socrates is also just. Poor, unshod, externally ugly Socrates looks like Love. But with respect to humans he is the unloving beloved. Rich, externally beautiful Alcibiades looks like the Good, but his soul is a veritable democracy of disorder. Like Athens itself, he dreams futilely of conquering Socrates, who will never love him because Alcibiades is not good enough.

Cristoforo Marsuppini, the younger brother of Carlo but singled out as “very thoughtful” (153), gives the speech on Alcibiades. He begins with a harmonizing summary of the Platonic interlocutors, presenting them as if their speeches had been complementary. In a world of religious and philosophic tradition, syncretism replaces dialectic—on the surface. The philosophic aim in this circumstance is to eroticize syncretism, which seems to have achieved a blissful unity of one and all, in order to keep philosophic eros, thus philosophy itself, alive.

Apparent harmoniousness notwithstanding, Cristoforo does address one aspect of Alcibiades’ disruption: the nature of “vulgar love,” that “perturbation of the blood” (164). Vulgar love is a disease. Cristoforo discusses the four humours and the effect vulgar love has on each; in a discourse anticipatory of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, he recommends a regimen of love cures. Here Cristoforo speaks like a Renaissance Eryximachus. Eryximachean medicine has been put in its place; it cures the disease of vulgar or bodily love in order to clear the soul’s way for better things. [7]

Whereas the Symposium“s final section presents a descent from the heights, Cristoforo describes an ascent of the ladder. After vulgar love has been purged, the beast tamed, the soul can turn to divine love. The ascending steps of divine love—that is, love-mania—are the poetic, the “mysterial,” the prophetic, and the amatory (170). Poetry’s music harmonizes the soul, calming corporeal lusts, awakening the soul’s “higher parts”; the Dionysian mystery (in this decidedly ‘Apollonian’ formulation) concentrates the soul’s attention on the intellect, “by which God is worshipped”; the prophetic/Apollonian mania takes the intellect, now fully supported by the other soul elements, to its own proper unity; finally, the “celestial Venus” directs the unified intellect to its telos, “the divine beauty and thirst for the Good” (170). Cristoforo illustrates this with the image of the soul as charioteer, chariot, and two horses, the famous Socratic image in the Phaedrus (171).

Cristoforo’s account of Socratic love leads not to the Symposium but to an apologia of Socrates. Socrates’ companionship, philosophic companionship, is the “single way of safety for the young” (173). Socrates is the true lover, the good shepherd who protects his flock from wolfish false lovers. Cristoforo’s Socrates does nothing but improve his young interlocutors, from Plato to Xenophon to Alcibiades. Socratic love leads the young to divine love. Socratic love here is love for persons, not only for the Good. Socratic love here is caregiving love, not unlike the love of Jesus for those He redeems. On this pious, harmonizing note the seventh speech and the dialogue itself ends, seven being the number of completion.

Conclusion

Despite its syncretist surface, the De Amore features the same tension between poetry and philosophy that may be seen in the Symposium. Ficino replaces the rivalry of Aristophanes and Socrates with that of Landino and Benci. But the tension is far less apparent in De Amore, for two reasons. First, Ficino is more discreet than Plato, because he needs to be; the Renaissance philosopher must deal not with a fickle but usually tolerant populace but with an ever-vigilant religious elite. Second, Ficinian love ‘works both ways.’ The philosopher loves the Good, but the Good also is presented as ‘loving’ the philosopher back. Love is a metaphysical force, circulating through creation, returning to its origin, the Good. This may be Ficino’s prudent rhetorical compromise with Christianity. It may also be his appropriation, with gratitude, from Christianity.

In De Amore, Ficino has written another chapter in the long, complex story of the relations between religion and philosophy—more specifically, of the relations between Christianity and Platonism. (The city comes in along with religion, because even the duality of Church and State is no sharp separation in Catholic Italy; the relations between religion and philosophy are also relations between the city and philosophy.) Augustine gives one, firmly Christian, account of this relationship. Origen gives a very different and (as I think) Platonic account. Ficino in my view belongs on the Platonic-philosophic side of the ledger, replacing Jesus of Nazareth with Socrates as “good shepherd.” But, unlike Bruno (and unlike Socrates?), Ficino was much too prudent to get himself killed by his city. His way of saying “God” when meaning “the Good” exemplifies this approach. (Philosophers as much as political and religious men need to master the art of rhetoric.) His departures from the text of the Symposium are designed to bring the thoughtful reader of his time and place, of the sovereign city of Florence and its regime, back to the Symposium, but safely. The beautiful harmony of the De Amore is the bait for philosophy’s salutary if sometimes painful hook. The philosophy of De Amore has nothing to do with ‘modernity’ (if understood as Machiavellianism), but is rather an instance of several Renaissance thinkers’ attempt to recover the philosophy of antiquity. Whether this recovery then paved the way for philosophic modernizers (Machiavelli of course uses examples from Rome, along with some from the Bible), is another question. The modernizers needed an atmosphere friendly to investigations relying upon the unassisted powers of the human mind. The recovery of ancient philosophy adds to such an ethos, but does not itself directly cause ‘modernizing.’

 

Notes

1. Sears Jayne: Introduction, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985, 9-10.
2. On the distinction between these two kinds of love, see Denis de Rougemont: Love in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Anders Nygren: Eros and Agape: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1941).
3. Conversely, see Ficino’s letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti: “Opposites are not loved by opposites,” in Marsilio Ficino: The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1988), 29. Hereinafter cited as Letters. See also Paul Oskar Kristeller: The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1964), 110-115. Hereinafter cited as Kristeller 1964.
4. See Ficino, Letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, Letters, op. cit., 30-32.
5. See again Ficino’s letter to Cavalcanti, ibid. Is Ficino himself as ‘idealistic’ or naïve as Benci? Not necessarily. the final paragraph of the letter contains an ironic twist. After adjuring his young friend to stay away from politics because “truth does not dwell in the company of princes” (30), after piling example upon example of princely injuries to innocent philosophers, Ficino straight-facedly writes: “However, if anyone, ignorant of our affairs, raises our long-standing friendship with the Medici, I shall reply that they should not properly be called princes, but something greater and more sacred,” namely, “fathers of their country in a free state” (32). Ficino is a philosopher who can deal with princes, evidently so long as they are sufficiently distinguished. He may not think his young friend is yet up to that task.
6. See Ficino, Letter to Giovanni Niccolino: “We should not read the works of philosophers and theologians with the same eye as we read those of poets and orators. In other writings, even though much may please us superficially, hardly anything is found to give nourishment. But in these it is not the outer covering which nourishes anyone but what lies within…. That is why the fruits of wisdom should be carefully removed from their skins so that they may bring nourishment.” (Letters 60)
7. See also Letter to Philosophers and Teachers of Sophistry (Letters 11-12).
8. In this I diverge from Kristeller, who writes, “Augustine is Ficino’s guide and model in his attempt to reconcile Platonism with Christianity” (Kristeller 15). The strong sense of the personhood of God, the stubbornness of sin, and the inadequacy of philosophy—all so vividly present in Augustine, and in Paul the Apostle before him—are missing in Ficino. Kristeller admits this with respect to sin; see Kristeller 211). I can only add that if one admits the point about sin, one must admit all the rest.

 

 

Julien Benda: Exercise d’un Enterré Vif: Juin 1940-Août 1944. Paris: Gallimard, 1946.

 

Hitler’s tyranny perfected the arts of killing people and mesmerizing Germans, but it also displayed a considerable talent for putting the peoples it conquered into a condition of moral hazard. Ordinarily, a conquered people elicits our pity at its suffering, our admiration for its resistance. But by carefully setting moral traps for its subjects—you may survive, but only by collaborating actively in our crimes, or passively, by pretending not to see them—the Nazis dis-spirited those of their victims they permitted to live, turning ordinary moral sensibilities against those who retained them, and into the service of the new regime which despised them. Even after the end of the war, with the Nazis defeated and expelled, the liberated peoples needed to find a way to live not only with what had been done to them, but worse, what they had been induced to do to themselves. When Charles de Gaulle met André Malraux in the months after the Allies had ended the Occupation, he asked what most impressed him about Paris, since Malraux’s return. “The lies.” For the French, and for peoples throughout Europe, it wasn’t easy to look in the mirror, in those days.

In a sense, Julien Benda’s moral circumstance during the war years was easier than most. By 1940 he was a man in his late seventies, hardly expected to join the Resistance. As a Jew, he could be admired simply for surviving; with the help of a friend, he fled Nazi-occupied Paris for the relatively safe city of Carcassone, far to the south and ruled by the puppet government at Vichy. There, he mostly stayed indoors, boring his surveillants, who were reduced to writing reports along the lines of ‘Observed going to the corner store; returned home with groceries,’ dossiers sometimes enlivened with animadversions about the seeming-innocence but suspected perfidy of all Jews. In his own description, Benda was “one buried alive.” His “exercise” consisted of self-examination—the only kind available to him, as the Nazis had confiscated his books. “The solitude and absence of dissipation” during the war years allowed his mind to exercise itself in considering “the whole truth of its nature,” intellectual and moral. He did this not as an act of self-absorption but “in the hope of bestowing to the science of Man an exact observation”(7). What he writes is an apology or defense of the ‘way’ or regime of his life of the mind, a defense against the intellectual and moral ways that had ‘buried’ him in the estimation of his fellow ‘intellectuals’ long before the war, and would keep him so buried for the remainder of his life, long after he had returned to Paris. He had enjoyed a brief moment in the public sun after the 1927 of his book La Trahison des Clercs, in which he opposed the regnant intellectual trends of historical determinism (he called it “divinized realism” and traced its origins to Hegel), and the preference for race-conscious and class-conscious willing and militant action over impartial thinking. He did so in the name of European civilization’s traditional esteem for classical philosophy and (mostly) humane Christianity. Critics of the book complained that Benda praises abstract thought while talking about himself and settling scores with his contemporaries; they ignored the genre of the book, which amounts to a sort of informal brief before the court of public opinion, not a treatise on epistemology. To do that, he should indeed be talking about himself and his adversaries.

He devotes most of his book to his understanding of the proper ‘way’ or ‘regime’ of the intellect. “The dominant order of my mind is the appetite for thought” (10). Although “strongly sensitive to poetry and to a beautiful form in art,” he prefers science to art. What is more (and a reader of Plato will recall Socrates’ argument in the Philebus), thought has its beauty, too, in the comprehensive theory and the profound satisfaction of the noetic moment. Politically, a due consideration for the practice of “thought in itself” beyond “particularistic passions”—such passions as individual self-interest, and especially nationalism—might establish “a real sentiment for peace among men” (12-13), although Benda doesn’t expect such an ethos to develop. The condition of “incessant inquietude” in the modern world hardly conduces to such thought. And that inquietude finds intellectual support among intellectuals themselves, philosophers like Henri Bergson (like Benda, a philosopher and ‘assimilated’ Jewish man), who misunderstand the nature of the cosmos itself as a condition of conflict, of perpetual and chaotic movement, and who as a consequence valorized “the fury of the moment” (13). Against “Nietzsche and German romanticism,” which anticipate Bergonism, Benda contends that the “aversion to the Apollonian is one of the things which makes me foreign to my time” (16-17).

He prefers the thinkers of the French seventeenth century, first of all Descartes, whom he associates not with the ‘Machiavellianization’ of science but with the attempt to examine his own mind in the hope of “leaving the moving sand to reach the rock in the clay” (16), a stable vantage point affording serenity and happiness. Benda seeks to understand “the nature of Man,” not man’s supposed “destiny”—the ever-receding ‘End of History’ promised by historicists. For this, he rejects subjectivism, the valorization of the imagination over reason, the preference for images over abstraction; to illustrate abstract thoughts, examples will suffice. He deplores the attempt by intellectuals to undermine their own strength by turning away from ideas to sense-impressions. An animal learns the temperature of a liquid by “dipping its paw into it,” whereas a man learns its temperature “by reading a number on a glass column,” a thermometer; “for me, the superior consciousness is that of the man; but for my contemporaries it is that of the animal” (25). With rigorous logic, he “honor[s] science for its method, not for its results” (26)—general theories derived from experimental testing of grand hypotheses impress him more than the inventions such theories may lead to.

Such theories, such thought, inevitably will be presented to the public, which leads Benda to a consideration of literary style. True to his seventeenth-century neo-classical models, he prefers correctness and simplicity to “beautiful images and musicality” in prose. He wants a writer to give readers facts, deploring “the French superstition of the form” (176), that is, the exaltation of mannered elegance of style over substance. Accordingly, he praises Xenophon over Plato, Polybius (“the most intelligent of the historians of antiquity” [176]), Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Taine, and Renan. He deplores such “false thinkers” (28) as Nietzsche, Paul Valéry, Alain, and André Gide (whom he singles out for several pages of criticism). Those who go into “ecstasies before pure acrobatics of words” only confuse themselves (32). He forthrightly concedes, “I myself am in some measure a littérateur and not a thinker” (36). Indeed, while abandoning his engineering studies (an initial attempt to follow in his father’s footstep), and switching to the study of history at the Sorbonne, he retained his esteem for science, and saw that science very much needed ‘literary,’ or at least literate defenders against the mythopoetic adepts of the doctrine of historicism. “Real thought is extremely rare, in all the world” (36), as the popularity of the various historical determinisms shows. Such doctrines mimic the dialectic of philosophy but do not really practice, basing their appeal on the passion for social, political, and economic justice. But like all passions, even “the spirit of justice” confuses the mind, obscures comprehension (32) by goading men to act indignantly but not thoughtfully. When it comes to justice, moral indignation is not enough.

Benda gets down to cases. Among contemporary French intellectuals, Paul Valéry displays “verbal virtuosity” but little else, placing metaphors before reasoning and neglecting to provide proofs for his assertions; he isn’t a philosopher but a sophist, at base an adherent of “intellectual nihilism” (47). The much-esteemed musicality of his verse appeals to intellectually fashionable Nietzschean motifs. Émile Chartier, a pacifist who published under the pen-name “Alain,” isn’t so much a sophist but a rhetorician or demagogue (47), and proved worse than useless in the years leading up to the Second World War. Benda reserves his most detailed criticism for Gide, who desires not truth but approval; in his vanity, he cannot say, as Socrates does to Gorgias, “I am, although alone, of another opinion” (39). Benda suspects that Gide took a disliking to him because Benda never mentioned him in his books. Although (or perhaps because) incapable of understanding Marxism, Gide became enraptured with the Soviet Union, whose rulers feted him when he visited it, then groveled to the Germans when they rolled into Paris in 1940; at the time, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still in effect, so his obeisance to the twin tyrannies did not put him in jeopardy. “There was in [Gide], as with certain reptiles, a sort of genius of perfidy which, as is frequent among men of letters, will often be translated into brilliant formulas” (45). When Gide ventured a personal attack on Benda in print, their younger, mutual acquaintance André Malraux assured Benda, “There is only one way to hurt you as a man of letters; it is to show that your books are worthless” (42). Benda took comfort in that, while not neglecting to repay Gide in his own ad hominem coin.

His decades-long association with his fellow intellectuals in the offices of the ardently republican Nouvelle Revue Française and elsewhere persuades Benda that conversation with them is “vain talk, required by social propriety” but intellectually worthless. “The man concerned with clear ideas must resign himself to live alone, in the company of a few strong books, and renounce any trade in ideas with the secular” (63)—by which he means those who read and think about “the books of the moment,” those favored by current opinion (153-154). “My taste for serious thought has condemned me to a near-total solitude,” “set[ting] me apart from normal humanity” (64). With equanimity, he allows, “As is just, I pay for it” (64). Insofar as he is artful—after all, he does write for publication—his literary style “attaches itself more to the relations of ideas than to… individual taste; looks for sharp edges not flowing outlines; takes for its models the moeurs of architecture, not those of musical flow”; “in short, it’s just the opposite of what the world demands of this task” (66). In this he prefers such writers as de Staël, Tocqueville, and Taine, who, in “evinc[ing] a scientific method, are not literary, and are no longer held to be such” (70-71). With respect to his readership, he has been rewarded not with numbers but with “a small number of really fanatical admirers” (77). (He means that in a good way.) So convinced is he that association with other intellectuals only serves to drag down a serious thinker, “For my whole life I have wished that my thought should appear in a journal where I could write alone. It’s a dream that I still do not give up.” (78)  He would have loved the blogosphere. However, he does not expect vindication from posterity, which more likely than not will remain as feckless as his contemporaries. He continues to write more to further his own philosophic quest than to impress the public—”to realize myself, to elucidate my ideas, to know who I am” (96-97).

The problem is fundamental to the relationship of society to thought. Men in society “demand that certain true problems be hidden; it is by the instinct of self-preservation that they are pleased to hear those who dissimulate such truths under literary flowers and flee from him who shows them the truth in its hardness” (90). The genuine intellectual “is a monster and must not forget it” (92), both for the sake of society’s good and his own. “My love for the exercise of thought merits the name of passion in the sense that when I can do it, I experience full joy and forget many external circumstances that make normal people suffer” (91-92). For a philosopher (especially one who practices some of the habits of Cartesian introspection in the service of forming clear and distinct ideas), there can be a certain charm to being buried alive.

But can such a monstre be sacré or, failing that, at least good in his own uncommon way? The second section of L’Exercise describes “my moral nature” (102). In contrast to his solitary intellectual life, this has a strong political element. Without allowing the passion for justice cloud his intellect, Benda found himself “detesting injustice “(104) when “the moral values to which I assign first rank”—order, discipline, tradition, and the national interest (all at the service of a republican regime of intellectual, moral, and political liberty)—”were in jeopardy” (103). He lists five such occasions. The first of these was the Boulangiste movement of the 1880s, when General Georges Boulanger and his followers nearly overthrew the Third Republic on a program of Revanche (revenge against the Germans, who had defeated France and seized the provinces of Alsace Lorraine in 1871); Révision (revision of the republican constitution framed as a result of the disgrace incurred by the Bonapartists who had lost the war); and Restauration (the return of the monarchy).   The second was the famous Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish officer in the French Army was falsely accused of treason by anti-Semitic, right-wing elements, again intend on discrediting the republican regime. German aggression in 1914, touching off the Great War, was the third such crisis, followed by the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the subsequent decade. Finally, there was the “Sixth of February” uprising in 1934, when a gaggle of right-wing organizations, including Action Française and the Croix-le-Feu, rioted near the National Assembly and forced the resignation of President of the National Council Edouard Daladier. This last near-coup provoked leftist counter-demonstrations and, in the Parisian intellectual milieu, the formation of the Comité de viligilances des intellectuels antifascistes (members including Gide, Alain, and Malraux), a precursor of the Popular Front movement. Although Benda himself did not join the Comité or the Popular Front, on the pages of the NRF he denounced fascism so strongly that he alienated the pacifist Alain and other French appeasers, who pinned their hopes on the Nazi-Soviet Pact and called Benda a war-monger. On all of these occasions, he came particularly to detest “this recent thing, of which Nietzsche has been the high priest: the esthetics of injustice” (104), including the praise of cruelty and its underlying will-to-power metaphysic. “I had the idea that Cain sketched a dogma to justify his crime” (105); it is “the primitive man,” whom “Nietzsche calls the normal man,” who “finds a joy in the commission of injustice” (106) justified by his “master-morality” (110). Under these circumstances, “Vive les esclaves!” (110)

A consequence of Nietzschean ‘primitivism’—not only unintended but denounced by Nietzsche himself, it should be said, who advocated the establishment of an international aristocracy and despised the German nationalism of his own time—resulted in “racism” (107), “the return to collective punishment [which] marks a huge regression in human morals” (108), “installing in Europe the moeurs of the Asiatic sovereigns” (109). Against this new regime of despotism, Benda looks not to French thinkers, who now sacrifice “private interest to the general interest” (111) in concurrence with Rousseau, but to the “Anglo-Saxon” respect for “the rule of law and proprieties” (110). He quotes Tocqueville, saying that absolute power rests on our contempt for fellow-citizens, and identifies the moral flaw of “primitive man”: “He practices the gift, which derives from love, and not the exchange, which postulates justice” (112). He refers to the custom of small, tribal societies, which form social networks based on acts of generosity, often entailing obligation and therefore subordination on the part of the recipient in contrast to larger, more complex societies which form social networks based on impersonal, rational calculation of mutual advantage under the principle of equal value received by both parties to the transaction. Justice, he writes, is regulative and stable, standing ‘above’ human social life, providing an objective standard for it, all in contrast with the shifting alliances of intra- and inter-tribal relations, as it were ’embedded’ in tribal custom.

As a republican liberal, he also rejects radical social egalitarianism, revolutionary fervor animated by a passion for deploying force majeure to eradicate the slightest perceived injustice. Hence his measured endorsement of “the democratic regime,” which he finds good insofar as it attacks unjust civil inequality, bad when impassioned majorities attack other, weaker nations, as seen in colonial wars. Further, while anti-democratic regimes valorize “the artistic spectacle of a society hierarchized in the manner of a cathedral” (esthetically pleasing to look at, but no place to live), democracies exhibit the contrary folly; in them, the dominance of “the greater number necessarily implies the triumph of the agreeable”—with a concurrent “indifference to serious thought” (121). In making this point he can integrate his intellectual preference for science over art into his moral position, defending intellectual probity, the scrupulous treatment of both ideas and human beings, and an esteem for intellectual and moral systems which offer enduring principles against historicist relativism and temporality. His anti-sensualist, anti-sensationalist, anti-estheticist critique of the worship of talent and ‘genius’ over truth and morality—liberty wrongly understood—brings him so far as to defend the much maligned Americans. “I would like to see the Americans not to humble themselves so much because they have little artistic sense, but proudly answer the Latin who makes them ashamed that they may have better virtues” (128).

By integrating the life of intellect with moral life, Benda eschews the ‘fact/value’ distinction, based on the assumption that reasoning and morality do not mix. Toleration understood as “simply wanting liberty for others” (136) is one thing; tolerance misunderstood as moral relativism (often the result of intellectual laziness or moral cowardice) quite another. “My attachment to intellectual probity brings a smile to the secularists in the name of their ‘skepticism'” (129). But the new theory of relativity in physics does not apply to human nature, and therefore to morality; nor does particle-wave theory refute the principle of reason or non-contradiction, which states (in its original, Socratic formulation) the same thing will not do or suffer the same thing, at the same time, in relation to the same part, and not that the same thing might be understood as two different ‘things’ if considered in relation to different methods of observation, at different times. “My will to see respect for the human person is for me a position of judgment, not sentiment, and has nothing to do with love  of the person, with humanitarianism, and especially with pity” (140)—here glancing again at Nietzsche’s fulminations. Not human life so much as human dignity counts; that is, the moral fact of equal human rights does not preclude a moral hierarchy among human persons. George Washington and Edmond Genêt both esteemed equal, unalienable rights, but whom would you entrust with high political responsibility?

Benda concludes his apologia or self-defense with a defense of Jewishness. The ancient Israelites were never ‘nationalists.’ Their prophets “never stopped denouncing the immorality of their own people,” along with that of foreign idolaters; indeed, the anti-Semites’ oldest and most virulent charge, that ‘the Jews’ were ‘Christ-killers,’ only affirms this, inasmuch as Jesus, “the most sublime among them,” was (of course) Jewish! (137-138). In sharp contrast, anti-Semites denounce Jews and other races, but never their own. For nationalists, as for over-indulgent parents, the love of one’s own always trumps the love of truth. The “respect for truth”—abstract, impartial, enduring—upheld by both “the religion of the scientific spirit,” seen, albeit in different ways, in both the Greek philosophers and in Descartes, and by “the religion of justice,” upheld by Judaism, taken together, characterizes precisely “many assimilated Jews in Western culture” (149-150). Jews like Julien Benda.

 

Susan Orr: Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 24, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.

 

For many students, the political philosophizing of Leo Strauss first comes to sight in the opposition between natural right and historicism, or perhaps in the opposition between ancient and modern. But for Strauss himself, according to his account in the Preface to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, political philosophy came to sight when, as “a young Jew born and raised in Germany,” he “found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament” (New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 1). Understood in light of the high rather than the low, this predicament resolves into the opposition or apparent opposition between revelation and reason. Strauss very nearly begins his account of the results of his investigation by admitting that unassisted human reason—thought unaided by divine revelation and governed by the principle of non-contradiction—cannot refute the testimony of the Bible. Aware of the political dangers of this admission, which becomes even more acute when Biblical motifs are ‘secularized,’ Strauss, famously turns to an investigation of premodern political philosophy, wandering far from Jerusalem, but without ever forgetting what Jerusalem stands for.

Susan Orr has written a commentary on “Jerusalem and Athens,” an essay that is in some sense central to Strauss’s Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Concerned that some of Strauss’s students have wandered altogether too far from what Jerusalem, Orr seeks to remind them, and all students of Strauss, of what Jerusalem stands for in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. At the end of her introduction she frames the question this way: Leo Strauss, “cautious nihilist” or “reluctant believer” (18)? Thus, in good Straussian fashion, she compels us to ask if Strauss might have been a reluctant nihilist or a cautious believer, or perhaps neither a nihilist nor a believer, but something else (for example, a Platonic political philosopher).

Orr’s introduction is the first of seven chapters. In Chapter 2, “Preliminary Reflections,” she observes that Athens and Jerusalem represent “the two great traditions of philosophy and faith” (22), of human guidance, freedom, contemplation, and progress as distinguished from divine guidance, obedience, and return. She thereby compels us to consider whether philosophy and faith are equally traditions, or if both are traditions. She goes on to present an elegant and accurate outline of Strauss’s essay, commenting that the central section is devoted to “Greek counterparts” of the Biblical account of genesis, of God’s creation, and that the central paragraph of the essay “deals with the curse of Canaan, the excellence of Nimrod, and the Tower of Babel—a paragraph which, “according to Strauss, contains the biblical understanding of the beginning of man as a political animal” (32). This observation compels us to consider that the phrase “political animal” most immediately calls to mind the political thought of Aristotle, a student of Plato.

Chapter 3 contains an ingenious argument concerning one aspect of the theme of beginning or genesis. Strauss observes that for “Jerusalem” the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, whereas for “Athens” the beginning of wisdom is wonder. Orr asks, Is not Biblical awe akin to Greek wonder? (She thus draws our attention to Strauss’s own denial, in another place, that awe is akin to wonder.) Orr continues: By emphasizing fear, not awe, Strauss artfully conceals “the compelling rationality of Jerusalem”; he does this because he is “lulling the atheists to sleep” (49). Why would sing this lullaby of Broadway? Because in his time and place the reigning opinion was atheistic. To be a man of faith in the modern world is to blaspheme against a militant and powerful atheism, an atheism that will confine the scholar of religious faith to some academic ghetto.

In singing this song, Strauss partakes of an art common to Jerusalem and Athens, Orr argues. Strauss prepares dogmatic atheists to awaken to what will be for them a new, reasoned consideration of “Jerusalem” (56). In the essay itself, of course, Strauss contrasts ‘scientific’ Biblical criticism not with the Bible itself but with natural theology. Strauss remarks that he will begin on the surface of the Bible, where both orthodox believers and ‘scientific’ historians begin.

In her central chapter, Orr writes that Strauss describes Jewish and Islamic revelation as perfect law, not dogma, as rational systems, even if revealed through a mere human being, a prophet. She is artfully silent on Strauss’s description of the “loyal philosophers” or falasifa as non-orthodox. Orr observes that Strauss’s emphasis on the coherence, rather than the divine inspiration of the Biblical account of genesis once again softens the dogmatism of atheists, who will now admire that coherence without bristling prematurely at the question of its source. Neither Strauss, nor Orr following Strauss, shirks the question of the Bible’s source. Orr writes that Strauss “says that man shares with God” not so much reason as an “ability to change his ways” (69). If God is “unpredictable,” then philosophy, governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “cannot touch” Him (69). It might be added that philosophy, then, cannot touch man either, that political philosophy is impossible, and that Heidegger is right. If the “seeming contradictions” of God in the Bible demonstrate the ability of God to change His ways, this does admit “the possibility that the Bible is inspired” (73), but it leaves open whether the Bible was inspired by God or by (equally changeable) men. In pointing to “the fundamental inscrutability of God” (86), one might suspect that Strauss invites us to wonder rather than to fear. But if one wonders rather than fears, one need not engage in either early-Heideggerian assertiveness or late-Heideggerian passivity.

According to the Bible, human life is not originally political. God intended man to be an apolitical being of childlike innocence governed by God. Man was not intended to know the good, morally or intellectually. “The difference between the Bible’s first discussion of politics and, for instance, Aristotle’s assertion that man is political by nature is astonishing” (83), Orr rightly comments. Strauss’s central paragraph describes “political life… as we know it now” (90): The human, Nimrodian attempt to united mankind by force fails when God destroys the Tower of Babel and confuses the tongues of the inhabitants, scattering human beings to the ends of the earth. This prevents “a worldwide kingdom” (90). One might add to Orr’s account that in this paragraph Strauss sides with the Biblical teaching against not only Nimrod but Hegel, (most immediately) Kojève, and all who would commit the sin against the Holy Spirit by replacing the Holy Spirit with the Absolute Spirit. By doing so, Strauss does not necessarily commit himself fully to Biblical conviction, but rather challenges us to see why ‘universalizing’ reason does not commit us to universal or worldwide government.

Perhaps these wonderings about God, including his wonderings about God’s justice in the story of Abraham and Isaac, lead Strauss to shift his attention from Genesis to Exodus, specifically, to the teaching on God’s name. Here Strauss says “I believe,” not “I know,” and translates the Tetragrammaton not as “I am that I am” but “I shall be what I shall be.” This reemphasizes the changeability of God, even as it emphasizes the covenants, the promises of God. Covenants require predictability, one might note. Following Strauss, Orr argues that “I am that I am” is too metaphysical to fit Biblical thought, too Being-oriented. “[O]ne can even go further” and “say that it is difficult even to speak abstractly in Hebrew” (93). God ‘is,’ so to speak, pure willing, not pure thought thinking itself; God is a person, not an ‘it.’ This tends to make the God of the Bible very close to Allah of the Koran—possibly too close. If God is pure willing, pure, arbitrary, “I shall be what I shall be,” then why does He exhibit such remarkable consistency throughout the Hebrew Scriptures? It is true that He ‘changes His mind’ from time to time, but only in response to the words and actions of men, themselves created with the capacity for free will.

In her fifth chapter, Orr discusses Strauss’s account of the “Greek counterparts” of Genesis, centrally, the account handed down by Hesiod. Now that he has atheists thinking rather than merely disbelieving, Strauss here admits that the Torah is not a coherent whole, but a compilation. Strauss uncompromisingly prefers the Biblical God, who is wise, and whose jealousy of man’s love stems “not out of need, but out of concern for us” (103), to Hesiod’s Zeus, who is jealous of Metis because Metis has wisdom Zeus lacks. Aristotle reflects “Greek” presuppositions in asking “whether it is prudent to call a man happy until after he is dead so as not to provoke the envy of the gods” (103). (Elsewhere, we know, Strauss in effect questions the piety of Aristotle, by noticing that the classical political philosophers, including Aristotle, exhibit the ancient city more as a natural not as a holy city [The City and Man, 240-241]. This may mean that the Philosopher feared human envy more than divine.) At any rate, the gods of Greece are ruled by fate, by a force; the ultimate power in the Greek universe is impersonal, ‘beyond good and evil.’ Aristotle’s god, not to be confused with fate, is pure thought thinking itself. Pure thought thinking itself transcends justice and injustice, although it does not transcend goodness. Be that as it may, Aristotle’s god is not a jealous god, any more than the God of the Bible is an envious one. To reflect upon the differences and similarities between envious, jealous, and neither envious nor jealous gods is to reflect upon the theme of ‘Jerusalem and Athens’—though not, to be sure, to exhaust it. Plato’s god is closer to the Biblical God than Aristotle’s. Orr notes that Plato’s theology, with its talk of providence, is both the closest “Greek” thing to the Biblical account of God and likely to be a noble lie (114).

In the sixth chapter, Orr turns to the second, much shorter, part of Strauss’s essay. In “On Socrates and the Prophets,” Strauss shows how not to bring the Bible and Plato together. He sets up a contrast between himself and the Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. The diverge on the issue of historicism. “By combining the social ideals of Plato and the prophets, [Cohen] envisioned a world of the future in which there would be no suffering, and no distinctions among men” (128). Orr thereby points us to the reflection that historicism is that part of philosophic thought that most closely imitates Biblical providence. Has philosophy corrupted religion, or vice-versa? (Or has each corrupted the other?) Perhaps this is the reason why Strauss distinguishes reason from revelation, even when he takes pains to defend revelation from charges of irrationality.

The problem of historicism, and of the politics historicism spawns, raises the problem of false prophets. In one of her most insightful passages, Orr remarks that Strauss does not “make the traditional arguments for distinguishing false from true prophets”; that false prophets are those who contradict Mosaic law; that true prophets “demonstrate the veracity of their calling through miracles” (136). Rather, in Strauss’s words, “false prophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is the temple in Jerusalem, the promised land, nay, the chosen people itself, nay, God’s promise to the chosen people if that promise is taken to be an unconditional promise and not part of a Covenant” (136). This attack on materialism is indeed a kind of Platonism and stands in opposition to all prophecy-of-the-flesh, whether it be dialectical materialism or the dialectical immaterialism of the Absolute Spirit. This stance comports with Strauss’s opinion that Socrates is “by Strauss’s definition, a pious man” (140), one “who investigates the human things and leaves divine things alone” (141). Moreover, “[f]rom Socrates and therefore philosophy’s perspective, the prophets have a beneficial purpose” (143); philosophy “lacks teeth” (144), but prophets, as orators, do not, and (one might add) philosophers might influence the thought of prophets. That it is not a good thing for prophets’ impulses to rule philosophers may be seen in the history of historicism.

In her concluding chapter, Orr accurately asserts that Socrates, unlike Nietzsche, does not hold it possible to unite Jerusalem and Athens, to synthesize reason and revelation. Strauss thereby establishes himself as “the new guide”—a better guide than Nietzsche—for perplexed moderns.

A gentle but firm guide to the perplexed reader of Strauss, Orr proceeds with careful judgment, slowing down impatient souls who want to the philosopher to ‘get to the point.’ She knows that a philosopher wants his student to be the one who gets to the point, and none too hastily. The impulse to get to the point too hastily yields an undue agitation for eschatological relief.