Abstract
Kenneth Hart Green has produced a fascinating book in which he examines Leo Strauss’s “rediscovery” of Moses Maimonides. In this study, we encounter a long and complex discussion of Strauss’s careful reading of Maimonides’s philosophical masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed. This “careful reading” for Green, and for many other scholars of the Guide who have been influenced by Strauss, constitutes a particular way of reading the work in which the exoteric and esoteric meanings of the Guide must be identified and clearly understood. According to Green, Strauss had already started to uncover the secrets of the Guide when he was a young man in Germany. In order to understand the historical context of Strauss’s momentous discovery, we must have a clear sense of the intellectual climate in which he was working in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strauss had studied with Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and many other important scholars and intellectuals in the years before he left Germany in 1932. For Strauss as a reader of Maimonides, however, the towering figure in the intellectual circles of that time was the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). Cohen was not only an enormously influential teacher of philosophy, who had among his students the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), he was also widely considered the leading Jewish intellectual of his time in Germany. In the last years of his life, he had written important pieces on the philosophy of religion, in which he tried to explain the relationship between monotheism and ethics in neo-Kantian terms. His book, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, was published in 1919, one year after Cohen’s death. This book and Cohen’s previous works established the context for the philosophical discussions of Judaism in the intellectual circles of Strauss’s time in Germany. His 1908 essay “Ethics of Maimonides” (Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis) was also an important source for Strauss in his early engagement with the thought of Maimonides. No work of Cohen, however, could have shaped the way Strauss read the Guide as much as his own discovery of how the works of other medieval writers, and in particular Alfarabi, were read by careful and informed readers from the same period. Green argues that “Strauss helped to make a decisive advance in the accurate understanding of the texts and thought of some of the great though often neglected medieval philosophers (besides Maimonides), such as Alfarabi, Judah Halevi, and Marsilius of Padua” (87). Strauss was convinced that medieval readers understood that these texts included beyond the literal level, an esoteric level of meaning. This discovery led Strauss to read the Guide as Maimonides had meant for it to be read. Now Strauss could see in the structure of the text and its literary style the clues that led the original reader through a labyrinth of ironic and contradictory statements to the true meaning of the text. The intent of this kind of writing was to protect the inexperienced reader from knowledge that could prove dangerous to the uninitiated and the author from readers who might be convinced that the author was defending ideas that could undermine orthodox teaching and then prosecute him. This theory of writing is the guiding principle of one of Strauss’s most influential books, Persecution and the Art of Writing. Strauss’s discovery of how to read the Guide provided the key to reading and understanding other important authors who had embraced the same techniques in the composition of their works. The same book includes an essay on Spinoza, one of the most serious critics of Maimonides. Strauss was convinced that Spinoza’s critique of Maimonides had to be addressed, because for modern scholars, guided by historicist and rationalist principles, Spinoza had revealed the weaknesses of Maimonides and rendered his thought invalid. Strauss, however, would argue that Maimonides was the greater thinker of the two. Green points out that for Strauss, “Maimonides remained the teacher by whom Spinoza was originally schooled and from whom he diverged; he adhered to his teacher’s fundamental passion for the life of the mind as it defines the human individual” (119). Both thinkers embraced this same passion, but Strauss believed that Maimonides had addressed the key religious and political issues (e.g., tyranny) with greater depth than Spinoza. This was particularly true with regard to the most important philosophical issue for Strauss, the relationship between reason and revelation, or between Athens and Jerusalem. Spinoza had tried to move beyond revelation, in favor of reason, guided by history and science. For Strauss, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem that had shaped Western Civilization had never been explained by anyone with greater depth than by Maimonides in the Guide. This is so because Maimonides, unlike Spinoza and the thinkers who would follow in his wake, had taken revelation seriously. The tension between Athens and Jerusalem is acute in the Guide.
Green seems quite convinced that Strauss much preferred the ancients to the moderns. Perhaps the reason Strauss thought this way is that he saw in Maimonides and the great philosophers who had come before him a true dedication to the life of philosophy and a sincere effort to seek the whole truth and accept the consequences of that search. For Strauss, the life of philosophy has as its most fundamental concern the examination of the “political.” Green argues that for Strauss, the “political” includes a consideration of the moral or ethical life and leads ultimately to a consideration of “the right way of life, and what it is that it encompasses” (102). Strauss believed that most modern philosophers are not true philosophers, but rather important and provocative “thinkers.” One key figure who illustrates this important distinction would be Martin Heidegger. Green states that for Strauss, Heidegger was a thinker whose radical historicism could be viewed as “antiphilosophical” and that the result of Heidegger’s project would be to lead Western philosophy into nihilism (156). Green is also convinced that Heidegger has had this impact on philosophy over the past forty years.
The question that must be asked, however, is what impact Strauss’s ideas have had on Maimonides studies since his death in 1973? The answer would probably be disappointing to Green. Of course, most scholars working in this field would readily acknowledge that Strauss was the most important Maimonides scholar of his generation, but many of his ideas seem to have a rather limited impact on the major authors who have published books on Maimonides in recent years. This fact should not surprise anyone who knows the history of the scholarship on medieval philosophy. Strauss’s contemporary, Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), perhaps the most influential scholar writing on the history of medieval Christian philosophy for about fifty years, is now often criticized and even ridiculed by minor figures working in the same field. In Strauss’s case, however, one of his most severe critics is perhaps the leading English-language scholar writing on Maimonides today, Herbert A. Davidson. In Davidson’s book, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford, 2005), he offers a devastating critique of Strauss’s reading of the Guide (393–403). Nevertheless, even if some of Strauss’s ideas about how the Guide should be read are not today widely accepted, no one can begin the serious study of Maimonides’s philosophical masterpiece without considering the work of Leo Strauss. Perhaps the only weakness that the reader might find in Green’s study is that it is written from the perspective of the true believer. As a true believer, he is absolutely convinced that Strauss’s interpretation of the Guide is correct. For this reason, Green is not likely to take seriously even the most compelling arguments against Strauss’s theory. This same devotion to Strauss’s ideas is not uncommon among the scholars who are most devoted to the teachings of Strauss. Ultimately, whether or not one is convinced by Strauss’s theory of esoteric reading, one must acknowledge that his analysis of the Guide has had a major impact on the scholarship on Maimonides. Green’s book helps all of us understand who Strauss was and what he taught generations of scholars about the greatness of Maimonides.
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In Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, Green has collected and edited the essays authored by Leo Strauss on Maimonides. All of the published works of Strauss on Maimonides are included in this edition along with transcriptions of important lectures published here for the first time. The collection of these materials in and of itself constitutes an important contribution to the existing scholarship on Strauss and Maimonides. Now scholars can refer to a single volume and find all of Strauss’s work on Maimonides from 1930 to 1968.
The edition begins with an introduction (87 pp.) in which Green traces the development of Strauss’s thought concerning Maimonides. It is important to note from the start that Green is strongly committed to the notion that Strauss’s ideas progressed from a series of insights in the early works, to a fully developed understanding in the later works. In particular, Green argues that Strauss’s interpretation of the Guide of the Perplexed evolved from the time of his first essays to the most important pieces Strauss published on the Guide in the 1960s. One of the key moments in this evolution is the publication of “The Literary Character of the Guide of the Perplexed” in 1941. According to Green, this essay represents a turning point in Strauss’s thought on Maimonides. Green argues, in fact, that by careful analysis of the literary character of the work, Strauss was able to “uncover the deliberately hidden logic by which its author had composed the Guide” (44). Green also states that this understanding of the concealed meaning had been hidden from readers for centuries. Green is convinced that Strauss was the first reader to understand how the Guide was composed since the time of Maimonides. This discovery, according to Green, is far more than the recovery of a hidden code that enables the knowledgeable reader to understand the true meaning of the Guide; it is, rather, the discovery of a lost art of writing mastered by biblical authors and by Plato (45). Strauss was convinced that the model that Maimonides was imitating was “the original book of secrets in its utmost concealed profundity, i.e., the Hebrew Bible” (45). In “The Literary Character . . .,” Strauss states, “The Guide as a whole is thus devoted to the revelation of the secrets of the Bible. Secret, however, has manifold meanings. It may refer to the secret hidden by a parable or word, but it also may mean the parable or word itself which hides a secret” (346). For Strauss, the Guide was a book written in a way that discouraged all but the most careful and informed reader from understanding the meaning of the work.
Perhaps the culmination of Strauss’s thought on the Guide can be found in his introductory essay to the Shlomo Pines English translation of the Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). This piece, titled “How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed,” includes an extremely complex description of the structure of the Guide. In fact, this essay is so dense that most readers unfamiliar with Strauss’s previous work on Maimonides would have a difficult time deciphering it. In his introduction to the edition, Green, commenting on the style of the essay, writes that Strauss “seems to have judged it requisite that he himself write about this book in such a fashion that his analysis becomes a sort of esoteric commentary on an esoteric book” (64). This observation is obviously true because the piece is almost as difficult to understand as the Guide itself. Why is this so? The answer would be hard to determine; however, Green explains that Strauss may have come to the conclusion that “the only adequate method of uncovering the actual intention of Maimonides is to attempt to present the true views of Maimonides in a somewhat hidden or at least diversionary fashion” (64). If this theory is correct, Strauss must have decided at some point that the Guide was simply a work too complex to be explained in a conventional scholarly way. This new approach to Maimonides scholarship, however, created a new problem; Strauss’s interpretation of the Guide could now only be understood fully by those who were familiar with his theories and his previous work. In effect, what Strauss created with this magnificent essay was a way of understanding the Guide that was open only to those who formed part of the same scholarly community. The followers of Strauss, his students and those scholars who were familiar with his work, now belonged to an exclusive group that could explain the secrets of the Guide and other esoteric works.
Although Green never makes this point in his introduction, most scholars familiar with the history of this scholarship are well aware of what happened. One of the unfortunate results of this change was that many scholars who never belonged to this select group but who could still appreciate other important contributions that Strauss had made to medieval studies (e.g., his superb essay “How To Study Medieval Philosophy” or “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi”) would find his most daring interpretive essay concerning the Guide almost impossible to understand. The same scholars would also discover that some of Strauss’s most notable followers would also produce scholarly essays that were written in what could almost be described as a code language (e.g., Seth Benardete’s essays on the Platonic dialogues). The point here is not that this scholarship is not ultimately edifying or even at times brilliant but rather that the style of the essays is peculiarly idiosyncratic. The most serious concern, however, is far more fundamental than the relative difficulty one encounters trying to make sense of a scholarly piece written in an almost opaque language; the question one finds oneself asking after struggling to unravel the discourse of the essay is whether or not Maimonides actually wrote the Guide in the way that Strauss tells us. If one can answer in the affirmative, then Strauss was right and all of Strauss’s effort produced a positive result. If, however, the answer is negative, the whole edifice collapses under the weight of overinterpretation and excessive conjecture.
Green does not imagine that Strauss could have been wrong in his interpretation of the Guide. He knows the history of the interpretation from the beginning. He knows this story as well as anyone writing on this subject today. Green is convinced that Strauss was right about the esoteric reading and that Strauss was the first to understand how to read Maimonides in eight hundred years. The problem is that many other scholars are not convinced that Strauss was right. Herbert A. Davidson has attacked Strauss for overinterpreting many of the structural features of the Guide. Davidson notes that Strauss gives great significance to features as simple as the use or non-use of the Arabic article “A” with Hebrew nouns. Davidson states that “notice, in his [Strauss’s] view, must be taken of Maimonides’ discussing natural science precisely in the seventeenth chapter of Part One and thereby linking the numeral seventeen to natural science. In fact, Maimonides did not assign numbers to chapters of the Guide and undoubtedly gave not the slightest thought to whether he was engaged in writing the fifteenth, seventeenth, or nineteenth chapter” (Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works, Oxford, 2005, 397).
Even if Strauss was wrong about many of the details in his reading of the Guide, his numerous publications and lectures are required reading for any serious academic study of Maimonides and his works. Those of us who study the Guide have in one way or another been influenced by Strauss’s work. Now, thanks to the work of Kenneth Hart Green, all of those studies will be accessible in one beautifully edited volume.