The greatest work of philosophy by the scholar commonly regarded as the greatest philosopher of Catholic Christendom remains unfinished. Thomas Aquinas abandoned the Summa Theologiae, declaring that all he had written seemed to him like chaff. Philosophy paled beside revelation—beside mystical experience and the glory of God.
To the believer, this story is testament to the humility even the finest of minds must feel upon encountering its Creator. To the nonbeliever, it may suggest the final incompatibility between faith and reason. The philosopher simply has nothing to say in the presence of God. Philosophy is either sovereign unto itself, or it is vanity.
Leo Strauss consistently drew the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem sharply. The two cities—metonymy for reason and revelation and the Hellenic and Hebraic sides of the Western experience—are in tension, a word that occurs with some regularity in the 14 essays that comprise a new volume edited by Geoffrey M. Vaughan, Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Several of the contributors to this book argue that Strauss exaggerates that tension, however. They find grounds instead for a "synthesis," another recurrent word in these pages.
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