Between Rome and 'Jerusalem and Athens'

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."