Reason, revelation, and American theocracy rightly understood.(A SYMPOSIUM ON REMI BRAGUE'S THE LAW OF GOD)(Critical essay)

Tocqueville famously diagnosed American consciousness as deeply affected by an untutored Cartesianism; in his view, our intellectual debt to Descartes was undiminished by our ignorance of his bequest. Likewise, many have surprisingly judged the contemporary American political scene as indelibly shaped by Leo Strauss's philosophical legacy; in fact, Michael and Catherine Zuckert recently remarked, "A specter is haunting America, and that specter is, strange to say, Leo Strauss." The radical tension between reason and revelation, as Strauss depicts it, could be seen as analogous to the communicative chasm that has opened up between our nation's religiously inclined and its committed secularists; the incompatibility of reason and revelation finds its American expression in the political and cultural conflict between Darwinians and Evangelicals or, as Peter Lawler has observed, between those who think evolutionary Darwinism comprehensively accounts for the whole of human experience and those who think a full rendering requires recourse to revelation.

While it is likely Strauss's work is studied even less than Descartes's, the many variations in American cultural discourse on Strauss's dichotomy are too numerous to catalogue here. It is sufficient to point out that the austere divide between the God-directed and Darwin-directed is an expression of the Straussian tension writ large over our cultural topography; apparently, our inability to see any hopes for a synthesis between reason and revelation means that we are all untutored Straussians now.

Remi Brague's groundbreaking new work, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, is also haunted by the specter of Strauss even though Brague specifically mentions Strauss only once and in brief, parenthetical fashion. Still, despite his obvious respect for Strauss's work, Brague presents a searching challenge to the very core of Strauss's philosophic thought and ultimately to the view of modernity he espoused. Strauss famously declares the "the ologico-political problem" the "central theme" of his investigations--he even describes himself as a "young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament." For Strauss, the irresolvable antithesis between reason and revelation was the explosive catalyst for the whole of the Western tradition and expressed itself microcosmically at both the political and individual level.

At the political level, the problem is manifest in the fact that divine law presents itself as the ultimate and comprehensive arbiter of human experience, thereby precluding any facile liberal attempt to relegate religion to matters of individual conscience. The claim of divine law to extend to the whole of human experience makes a mockery of the distinction between public and private and its constitutional offspring, the separation of church and state. Furthermore, the incommensurability of reason and revelation at the level of individual choice means that any attempt to confront seriously the two available alternatives necessarily requires an arbitrary determination.

For Strauss, then, when it comes to the most important matter, we must choose and must choose willfully--we are left without any legitimate rational ground to defend subsequently what amounts to a primitive moral decision. If Evangelicals and Darwinians in America find themselves pitted against one other without hopes of reconciliation it would seem to be because they found the Straussian logic to be inexorable on this score. Apparently, Americans too are born in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.

Brague announces his intention, however, to "enlarge" the theologico-political problem and even to "move beyond its boundaries." In the initial movement of Brague's argument he prefers the formulation, "theo-political" to "theologico-political," since the term "theology" already assumes the "project of a rational elucidation of divinity" which is "specific to Christianity." While Strauss generally has little to say about Christianity, presumably because its attempt at a synthesis of reason and revelation only obscures their mutual exclusivity, Brague considers the theologico-political problem to be a product of Christian categories; in fact, the term "theology" itself already presupposes a "way for the divine to pass through the prism of discourse (logos)."

While some sort of theological component is detectable in the other two major Western religious traditions, Islam and Judaism, it is mostly due to the palpable effect the development of Christianity had on both of them. Ultimately, Brague considers the term "theo-political" itself inadequate and inferior to "theio-political," since the former term specifically addresses only the particular relationship between politics and God versus the more general mediation between politics and the divine. Even the term "theio-political" still only makes sense when understood through the unique prism of Christian interpretive paradigms. Christianity, for Strauss, is an historically anomalous tributary branching from the central philosophical development of Western consciousness. But Brague considers it to be a "highly revolutionary event not to be turned into something banal." Therefore, Strauss's discovery of the theologico-political problem is deeply suspect, according to Brague: it excludes the transformative impact of the Christianity actually responsible for its birth.