Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence
Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 4
by Ellis Sandoz
Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.
IV Behind Strauss and Spinoza stood the Averroists
In modern philosophy the hard line drawn between religion and philosophy is exemplified in Spinoza's attitude as expressed in Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) where the principle is laid down as follows: "Between faith or theology, and philosophy, there is no connection, nor affinity. I think no one will dispute the fact who has knowledge of the aim and foundations of the two subjects, for they are as wide apart as the poles." "Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith . . . looks for nothing but obedience and piety. Again, philosophy is based on axioms which must be sought from nature alone."36
"The core of Strauss's thought is the famous 'theological-political problem,' a problem which he would say 'remained the theme of my studies' from a very early time."37 Strauss's gloss on the quoted Spinoza passage suggests that the philosopher who knows truth must refrain from expressing it out of both convenience and, more so, duty.
If truth requires one not to accommodate opinions to the Bible, piety requires the opposite, "i.e., that one should give one's own opinions a Biblical appearance. If true religion or faith, which according to him requires not so much true dogmas as pious ones, were endangered by his Biblical criticism, Spinoza would have decided to be absolutely silent about this subject." But, of course, to thicken this tangle, the rule of speaking "ad captum vulgi" means so as to satisfy the dominant opinion of the multitude, which in Spinoza's situation was that of a secularist Jew speaking to a Protestant Christian community.38
It was Spinoza's intention to emancipate philosophy from its position as mere handmaid of scripture. "In his effort to emancipate philosophy from its ancillary position, he goes to the very root of the problem — the belief in revelation. By denying revelation, he reduces Scripture to the status of the works of the Greek poets, and as a result of this he revives the classical conception of Greek philosophers as to the relation between popular beliefs and philosophic thought."39
Behind Spinoza and Strauss stand the great Spanish Islamic philosophers of the medieval period who insisted upon philosophy as a purely rational enterprise based on Aristotle and steering a middle way, one infected neither by dogmatic religion nor by traditional mysticism — to take the case of Averroes, the great twelfth-century falasifa Ibn Rushd. It may be useful to recall that Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles is the Western Christian "comprehensive systematic work against the Arabic-Aristotelian philosophy. In 1270, thirteen Averroistic propositions were condemned by Étienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, and the year 1277 brought the sweeping condemnation of 219 propositions, including besides the Averroistic proper, several of Thomas Aquinas which seemed equally dangerous."40
By the Averroist tradition, philosophy is considered to be "the systematic application of demonstrative reasoning to the world." Such philosophy starts from indubitable first principles and cannot be empirical, since philosophy is conceived as a demonstrative science and there can be no indubitable premises about any part of the world as experienced, much less about the whole cosmos.41
Philosophers are capable of arriving at truth directly and, thus, at the highest level, have no need of scripture or revelation — a teaching that necessitates discretion in communication. As a thoroughly rationalistic enterprise, not mysticism but only philosophy allows union with the divine, since that union requires knowledge of the theoretical sciences.42 There are levels of human nature and levels of discourse and truth to match. "For the natures of men are on different levels with respect to [their paths to] assent. One of them comes to assent through demonstration; another comes to assent through dialectical arguments, just as firmly as the demonstrative man through demonstration, since his nature does not contain any greater capacity; while another comes to assent through rhetorical arguments, again just as firmly as the demonstrative man through demonstrative arguments."43
Ibn Rushd identifies the elite (philosophers) as those who are taught by demonstrative argument, the theologians (a mere subclass of the masses) as those suitable for dialectic, and the masses themselves as those who can understand only through imaginative and persuasive language. Farabi names only two classes, the elite and the masses.44
This view, of course, requires secret or artful teaching and caution of philosophers. Thus, Farabi endorses Plato's techniques of concealment and Aristotle's methods. They "used different methods but had the same purpose of concealment; there is much abbreviation and omission in Aristotle's scientific works, and this is deliberate. . . . Different expressions of truth suit different levels of understanding. . . . Zeno said: 'My teacher Aristotle reported a saying of his teacher Plato: "The summit of knowledge is too lofty for every bird to fly to'."45
Finally, there is the agreement of the greatest Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, who writes of Genesis 1:1 ("In the beginning God created heaven and earth"): "It has been treated with metaphors in order that the uneducated may comprehend it according to the measure of their faculties and the feebleness of their apprehension, while educated persons may take it in a different sense."46 Strauss's embrace of this paradigm of philosophy is stated in many ways, such as the following from his 1962 preface to the English translation of Spinoza's Critique of Religion: "I began . . . to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and its classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation."47
Voegelin's attitude toward this model of philosophizing — and hence toward the Straussian approach to philosophy to the degree it is indebted to this model, a matter to be more fully ascertained than I can attempt here — is suggested by his study of Siger de Brabant, a Latin Averroist. The notions of the grades of human nature and levels of communication just noticed, Voegelin finds, show "the inclination to treat the non-philosophical man as an inferior brand and even to compare him to animals, an attitude which seems to crop up as soon as the Christian insight into the equal spiritual dignity of all men is abandoned."
Along with the elitist idea, which may be confined to "the intellectual sphere of the vita philosophi . . . [comes also] the liberal idea of the educated man as a social type superior to the uneducated common man, the vilis homo . . . . The bourgeois implications are obvious, for the ideal of intellectual life is coupled with the idea that the man of substance is morally superior to the poor man."48
More generally, then, Voegelin remarks of the falasifa that "philosophy had become in the Arab environment, more so than it was with Aristotle, a form of life for an intellectual elite. "49 Philosophy did not mean for them a branch of science, but signified an integral attitude towards the world based on a "book," much as the integral attitude of the orthodox Muslim would be based on the Koran.
The sectarian implication is beyond doubt; the falasifa represent a religious movement, differing in its social structure and content of doctrine from other Islamic sects, but substantially of the same type . . . .The great Arabic philosophical discussions did not center in the Organon or Physics of Aristotle, but were concerned with the twelfth book of Metaphysics and the third book of De Anima as transmitted by the Commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias . . . . The keystone of the canon was the so-called Theology of Aristotle, an abridged paraphrase of the last three books of the Enneads of Plotinus.
The Neo-Platonic mysticism and the Commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias to De Anima were the dynamic center of Arabic philosophy, furnishing the principles of interpretation for the comments on Aristotelian works proper. They made possible the evolution of the idea of the Active Intellect as an emanation from God arousing to activity the passive intellect of man. The aim of human life is in this system the achievement of the complete union, the ittisal, of the human intellect with the Active Intellect. Behind the dry technical formula of the oneness of the Active Intellect in all human beings, lie a mystical experience and a well-developed religious attitude giving their meaning to the theoretical issues.
The clash between Faith and Reason in the thirteenth century is at bottom a clash between two religions, between Christianity and the intellectual mysticism of the falasifa. . . . It was this mythical Aristotle who dominated the falasifa and through their mediation became known to the West. It was not primarily the content of his work that created the disturbance; the Aristotelian results could be assimilated, as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas have demonstrated. The danger was the mythical Aristotle as a new spiritual authority of equal rank with the Christian revelation and tradition. The Aristotle who was a regula in natura et exemplar could be a model requiring the conformance of man in the same sense in which the Christ of St. Francis could be the standard of conformance for the Christian.50
The gulf that separates Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss and some of the possible reasons for it by now have become more evident, even if the heart of their rival modes of philosophy remains to be explored. That is a task readers must undertake for themselves, if they are drawn to pursue the quest for truth in the loving search of the Ground called Philosophy. 
[This is the last of 4 Parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.
Part 2 may be read HERE. Part 3 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
36. Benedict de Spinoza, Writings on Political Philosophy, ed. A.G.A. Balz, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1937), 16.
37. Steven B. Smith, "Leo Strauss: Between Athens and Jerusalem," Review of Politics 53 (Winter 1991): 78. Strauss's early study of Spinoza's Tractatus was written between 1925 and 1928 and published as Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Gründlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft: Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-Politischem Traktat (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1930; English translation 1965). As he remarks to Voegelin, "Hula was telling me that you are interested in Arabic political philosophy. That was once my speciality" (20 February 1943, Letter 7). Strauss recurs to a comparison of Averroes with Husserl's treatment of Aristotle's De Anima, book 3, and to his medieval studies, including Maimonides and his "Essay on the Law of the Kuzari" on 11 October 1943, Letter 11.
38. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 142-201 at 168, 178.
39. Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), 1:163. For Spinoza's "grand assault on traditional philosophy," see ibid. 2:160-64. Cf. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 188-91.
40. Voegelin, "Siger de Brabant," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (June 1944): 511.
41. George F. Hourani, Averroes: On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy [a translation of Ibn Rushd's Decisive Treatise] (London: Luzac, 1961), 20-21.
42. Ibid., 27-28.
43. Ibid., 49 [The Decisive Treatise, 6.17-21], cf. 92. In this work the judge and philosopher Averroes defends philosophy on the basis of Law, which is to say politically. Thus, "if teleological study of the world is philosophy, and if the Law commands such a study, then the Law commands philosophy," a sentence that stands as the summary of chapter 1 (ibid., 44; cf. 83 n. 7).
44. Ibid., 92.
45. Ibid., 106.
46. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlaender, 2d ed. (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1904), 4.
47. Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965), 31; also reprinted in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 257.
48. Voegelin, "Siger de Brabant," 520.
49. Ibid., 512.
50, Ibid., 514-16.
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