Philosophy and the Beyond

“The philosophies of this world are blind to true divinity—the living God”.  This introductory proposition summarizes a traditional indictment of Christianity as represented most notably by Saint Paul.[1] Drawing upon the pagan Varro, Saint Augustine would confirm the limitations of “philosophy” in terms of natural reason (as theologia naturalis), a reason blind to its own onto-epistemic antecedents, its true ground, no less than to its own civil dimension.  Yet, early Christianity yields to further precision.  With medieval Thomism, God is clearly no mere limit of reason, but purissima mens, naming the inexhaustible depths of reason itself: the mysterious, providential ground of philosophy, or of what is thus called.  Accordingly, with Dante, far from smothering reason (if only via a promise to complete it), God emerges as cherished sign that reason is irreducible to any of its arguments: reason knows reasons that unreason fails to discern.

Modern man has learned to distrust the arcana of medieval reason as misguided and misguiding “mysticism”.  We have “read” Kant if only through osmosis, by being taught by his multifaceted acolytes to restrict all knowledge of the pre-empirical to a mere formalism, an empty abstraction (at best, an “analytic,” rather than “synthetic” a priori) justified only insofar as it can contribute, if only by the uses we make of it, to the rise of a new metaphysics of History as the trans-empirical realization of all old formalisms.  We are then finally ready, seemingly “programmed,” to despise all knowledge of “the Beyond”—of what lies secretively beyond experience—as a mere shadow of knowledge of our historical destiny, knowledge that is one with our own lives.

Kant set the stage for our debates over the Beyond when he approached religion as signaling the “transcendental” sublime depths of reason—the noumenal ground of the Will.  Thereupon, Kant effectively “legalized” reason, turning it into a machine banned by its own nature from asking as regards soul, or “the nature of God” (natura dei).  It is modernity’s “new science” (viz., that of Copernicus and Galileo) that is supposed to provide us with our only trustworthy access to the Beyond.  It is to the new science that the new philosopher turns to acquire glimmers of genuine meaning.

Reason’s turn to the new science has eclipsed, meanwhile, reason’s original turn to poetry, or rather reason’s original reliance on the poetic to transcend experience (Kantian aesthetic appeals to the sublime hardly countered the modern tide of the reduction of transcendence to the arguably false transcendence of “subjective feeling”).  The poetic reason of pre-modernity has been eclipsed by the scientific reason of our own age, now systematically projected upon all reason.  Yet, pre-modern man had no need for our science, insofar as he derived meaning through a poetry rendering commensurate the depths of reason and reason’s surface.  In this respect, it is worth recalling C. S. Lewis’s ruminations on a lost age of enchantment.[2] More importantly, however, it is worth returning to Vico’s tacit warning against a modernity that will expose medieval Christianity in a way reminiscent to the way Christianity had already exposed pagan poetry and divinities—as a lie.  Once the element of deception or enchantment in old religion is exposed to vulgar eyes and ears, there is no returning to old Gods.  This applies to Christianity no less that to ancient Greco-Roman religions.  A renewed effort is to be made by a new generation of religious poets, not to “re-enchant” romantically (Lewis), but to enchant us equally, if not more fundamentally, if possible, or else not at all.  But is it possible to dive, if not deeper than, at least as deep as medieval Christianity, as opposed to reifying Christianity on a meta-Christian (read, historical, or even transhistorical) plane?  Is it possible for us to revert to a forgotten core, as opposed to rising to a “broader context”—one that is evermore vacuous, mediated, or alienated from the core?

A return to the roots need not presuppose any Hegelian progress, even as it might feed into it, as in Heidegger’s case.  For, as Jacob Klein once showed, the roots exposed by rigorous investigation (phenomenology) can convince us to counter any project of overcoming the plant growing out of the roots—all parasitic weeds notwithstanding.

If our task is not to demythologize religion, or to abstract roots from a withered plant, thereby setting the stage for the rise of a thoroughly scientific religion, a religion married to or crowning modernity’s progressive materialism, then we face—in the opposite direction—the ancient alternative of rekindling the poetic quest for and sheltering of roots as ends in themselves.  Our work as new religious poets would be one of reconverting speech into a mirror of speech’s roots, a mirror inviting the roots to speak freely and thereby to guide us back to them, not as trampolines to unforeseeable realms—no matter how blissful, no matter how heavenly—but as ends in themselves, as original meccas.  We are then faced with the challenge of reorienting speech back to its roots.  Yet, we can achieve the reorientation in question today only on condition of our disentangling our speech from formidable prejudices weighing against our radical endeavor—modern prejudices retraceable to a questionable anti-Platonic reading of Christianity as leaving pagan poetry and its Gods behind.  Our prejudices may be effectively neutralized as we retrace them to a failure to discern Christianity’s early assault on paganism as aimed at only the corruption of paganism, as opposed to the true poetic roots of paganism.  It is by thus proceeding that we may escape the suicidal immanentism driving our Age to remain, as it were, lost in the future, and recover its antidote in the soul of a classical tradition of poetry represented most remarkably by the likes of Dante Alighieri in the face of Christianity and by Giambattista Vico in the face of modernity.[3]

To live facing back to the roots of speech is, for our classical poets, to grow aware that we live in those roots—that they are living and life-giving roots allowing us to make sense of Christianity’s appeal to a living word as root of our own life, of our own humanity.  It is in returning to the roots of our humanity as substantive ends (not merely as “structural” abstractions) that we begin to (re)conceive life’s roots as providential and our life as best lived in prudent response to its roots.  This is not to sustain that the divine will take care of everyone, or of every facet of our life, but that the ground of our life adequately supports our caring for it.  To speak with the Bible, the true God is a jealous God; for he wants us for himself.  Yet, “willing” is not of the essence where the poetic metaphor signals Platonically the return of an image (eikōn/εἰκών) to its intelligible paradigm—the thing itself.  In us would then dwell the echo of a divine desire for divinity, the sign of eternal love as master-key to all life.

Returning to Christianity as defense of the true roots of paganism (Vico) makes sense only where those roots “fail” to provide for all those who do not turn back to them.  By the same token, the only paganism that can still and arguably should still make sense, today, is one for which providence does not justify kings and nations, but heroic converts to divine care or love (caritas) as an end in itself.  The pagans we can still meaningfully befriend are immune to early Christian condemnations of paganism.  On the other hand, the Christianity that can still make sense to us in the aftermath of the modern Enlightenment critique of the Bible is a faith that does not complete or exalt philosophy as such, but its pagan poetic expressions and then, only by way of drawing us back to them.  Rather than offering a universal consummation of the Socratic life, the only Christianity strong enough to respond meaningfully to modernity is one confirming the necessary, intimate bond between Socrates and divine transcendence—between the Socratic life and the Beyond.  Otherwise put, the only Christianity immune to modern science’s instrumentalist assault upon it, is one invoking, even proclaiming—not proving once and for all—the ultimate justice of the Socratic life.

The Christianity acknowledging, even cherishing its “failure” to prove Socrates right can still serve as godfather to all those daring to walk in Socrates’s shoes.  The godfather can still speak both meaningfully and effectively in the exalted tongue of saints, without pretending to settle the problem of Socratic heroism in the interests of the glory of heaven.[4]

When conceived as settling “the problem of Socrates,” even the saintly life illuminated by extraordinary religious promises and expectations merely contributes to discrediting Socratism, if only unwittingly, by exposing it to an alien condition of justification—as if the Socratic life were invalidated by the fall into disrepute of its (Christian) “proof”.  On the other hand, there where poetry is not conceived as “proving,” but as merely introducing us to Socratic heroism, both poetry and Christianity will stand immune to modernity’s critique of both.  This is what Giambattista Vico called for when speaking of Platonism’s and Christianity’s mutual “confirmation”.  Leo Strauss would draw attention anew to the challenge at hand, most notably in his 1970 lecture, “The Problem of Socrates,” which ended with the following considerations:

For according to Plato as well as to Aristotle, to the extent to which the human problem cannot be solved by political means it can be solved only by philosophy, by and through the philosophic way of life.  Plato too presents men who are not good or who are then bad, but he does this only to present all the more clearly the character of the good men, and this is his chief theme.  Poetry, however, presents only such human beings for whom the philosophic life is not a possibility.  From Plato’s point of view the life which is not philosophic is either obviously incapable of solving the human problem or else it does solve the human problem in a wholly inadequate or in an absurd manner.  In the first case it is the theme of tragedy.  In the second case it is a theme of comedy.  From here we may understand why it is according to nature that philosophy delegate to poetry a ministerial function, a function which philosophy itself cannot fulfill.  Poetry presents human life as human life appears if it is not seen to be directed toward philosophy.  Autonomous poetry presents non-philosophic life as autonomous.  Yet by articulating the cardinal problem of human life as it comes to sight within the non-philosophic life, poetry prepares for the philosophic life.  Poetry is legitimate only as ministerial to the Platonic dialogue which in its turn is ministerial to the life of understanding.  Autonomous poetry is blind in the decisive respect.  It lives in the element of imagination and of passion, of passionate images, of passion expressing itself in images which arouse passion and yet modify passion. It ennobles passion and purifies passion.  But autonomous poetry does not know the end for the sake of which the purification of passion is required.[5] (boldface added)

Where we replace Strauss’s “poetry” with “Christian poetry,” or “Christianity” simpliciter, we face the difficulty of an interpretation of the Bible on account of which Christianity would consummate classical poetry’s failed attempt to solve the human problem aside from, or even beyond philosophy.  Has Christianity succeeded there where pagan poetry had failed?  Or did Christianity fail evermore blatantly than pagan poetry?  Did Christianity’s “Comedy” resolve the Socratic problem, thereby sparing us the trouble of facing the dangers characteristic of Socratic heroism?  Or did Christianity not rather end up presenting and sanctifying, if only unwittingly, the philosophical life more vividly than ever before as our supreme destiny as human beings?  Or did Christianity lead to both results, by setting the stage for a modern equivocation concerning the nature of philosophy, now to be reified positivistically in terms of a Science (knowledge) accessible equally to both good and bad men?  Has Christianity’s saintly defense of philosophy led to a mechanistic alienation of philosophy from its original ground and end—its original good?

Although, beyond the confines of modern progressivism, Christianity cannot be justly said to have lowered the standards of classical Socratic heroism, Christianity has exposed Socratism to unprecedented skepticism by exposing philosophy’s ground before the tribunal of non-philosophical passions.  As long as medieval saints and angelic doctors were in charge of interpreting the ground in question, the philosopher could discern in Christianity a divine blessing; yet, where early Christian heroes were overthrown, notably in the name of “freedom and equality,” by legions of the non-philosophical students of modernity’s “new science,” the Christian revelation came to be appropriated as evidence, if not conclusive confirmation of the impossibility of Socratic heroism.[6] Whether or not it agrees with the Bible, our Age has drawn from the Bible the lesson that Socratic heroism is, in the best of cases, foolish, insofar as the Christian God is either 1. sought to solve the problem of politics, or human corruption, or 2. rejected as masking the utter lack of any justification for “classical political idealism” (Strauss).  Thus, whether or not we are faithful, today we reject Socratism as senseless.

A Christianity calling us back to Socrates would necessarily be one free from modern appropriations and thus also one that presents itself as consummating ancient poetry merely in the strict sense that it points back to it as its meta-poetic echo, guiding us to poetry so that poetry may guide us further.  For classical poetry had succeeded in that sole task it was welcomed for by Platonists, namely the task of (re)opening political life to philosophy, and thus of promoting political idealism.  Classical poetry had civilized men, it had humanized their lives, shaping their world (mundum), thereby providing a suitable stage for philosophers’ life of ascent to the roots of our humanity, roots identified with the divine ground of poetry itself.  For today’s Christians to revert to their “Socratic calling” would be for them to promote a Christianity that remains immune to the onslaught of modern progressive materialism—a Christianity that has long, albeit perhaps only long ago, stood for the lost dignity of human life, a dignity that, as Vico would not tire to remind us, is buried, not in ancestral memory, but in our own common civil nature.[7]

For Christianity to recover its old nature, guides are needed, philosophers, Platonic ones, engaged in converting today’s Christianity to the proper function of classical pagan poetry, where, to return to Strauss’s words (cited above), “poetry is legitimate only as ministerial to the Platonic dialogue which in its turn is ministerial to the life of understanding”.  For, “autonomous poetry is blind in the decisive respect.  It lives in the element of imagination and of passion, of passionate images, of passion expressing itself in images which arouse passion and yet modify passion”.  Yet, poetry “ennobles passion and purifies passion,” thereby preparing us for a reason open to the very ground of our passions—even, and this point is crucial, where poetry is an “autonomous poetry [that] does not know the end for the sake of which the purification of passion is required”.

Poetry as such does not need philosophy; it is we who need philosophy, today, for the sake of returning to poetry in its original capacity of educator of the passions in preparation for a reason, a dialogue, opening our daily lives to their original, generative meaning, thereby re-establishing our lives as “right path” (Dante’s diritta via), telos most just and blessed.

Can Christianity still serve poetically the interests of a life rationally open to the Beyond?  Given an affirmative answer, Christianity must reach at once higher and lower than both its current apologists and its current detractors, being at once more and less pagan: “more,” insofar as it swears that meaning gives itself to poetry, but “less,” wherever the poetry it revives or helps us revive pretends to dispense with the Beyond, divine transcendence.  Poetry will no longer be ministerial to modern scientific progressivism; no longer will it prostitute itself to embellish the march of technology, consummate idolatrous incarnation of lust for empowerment (St. Augustine’s libido dominandi).  As with Dante’s rebirth of poetry (Purgatorio 1), so too for us, meaningful Christianity calls forth a battalion of bridge-makers (Dante’s “faithful to love”—fedeli d’amore) between the depths and the surface of reason.  These pontifices, these “popes,” will, to be sure, limit dramatically the role of non-philosophical crowds in bridging the wonderous hiatus between meaning and power (as between quality and quantity), since our crowds will no longer be called to serve the New Science (Galileo, Bacon, etc.) that had hitherto promised to measure meaning, or to reduce meaning to a function of measurement—of mechanical control.  Knowledge would no longer stand as the conquest of a collectivity slavishly implementing a Universal Method (à la Descartes) to “frame” every single facet of our everyday life, but as the gift transmitted—and thereby translated—by very few divine poets to populations who would thereupon be called to repent, to return to a Good beyond all goods and to approach all goods, no longer as idols, as impostors, but as signs, pointers back to our own Good, perfection of our own being—ens perfectissimus.  Our new poets would then foster popular piety as a life of self-purification, in preparation for a “great conversion” to a dialogue open to the grounds of piety.

A poetry purging men of violent impulses against philosophy is a poetry forestalling the rise or consolidation of a cast of “scientific” intellectuals who make use of elements of philosophy to fuel violence, by re-grounding reason in the passions.  The new poetry will no longer remain ostensibly indifferent to the distinction between good and evil and so to the distinction between a natural articulation of reason and a devious one—between a candid, innocent one and a diabolical one (Vico called it the boria de’ Dotti: the intellectual flatulence of Doctors, the learned in doctrines).  Thus, will the new poetry invite only a pure philosophy, as opposed to a “scientific” or progressive hybrid of philosophy and resentment against philosophy—of logos and misology.

Unlike modern science, the philosophy undiluted with resentment against it does not aim at changing the world, but at understanding it, or, to be more precise, at entering into the intelligible sphere of reality (Platonism’s “world of ideas”), there where our daily problems stand open to thought, not driving us away from thought and into the arms of fear.

By way of bringing further into focus the distinction between our “scientific societies” and their “poetic” alternative, we could say that the latter’s poets are replaced, in the former, by an impersonal, mechanically implemented method, just as a “natural aristocracy” comes to be replaced by a market of experts whose expertise remains ineluctably a function of market forces.  And ineluctably do our experts leap from one market determination to another, reminiscent of butterflies flying from one flower to another, not trusting any poetic logos as telos.  What the technological market feeds us is as fetishistically opaque to truth as purely poetic creations are teleologically reflective of it, serving as signposts on the Calvary of logos—as Stations of a Cross, but also and ultimately as milestones of purification, as of the transubstantiation of fear-bound temptations into freedom-bound challenges.

In the light of heroic poetry freeing us from fear, evil is exposed as the freezing of logos (Dante’s Beelzebub), a nailing of logos to a cross, shutting the present—Aristotle’s nun as “pivot” of time—to eternity, thereby serving the cause of radical immanentism.  Heroic poetry responds by shattering the “gravestone” trapping logos underground as if it were but a corpse.  To further echo the Gospels, the logos shall rise again “in three days,” the completion of time (past, present, and future, for, as Aristotle reminds us, “three” can be understood as all).  When does the logos rise to eternity?  In the “now” (nun) in which present and future coincide; the now that is the moment in which eternity shines forth.  So, poetry liberates the now from the strictures imposed upon it by those who, not satisfied to foolishly deny eternity, impose their own will as filling the vacuum left upon eternity’s extradition.  No longer inhabited by the Beyond, the atheist’s “now” opens itself vilely to host eternity’s impostors.

What these imposters do not know, or what they pretend not to know, is that the now they suppose themselves to occupy, the now they shut to angelic eternity for the sake of opening it to a chasm of diabolical, orgiastic distractions, is poetry’s creation, the creation of a regal logos that, stretching out to eternity itself, discloses the now without ever being bound to it.  Upon being buried into the now, having lost its earthly shadow, poetry cannot but resurrect into the heavens; as Dante’s avatar at the end of the Florentine’s Comedy, catapulted by a bolt of divine lightning into the heavens of divine love.  Insofar as poetry is there for us, upon our forsaking it, it ascends back to the heights whence it has promised to return.

As Dante’s Comedy shows unambiguously, poetry “returns” in response to our fear in the face of a world brimming with evil, even as, upon its “Second Coming,” poetry is likely to appear at first with the might of a majestic Jove.  For where the betrayal of poetry has thrust us into a world of evil coinciding with poetry’s own absence, this absence crowded by myriads of monsters of the imagination fills us with a fear that, though prompting us to welcome poetry back into our lives, has already driven us into an abyss whence poetry can appear only far above us, as a hardly recognizable formidable Will.  There, even as it may appear to promise, or even as its appearance promises to rid our world of all monsters, poetry can at least help us face our monsters without fear, by helping us see them in a poetic context, or in the light of a poetic good.  The monsters we face daily are no longer scary once we turn to the good of poetry, the good that shows us repugnant ugliness as the mere byproduct of a betrayal of poetry, or of poetry’s living telos.  Accordingly, Dante’s Comedy does not situate pride at the bottom of our inferno, but betrayal, mother of all impostures.  It is only upon our betraying poetry’s way, thereby no longer trusting its hidden or “unseen” things (St. Paul), that we begin resting our hope on superficial or “seen” things, mortal things that cannot but disappoint us.  Whence our fear (and the pride that wants to conceal it); for in trusting the apparent, we no longer trust, but suspect that which lies behind it—and suspicion is one with fear.

Sailing on the boat led by logos, walking with logos over the waters of deadly worldly illusions, we no longer trust, nor fear “the seen”; for we tread a path unseen and untouched by the seen, namely the telos of logos.  And on that “path of reason” we are indifferent to the problem of pride, insofar as pride is a sin only for the vulgar who are still tied to vanity’s fueling betrayal of the Good.  Whence the commendable and most welcome help Christianity lends us as it rebuts prideful sinners by deflating egos in humility, preparing us to face the philosophical challenge of exposing all travesty, all imposture, lest this stain, as Boccaccio would acutely remind us, even the person and life of saints.

Philosophy reminds us that evil is here, as closure of “the now” (Aristotle’s nun), creative pivot of time, to its original openness and teleological bond to eternity.  This is tantamount to admitting that in the respect that the now stands constantly open to eternity, there is and can be no evil—none in the heavens of res ispae, of “things themselves”.  To (re)open the now, or the problem of the now, to eternity would be to invite its resurrection, its being “born again” on the way to heaven.  How is the now redeemed?  By our confessing, or drawing back within the arena of conversation, the sinfulness of the betrayal that had sentenced the now to obscurity.  There where we denounce the betrayal of the now’s original telos, as “first fault,” all of our sins are forgiven; for, no longer trusting the logos’ impostors severing the now from eternity, we naturally trust the logos itself as our own path of life, showing that it is our faith that saves us, as it draws us to the triumph of a logos unbound to any Will, least of all our own.

In the absence of any betrayal of philosophy, even pride is welcome, if only as ally of prudence, most notably insofar as philosophy in the hands of non-philosophers feeds into an evil imposture.  Whence the lingering need for Christianity, great enemy of “pagan” horrors, monstrosities, ugly distortions, or all evil impostures produced by betrayal.  That same Christianity announces that only in the living Word/Logos are we free from sin and so fearless in the face of evil.

What does it mean to face evil?  Not—reminds us Christianity—to “convert” it (as modern “science” would pretend to do in its neo-alchemic laboratories), but to rise above it, as we speak of evil only as the shadow over which it behooves us to forthwith lay the veil of pudor.  Knowing no regret in leaving evil’s fleshy world behind, the good Christian—the good man—does not flee problems as an evil, but meets them to rise with them above evil—and to restore problems for others, as guides and spheres of awakening.  The goal here is to meet problems “on higher ground,” not merely as abstract formulas, but as spiritual, meaningful spheres of awakening, including our own.  So that it makes sense to refer to problems as being alive, and to ourselves as eminent problems in our own right: living problems as the bread of life and life itself.  But then, vile, debased people deserve being addressed as debased problems, problems in the dark.  Whence the importance of Dante’s reminder in his Convivio that we ought to seek the company of noble people.  These are, as Dante’s “castle of nobility” (Inferno 4) shows most vividly, problems open to investigation, friends, not haters of thought.  Indeed, to echo Aristotle, we may say that “the friends of the Ideas” are none others than the Ideas (“permanent problems,” reminds us Leo Strauss) as friends, even and especially where noble spirits are met with dismay by all those for whom and in whom pride (and the impostures it sustains) remains the mask of a betrayal.  For when all is said and done, our first betrayal pertains to our divine humanity, to the heroism of what Vico would call our “natural aristocracy”.  Such, at any rate, is the admonition of Platonic poetry: we have abandoned heroism; we have betrayed the hero.  As the Gospels’ Judas, we have lost our own humanity and fallen into godless obscurity.  There thought yields to fear unto despair; what is alien to man eclipses what is proper to the human being understood as the place where thought awakens to itself—where thought turns to itself as good—or, to speak with Buddhists of old, where the lotus blooms, blowing out all obscurity; such being the proper meaning of nirvana.

Why should Christians still heed the counsel of pagans who merely seek God, given that with Christianity God has already found us?  Dante helps us see why, where he shows that Christianity’s God responds to pagan quests.  The implication is that the God who finds us aside from the pagan quest is not the true Christian God.  Are we then to conclude that pagan “seeking” constitutes our proper response to a divine call?  Is Christianity given providentially the task of reminding us of the ground or heart of the question?

The question itself strengthens us in the face of failed attempts to resolve it, if only in Nietzschean laughter.  Christianity sustains our response to its modern detractors, by suggesting that there will be a Great Laughter once all masks (impostures) come off.  In this valley of tears that we call our world, however, we live best by enjoying only the signs of the last laughter.  It is the signs, not the laughter, that make our life livable.

The signs of our divine end offer no mere consolation to those who are found and thereby chosen as seekers, as by a thought that, having spanned across infinity, reaches out to finitude.  Are we, our “selves,” the finite places thought lands upon, only to rise back to infinity?  Do we as “selves” emerge by any other agency?  Are we ourselves the signs of infinity’s presence, of thought’s entering into “this world” as the master key to its constitution?  What would such a case teach us about what life truly is, or of how we ought to live?  That we ought to crave replacing thought in the universe of its determinations?  Or, that libido dominandi, “the thirst to replace the Lord (Dominus)” is but a brutish imposture of a life that is true in the act of tending back to—of seeking gratefully—its inexhaustible interiority?

We speak of life, now, against the grain of those Frankenstein’s wanting to derive the animate from the inanimate.  How life enters into the inanimate we can say no more than Dante can define “the point” through which the poet enters into his world (Inferno 1.10-11).  What counts is rising out of the dominion of the inanimate, to discover life—anima—in and of itself.  This, the poet can achieve and help us achieve by living in the medium of a speech manifesting life unobstructed by obscurity, in the very act of exposing obscurity as the divine recesses of thought itself.

Notes

[1] Cf. e.g., 1 Corinthians 1.20 and Colossians 2.8.

[2] C.S. Lewis, “Talking About Bicycles” (1946), in Present Concerns.  Edited by Walter Hooper.  San Diego: Harcourt, 1986; 67-72.  See also Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.

[3] See my “Epistemology’s Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico,” in Telos, 185 (Winter 2018): 105-27.

[4] Cf. Leo Strauss, “The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates: Six Public Lectures” [1970], Interpretation, 23.2 (Winter 1996): 127-208; and “Two Lectures,” Interpretation 22.3 (Spring 1995): 301-38.

[5] Pp. 182-83 of Leo Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates: Five Lectures,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss.  Edited by Thomas L. Pangle.  Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1989: “The Problem of Socrates: Five Lectures”: 182-83.

[6] See my “Christianity and Philosophy in Dante,” in Mediaevalia, Vol. 42 (2021): 143-86.

[7] See my “Humanisme et mystère dans la philosophie de Pic de la Mirandole,” in Dogma: revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines, Vol. 14 (Winter 2021): 8-38.

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