Disturbing Proximity

Abstract

Disturbing Proximity William H. F. Altman John J. Ranieri. Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 272. Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 254. John J. Ranieri. Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 272. Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 254. It is certainly not the thematic proximity of these two well-researched and thought-provoking books that disturbs: they complement each other in many useful ways, creating in the process a whole greater than its parts.1 One aspect of this overlap is methodological: Lazier is an intellectual historian while Ranieri's field is philosophy. But the more important factor is that while both books are in large measure devoted to Leo Strauss, Ranieri never mentions either Hans Jonas or Gershom Scholem—the other two members of Lazier's triad of interwar German Jewish intellectuals—while Lazier never discusses Eric Voegelin, with whom Ranieri links Strauss.2 Given the primary importance of Gnosticism in Lazier's book—along with Pantheism it is one of two modern heresies under consideration there3—his decision not to consider Voegelin becomes less jarring in the context of Ranieri. In the meantime, Ranieri's [End Page 292] failure to discuss key figures like Jonas, Scholem, and Karl Barth makes Lazier an indispensable historical corrective along the way. It is rather the pervasive proximity of an uninvited guest to this rich intellectual banquet that is disturbing. As long as anti-Semitism is considered an adventitious or merely expedient element of National Socialism, itself understood as little more than collective stupidity,4 it can, of course, be safely excluded from serious discussion both of contemporaneous thinkers who regarded Old Testament Revelation as "disturbing" and interwar German heresies whereby God was "interrupted." But if, as Strauss famously claimed, National Socialism "had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews,"5 it must be considered in an intellectual context as well as a Jewish one. Strauss's friend Jacob Klein pointed in this direction when he called National Socialism "Judaism without God."6 It turns out that there is a disturbing proximity between Klein's astute analysis of National Socialism and the four German-born thinkers considered in these two books.7 The only serious flaw in Ranieri's treatment of Strauss is his claim that "the Second Cave" is an attempt to outflank Christianity but not Judaism (pp. 23–24).8 But Ranieri is miles ahead of Strauss's apologists who read the Second Cave as a critique of historicism rather than Revelation.9 [End Page 293] Despite his repeated and perfectly appropriate insistence on the illegitimacy of Strauss's "silence with regard to the New Testament" (p. 173, also 11–13), Ranieri overlooks the anti-Jewish implications of Strauss's post-Platonic image of the recovery of "natural ignorance" (p. 24)10 through a Nietzsche-inspired (p. 24)11 emancipation from the tradition of Revelation.12 It is interesting to ponder exactly why an anti-Christian Strauss should be so much more palatable than an anti-Jewish version.13 But for someone who once accepted14—and never subsequently repudiated—the truth of Nietzsche's claims about the Jewish origins of Christianity,15 Strauss's obvious anti-Christianity doesn't ipso facto disprove the hypothesis of his covert anti-Judaism. The most important contribution Ranieri makes to the understanding of Strauss is likewise connected to this Christian orientation. Ranieri's readings of "Jerusalem and Athens," "Progress or Return?," and "On the Interpretation of Genesis" (pp. 115–24) are competent and often insightful, but his treatment of On Tyranny (and related documents)16 is magisterial. Ranieri begins by revealing that charity is the unlikely villain in Strauss's intellectual universe.17 By replacing the self-affirming and autonomous "admiration" of the classics with an other-dependent "love,"18 "the triumph of the biblical orientation"19 undermines all that is [End Page...