As I complained before, I can’t seem to get things to stick in threads from my laptop.

So Ralph asks: Am I more Voegelinian or more Straussian? Am I way existential or way political? Well, I have no idea what it means to be Voegelinian; I don’t even speak Voegelianese. It’s very hard to know what Strauss’s “bottom line” is, and certainly Straussians seem to disagree. My objection to Strauss, maybe, is that, deep down, he follows “classical political philosophy” by denying any foundational status to personality or individuality. For him, philosophy is getting over yourself, learning how to die, overcoming the illusions of personal significance — even those intertwined with eros — in the progress toward a kind of transerotic solitude.

Straussians often think in terms of “the city and man.” There’s the civic excellence of the good citizen and statesman, and there’s the natural excellence of the philosopher. But I follow, for the most part, the third way of the personal logos as found in the writings of the early Church Fathers (see the excellent work of Ratzinger). The basic Christian insight really did authoritatively discredit both natural theology (the god of the philosophers) and civil theology (the gods of the city). The Romans often mistook the Christians for atheists because they, like Socrates, denied the real existence of a theological foundation of the political community. The modern philosophers, who denied the real existence of the personal Creator the Christians describe, still accepted and “secularized” (if you want) the denial of natural and civil theology (for Locke, we free individuals are not parts of nature or the city). For Strauss, modern philosophy is, in that respect, infused with Christian presuppositions about the irreducible status of personal identity. (Rousseau wanted to both restore civil theology and radicalize authentic personal identity — and boy did that misbegotten effort screw up the world.) Strauss’s denial of any truth to the so-called secularization theory is obviously “exoteric” and contradicted by many particular sentences in, say, Natural Right and History. If the project of Strauss is to restore civic theology and/or natural theology, he and his followers are in the process of failing.

The characteristic modern heresy — found even or especially in modern philosophers — is that it’s possible to be personal without being relational. But being relational doesn’t mean, at the deepest level, being political or even being familial. The personal love that connects husband and wife and parents and children has a very deep status in Christianity as characteristics of beings made in the image of the personal, relational God. But for Christians — as opposed to, say, Mormons — family life as we now experience it does not survive our biological demise, although our personal, embodied being does. The real but imperfect love of human beings for each other is “relativized” somewhat by the perfect transparency of each of us before the God who made each of us in particular and sees and loves each of us just as he or she is. Obviously, the big difference between Thomas Aquinas and both Maimonides and Locke has to do with that particular providence.

So, for Ralph, orthodox Christianity is too “existential.” But surely so too is “the philosophic experience” described or popularized by Straussian Allan Bloom — focused as it is on death as personal extinction and singularly living the truth about the lack of difference between particular persons and particular leaves. But orthodox Christianity, being all about the equality of all relational persons under God, is a long distance from Kantian autonomy, as it is from the thought of one existentialist that hell is other people. And obviously we Thomists agree with Ralph that we come to the universal truth through the particular loving and “character forming” experiences of being embedded in communities. Logos, after all, is personal; it is a characteristic of a well-formed relational person, and not of a mind or a body or even a mixture of mind and body. But we don’t forget that the church is more foundational than and quite distinct from the city.

Overall, Ralph seems to be more political and more familial than both Christians and Straussians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There may well be a lot right about it, at least as a way of challenging us to think radically about who we are.

Don’t take any of these ramblings too seriously. I’m too tired to read them over, and this is only a blog, after all.