Newspaper Reader wonders about the toxic mythology of esotericism.
Jan 18, 2025
3. Esotericism
Strauss’s claims about esotericism ought to be understood within the broader trajectory of his life’s work. Such an approach is in fact in keeping with Strauss’s own recommendation for how to read philosophical texts, esoteric or otherwise. According to Strauss, an interpretation of a given text must begin “from an exact consideration of the explicit statements of an author.” However, “The context in which a statement occurs…must be perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can reasonably claim to be adequate or even correct” (PAW, p. 130). Turning to the context of Strauss’s claims about esotericism helps to unravel a number of other important themes in his work, including what he calls the “theologico-political predicament of modernity,” the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, and the relation between revelation and philosophy (what Strauss also calls “Jerusalem and Athens”).
In his first published contention that Maimonides is an esoteric writer, Strauss self-consciously examines what it means to write about an esoteric text. Clearly referring to himself, Strauss writes:
No historian who has a sense of decency and therefore a sense of respect for a superior man such as Maimonides will disregard light-heartedly the latter’s emphatic entreaty not to explain the secret teaching of the Guide. It may fairly be said that an interpreter who does not feel pangs of conscience when attempting to explain that secret teaching and perhaps when perceiving for the first time its existence and bearing lacks that closeness to the subject which is indispensable for the true understanding of any book. Thus the question of adequate interpretation of the Guide is primarily a moral one. (PAW, p. 55)
Strauss maintains that before attempting to answer the question of whether a secret teaching, only hinted at in the text, can be grasped with confidence and precision, it is necessary to consider the moral implications as well as the moral impetus of a writer willing to write about such a secret. In making this claim, Strauss aligns his own dilemma with Maimonides’ dilemma and by so doing he points to the basic motivation that directs his own claims about esotericism. The question is thus twofold: why did Maimonides write the Guide in the first place and why does Strauss write about esoteric writing? In answering the first question, Strauss notes that the literary form of the Guide is a letter to Maimonides’ gifted student Joseph, who, like many Jews of Maimonides’ time, was traveling in far and distant lands: “Joseph’s departure was a consequence of his being a Jew in the Diaspora. Not a private need but only an urgent necessity of nation-wide bearing can have driven Maimonides to transgress an explicit prohibition [to write about esoteric matters]. Only the necessity of saving the law can have caused him to break the law” (PAW, p. 49).
If this is Maimonides’ reason, what is Strauss’s? Strauss is willing to make the seemingly immoral and indecent move of revealing the secrets of an esoteric text in order to save those secrets. The secret that Strauss seeks to save is insight into the political, philosophical, and theological meaning of what he calls “a forgotten type of writing.” But why does Strauss care about this forgotten type of writing? We can only answer this question by looking to Strauss’s published work as a whole and to the place of Persecution and the Art of Writing within this whole and to do so it is necessary to understand Strauss’s most basic question, which concerns what he calls the “theologico-political predicament of modernity.”
A Myth about a Myth: or free imaginative variation!
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