In his Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green newly configures the approach taken to the age-old problem of reason and revelation by the towering 12th-century philosopher Moses Maimonides and by his 20th-century interpreter Leo Strauss. Daniel Rynhold writes in his review:
Modern thought, Green argues, has approached religion by either refuting it or “claiming to contain it in versions of rational moralism,” which amounts “merely to [putting] it to sleep by attempting to . . . repress or deny the deeper conflict in the soul of each human being.” . . . As [Friedrich] Nietzsche had before him, Strauss recognized “the frailty of reason as a substitute for religion in political life, never mind what its absence from morality and psychology yields as an access to the human soul.” But while Nietzsche’s response to the threat of nihilism called on man to fill the vacuum himself, . . . Strauss came to understand through his study of Maimonides that Nietzsche’s post-religious nihilism could only be avoided through a return to revelation. . . .
For Green’s Strauss, the key to Maimonidean wisdom is the view that the dialectic between Jerusalem and Athens defines Western civilization; the modernist attempt to dissolve that tension ignores the centrality and power of the religious impulse for human endeavor. . . . Thus . . . Strauss echoes a number of modern Jewish philosophers . . . in thinking that “a balance of forces and a dynamic tension is healthier in the mind than a single dominant view or form of thought in complete control,” and it is in his unearthing of the hidden Maimonides that Strauss discovers the way to navigate this necessary tension. Green’s Strauss is not, therefore, a cynical atheist—and neither is his Maimonides.
Read more on Notre Dame: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/61780-leo-strauss-and-the-rediscovery-of-maimonides/