Understandably, many take Leo Strauss’s essay, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” as an important entrepôt for his thinking about esoteric communication. This essay, written originally in 1941, begins with a description of the chilling political moment:
In a considerable number of countries which, for about a hundred years, have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of public discussion, that freedom is now suppressed and replaced by a compulsion to coordinate speech with such views as the government believes to be expedient, or holds in all seriousness. It may be worth our while to consider briefly the effect of that compulsion, or persecution, on thoughts as well as actions. A large section of the people, probably the great majority of the younger generation, accepts the government-sponsored views as true, if not at once at least after a time.
Further down, he elaborates on the power of government to establish its own kind of truth:
[Many ordinary human beings] would admit, as a matter of course, that man can lie and does lie. But they would add that lies are short-lived and cannot stand the test of repetition—let alone constant repetition–and that therefore a statement that is constantly repeated and never contradicted must be true. Another line of argument maintains that a statement made by an ordinary person may be a lie, but the truth of a statement made by a responsible and respected man, and therefore particularly by a man in a highly responsible or exalted position, is morally certain. These two enthymemes lead to the conclusion that a statement which is constantly repeated by the head of the government and never contradicted is a truth of at least the second power. This implies that in the countries concerned all those whose thinking does not follow the rules of logica equina, in other words, all those capable of truly independent thinking cannot be brought to accept the government-sponsored views. These people may be called, in the absence of a better term, the intelligent minority, to distinguish them from such groups as the intelligentsia.[1]
Strauss’s prose is somewhat infamous, and the reader can see why. What I take Strauss to be saying exoterically, in short, is that propaganda works. Governments and their officeholders (especially now in the midst of WWII) have the power set a kind of “truth” for the broader society. Much of this is too nebulous to really put to the test: is this actually how Western public opinion operated during the war? I note with curiosity what one of Strauss’s contemporaries said on this same subject in 1944:
In the last few years I have spent a great many hours in third-class railway carriages (or corridors) crowded with servicemen. . . . I found that nearly all these men disbelieved without hesitation everything that the newspapers said about German cruelties in Poland. They did not think the matter worth discussion: they said the one word “Propaganda” and passed on. This did not shock me: what shocked me was the complete absence of indignation. They believe that their rulers are doing what I take to be the most wicked of all actions—sowing the seeds of future cruelties by telling lies about cruelties that were never committed. But they feel no indignation: it seems to them the sort of procedure one would expect. This, I think, is disheartening. But the picture as a whole is not disheartening. It demands a drastic revision of our beliefs. We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of their favourite newspapers are the intelligentsia. It is they who read leading articles: the poor read the sporting news, which is mostly true. Whether you like this situation or not depends on your views. It is certainly hard on you if you are a Planner or a man with any panacea that demands a nation of united enthusiasts. . . . If you are not a Planner, you may feel that this immovable scepticism, this humour, this disillusioned patience . . . is no very bad basis for national life.[2]
In other words, some other capable intellects would have sharply contested Strauss’s assessment of the modern demos and its situation in one of those “formerly-free” countries. According to Lewis, Strauss’s description held true to some extent but mainly for the educated classes. While they both admired Plato, Lewis has a peculiar confidence in the British hoi polloi’s horse sense to shrug off propaganda; Strauss seems to look instead to a select few intellectuals.
In charity to Strauss, his temperature-taking in 1941 is more of an imaginative setup for the main meat of his plea on behalf of reading esoterically. He rightly goes on to point out that, even in environments hostile to truth and free thinking, compulsion, coordination, or “persecution” cannot really stop independent thought, nor can it stop heterodox authors from “writing between the lines”: of communicating their real message cleverly beyond the meaning of the bare words on the page. Here, Strauss suggests that the best—perhaps the only—preparation to catch this kind of communication is to study ancient rhetoricians.[3]
For my part, having studied some of that rhetoric, I don’t think Strauss’s case is completely ridiculous at heart—even if his essay is perhaps not entirely fair to the art of history as a discipline (and I might include classics in here as well.)[4] At the same time, I think Strauss’s case about persecution—particularly in his tendency to syncopate modern democracies, totalitarian states, and ancient societies—is overstated. Roman emperors, for instance, were not like some modern Gestapo or Wilsonian Committee on Public Information; they were neither all that capable or even willing most of the time to recreate the tightly-wound, homogenous social environment that facilitated Socrates’ death.
In fact, the Roman expectation was that philosophers in particular were permitted and expected to speak their mind, especially to the emperor: parrhesia, “freedom of speech.” To be sure, there are plenty of examples where censorship or persecution kicked in, and not all philosophers were safe all the time before certain emperors, but these cases are counterbalanced by other instances where an author was clearly not too afraid to speak bluntly, such as Procopius vis-à-vis Justinian. Or at other times, imperial authorities do not seem especially zealous to make everyone toe a strict social line. Ancient societies, in other words, were variegated, and I rather doubt most intellectuals in antiquity worried much about saying what they actually thought on most days. Remember, the ancient world may have executed Socrates and Jesus, but it also produced not a few Euhemerists, too.
Lewis’s remarks should make us ask whether Strauss may have also exaggerated modern homogeneity. His complaints about “history” and historicism notwithstanding, Strauss’s apparent conflation of radically different cultures and constitutions simply strike me as sweeping, overly hasty analysis speeding along to throw a subtler social dynamic in high relief. Put differently, we can mark the overgeneralization and still grant some underlying truth to the notion of social pressure and an adaptive rhetoric.[5] Altogether, the kind of social givens Strauss asserts in the opening of “Persecution and the Art of Writing” just seems like a reductionist move, one which may limit how readily we apply Strauss’s model.
When I made this point to a respected teacher who knows Strauss’s oeuvre much better than I and greatly admires his thinking, he suggested that my spotting these patently “bad arguments” in the essay indicated Strauss was writing esoterically here as well: the unpersuasive reasoning was the trail of intellectual breadcrumbs. Whither it leads, my teacher did not say. If he was right—if Strauss’s writing was “esotericism” all the way down—that does seem to raise a host of new hermeneutical problems, not least that some of the more common interpretations of him (even by his defenders) may be wrong. This approach would also seem to place Strauss on a pedestal, where he almost might be above making bad arguments.
Or perhaps, bedazzled by his abstruse intellect, I am simply mistaken through and through. For those of us in this predicament, we may have to content ourselves with the masters who speak in the light what was said in darkness and proclaim on the rooftops what was said behind closed doors.
See Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8, no. 4 (1941), 488-9. ↑
C. S. Lewis, “Private Bates,” The Spectator, December 29, 1944. ↑
Strauss, 490. ↑
Strauss’s sweeping criticism of history reminds one of how later postmodern and social scientific theories often exaggerate the blindness of scholars in prior ages. “Our predecessors were wretchedly blind to these crucial subtexts, whereas we with our new Promethean tools can see.” As one cranky medievalist observed, however, this maneuver isn’t really fair. Although it lacked “theory,” older scholarship knew very well such textual subtleties existed: spotting them was what made for good, critical reading. Roger Collins, “Making Sense of the Early Middle Ages,” The English Historical Review 124, no. 508 (2009): 641–65. ↑
Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). As a kind of translator and apologist for Strauss’s position on esotericism, I find Melzer’s arguments fairly reasonable in most instances, but I also think the composite picture is more attenuated than Strauss and some of his more ardent admirers let on. There’s a difference between full-blooded esotericism and rhetorical gamesmanship. Certainly, many ancient observers themselves could have pointed out the rhetorical difference between the communication of, say, the gnostics and a Vergil. The Christianity of the “Great Church” also seems to fit into the Straussian schema poorly (as far as I can make sense of it): a premodern movement that openly and sharply criticized the host society to the point of inviting martyrdom while also stressing that its “good news” or kerygma was meant to be made public. ↑