[In the following favorable review of Faith and Political Philosophy, Schall contends that “it would be difficult to find a more profound and stimulating book covering the whole history and understanding of faith and reason in Western intellectual history.”]

This book [Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voeglin, 1934-1964] is of fundamental importance in political philosophy as well as in theology, philosophy itself, and history. The fact that it lacks an Index is unconscionable. The book consists of some one hundred six pages of precious correspondence between Strauss and Voegelin, plus a reprinting of Strauss's famous essays “Jerusalem and Athens” and “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” with Voegelin's “The Gospel and Culture” and “Immortality: Experience and Symbol.” To complete these essays and letters are perceptive, often brilliant, essays by James Wiser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Timothy Fuller, Ellis Sandoz, Thomas Pangle, and David Walsh. It would be difficult to find a more profound and stimulating book covering the whole history and understanding of faith and reason in Western intellectual history.

Strauss and Voegelin are, more than anyone else in this century, responsible for reinvigorating and deepening political philosophy as a means to confront and understand the meaning of our times. Both were German exiles from World War II who lived in the United States and devoted themselves to understanding what had happened in modernity in Europe and what was happening in the United States. Both recognized that a return to the classical Greek and Biblical origins of our civilization was necessary for grasping what the crisis was about and for curing it. Both agreed that modernity had taken a wrong road that resulted in ideologies and systems at war with the human spirit.

The seriousness with which both Voegelin and Strauss took their studies cannot be overestimated. This seriousness, itself reflective of the Platonic eros towards truth, was free enough to recognize that revelation could not be left aside in an estimation of the meaning and direction of our times. Few, if any, modern universities are so free, which is why both authors are treated with great reserve in them. On the other hand, both Strauss and Voegelin were fiercely philosophical as a way of life and as a search for the ground of being.

This correspondence is spare. Several of the commentators have taken great efforts to understand its import and the reasons why it did not proceed further. Wiser thinks that they are simply incompatible. Others opt for one or the other thinker. David Walsh, in a remarkable essay, has sought to resolve their differences, differences that each commentator realizes is a question posed by their correspondence. In so many ways, the correspondence itself, read in the light of the essays and commentaries, is simply gripping. One has to lack a soul not to realize that here we approach, haltingly, the ultimate things.

Strauss was a Jew, remarkably learned in both Jewish theology and Greek knowledge, who opted, by virtue of his own theory, for philosophy. He recognized, however, that philosophy itself could not exclude revelation, could not neglect Jerusalem. (Strauss's relation to Rome is abidingly enigmatic, as is Voegelin's). For Strauss, the vitality of Western civilization included both revelation and reason and their irresolvability.

Voegelin was a Christian, though of a peculiar denominational sort. He sought to overcome the distinction of reason and revelation to include, on the basis of experience, the possibility of an intimate and ordered relationship between Judaism, Christianity, the other religions, and philosophy in its various manifestations. Voegelin saw modernity to be the result of the attempt to make revelation into a this-worldly project through doctrine, one which finally leads to the ideologies of our time. Political movements, thus, have philosophical and theological origins.

In the correspondence, both thinkers, though wary, are respectful of each other and, at the same time, precise and accurate. Each recognized in the other a philosophic friend and, at some level, a possible theoretic adversary. This book rightly includes the major essays of Voegelin and Strauss on the topic of reason and revelation to enable the reader to see the pertinence of their correspondence, something the commentaries seek further to clarify. The book, in short, is exciting and profound.

One cannot help but be conscious of the caution towards Catholic argumentation in both writers. All the commentators are aware of the Jewish and Christian elements in them, though no one remarked on the related Islamic question, most present in Strauss. Voegelin began his essay on “The Gospel and Culture” with a citation from the Dutch Catechism, itself a most flawed work in many ways. One cannot help but wonder how he would have reacted to Le Cathéchisme de l'Eglise Catholique, a far superior and more brilliantly “dogmatic” work.

Voegelin's systematic opposition to “dogmatism” seems at times to misunderstand the very purpose of the human intellect itself, in its very reception of revelation and reason, to seek to understand and formulate what it has received from both sources. In this sense, Strauss himself, rightly I think, claims to be more “Catholic” than Voegelin.

What seems clear from the work of both authors, however, is that political philosophy has been at the forefront of the meaning of revelation in modern times. Theologians, philosophers, and scientists have all in their own ways failed to grasp how their disciplines have contributed to the “modern project,” to the attempt of man to explain himself only by himself, which, as Strauss said, has been the chief meaning of the disorders of modernity. This correspondence is a trumpet call from the political philosophers to theologians, scientists, philosophers, and historians to wake up, to attend to the real origins and meanings of the disorders of modernity that have arisen from a failure to understand reason and revelation.