Spinoza's Critique of Religion

by Leo Strauss, Elsa M. Sinclair (Translator)

Leo Strauss articulates the conflict between reason and revelation as he explores Spinoza's scientific, comparative, and textual treatment of the Bible. Strauss compares Spinoza's Theologico-political Treatise and the Epistles, showing their relation to critical controversy on religion from Epicurus and Lucretius through Uriel da Costa and Isaac Peyrere to Thomas Hobbes.

Strauss's autobiographical Preface, traces his dilemmas as a young liberal intellectual in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as a scholar in exile, and as a leader of American philosophical thought.

"[For] those interested in Strauss the political philosopher, and also those who doubt whether we have achieved the 'final solution' in respect to either the character of political science or the problem of the relation of religion to the state." — Journal of Politics

"A substantial contribution to the thinking of all those interested in the ageless problems of faith, revelation, and reason." — Kirkus Reviews

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago. His contributions to political science include The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, The City and the Man, What is Political Philosophy?, and Liberalism Ancient and Modern.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Politics, Nonfiction

334 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Leo Strauss was a 20th century German-American scholar of political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss authored books on Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, and articles on Maimonides and Al-Farabi. In the late 1930s, his research focused on the texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraging the application of those ideas to contemporary political theory.

Reviews

[Zelai Xu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think both Cohen and Strauss didn't take Spinoza seriously/literally enough, as old Strauss admitted in the preface. The real addressee of both Cohen and Strauss, however, is Moses Mendelssohn.

[Jeff Samuelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too technical for me and also not fair criticism of some of Spinoza’s views.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book on the day that the long-awaited and much-redacted Mueller Report was finally released to the American public and world media--of all days! There does seem to be some justice (I dare not call it poetic since I love poetry) in that coincidence, given Strauss' comments in the appendix on Carl Schmitt's Der Begriff Des Politischen on the impetus of modern liberalism to convert politics into another species of entertainment. Strauss contrasts Spinoza's thought with the likes of Calvin, Maimonides, Epicurus, and others, but the thinker whose shadow looms largest over Spinoza's work is that of Hobbes. Sometimes Strauss' chains of reasonings are painfully hard to follow, but in the end he seems to cede the laurel to Spinoza on the grounds that he understood in a way that Hobbes did not that for many human beings the yearning to live free is greater than the will to live simpliciter (somewhat reminiscent of Nietzsche's dictum "man would rather will nothingness than not will"). Throughout the book though there is the suspicion voiced by Strauss that Spinoza may after all not really understand the impetus to faith and orthodoxy espoused by Maimonides, though the ground of that suspicion seems only to be revealed in the little essay on Schmitt, a ground that dare not speak its own name in the case of the orthodox, and that is the belief that a humanity rendered so blissfully pacific and harmless as the politics of a Spinoza would have it would be a humanity whose destruction one might long for as a release and cure for boredom. In the end I thus found Nietzsche's shadow, though he is only named once or twice, to be even more of a looming presence than that of Hobbes.

[Frater · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. Interesting how he sets out to refute not just Orthodox Judaism and Christianity, but also the Kalam/Mu'tazalite argument of the equality of reason and revealed religion as equal paths to God.