Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism is an important contribution to the study of Camus and the disciplines of religion, philosophy, literature, and political theory. In addition to offering a fresh and literal translation of this neglected but critically important work by Camus, Ron Srigley also provides an introduction that places the work in the context of Camus’ life and thought. Srigley also reviews the scholarship on Christian Metaphysics and shows how his translation and interpretation of the book fit into this literature. The book concludes with an epilogue with Rémi Brague that takes issue with Camus’ account of Christianity. For those who read and study Camus, and even for those who do not, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism is required reading as an entry point to one of the most original and influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Srigley’s translation of Camus’ Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism is the second one in the English language. The first translation is Joseph McBride’s version which was published in 1992. According to Srigley, his translation aims at more literalness than McBride’s because:

“. . . a faithful translation will not try to smooth over the bits that jar or seem unfamiliar, but allow them to stand in order to test the reader’s patience and stretch his imagination in the hope that some unsuspected corner of the original text might be revealed” (12-13).

Besides being more literal, Srigley’s translation expands on McBride’s clarification of Camus’ biblical citations by tracking down Camus’ other unidentified sources and offers proper titles and references for them. Srigley also shows in his notes how the ideas and arguments of Christian Metaphysics unfold in Camus’ subsequent works, revealing the importance of this book for Camus’ mature thought.

Finally, McBride’s translation does not present Christian Metaphysics in the broader context of Camus’ works or explain its influence on them. Srigley corrects this fault not only by offering an informative introduction about Camus’ life and thought and the critical role that Christian Metaphysics plays in them but also by providing a review of the scholarship on this work: McBride’s interprets the work in the context of Camus’ idea of the absurd; I. H. Walker explores Camus’ use of Plotinus’ Enneads; Jacques Hardré looks at the argument and structure of Christian Metaphysics; and Paul Archambault explores the book as a way to understand and judge the character of Camus’ Greek culture.

In his introduction, Srigley illustrates his points of agreement and disagreement with these interpretations. For Srigley, the book is significant because it shows Camus’ abiding concern with the relationship between Christianity and Classical Greek Civilization that appears in his later works. Although Christian Metaphysics was Camus’ thesis for his university degree, its theme was revisited by Camus throughout his career: the relationship between Christianity and Greek civilization.

The first chapter, “Evangelical Christianity,” examines biblical texts and the works of the early Church Fathers to demonstrate the novelty of Christianity in relation to the classical world. Camus explores Gnosticism in the second chapter, “Gnosis,” where he argues that Gnosticism was not an exclusively Christian phenomenon but rather an attempt by both pagan and Christian thinkers to reconcile reason with the belief of salvation. The next chapter, “Mystic Reason,” analyzes Plotinus’ Enneads, in which reason and salvation are reconciled within the tradition of Greek philosophy.

The final chapter, “Augustine,” argues that Augustine’s Christian synthesis of Hellenism and the Gospels was more successful than that of the Gnostics because he relied upon Plotinus’ work. By conceiving reason as participatory, Plotinus made Greek reason more acceptable to the Christian faith. Augustine, in turn, used this understanding of reason to make Christianity more suitable to Greek and Roman pagans. The result was a Christian metaphysics that had a universal appeal in the Mediterranean world.

For Camus, the great novelty of Christianity is not faith because faith only shields Christian beliefs from criticism but rather the Christian notion of apocalyptic history and a final redemption in the afterlife. This belief in the apocalypse expresses a tragic sensibility in which the Christian embraces his or her mortality in the hope of redemption. Yet this path to redemption also empties the world of meaning, unlike the Greeks who recognized the divine but also the significance that the world possesses. Throughout Christian Metaphysics, Camus approaches each tradition from the other perspective and points out their assumptions and contradictions. Thus, Christian Metaphysics was the first step in Camus’ intellectual journey, a journey that culminates in mature works like The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus, in which Camus returns to an exploration of the relationships between Christianity, Greek Civilization, and modernity.

Srigley argues that in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is critical of the Christian and modern apocalyptic aspirations which he formulated as the absurd. Yet without a sense of the apocalyptic, the absurd descends into nihilism, making morality groundless and therefore meaninglessness. Throughout The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus alternates between the position of rejecting apocalyptic aspirations and recognizing their importance as a measure of truth. These contradictions continue in The Rebel, where, according to Srigley, the two histories of antiquity are presented and contradict each other: the Greek and the Christian. For the Greeks, modernity and Christianity are one and the same, and therefore hope only resides in Greek Civilization as an alternative to modernity; for the Christian, its religion is the most effective alternative to modernity because it is the only tradition to have overcome the metaphysical rebellion and the problems of evil and death on which modernity rests.

Rémi Brague contributes his own thoughts about Christian Metaphysics in the Epilogue (translated into English by Srigley). Brague criticizes Camus’ analysis of Christianity because Christ “is paradoxically conspicuously absent” in the work (136). Brague claims that Camus’ failure to incorporate the person into his analysis makes Christian Metaphysics a flawed work. For Brague, the person is the one who is able to synthesize the insights of both Christianity and Greek Civilization, a concept that Camus neglects.

It might be a little unfair to criticize Camus for not addressing the concept of person in a work with the word “metaphysics” in its title, but Brague’s critique provides an interesting entry point to interpret the work in relation to the others in Camus’ oeuvre: is it best to demonstrate the development of an author’s work from his or her early works and those that come later, or is do we demonstrate the deficiencies of the early works from the vantage point of the mature ones? Which account best reveals the author’s thoughts and his or her development? I do not claim to know the answer to these questions, but the fact that Camus’ early work provokes them is a testament to the originality of his thought and the enduring influence he has on thinkers today.

originally published in the Voegelin View in 2015

The post Camus’ Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Strangely, Strauss appears to be more of a modern than a classicist in his understanding of nature as a forerunner to positivism. According to Brague, the concept of nature underwent a transformation that not only banished divinity from itself but also expelled divinity from the concept of law. The modern period is characterized as a period where humans became fully autonomous in their ethical, economic, and political actions. The law no longer required divinity: it was legislated by and for human beings.

Mathematics, and to a lesser extent, the natural sciences, became the model of causality and, later of nature itself. For Brague, Descartes was the first thinker who sought to understand nature as a mathematical entity: nature was conceived of as laws instead of rights (LG, 234). The law of nature was one of motion without telos: there was no prime mover with which nature sought unity (LG, 234).27 With the rise of “scientific law” mathematical physics, both the concepts of nature and law moved away from an Aristotelian ontology to a scientific causality. By the time of the sixteenth century, the law was understood as natural in the sense it was a type of motion that was neither violent nor accidental; as Hooker wrote, “That which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working, the same we tearmed a Lawe” (LG, 235).

Coinciding with the change in the concept of nature was the change in the concept of divinity. Descartes still required a God for his law of nature to work, but it was a God characterized by its omnipotence rather than by its teleology: “The lawgiver of nature is freed from His own laws” (LG, 235). Descartes asserted that “it is God who has established the laws of nature [as eternal mathematical truths], as a King establishes laws in his Kingdom,” with such a law of nature “inborn in our minds, as a king would establish law in the hearts of his subjects if he had power enough to do so” (LG, 235). The law of God therefore was the law of nature, making the normative and the descriptive one and the same, but removing nature’s teleological drive towards the divine.

By the time of Hobbes, the law of nature still was the law of God, but it had become plural. This shift from the singular to the plural removed the notion of a universal order and was replaced by a universal science of constant and observable relations. This new science no longer searched for causes or, as Auguste Comte wrote, “the inaccessible determination of causes—that is, for the constant relations that exist between observable phenomena” (LG, 235). God was re-conceived as the clock-maker deity and eventually became superfluous to any claim to observe the regularities that exist in nature. The notion of the “laws” of nature was replaced in the nineteenth century by mathematical equations or vaguely-formed principles. Nature thus was no longer understood as the general laws of God, whether singular or plural, but as a phenomenon of uniform motion that was regular, observable, and ultimately purposeless.

Law in the strict sense was no longer conceived of as natural and, therefore, was entirely human, as Spinoza claimed: a law is “a prescribed rule of conduct (ratio vivendi) that man prescribes for himself or that he prescribes for others with some aim in mind” (LG, 238). Montesquieu continued in Spinoza’s footsteps with his Esprit des lois, where he remarked, “Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things. Law in the general is human reason insofar as it governs all people of earth” (LG, 238–9). The law was entirely a human invention. If there were any association of divinity attached to the law, it was the result of clever people; as Montesquieu wrote, “Any law, without which [society] could not exist, becomes by that token a divine law” (LG, 240). Earlier, Machiavelli had made a similar observation about how civil authority required divine authority regardless of its truth. The divine was the recourse of clever people who wanted to establish laws that went beyond what was commonly accepted. Although the law was not divine, it still needed divinity not because it was true but rather because it provided the foundational legitimacy for the state (LG, 240).28

According to Brague, Austin was the last example of one who resorted to a notion of divinity to support his theory of legislation. In The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, Austin asserted that “the divine law is the measure or test of positive law and morality,” with God defined as “the intelligent and rational Nature which is the soul and guide of the universe” (LG, 240). However, humans recognized the divine law not as something revealed but rather as derived from the principle of general utility, for positive law was “fashioned on the law of God as conjectured by the light of utility” (LG, 240–1). What was commonly demanded was what God had demanded. By invoking God as the standard of positive law and equating Him with the principle of general utility, Austin did not have to appeal to the “ambiguous and misleading” law of nature (LG, 240–1).

Austin’s notion of divinity was so vague that the contents of it could be arranged by humans to suit themselves, while at the same time he discarded the notion of nature as a standard and thereby also the requirement that humans subject themselves to it. Previously, the concept of nature had been stripped of any idea of divinity; now, it had been emptied of any notion of mathematical and logical causality to which humans would have to submit themselves. All that remained was an entity to be prodded and exploited by humans for the principle of general utility. The scientific method and the instrumentalization of the divine had emptied nature of any meaningful content for either law or human beings.

The Emptying of Divinity

If nature had become emptied of any meaningful content, then the divine would have transformed from Aristotle’s prime mover to Kant’s legislator. The elimination of divinity’s magnetic attraction for nature, as informed by nous, would result in a deontological ethics of self-imposed duties. According to Brague, this transformation started with the Protestant Reformation, with Luther’s return to St. Paul’s polemic concerning faith alone against the law. Although Luther redirected the polemic against the Roman Catholic Church with an understanding of grace as the unmerited favor of God, he also emphasized the law as being an essential aspect of Christianity, such as in his teaching of the two kingdoms (LG, 242).29 Christianity came to be perceived in juridical categories, with Jesus known as the Lawgiver, to both the defenders and critics of Christianity.

The tendency to place law at the center of religion found its culmination in the works of Kant, who re-conceptualized ethics as commandments. The moral law that commanded someone, with no hope to appeal, has no need of a source, even if that source were God Himself (LG, 243). Morality consequently did not rest on a religious foundation—in fact, religion rested on the foundation of morality. Kant wrote of “the recognition of all duties as divine commands, not as sanctions, i.e., arbitrary and contingent ordinances of a foreign will, but as essential laws of any free will as such.” However, “even as such, they must be regarded as commands of the Supreme Being, because we can hope for the highest good (to strive for which is made our duty by the moral law) only from a morally perfect (holy and beneficent) and omnipotent will; and, therefore, we can hope to attain it only through harmony with this will” (LG, 243). Like Strauss, Kant required a type of “faith” in an omnipotent God and in the immortality of the soul in order for his philosophy to operate.

Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience. The moral commandments required the statutory commandments to clarify certain matters, such as the worship of God, but ultimately they were from the human and not from the divine. Religion was nothing “but laws” for Kant—a simple appendix to morality (LG, 244). The divine had been reduced to law, and the functional source of that law resided in human conscience.

After the French Revolution, the connection between divinity and law resurfaced, but in a historical context. The historical study of law arose in reaction to the fabricated juridical rules born of the French Revolution that Burke had criticized. This school of thought emphasized the organic development of law as a historical process. Brague concentrates on three thinkers to represent this turn in Western thought: Henry Sumner Maine in England, Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Switzerland, and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in France. Believing in the notions of progress and evolution, these three thinkers pushed divinity back to its primitive origins and reduced it to a phenomenon from which humans had escaped in order to pursue a purely rational and systematic law for modern Western civilization.

Maine modeled his historical method after the natural sciences and concluded that the idea of the natural originated in the need to find principles to integrate foreigners, who had no legal status, into ancient Rome (LG, 245–6). The Roman ius gentium was combined with the Greek notion of physis to solve this problem, with the family as the starting unit for law. Although religion never appeared as a theme, it did surface as something associated with law throughout his works, particularly with canon law. Maine recognized that the divinity prescribed certain laws; however, the divinity in his overall account was something from which humans and the law should escape. The history of law was one of the individual liberating himself over time from various group units to his autonomous, independent self. Bachofen conceived of history progressively but differently in content when compared to Maine: history was the march from a maternal and material principle to the paternal and immaterial ones (LG, 246–7). Initially, there was one great law that governed all of humankind, and this one great law was associated with the religion of Mother Earth and Her notion of equality. This law of equality was older than the positive law of the state but has now been supplanted by the paternal and immaterial law of humankind’s historical progress. Like Maine, Bachofen recognized the divine origins of the law and also dismissed it as a relic of a primitive and no longer needed civilization.

Coulanges also concurred with Maine and Bachofen that the law was initially religious, with the familial existing before the civic (LG, 246–7). No human invented the law: the law was presented to humankind without being sought. A direct and necessary consequence of religious belief, the law applied itself to the relations among all people. The ancient law was never explained, written, or taught: it was learned in the religious rituals of a people. Contrary to Rousseau’s contention, the law was not the work of a legislator but was imposed on the legislator. However, Coulanges, like the others, argued for the inherent limitations in the ancient law and rejected it for a more progressive—rational and systematic—account of law for the civilization of his day.

Conclusion

The emptying of the conception of divinity reduced God to human conscience and later to primitive civilization, while the emptying of the conception of nature reduced its teleology to Austin’s entity of ambiguity and purposelessness. The emptying of these concepts yielded a positivist (or what Brague calls “sociological”) study of both legal and religious phenomena (LG, 248). Setting aside all claims of the validity of the object he studies, the positivist reduces notions of divinity, nature, and law to mere opinions. The irony is that the positivist can follow the development and path of these opinions, but he himself is unable to leave any mark on history because he has nothing to say about the truth of what he is studying.

Strauss seems to be following the positivist’s path, although he would reject the claim that he only wrote about opinions. Rather, it would appear that Strauss believed the positivist program would yield objective truth claims, such as a theory of natural rights, which would have no essential need for divinity. Strauss’s criticism of Weber, the great sociological positivist, was that he “never proved that the unassisted human mind is incapable of arriving at objective norms.”30 For Strauss, natural right could be discovered by the unassisted human mind, i.e., without divinity, if only one were able to pursue this aim for his entire life. This claim is a genuine possibility and, as Brague has traced in his book, represents where we are today. Whether this project is possible is something on which Brague refuses to comment.

Where Brague and Strauss disagree is in their interpretation of Greek philosophy. For Brague, nature was a repository of divinity for the Greeks, a position that is contrary to Strauss’s. An examination of Aristotle’s physei dikaion and its related concepts of physis, nous, phronesis, and spoudaios suggest that Brague’s interpretation is more accurate than Strauss’s. However, Brague’s account of physis is also deficient because he fails to note its dual teleological structure: it seeks to realize its own essence as well as its unity with the prime mover. Brague’s neglect of the prime mover as related to the Greek concept of physis, and his neglect of Aristotle more generally, has been remedied by my analysis of Aristotle’s account of nature and its relationship to the modern notion.

Notes

27. Brague recognizes this change in the conception of nature in terms of its teleology, thereby making his neglect of Aristotle’s “right by nature” all the more perplexing.

28. As Brague later notes, this explains why both Rousseau and the French Revolution sought a return to the sacrality of the laws when establishing a new regime.

29. For example, Brague cites Zwingli as one who returned to Old Testa- ment Law in his Protestant Christianity. Strangely, Brague neglects Calvin, who would be the best example and evidence of this argument.

30. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 70.

The post Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God (Part Three) appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Aristotle’s right by nature (physei dikaion) was where “everywhere [it] has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that . . . and yet it is changeable—all of it (kineton mentoi pan).13 Thus, Aristotle’s physei dikaion appeared self-contradictory, where it was valid everywhere and always, but it was also everywhere changeable. One possible solution was that Aristotle wrote esoterically, although it is not clear what would be the hidden truth.14 A more likely answer was that Aristotle meant what he wrote and left it to us to figure out what he meant by physei dikaion as being both universal and contingent.

On the one hand, Aristotle argued that physei dikaion was universal: it had the same force everywhere in forbidding such acts as murder and theft. On the other hand, physei dikaion was changeable in the sense that universal principles can have diverse actualizations according to time, object, aim, and method. The criteria of time, object, aim, and method allowed us to make the distinction between killing and murder. If certain acts fell short of or exceeded this criterion (the mean), then they were considered bad, for as Aristotle wrote, “There is neither a mean of excess and deficiency, nor excess and deficiency of a mean.”15

Murder consequently did not break some abstract rule, but it missed the mean for concrete action. Although the criteria of time, object, aim, and method may appear vague, e.g., “Do not kill at the wrong time, involving the wrong object, with the wrong purpose and method,” for Aristotle, it was appropriate to a reality that did not yield a permanent, detailed standard. Moral and ethical acts were not governed “by any art or set of precepts” but rather “according to right reason” because what was right was “not one, nor the same for all.”16 Each situation must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis with the underlying universal substance of ethics—the one way of being good—driving all of the means.

This paradox of physei dikaion was personified in the mature person (spoudaios) who saw “the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them” and who possessed the virtue of practical wisdom (phronesis) that included other virtues, for “with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences.”17 Like physei dikaion, Aristotle defined phronesis paradoxically: its possessor had the “ability to deliberate well about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general” but could produce “no demonstration” of its first principles, even though its particular actions were true in practice.18 Phronesis could not become a science (episteme) because it was bogged down in the particulars of the world, yet, at the same time, it required deliberation of what was generally good.

This paradox of phronesis can be somewhat clarified by looking at Aristotle’s concept of nous (intellect) as both divine and human. Nous was “something divine” and superior to “our composite nature,” but it also “more than anything else is man.” By following nous, humans could make themselves immortal and “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”19 Thus, Aristotle discovered that human beings possessed something within themselves that was different from them and yet paradoxically was the best thing of them—something superior to humans, which they were able to locate through a cognitive faculty that Aristotle termed nous. By making this cognitive faculty both human and divine, Aristotle had shifted divinity from the anthropomorphic gods to the intellectual faculty of the human soul.

It is clear that Aristotle believed in a divinity that was superior to but connected with humans. He wrote that there were “things much more divine in nature even than man,” which included not only the heavenly bodies but also the creator god as a physical force.20 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle also stated that “first philosophy” studies ontology, eternal causes, and the “first mover” god who was “in a better state” than humans.21 However, this “first mover” was not a creator god. Aristotle conceived of it as a final cause and not as one who set things in motion. The prime mover therefore was not the cause of the world, but the preservation of it by its rational and love-inspiring attraction.22 Thus, for Aristotle, the notion of divinity had shifted from the anthropomorphic gods to both the human intellect and the prime mover, the two of which were different yet attracted to each other.

Nature therefore was all of reality’s present form moving towards the prime mover. Defining nature as a member of “the class of causes that acts for the sake of something,” Aristotle declared that the “form” of any reality and the “mover” of any nature often coincide.23 If nature could become identical with divinity, then it would be both natural and divine. Like nous, nature was both divine and non-divine in its composition, with the latter being drawn towards the former. This claim rested upon the human reflection of their nous: “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”24 As a result of this conceptualization of nature, Aristotle’s physei dikaion was the attraction that humans have both physically and ethically to the prime mover.

The apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s physei dikaion—it was universal in force but changeable in action—was resolved by his understanding of nature’s being everything and everywhere and having a dual final cause at the same time. All of reality sought unity with the prime mover and for what it was supposed to be. For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans that occurred within the nous of the mature person (spoudaios).

Strauss, Brague, and Greek Philosophy

Given the variability of phronesis, Aristotle denied it the status of science (episteme) while categorizing it as a deliberate intellectual virtue. The universal-variable principle of phronesis, the many practical paths towards the prime mover in ethical action, precluded logical and consistent proofs. But the universality of the objective was unchanged, which allowed the spoudaios to make decisions rooted neither in relativism nor deontology but something in between as a physei dikaion. However, if physei dikaion cannot be studied at the level of episteme, how can it be demonstrated, especially with regard to Strauss’s and Brague’s differing understandings of nature’s relation to divinity? Is a theory of natural rights only accessible by an autonomous reason that uncovers a nature devoid of divinity? Or does a theory of natural right rest upon an account where both nature and reason are consubstantial with divinity?

The impossibility of studying physei dikaion at the level of episteme certainly restricts the types of demonstration of its existence where the objects of natural reason can be known as the “experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight.” Such an account of physei dikaion cannot be verified by the positivism that Strauss seemed to advocate or that modern science demands. Deductive and logical reasoning are also avenues that are blocked, since physei dikaion has no axioms from which one can reason to conclusions or first principles. By relying upon habituation in virtue and the experience of a mature person to make correct judgments, physei dikaion is beyond the grasp of those who are neither virtuous nor mature. In short, the traditional demonstrations are not available for the proof of physei dikaion.

The demonstration of physei dikaion is the same as the demonstration of nous as something both human and divine. To repeat from above, Aristotle wrote about his claim of nous, “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”25 Aristotle appealed to a philosophical introspection of human experience for the demonstration of nous and, one could infer from his other statements, for physei dikaion, too. The acknowledgment that an action is ethical—that it is right by nature—can be verified by others not through empirical, mathematical, or modern scientific reasoning but through the introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature, serious, and virtuous person.

Some may find this proof unsatisfactory because it lacks the objective character that positivism claims for itself. Be that as it may, it should be evident after investigating Aristotle’s concepts of nature (physis), right by nature (physei dikaion), human intellect (nous), and practical wisdom (phronesis) that Aristotle had rejected an epistemological framework of sense-based, logically consistent propositions that Strauss advocated. The end result is that Aristotle’s physei dikaion is not the theory of natural rights that Strauss attributed to Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s appeal to the philosophical introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature person (spouadios) to verify whether one’s actions were physei dikaion is as different as can be when compared to Strauss’s account of Greek philosophy. Simply put, when compared to Brague, it appears that Strauss had misread Aristotle and, perhaps more broadly, misinterpreted Greek philosophy.

However, Brague’s account of Greek philosophy as one where the concept of divinity became separated from anthropomorphic gods to reside in physis is only partially correct. What Brague fails to account for is Aristotle’s prime mover as the other repository of divinity.26 That is, physis was the expression of divinity as an intelligible, rational structure, but this expression was incomplete because it longed for unity with a prime mover. Physis therefore had a dual telos: it sought to realize its own essence as well as unity with the prime mover. The neglect of the prime mover—and Aristotle more generally—in Brague’s work does not weaken his overarching argument, but it does not strengthen it either.

Notes

13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134b18–20.

14. It would seem unlikely that Strauss would make Aristotle a nihilist, given his remark that the philosopher needs to have a type of faith in his quest to know the whole of reality.

15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106a25–1107a26.

16. Ibid.,1103b31–1104a9, 1106a32.

17. Ibid., 1113a30–35; 1144b30–1145a1.

18. Ibid., 1140a24–1140b30; 1142a11–30; 1146b35–1146a7.

19. Ibid., 1177b27–1178a8.

20. Ibid., 1141b1–2; also see Aristotle, Metaphysics, 98b–984a.

21. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a–1005a, 1026a.

22. Ibid., 1072a20–1072b4; 984b15–20.

23. Aristotle, Physics, 198a20–198b10.

24. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1248a25–7.

25. Ibid., 1248a25–7.

26. Cf. n. 12.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

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