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I will defend Strauss’ ancients/moderns distinction to Catholic scholars, especially my friends in this symposium, on the grounds that it is helpful in our own struggle with modernity. I am grateful for their agreement to this conversation and especially to Ken Grasso for organizing it. Modernity is a problem for Catholic thought. Pope John Paul II argues in Fides et Ratio (1998) that modernity has undermined reason as a means to knowledge of truth and urged people of faith to come to reason’s defense. He says reason and revelation stand or fall together against the irrationalism in which modern thought has at last culminated. He means, I think, the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the popularizations of their “post-modern” progeny. He is particularly concerned about the “de-Hellenization” of modern theology. Modernity’s undermining of reason was also Strauss’ theme. He argued that Western Civilization is a product of the unresolved tension between the claims of Greek philosophy and Biblical revelation.1 This tension generates an energy that enables Western Civilization to renew, and thereby preserve, itself. Strauss lived that tension. Although the claims of philosophy were finally incompatible with those of revelation, he regarded these claims as not resolvable on any basis that both could accept. Accordingly, if reason rejects revelation as a form of genuine knowledge, that is dogmatic and therefore rationally indefensible. Thus, Strauss as philosopher could be neither a convinced believer nor a convinced unbeliever. He apparently lived in sympathy with his Jewish heritage, though not in strict observance of that heritage’s forms. He took pains to re-appropriate that heritage’s questions and learning and not let them be forgotten.2

Whether Strauss’ Ancients/Moderns Reading of the History of Political Philosophy Unjustly Depreciates Christianity