Harry V. Jaffa is one of the great teachers of political philosophy in our times who has inspired a generation of students in the field of American political thought. As might be expected, the students bear the stamp of the teacher, which means you can always tell a Jaffa student when you see one because he or she has a glow of moral earnestness that is impossible to ignore.

The immediate cause of the moral earnestness is easy to identify: Jaffa takes the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence more seriously than any other scholar I have encountered, and he has sought to revive those principles as the living creed of the American republic. As a teacher, Jaffa breathes into his students the sacred fire of the Declaration and its two great interpreters, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln; and he instills in his followers a deep reverence for the American Founding and the Union's cause during the Civil War. Lest anyone be mistaken about his intentions, Jaffa ends his latest book, A New Birth of Freedom, with a battle cry for all chivalrous knights of the Lincoln brigades: “We must then take up the weapons of truth and go forth to battle once again for the cause of Father Abraham, of Union, and of Freedom, as in the olden time.”Footnote ¹ One can almost hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” sounding in the background as Jaffa moves the reader to take up a moral crusade on behalf of natural rights republicanism.

While it is easy to see why Jaffa is an inspirational teacher, it is more difficult to explain how Jaffa arrived at his moral crusade on behalf of Lincoln and the Declaration. After all, Jaffa cites Leo Strauss as the most powerful influence on his thinking—as the scholar who changed his life.Footnote ² Yet, it is difficult to find in Strauss's writings the words and tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” even though Jaffa insists that he is following the lead of Leo Strauss and fulfilling Strauss's intentions. Jaffa's relation to Strauss is, therefore, a puzzle which I shall investigate in order to shed light on Jaffa's contribution to the Straussian legacy and to the natural rights philosophy of America and the Western tradition.Footnote ³

My principal argument is that Jaffa's intellectual career is marked by continuity and change that is both faithful and unfaithful to Leo Strauss. The element of continuity is the lifelong effort to meet the challenge of Strauss's book Natural Right and History by defending principles of natural right against the moral relativism or nihilism that Strauss equated with the “crisis of the West.” One can see that Strauss's book gave Jaffa a mission to save the West (and possibly the world) by coming up with a philosophically defensible argument for natural right—understood as a rational standard of right and wrong that is universal and timeless because it is grounded in nature or human nature; such an argument would give Western nations an objective basis for the truth of their convictions instead of viewing them as arbitrary opinions or mere historical prescriptions. Jaffa accepted the challenge of developing a “political science of natural right” as his greatest intellectual ambition and worked on several strategies in his career.Footnote ⁴

What I shall also argue is that, in the course of development, Jaffa changed strategies by moving from a defense of classical natural right—chiefly Aristotle's version—to a defense of modern natural rights—chiefly, the principles of the Declaration of Independence—and that the change led Jaffa to depart from Strauss's thought. In his first book, Thomism and Aristotelianism, Jaffa sought to recover Aristotle's teaching as a possible solution to the nihilism of modern value-free social science. The thrust of that book was in accordance with Strauss's thought because it sought to separate the pagan Aristotle from the Christianized Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas—a reflection of Strauss's view of the irreducible tensions in the Western tradition between reason and revelation. But Jaffa never decisively vindicated Aristotle, mainly, one suspects, because of philosophical difficulties with Aristotelian natural right.

Jaffa's response was to shift his focus from classical natural right to the American Founding in order to develop an argument for the natural rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence. The key to the new strategy was the claim that he did not have to abandon Aristotle or Aquinas in order to vindicate American principles because a common vision of “moral order” exists in the three main elements of the Western tradition (represented by three cities)—in classical Greek philosophy (Athens), in biblical revelation (Jerusalem), and in the modern natural rights doctrine of the American Founders as interpreted by Abraham Lincoln (Peoria). Interestingly, Jaffa also argues that the moral order of the West could be vindicated without definitively resolving ultimate theoretical questions and that this practical solution was a fulfillment of Strauss's intention. The problem, I will conclude, is that Jaffa's efforts at harmonizing the main elements of Western civilization go against Strauss's emphasis on their irreducible tensions, which means Jaffa's vision of moral order rests on a false synthesis of disparate elements that are best left in their original forms.

The Early Jaffa: Thomas vs. Aristotle

Jaffa's first book, Thomism and Aristotelianism, was published in 1952 and bears the influence of Leo Strauss in theme and format.Footnote ⁵ The introduction describes the motive for the book as a concern for the lack of rational foundations for contemporary social and political science due to the influence of positivism and historicism. Jaffa's study is an early statement of Strauss's thesis in Natural Right and History, which criticizes modern social science for being value-free—unable to pronounce rational judgments about morality (right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice) because it holds that only facts are objective, values are subjective. Commenting on the danger as well as untenability of this stance, Jaffa says that we need a comprehensive review of political science, including a reconsideration of its classical formulation by Aristotle.

Jaffa further observes that Aristotle's ethics and politics are currently taken seriously as sources of truth only in the natural law doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic natural law is the last serious source of Aristotelian philosophy because Catholicism holds St. Thomas Aquinas as the greatest doctor of the Church and, of course, “Thomas is the disciple of Aristotle and recognizes his authority as paramount” (6). Therefore, Thomism and neo-Thomism are the primary means for a living encounter with Aristotelian political science and for investigating the possibility that it might be the true teaching, once and for all times. If it were the true teaching, then a rational response to the value-free nihilism of modern social science could be found in Aristotle.

One wonders why Jaffa did not simply undertake a direct study of Aristotle's texts to determine their truth or falsity, since Jaffa states that “our primary concern is with Aristotle, and our concern with Thomas is due to his great prestige as an interpreter of Aristotle” (161). Following this indirect approach, Jaffa poses the central question of his study: Is Thomas Aquinas an accurate and impartial interpreter of Aristotle, or does Thomas give us an Aristotle that has been altered or distorted by Christian faith? This question drives Jaffa's book: “We must face the responsibility of determining to what extent the moral and political, as well as the theoretical philosophies of Aristotle and Thomas are in fact the same, and to what extent they are different. And if … different, it is necessary to discover the principles underlying those divergences” (7–8). Jaffa is aware that this question is not original to him or to Strauss. In a postscript, he commends the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston for offering a similar analysis of Thomas Aquinas in A History of Philosophy that includes a critical evaluation of the “latent tensions in the Thomist synthesis.”Footnote ⁶

Nevertheless, Jaffa takes an original approach that highlights the difficulty of synthesizing Greek philosophy and biblical revelation. He has learned from Strauss the meticulous art of close textual analysis and has chosen Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Commentary on Aristotle's Politics as the primary means for developing his thesis rather than the usual work, the Summa Theologiae. This approach is demanding but rewarding because it allows Jaffa to untangle the original, pagan Aristotle from the Christianized Aristotle of Thomas. At the risk of oversimplifying Jaffa's subtle argument, I will summarize its main findings in three points.

The first point concerns Aristotle's method. Jaffa argues that Aquinas seeks to give a faithful summary of Aristotle's Ethics but actually gives the book an order or structure that is more rigid and more theoretical than the original Aristotle. According to Jaffa, Aristotle's argument develops by ascending from lower to higher rungs on the ladder of perfection—as seen, for example, in the overall movement in the text from the moral virtues to the intellectual virtues (an ascent from lower to higher ends); in the movement within the eleven moral virtues from courage, the lowest, to justice, the highest virtue; and in Aristotle's revision of his views on such topics as the relation of pleasure to happiness. In other words, Jaffa views Aristotle's method of reasoning as dialectical—as an ongoing argument that revises prior judgments as it proceeds from lower to higher ends—and he criticizes Thomas for obscuring this crucial feature of Aristotle's method: “Thomas' conception of the ‘design’ of the Ethics is rather of an architectural structure than an organism … [I]t does not imply any notion of growth or ascent in the elaboration of Aristotle's moral doctrine” (48–49).

Although Jaffa does not fully elaborate the significance of his criticism, he seems to think that Aquinas does not give full credit to Aristotle for writing a work of practical science. Thomas turns Aristotle's Ethics into a work of theoretical science by failing to acknowledge that Aristotle derives his ethical judgments from a dialectical analysis of what is commonly praised and blamed or what is called noble and base by discerning people in order to discover “the common element of truth in all common opinions or … in the most authoritative [opinions]” (90). Thomas also sees Aristotle deducing morality from theoretical notions about the human species—for example, that man is a rational animal—that are derived from metaphysics and physics rather than from common opinions (24–25, 79). According to Jaffa, Thomas is led thereby to a more exact and categorical view of moral virtue than Aristotle. Thomas demands virtuous behavior even in extreme situations, where the rules of morality might be suspended or extenuated out of necessity by most people: “Aristotle clearly indicates that it is impossible to say, in the abstract, whether a man ought or ought not to be pardoned for doing the basest deeds to save his family … in his view, no simply true general statement can be made on this question. [But] Thomas says unequivocally of the brave man that he will obey the dictates of reason in the face of any terror, however great” (109). Jaffa's conclusion is that while Aristotle stays within the horizon of practical experience, Thomas “presupposes knowledge of the virtues through a natural habit of understanding loosely called conscience or more exactly synderesis … [and Thomas] unjustifiably imputes to Aristotle his own view” (114–15). In respect to method, then, Thomas modifies Aristotle by giving the Greek philosopher a Christian “spin” (attributing a stricter approach to morality than prudence requires) that Jaffa finds unjustified.

The second major point of Jaffa's study concerns the content of virtue, especially the tension between pagan pride and Christian humility. Jaffa begins his book with an epigraph from Winston Churchill: “It is baffling to reflect that what men call honor does not always correspond to Christian ethics.” Jaffa uses this thought to highlight the main challenge of incorporating Aristotelian ethics into a Christian framework. In a subtle and complex analysis, Jaffa shows that the tension between pagan pride and Christian humility drives Thomas to soften the edges of magnanimity—the virtue most concerned with honor and pride—and to diminish the difference between the horizon of morality (or of practical action) and the horizon of philosophy in Aristotle.

As Jaffa shows, the notion of what is honorable is used by Aristotle to give a rough indication of moral virtue, following the common opinions of praise and blame in political life. This culminates in Aristotle's teaching about magnanimity—the crown of the personal virtues, a kind of proper pride in which one who is truly great demands the highest honors and actually deserves them, usually for being the greatest benefactor to his country by founding the nation or by saving it during times of war and crisis. It was exemplified in England by Marlborough and Churchill and in America by Washington and Lincoln (129). How does Thomas treat magnanimity in his commentary on Aristotle, given its obvious tensions with Christian ethics?

In Jaffa's view, Thomas may have aimed at expounding Aristotle in his own terms, but Thomas also felt a need to save magnanimity from some of the harsher, unchristian features of pagan pride—such as disdain for inferiors, a tendency to be ungrateful for favors, the insistence on being the superior one, and illusions of godlike self-sufficiency. In order to soften these features, Thomas portrays the magnanimous man in more benevolent and moral terms than Aristotle does—as someone who does not choose to forget favors and as someone, in Thomas's words, whose “whole attention is taken up with the goods of the community and God.”Footnote ⁷ According to Jaffa, Thomas portrays magnanimity as the dutiful service of a high-minded public servant rather than the glory-seeking of an obsessive egoist.

In elaborating this interpretation, however, Jaffa is led to a curious paradox. He claims that Thomas sees magnanimity as the highest form of moral behavior and tries to hide its deficiencies, whereas Aristotle describes the magnanimous man as he really is—possessing certain illusions about his own self-sufficiency that enable him to perform great deeds (31–33). Aristotle, in other words, gingerly protects the pride of the magnanimous man from the insights of philosophy that might puncture his illusions of self-sufficiency—implying a depreciation of morality in favor of philosophy and indicating that Aristotle actually has a lower view of magnanimity than Thomas does. In Jaffa's words, “Aristotle intends to portray magnanimity … within the moral horizon alone” (141), even though Aristotle clearly teaches at the end of the Ethics that “there is something greater than the virtue of the magnanimous man” (138), namely, the intellectual virtue of the philosopher. While Aristotle tries to be faithful to the moral horizon upon which men act, Thomas “repeatedly qualif[ies] Aristotle's description of the magnanimous man in order to ‘save’ his character in accordance with … a higher standard of perfection” and, in so doing, “mistakes Aristotle's intention” (141). The lesson for Jaffa is that Thomas gives us a moralistic Aristotle that fails to appreciate the nobility of pagan pride as well as the radical, amoral detachment of pagan philosophy.

The third major point of Jaffa's study concerns natural right and natural law. This issue is the culmination of the book because it demonstrates most clearly the difference between Thomas's effort to harmonize Greek philosophy with Christian revelation and Jaffa's effort to separate the two. Here again, the issue turns on a subtle analysis of Aristotle's text—the notoriously difficult passage on justice in the Ethics (bk. 5, sec. 7) where Aristotle says that natural right is both unchangeable and changeable. Specifically, Aristotle says, on the one hand, that “natural right is that which has the same force (dunamin = dynamism, potentiality) everywhere and is not affected by what men think” because “what is by nature is unchangeable (akineton = not moveable)” and, on the other hand, “with us [humans], there is something natural and this is changeable (kineton = moveable)”; for example “by nature the right hand is stronger (kreitton = physically stronger), although it is possible for any man to become ambidextrous” and the form of government is variable but “one form is best everywhere by nature.” The obvious problem is Aristotle's seemingly contradictory claims about the unchangeability and changeability of natural right.

According to Jaffa, the ambivalence about natural right in the Ethics reflects Aristotle's view of the weakness of justice as a force in human affairs: justice may be a universal aspiration, and one form of government may be the best everywhere; but human nature is lacking in active agency that directs the human soul to virtue, and human beings lack an innate sense of right and wrong that gives them clear, natural knowledge of virtue (175). The relative weakness of justice reminds Jaffa of Aristotle's statement in the Ethics (bk. 3, sec. 1) that moral virtue is a habit (something acquired by training) rather than something naturally imprinted on the human soul. Jaffa is also fond of quoting Aristotle's statement in the Ethics (bk. 10, sec. 9) that most people “‘have not even a conception of what is noble and truly pleasant’” (177) because it reveals Aristotle's sense of the weakness of natural knowledge of justice.

While not claiming to explain fully Aristotle's complex views on natural right, Jaffa offers the following interpretation. On the one hand, Aristotle teaches that natural right is unchangeable or immutable because the best regime for all human beings (everywhere and always) is the rule of the wise and the virtuous. On the other hand, the best regime is only imperfectly realized in most cities and nations, so natural right is actually part of political right and is subject to change because “natural right enjoins obedience to any legal justice which may reasonably be said to aim at the common good … [hence] the mutability of natural right follows … the mutability of constitutions” (182).

Jaffa thinks Thomas misses the crucial point about the weakness of natural right as a force in the human soul and thereby turns Aristotelian natural right into something stronger—into Christian natural law, according to which morality is written on the human heart by a lawgiver (God) who gives human beings “a natural habit” of moral knowledge and even a natural inclination to virtue. In Jaffa's words, “Thomas apparently takes Aristotle's statement, to the effect that what is naturally right or just does not depend on opinion, as an outright endorsement of his own doctrine that there is a natural habit of the understanding by which we know what is, in principle, right and wrong according to nature” (175, Jaffa's emphasis).

At the end of his book, Jaffa attributes Thomas's mistake to the Christian belief that morality is supported by “divine particular providence,” “personal immortality,” and “a divinely implanted ‘natural’ habit of moral principles”—a belief that leads Thomas to “impute non-Aristotelian principles to Aristotle” (187).Footnote ⁸ Jaffa concludes, then, that Thomas is an unreliable guide to Aristotle and that “[Thomas's] assumption as to the harmony of natural and revealed doctrine is entirely unwarranted” (187). In sum, Jaffa has shown that “nature elevated by grace is different from nature simply” and that “reason ‘informed’ by faith is different from reason simply” (200 n. 20).

The major disappointment for a reader of Jaffa's book is that, after separating the original Aristotle from Thomism, Jaffa makes no judgment at all as to whether Aristotle's teaching is the truth about natural right. As a result, Jaffa never answers the question he posed at the beginning of his book: whether Aristotelian political science could be resurrected as a rational alternative to the nihilism of today's value-free social science. As far as I can tell, Jaffa leaves the question open, while actually exposing two serious problems with Aristotle that he does not resolve—namely, the changeability of natural right and the relation between practical and theoretical science in Aristotle's Ethics. The changeability of natural right implies uncertainty about the power of justice in human affairs and raises doubts about the moral order of nature and society that Jaffa leaves unresolved. Concerning the relation of practice and theory, Jaffa seems to concede a point to Thomas Aquinas: the status of ethics as a practical science remains in doubt because the practically wise man (the phronimos) depends on the theoretically wise man (the sophos) for knowing the truth about human happiness. Practical wisdom does not stand entirely on its own ground because it glimpses the limited and secondary nature of happiness in moral and political life, while pointing toward the supreme happiness of the philosopher who contemplates the eternal things (186). Whether the moral realm is subverted by these insights is left unanswered by Jaffa, and the difficulty may well be the spur that drove him to find stronger foundations for natural right and moral order in modern doctrines.

Jaffa's Turn to the Declaration of Independence

After completing Thomism and Aristotelianism in 1952, Jaffa turned to the study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and began working on the book that became his bestseller, Crisis of the House Divided (first published in 1959, reprinted in 1973 and 1982).Footnote ⁹ In the preface to the third edition, Jaffa says his study of Lincoln was motivated by Leo Strauss's challenge of finding a “political science of natural right” as an alternative to the relativism of modern social science. But Jaffa now equates natural right with the inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence based on the “laws of nature and of nature's God” that inspired the American Founders and Lincoln. Henceforth, natural right for Jaffa means the principles of the Declaration of Independence rather than those of Aristotle's Ethics.

But a surprising thought accompanies the change: Aristotle does not have to be abandoned because, in some sense, Aristotle is on the same plane as Locke, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In the third preface to Crisis, Jaffa says explicitly that his work is inspired by Strauss's recovery of classical natural right (also called “Socratic natural right”), which includes not only natural right but also prudence and rhetoric—prudence (phronesis) in adapting general principles to particular historical circumstances and rhetoric for making those principles persuasive to people. Thus, classical Greek philosophy remains the philosophical foundation for natural right, but the content is now the Declaration's principles of inalienable natural rights and the equality of all men, expressed above all in the speeches and statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln. How could Jaffa make this shift?

I cannot say for sure what prompted Jaffa to make the change, given Strauss's teaching about the difference between ancients and moderns—the difference between classical natural right (requiring virtue and an aristocratic regime of virtuous rulers) and modern natural rights (requiring freedom and a democratic regime of equality based on the consent of the people). Strauss, of course, indicates points of continuity between ancients and moderns: both claimed reason could discover principles of justice and morality in human nature. Even as great a critic of Aristotle as Hobbes “was indebted to the tradition for a single, but momentous, idea: he accepted on trust the view that political philosophy or political science is possible or necessary.”Footnote ¹⁰ But on crucial issues such as the primacy of the contemplative or theoretical life, the teleological view of nature, the priority of virtue over freedom, and the awareness of eternity in political life, Strauss presents powerful criticisms of modern political philosophy in Natural Right and History for rejecting classical philosophy, which led him to state explicitly that “Nothing that I have learned has shaken my inclination to prefer ‘natural right,’ especially in its classic form, to the reigning relativism, positivist or historicist.”Footnote ¹¹

Given Strauss's distinction between ancients and moderns and his clear preference for the ancients over the moderns, Jaffa's turn to a synthesis of the two perspectives and Jaffa's tilt toward modern natural rights principles in the Declaration of Independence appear to be a departure from Strauss. It is a departure that Jaffa never justifies fully, leaving one to speculate about the reasons. My guess is that Jaffa was led to the synthesis partly by his authentic efforts to understand Abraham Lincoln, whose soaring ambition for honor and glory appeared to Jaffa to be an example of Aristotle's magnanimity but whose political principles were republican and American, making Lincoln a kind of classical statesman promoting a modern regime of natural rights republicanism.Footnote ¹² Using hindsight to explain his new emphasis on America, Jaffa also has written that combining Aristotle and Locke was possible and necessary because the American Founding included both: “the Founding, which Lincoln inherited, was dominated by an Aristotelian Locke—or a Lockean Aristotle.” Yet, Jaffa apparently seeks more than historical accuracy, because he claims that Aristotle himself would have been a Lockean natural rights philosopher if Aristotle were alive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Christian era: “[If] Aristotle [had] been called upon, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, to write a guidebook for constitution makers, he would have written something very closely approximating Locke's Second Treatise.” Jaffa's hypothetical suggestion is that if Aristotle had faced the tyranny of divine right kingship and the sectarian wars of Christianity, “he would have recognized those differences from his Politics that prudential wisdom required” and adapted his teaching to modern circumstances by advocating freedom and limited government over a regime of virtue.Footnote ¹³

Here we see the new Jaffa, a Straussian scholar who begins moving away from Strauss's emphasis on the irreconcilable differences among elements of the Western tradition to becoming a scholar who seeks to synthesize (even to equate) the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Shakespeare as bearers of a common conception of “moral order” that not only saves the West from nihilism but elevates the Declaration and the American republic to the best regime possible.Footnote ¹⁴ The primary argument that Jaffa develops is that a common ground for moral order can be found in the notion of human dignity—in the claim that the “essence” or “nature” of man really exists and has moral significance because man is the rational animal with a rational soul that must be respected in any just or legitimate regime. For Jaffa, the dignity of man as rational animal is an objectively true and philosophically defensible proposition that supports the moral order of classical, medieval, and modern natural right. It enables Jaffa to develop a synthesis of classical (Socratic and Aristotelian), medieval (Thomistic), and modern (Lockean, Jeffersonian, Lincolnian) principles and to find the highest expression of human dignity in the God-given natural rights of the Declaration of Independence and especially in Lincoln's 1854 Peoria Speech which enunciates the “ancient faith” of the Declaration as the essential humanity of all people, equality of rights, and government by consent of the governed.

The evidence for Jaffa's turn toward a grand synthesis appears first in a short essay entitled, “In Defense of the ‘Natural Law Thesis’,” published in 1957.Footnote ¹⁵ This relatively unnoticed but important article is the only sustained effort in Jaffa's corpus to offer in his own name a theoretical defense of natural right or natural law against its critics. The specific purpose of the article is to refute the skeptical attack on natural law by Felix Oppenheim, a prominent value-free social scientist of the 1950s, who adheres to the fact-value distinction and denies the rational basis for objective norms of morality, including the natural right of Plato and of Aristotle and the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence.

Jaffa contends that the fact-value distinction is untenable because it inconsistently affirms scientific knowledge of facts while denying rational knowledge of values. Yet, Jaffa claims, if facts about the world can be known, then values also can be known with some degree of certainty because both have the same premise: the real existence of the external world of nature. Jaffa's reasoning is that we assume the existence of the external world in all our actions and thoughts, even though there is no definitive way of proving theoretically that this is a fact and not an illusion. It follows that, if we cannot deny the reality of the external world, we also cannot deny the real existence of a man or human being. Arguing like a Platonic-Aristotelian philosopher, Jaffa then says that, just as we perceive the existence of “this chair” by intuiting the universal idea of “chairness,” so we perceive the existence of “this man” by intuiting the universal idea of “man” or “humanity” whose distinctive feature is to be a rational animal with intelligence: “While plants and animals … [can] be conceived as forms that are epiphenomena of some more fundamental subhuman reality, man cannot be so conceived. Intelligence cannot be regarded as the by-product of unintelligence … [for] the doctrine of an unintelligent primary reality, being itself a product of man's brain, would also have to be regarded as an illusion… . Intelligence is [therefore] an irreducible reality” (200–201).

Following this logic, Jaffa argues that natural law or natural right is real (not an illusion) because man as a rational, intelligent being is an irreducible fact with value implications: man's rational nature implies a standard of perfection, and the perfection of our rational nature includes the idea of justice. Human nature, therefore, provides a ground for universal norms of justice, which is the premise of natural law. Interestingly, Jaffa argues like an Aristotelian against Oppenheim, concluding that Aristotle's universal norm is the happiness of the virtuous man whose perfection of reason gives him an ordered soul in which the rational part rules over the irrational part. Jaffa also says that man's nature as a rational animal supports the existence of “the laws of nature and of nature's God” proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence (190, 205 n. 2). Herein lies the metaphysical basis of natural right—the dignity of man as rational animal—that supplies the ground for moral order in Jaffa's account of the Western tradition.

With this proposition more or less settled in the late 1950s as the foundation for natural right, Jaffa moved to his grand project of vindicating the principles of the Declaration of Independence laid down by the American Founders and reinterpreted by Lincoln. Jaffa's plan in 1958 was to write two volumes: one, a historical study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates showing that they were a genuine debate about the natural rights principles of the American regime, entitled Crisis of the House Divided; the second volume, to be called A New Birth of Freedom, would be a more ambitious book in which Jaffa attempts to vindicate philosophically (as opposed to recovering historically) the natural rights principles of Jefferson and Lincoln. The two books would complement each other and have the same overarching theme: a dramatic duel between objective truth versus relativism or nihilism, following the paradigm of Strauss's Natural Right and History in which natural right is pitted against the relativism of value-free positivism and historicism. This paradigm remained for Jaffa the basis of his entire intellectual career—a series of writings in which all the heroes are proponents of natural right (Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Shakespeare),Footnote ¹⁶ and all the villains are relativists of one kind or another (Thrasymachus, Douglas, Calhoun, revisionist historians such as Carl Becker, and even Supreme Court Justices Rehnquist and Scalia). Let us examine Jaffa's two books to see how the battle for moral order unfolds.

In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa argues that the Lincoln-Douglas debates were expressions of statesmanship at the highest level because they focused on two principled visions of American democracy: Stephen A. Douglas's vision of “popular sovereignty” in which the people rule without being bound by a higher law of natural right versus Abraham Lincoln's vision of “republican self-government” in which the people rule in accordance with the higher law of the Declaration and its God-given natural rights.

In defending this interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Jaffa takes on revisionist historians like Richard Hofstadter who diminish the whole debate by portraying the protagonists as nothing more than ambitious opportunists who merely paid lip service to moral principles. In the revisionist view, Douglas is a racist demagogue who exploited “popular sovereignty” to gain power by holding together the northern and southern factions of the Democratic Party; Lincoln is an ambitious politician who exploited the “myth of the self-made man” to appeal to the prejudices of the white, lower-middle classes and referred to the equality of the Declaration without believing it.Footnote ¹⁷ Jaffa also writes against the value-free social scientists who do not think that recovering a debate over first principles is important for the American republic. Against this viewpoint, Jaffa writes, “As far as I know, Crisis of the House Divided is the first book to take seriously the question of whether the laws of nature mentioned in the Declaration did in fact exist, and therefore whether Lincoln or Douglas was correct in asserting that his policy … squared with the teaching of the Declaration” (intro., 10–11; 21–26; 364). The power of Jaffa's study comes from its Straussian approach of taking seriously debates about the truth or falsity of natural right because the moral order and legitimacy of the American regime are at stake.

Following this approach, Jaffa makes the debates between Lincoln and Douglas come alive today by showing how each man sought to define the first principles of the American regime. Surprisingly, Jaffa initially creates a curious reversal of sympathies for modern readers—a reversal that perplexes people today (as I discovered when I began teaching Jaffa's book in my own college courses). Contemporary students invariably feel that Jaffa's “case for Douglas” is stronger than they expected because Douglas's principle of popular sovereignty sounds a lot like today's “multiculturalism” or “diversity”: it allows local majorities in different states or regions to choose their own laws and culture without requiring one uniform set of moral principles to be imposed on the whole nation in the name of higher law. Douglas tolerates diversity among Northern, Southern, and Western regions; among industrial, agrarian, and ranching economies; and among free, slave, and mixed societies. Douglas also comes across as the noninterventionist who seeks to avoid civil war by letting people do what they want, claiming that this was what the American Founders intended when they compromised with slavery. Douglas seems opposed to the attitude of self-righteous superiority that leads to violent conflict among different visions of the good life and prefers instead to “live and let live” by fostering a loosely organized federation of states that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and even include Mexico (if it wished to join the United States) in a large, diverse, decentralized, hemispheric republic tied together by a minimal consensus about the U. S. Constitution's rules for procedural democracy (41–103). Douglas's America, Jaffa shows, is based on the appeal of moral relativism, as is today's multiculturalism, because it avoids standards of judgment according to a higher moral law and promises peaceful “nonjudgmentalism”—a policy of “don't care” that allows slavery to be voted up or down in any state, if that is what the people want. As such, Douglas's America is the ultimate expression of populist democracy.

By contrast, Lincoln believed that the true meaning of American democracy is “republican self-government” based on the higher moral law of natural right. As Jaffa shows, Lincoln was a moral absolutist who believed everyone in America finally had to accept the truth of the Declaration and its insistence on the God-given natural rights and equality of all human beings. In his famous “House Divided” Speech (1858), Lincoln boldly asserts that America must become entirely slave or entirely free: there can be no compromise with regional diversity, no acceptance of the “don't care” attitude of popular sovereignty and states rights. To be sure, Jaffa insists that Lincoln was pushed into this position by a conspiracy to nationalize slavery by the likes of Taney, Douglas, Pierce, and Buchanan—an alliance by “preconcert” of all three branches of government working together to extend slavery from the South to the West and eventually to reintroduce slavery into the free states of the North. Jaffa makes us aware that Lincoln understood the fateful consequence of saying the nation could not be divided and that all Americans eventually had to accept one abstract truth about first principles: the fateful consequence was the possibility of civil war (276–301).

According to Jaffa, Lincoln understood and was willing to accept the consequences because he had a lifelong ambition to save the American republic though a creative “re-founding” that would bring Lincoln greater glory than Washington. Using Lincoln's early Lyceum Address (1838), Jaffa argues that the young Lincoln showed signs of heroic greatness—an awareness of Aristotle's virtue of magnanimity—in his references to a towering genius of Napoleonic ambition whose passion for glory could be satisfied by either saving or destroying the Republic. Lincoln chose the constructive course of saving the Republic because he cared about the dignity of man—he believed that the American experiment was a test of “the capability of a people to govern themselves” and this, in turn, was a test of human dignity, a test of whether human beings were destined to be children, subjects, or slaves needing masters and authoritarian father figures to control them or whether they could be free, responsible, rational adults with the capacity for self-government (205–25). The success or failure of the American experiment, therefore, had universal, even cosmic, significance for Lincoln: it was “the last, best hope of earth” because the dignity of man as a rational animal was at stake. But saving the Republic meant having the natural rights principles of the Declaration recognized by the entire nation—by persuasion and consent or by force and imposition, if necessary. This was the principled prudence of Lincoln's magnanimous statesmanship: the combination of natural right and political rhetoric in a grand design that would gain recognition for the truth of the Declaration's principles, refound the Republic, and vindicate the dignity of man.

The key to the grand design was Lincoln's creative reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Whereas Jefferson and the American Founders appealed to the self-evident truth of equality to justify the Revolution of 1776 but did not try to implement equality as a political program, Lincoln turned the equality principle of the American Founders into a “progressive” goal to be approximated in the future through gradual steps by the federal government (318–21). Lincoln thereby set the American nation on the future course of realizing progressively the equal dignity of all citizens of the Republic:

1. 1. by stating publicly and repeating “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” namely, that the equality stated in the Declaration applies to all human beings, including blacks and women, even if they were not freed by the Founders;

2. 2. by focusing on the practical task of stopping the extension of slavery into the new territories as stated in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, so that new states admitted from the territories would be free states and so outnumber the slave states that slavery would be marginalized and set on the course of extinction;

3. 3. by reacting to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which permitted slavery in the new territories, by insisting that the nation become all slave or all free—thereby polarizing the nation and pushing it toward a crisis that would likely lead to civil war;

4. 4. by leading the nation during the Civil War with the initial goal of saving the Union while waiting for the right time to issue an Emancipation Proclamation that would begin the process of freeing slaves;

5. 5. by planning for reconstruction through a gradual process of changing public opinion toward equality for freed black slaves, beginning with the 13th Amendment and planning for the 14th Amendment, but never moving more than one step ahead of public opinion toward a progressive equality that would stop short of full racial mixing through intermarriage (368–81).

This grand design, which Jaffa sometimes suggests was in Lincoln's mind from the earliest years, or no later than 1854, was Lincoln's creative reinterpretation of the Declaration—the gradual recognition of the full truth of equal natural rights for future generations.

Whatever one might think of Jaffa's grand interpretation of Lincoln in Crisis of the House Divided, one could hardly be surprised that Jaffa aimed at an even more grandiose goal in his second volume, A New Birth of Freedom. In the later book, Jaffa promised not only to finish the history of Lincoln's statesmanship during the civil war but also to vindicate the truth of Lincoln's principles philosophically. In fact, philosophical vindication is the main goal of the second volume because, as Jaffa always acknowledged, he is not a historian but a student of political philosophy in the school of Leo Strauss—meaning a defender of the truth of natural right against relativism and nihilism. As Jaffa says in New Birth, “The movement of this book … is from the debate with Douglas to the debate with Calhoun. The difficulty in characterizing [the debate] is that the premises underlying the thought of Douglas and Calhoun are the premises of historicism, positivism, relativism, and nihilism … that have become the conventional wisdom of our time. Lincoln's acceptance of the idiom of natural rights and natural law—above all his acceptance of the idea of nature not merely as a record of cause and effect but as a source of moral principles—has become alien to us. Hence, it was necessary to challenge the conventional wisdom of the present day to gain a hearing for Lincoln… . In doing so, I believe I have vindicated not only Lincoln's rejection of the Southern states rights dogma but also the intrinsic validity of the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence” (preface, xiii-xiv).

As several scholars have pointed out, Jaffa's statement about the interpretive framework of New Birth makes it the most explicitly Straussian of his works.Footnote ¹⁸ It not only refers to Strauss repeatedly—“my hermeneutics are … those of Leo Strauss” (preface, xii)—the plan of the entire book also follows Natural Right and History by defending natural right against various forms of historicism, positivism, relativism, and nihilism.Footnote ¹⁹ This plan makes the later book more Straussian than the first volume: Whereas Crisis focuses on the clash between Lincoln and Douglas (understood as the clash between natural right and the relativism of “popular sovereignty”), New Birth focuses on Lincoln versus Calhoun (understood as natural right versus Calhoun's states rights and historically based “prescriptive rights”). The surprise of Jaffa's New Birth is that even though it is the most explicitly Straussian of Jaffa's books, it also departs markedly from Strauss (and from Jaffa's own thesis in Thomism and Aristotelianism) by trying to defend the natural rights principles of the Declaration through a grandiose convergence theory of classical Greek, Christian, and modern natural rights (with new additions from Roman history).

The main argument of New Birth is reminiscent of Jaffa's “Defense of the ‘Natural Law Thesis’” that we discussed above. Its central principle is human dignity—or the common humanity of all people—that relies on a classical version of philosophical “essentialism.” One formulation that Jaffa uses in New Birth resonates throughout the book: “When the Declaration asserts that all men are created equal, it is asserting … [that] all human beings are equally human beings, in the same sense that all dogs are equally dogs, and all chairs are equally chairs. Anything denominated by a common noun partakes equally in the class characteristics referred to by that noun … [this means] human beings as human beings are not white or black, or human beings of any other color” (120). Hence, it is possible to speak metaphysically about the essential nature of man as a distinct species in the overall hierarchy of being in the universe:

In these passages and others like them throughout the book, Jaffa weaves together in an original way the arguments of Aristotle, Christianity, and Lincoln to vindicate the Declaration.Footnote ²⁰ Jaffa's goal is to find a philosophically convincing rationale for Lincoln's Peoria speech (1854) in which Lincoln refers to the “ancient faith” of America as the Declaration's underlying principle “that no man is good enough to govern another, without that other's consent… . [T]his is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”Footnote ²¹ Jaffa emphasizes the phrase, “no man is good enough to govern another without that other's consent,” as the essential meaning of equality or equal natural rights. Instead of following the strategy of modern liberalism, however (which would mean using the “state of nature” argument that John Locke used to defend equality), Jaffa constructs a quasi-Aristotelian or quasi-Thomistic metaphysical argument about the nature of human beings in the God-given hierarchy of being. According to that argument, the hierarchy of being in the divinely created natural universe is self-evidently divided into three different levels, with God and angels at the top, man in the middle, and beasts or animals at the bottom. Each of these beings has its own distinctive nature or essence, although Jaffa downplays “the rational animal” argument in New Birth (sensing, I suspect, the potential of this argument to uphold natural inequalities of intelligence among human beings that could justify the undemocratic rule of the wise over the unwise without their consent). Instead of referring to the essence of man as the rational animal, Jaffa merely points to the nearly universal agreement about the essential differences between God, man, and beast to establish the common humanity of all people as the basis of equality:

For Jaffa, this is the clinching argument for the truth of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence and in Lincoln's vision of America.

Jaffa uses the clinching argument to explain why Calhoun is wrong about slavery and states rights, although the characterization of Calhoun in New Birth is admittedly ambiguous and disputable. On the one hand, Calhoun is depicted as a twisted proponent of natural right—as an advocate of natural inequality who sounds like a twisted or racist Aristotelian in applying the doctrine to the white and black races. On the other hand, Calhoun is depicted as a historicist who rejects “nature” altogether for a historical view of reality that emphasizes evolutionary forces and Social Darwinism. In other words, Jaffa acknowledges that Calhoun refers to both nature and history in A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States. Despite the references to both standards, Calhoun emerges in Jaffa's book as the archvillain because he is ultimately a historicist—someone who rejects an unchangeable view of human nature and a permanent essence of man. Jaffa defends the historicist charge by dismissing Calhoun's references in A Disquisition to the “law of our nature,” which describes man's social nature (or natural need for society) as well as man's antisocial nature (or natural tendency to violence and domination). Jaffa writes, “In Calhoun's writings, ‘laws of nature’ do indeed appear; but they are laws of cause and effect. They are not prescriptive or normative, as in the political philosophy of the Declaration” (431). Hence, “with respect to the end or goal of his science, man would appear to be for Calhoun—as he is for Aristotle and Jefferson—the being in-between God and beast, partaking of both the lower and higher natures” (442). But Calhoun is really a historical materialist like Marx and Darwin: “Calhoun's account of [the Roman and British] constitutions reminds us of Darwinism. The constitutional organisms that enabled Rome and Britain to survive, prosper, conquer, and rule were the unintended results of the struggle for survival of their constituent elements. … Calhoun's teaching [is] one variety of Social Darwinism that dominated the later nineteenth century” (451–52).

After fitting the debate between Lincoln and Calhoun into the Straussian framework of nature versus history, Jaffa moves beyond Strauss with the claim that the principles of the Declaration and of Lincoln are supported by all major strands of the Western tradition. How is it possible for Jaffa to make this claim? The answer in general terms is that all the major strands uphold natural right against relativism. The more particular answer is that all share the “essentialist” view of man in the hierarchy of being as a species between God and the beasts, and all see the dignity of man as a rational animal supporting a basic idea of justice as equality as well as government by consent of the people. In New Birth, Jaffa actually describes a convergence of four separate strands of the Western tradition, all upholding the Declaration's and Lincoln's principles:

• • The first (discussed above) is classical Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle's Politics and a version of Platonic essentialism, that is the primary source of the argument that all humans share a common nature and a common dignity as rational animals, existing as they do between gods and beasts and, therefore, deserving to rule and be ruled in turn rather than being subject to alleged superiors, such as kings or aristocrats.

• • The second source is Christianity, in the form of Thomism and in the form of a newly developed, twentieth-century school of theology that affirms a necessary connection between Christianity and democracy. In a footnote to New Birth, Jaffa points to the similarities between Thomism and the Declaration: “The perspective of the Declaration is in agreement with Thomas Aquinas's conception of the natural law as the rational creature's participation in the eternal law, the law by which God governs the universe” (509 n. 84). Jaffa even finds affinities with Pascal (usually viewed as a great critic of natural right): “Pascal himself assumes the existence in his own mind of something like the truths of the Declaration” (104). Jaffa also supports his case by citing theological developments within Christianity: “That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself… . This view was set forth with matchless eloquence in 1910 by Bourke Cockran, the leading lay spokesman for the Catholic Church in America at the turn of the century” (151–52).

• • The third source of support for the Declaration's and Lincoln's principles that Jaffa cites in New Birth is Roman imperial history. According to Jaffa, the Roman Empire began the process of distinguishing God's realm from Caesar's realm, but it was unable to realize fully the notion of religious liberty implied in that distinction. The idea remained unfulfilled until the time of the American Founding and the proclamation of the Declaration's natural rights principles: “The solution to the problem of the relationship of emperor and pope, or of Caesar and Christ, was only discovered in the American revolution and the American Founding in the separation of church and state… . Since the American Revolution, the Jeffersonian principle that it is against natural right for any government to intervene between a man and his God has come to be widely accepted … as the authentic interpretation of Jesus' reply to the Pharisees” (140–41).

• • The fourth source is the philosophy of Jefferson and Lincoln themselves, especially the notion that men are not ordained by God to be either kings and subjects or masters and slaves. Jaffa is fond of quoting Jefferson's saying that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” In Jaffa's view, Jefferson's statement denying divinely ordained hierarchies within the human species (but not among different species) is equivalent to Lincoln's statement that “no man is good enough to govern another without that other's consent”—an affirmation of the Declaration's basic human equality that is the legitimizing principle of the American republic.

In sum, Jaffa's thesis in New Birth is that moral order is upheld by a grand convergence of classical Greek philosophy, medieval and modern Christianity, the development of Roman imperial history, American idealism, and even Shakespearean poetry—all of which support the God-given natural rights of the Declaration of Independence and help to make them the permanent truths of mankind, which no form of relativism, nihilism, positivism, or historicism can defeat (whether it is espoused by Douglas and Calhoun or by modern historians, Supreme Court justices, and value-free social scientists).

Jaffa's Reservations about the Grand Convergence

Despite the optimism expressed in New Birth about the grand convergence of forces upholding moral order, Jaffa indicates in other writings that this is not his final word on the matter. It appears to be a deliberately exaggerated view, emphasizing the common belief in some kind of higher law of justice or natural right among the various elements of the Western tradition, all embracing a common belief in the dignity of man as a rational animal. As such, Jaffa's arguments could be regarded as a partially true but overstated expression of a public philosophy, designed as an exoteric teaching to strengthen moral order in the West by emphasizing common ground and downplaying differences.

In other writings (mostly during his later career while still being contemporaneous with the long gestation period of New Birth), Jaffa offers a more nuanced view of the Western tradition. He seems to acknowledge Strauss's point about irreducible tensions between reason and revelation and, to a lesser extent, the tensions between ancient and modern political philosophy. The more refined position still finds a convergence in the different strands of the Western tradition, but it admits the fact of irreconcilable differences between reason and revelation and irresolvable debates on first principles—for example, divergences on the question of the creation or eternity of the world. From this viewpoint, Strauss's teaching about the open-mindedness of the philosopher—an openness that resembles Socratic “skepticism” or Socratic “knowledge of ignorance”— provides Jaffa with a different kind of justification for the moral order of the West and the principles of American natural rights republicanism.

In other words, Jaffa's collected writings present two different strategies for defending moral order. One is a theoretical argument about human dignity (the dignity of man as a rational animal, existing between beasts and God in the hierarchy of being) that supports equality and natural rights. This appears to be Jaffa's partly true but overstated exoteric teaching. The second is a practical argument derived from Socratic skepticism, according to which the philosophical openness required by the unsolvable debate between reason and revelation, combined with the broad agreement of classical philosophy and biblical faith about morality, supports American civil and religious liberty. Let me finish this essay by discussing the second strategy in relation to the first strategy, with some concluding thoughts about how both strategies depart from Strauss's thinking.

In a memorial essay, “Strauss at 100” (2003), Jaffa argues that Strauss's lifelong aim was to restore Socratic philosophy and biblical revelation in order to overcome the dogmatic skepticism of modern philosophy, which culminated in nihilism or the loss of confidence in reason and truth. In this essay, Jaffa goes beyond Natural Right and History by appealing to two of Strauss's essays “Progress or Return?” and “What Is Liberal Education?” Jaffa claims that in these two essays Strauss acknowledges the irresolvable nature of the debate between reason and revelation about first principles, especially the debate about creation or eternity—whether the universe is created by God or is uncreated because it exists eternally by its own natural powers. Neither side seems to be able to refute the other: the biblical claim that the universe is the creation of an omnipotent, mysterious God is a miracle that faith alone can embrace because it is beyond reason to prove or comprehend. The philosophical claim that the universe is eternal (meaning it exists necessarily in some fashion) is the underlying assumption of any rational inquiry that aims at understanding why things are the way they are and not otherwise.

Fortunately, Jaffa argues, Strauss did not view the matter as an exclusive choice but as a “dialectical conclusion” that allowed for mutual cooperation: “Socratic rationalism had to grant the premise that supplied the ground for faith [namely, the mysterious character of the whole]. The reason … for continuing an endless philosophical inquiry, and the reason for ending such an inquiry by turning to biblical religion, was one and the same. … For Strauss, to restore the authority of Socratic rationalism was … to restore the authority of biblical faith. [Moreover,] both the Bible and Socratic philosophy provided a firm basis for moral choices, and the moral choices were substantially the same … [implying] agreement upon the moral order which must inform the life of decent society” (4). In other words, Jaffa interprets Strauss to be saying that Socratic philosophy and biblical faith share a sense of the mysterious nature of the whole universe while also agreeing about the fundamentals of moral order and the principles of a just and decent society.

After making this point about shared theoretical premises and shared practical principles, Jaffa quotes from the essay “What is Liberal Education?” in which Strauss speaks of “the dignity of the mind … [as] the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated” (6). Jaffa's inference is that “Strauss says nothing here of the necessity to choose between these two opinions. The crisis of the West does not require us to make such a choice, and we do not know that Strauss himself ever made it. What it does require is to recognize the authority of the moral order based upon the dignity of man, supported by reason and revelation. To secure that recognition was, I believe, the essential purpose of Leo Strauss's life and work” (6–7). The implication is that Jaffa recognizes Strauss's view of the ultimate, theoretical incompatibility of biblical faith and Socratic philosophy about creation and eternity; but Jaffa believes that Strauss finds a common ground in both elements of the West for the moral virtues, human dignity, and a decent political order. This is a different sort of argument than the one Jaffa presents in the Lincoln books about man's place in the hierarchy of being between God and beasts because the argument about Strauss is based on Socratic skeptical wisdom rather than a rationally settled doctrine about the metaphysical nature of reality and man's dignity in the natural universe.

Taking the skeptical argument one step further in “The American Founding as the Best Regime” (2002), Jaffa shows how the tensions rather than harmonies among the elements of Western civilization support the greatness of the American regime. Jaffa's thesis is that America is the best regime because it established civil and religious liberty (albeit “under God”) without forcing a decision on the theoretical debate between reason and revelation. Thus, the American Founding did not deny or inhibit the quest for human excellence through philosophical activity or moral virtue: it “limited the ends of government but not the ends of man.” The American regime did not deny the highest ends of man because it was not a product of the dogmatic skepticism of the Enlightenment or modern philosophy, which culminates in the denial of reason's power and of revelation's claim to know the truth and in the value-free relativism of modern social science. American political freedom is based on the moderate and open-ended skepticism of Socratic rationalism, which does not deny the possibility of biblical faith but opens a space for faith and for a debate about reason-revelation within philosophy itself. According to Jaffa, this is an unprecedented achievement in the Western world—an achievement not found in the ancient Greek polis, the Roman Empire, Christian feudalism, or the seventeenth-century world of divine-right kingship. No regime has ever been founded on this combination of theoretical openness to the highest ultimate questions and of practical commitment to moral order through a morally virtuous conception of freedom. In Jaffa's words: “The unprecedented character of the American Founding is that it provided for the coexistence of the claims of reason and revelation in all their forms, without requiring any political decisions concerning them. It refused to make unassisted human reason the arbiter of the claims of revelation, and [to make] revelation the judge of the claims of reason. It is the first regime in Western civilization to do this, and for that reason, it is, in its principles or speech … the best regime. But the virtue of the American Founding rests not only upon its defusing of the tension between reason and revelation, but on their fundamental agreement on a moral code…. This moral code is the work of ‘Nature's God’—reason—and the ‘Creator’—revelation … making reason and revelation, for the first time, open friends and allies on the political level” (8–9). Once again, Jaffa's strategy is to use Socratic openness or nondogmatic skepticism to vindicate American patriotism and natural rights rather than using settled doctrines about nature's hierarchy of being.

Conclusion and Evaluation

The last quotation provides a convenient stepping stone for the evaluation of Jaffa's political and philosophical thought. It indicates that Jaffa is faithful and unfaithful to Strauss in very interesting ways. In his early work Thomism and Aristotelianism, Jaffa stressed the irreducible tensions between classical philosophy and Christian revelation; he criticized Thomas Aquinas for trying to harmonize the two and sought to recover a pure Aristotelian teaching but never fully vindicated Aristotle's doctrine of natural right. In his middle work on Lincoln, Jaffa emphasized the grand convergence of Aristotle, Christianity, Roman history, the American Founders, and Lincoln in supporting the Declaration's principles of God-given natural rights and government by consent of the people. Jaffa claimed common ground in a notion of human dignity that sees man as the being between beasts and God. In his later writings on Strauss and America, Jaffa acknowledges the theoretical differences of Socratic philosophy and biblical faith but finds common ground in the nondogmatic skepticism of classical rationalism and in a shared commitment to moral order, which Jaffa equates with the American Founding and its unprecedented openness to theoretical and theological issues.

In assessing these writings, one can admire Jaffa for accepting the challenge posed by Leo Strauss to develop a natural right teaching that could overcome the relativism and nihilism of the modern West; and one can recognize Jaffa's original contributions in his arguments about human dignity and Socratic skepticism in the service of American natural rights republicanism. But the arguments for human dignity are driven by wishful thinking about the convergence of Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria that leads to repeated exaggerations. Some of the attempts at convergence are so strained that they seem almost funny, like the statement that “the Bible is a Platonic book,”Footnote ²² or “Lincoln's recovery of the Founding corresponded closely with the Maimonidean recovery of the rational origins of prophecy,”Footnote ²³ or Lady Macbeth “rejects the traditional moral distinction between beast, man, and God which we find in Aristotle's Politics as well as in Locke's Second Treatise and in the Declaration of Independence.”Footnote ²⁴ But the exaggerations are serious problems because they suggest that the classical and medieval philosophers would have embraced the principle of equality or equal rights underlying American republicanism as a kind of adaptation of natural right. Despite Aristotle's view of the changeability of natural right, he held as immutable the view that “one form of government is best everywhere by nature” and the best form is based on natural inequality and implies an aristocracy of the wise and virtuous, compared to which a polity is a decent second choice and a democracy a third choice. Insofar as Strauss himself embraced the teachings of classical natural right, he offered a more prudent—and a decidedly cooler and more detached—view of America than the moral idealism and ardent patriotism of Jaffa and his students would permit.

Similarly, Jaffa's use of Socratic skepticism on behalf of American greatness seems like an ingenious but fanciful way of reconciling reason, revelation, and American patriotism; and it is a reconciliation that Strauss never proposed and that the American Founders, as far as I can tell, never embraced. Jaffa exaggerates the Socratic openness of the American Founding on theological issues, including the Declaration of Independence, which clearly mentions God as the source of natural rights, implying a settled doctrinal decision in favor of the creation of the natural universe by an eternal God who endows human beings with their inherent rights—a religious feature of the Declaration that Jaffa sets aside in most of his discussions about Socratic America.

My conclusion, therefore, is that Jaffa goes beyond Strauss in his passion for moral order in the Western tradition and in American political life. Strauss, of course, took very seriously the question of moral order, but he always left arguments open to ambiguity and to a version of Socratic doubt that did not endorse any nation or regime because philosophy ultimately transcends the realm of politics altogether for the detached contemplation of eternal things. Jaffa also departs from Strauss in his enthusiasm for reconciling all the elements of the Western tradition out of an apparent unwillingness to live with the tension of exclusive choices that Strauss celebrated as the secret of the vitality of the West. Jaffa's journey from Athens and Jerusalem to Peoria has obviously inspired many people to follow in his footsteps, but it also encourages people to oversimplify the path to moral order and to understate the radical nature of the philosophical and spiritual life.