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© 2014. Idealistic Studies, Volume 44, Issues 2 & 3. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 249–262DOI: 10.5840/idstudies201541729

STRAUSS, KIERKEGAARD, AND THE “SECRET OF THE ART OF HELPING”

Matthew Dinan

Abstract: This paper compares Leo Strauss’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s views on esoteric writing. I argue that both thinkers have recourse to this kind of writing due to similar rhetorical dilemmas. Kierkegaard indeed uses indirect communication in his attempt to restore “simple” Chris-tianity to a “Christian” age, and Strauss’s recovery of esoteric writing similarly aims to restore science—understood as philosophy—to the “Scientific” age. Both, in short, suggest that esoteric writing can help circumvent the distortions of late modern intellectual culture to recover and indeed spur readers toward philosophy or faith understood as ways of life. The encounter between Strauss and Kierkegaard on the subject of esoteric writing shows, contra some of Strauss’s recent interpreters, that there is considerable common ground between the postmodern needs of religious faith and philosophical rationalism, despite, and indeed because of, their ultimate incompatibility.

Leo Strauss’s brief, tangential, and censorious references to Søren Kierkeg-aard in his published writings and correspondence belie some extraordinary similarities between the two thinkers.1 Both Strauss and Kierkegaard limn the relationship between reason and revelation, point out the inadequacies of the modern age and modern liberal democracy, criticize the contradictions of historicism, and appeal to Socrates as a model of the philosophic way of life. Despite these similarities the most interesting thing Strauss and Kierkegaard share is inarguably also the most peculiar: their relatively frank discussions of a phenomenon many deny exist at all, esoteric writing, or indirect com-munication.2 Despite these significant areas of overlap, especially this last, few scholars have put Strauss and Kierkegaard in meaningful conversation.3 This paper attempts to remedy this shortcoming by comparing Strauss and Kierkegaard on the subject of esoteric writing.

Strauss’s understanding of esoteric writing furnishes a tradition in which to situate Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship that avoids extremes advocated by two groups of scholars: those who view the indirect com-munication as an unimportant quirk of a more or less directly-exposited philosophy, and those who view Kierkegaard’s texts as undecidable master-works of Derridean deferral avant la lettre.4 Kierkegaard’s professed reasons

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for the use of indirect communication indeed align with what Arthur Melzer, inspired by Strauss, calls the “pedagogical motive for esoteric writing.”5 Closer examination reveals that both identify esoteric writing as critical for the postmodern recovery of authentic, prephilosophical experiences of faith and philosophy. Kierkegaard’s description of esoteric writing moreover sheds light on Strauss’s own rhetorical situation: just as Kierkegaard finds himself in the unenviable situation of having to restore “simple” Christianity to a Christian Age, Strauss, confronted by historicism, attempts to restore an authentic understanding of science—as philosophy—to a Scientific Age. Both, in short, suggest that esoteric writing can help circumvent the distor-tions of late modern intellectual culture to recover and indeed spur readers toward philosophy or faith understood as ways of life. The encounter between Strauss and Kierkegaard on the subject of esoteric writing shows, contra some of Strauss’s recent interpreters, that there is considerable common ground between the postmodern needs of religious faith and philosophical rationalism, despite, and indeed because of, their ultimate incompatibility.

“Written Speeches Caused by Love”: A Philanthropic Motive?By “esoteric writing” Strauss means the species of literature in which “the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines”; that some texts are ultimately addressed “not to all readers, but to trustwor-thy and intelligent readers only.”6 In order to accomplish this goal, writers create polyvalent texts with “certain obtrusively enigmatic features” like “obscurity of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms, inexact repetitions of previous statements, strange expressions, etc.”7 The principal reasons for the adoption of this strategy appear to be two: in Persecution and the Art of Writing Strauss suggests that esoteric writing is undertaken to avoid the persecution certain to attend the “public expression of the heterodox truth,”8 and in the later “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing” esoteric writing responds protectively to the disjuncture between the need of philosophy to dissolve opinion into knowledge, and the fact that “opinion is the element of society.”9 As Michael L. Frazer observes: “There is a critical difference between an esotericism arising from a necessary gap between society and philosophy and an esotericism arising from the contingent fact of persecution.”10 In the case of persecution, to borrow language from Paul J. Bagley, the esotericism is only “conditional,” or “weak”;11 esoteric writing is in this case practiced only out of a desire to avoid sharing in what the saint in the Prologue to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra colorfully calls “the arsonist’s punishment.”12 The second formulation, Bagley argues, is the “strong” case: the incompatible needs of philosophy and the city make the use of concealment a necessary and permanent part of all responsible philosophical writing, and some philo-sophical writers are inclined to “consider . . . [their] social responsibility.”13 Not everyone wants to be an arsonist.

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THE “SECRET OF THE ART OF HELPING”

In Philosophy Between the Lines Arthur Melzer, citing Strauss, suggests that the conditional and unconditional forms of esoteric writing arise in re-sponse to how one understands the relationship between philosophy and the city. Modern thinkers are inclined to a “harmonist” view in which philosophy and politics can be reconciled, and their use of esotericism is consequently only conditional or temporary. Ancient and medieval writers, by way of contrast, affirm a thoroughgoing and ineluctable antagonism between the two, necessitating unconditional esotericism.14 Melzer however observes that such a division does not capture the full range of motives for esoteric writing. Summarizing what is developed in a seemingly “unanalytic” manner in Persecution, Melzer analytically classifies the four main types of esoteric writing. Writers aim to pursue some good or to avoid some evil in writing esoterically. The evils to be avoided are “either some harm that society might do the writer (persecution) or some harm that the writer might do society (‘dangerous truths’).”15 The goods sought include “either the political (cul-tural, intellectual, religious) reform of society in general or the philosophic education of the rare and gifted individual (or both).”16 Melzer’s resulting taxonomy: “defensive” esotericism aims to avoid persecution, “protective” esotericism aims to avoid harm to society, “political” esotericism aims to reform society, and “pedagogical” esotericism aims at the philosophical education of readers.17 Modern writers favor the defensive and political sorts, and ancient writers favor the protective and the pedagogical.

But all of these analyses of obscurity—despite their usefulness and clar-ity—run the risk of themselves obscuring something crucial about the practice of esoteric writing as described by Strauss. Leaving aside the question of whether it is indeed possible to be primarily concerned with avoiding an evil rather than seeking a good, all types of esoteric writing betray the ultimate desire to be understood by someone insofar as they are writing. As Kierkeg-aard indeed observes on this subject, if the goal of an author were obfuscation tout simple, “it is perfectly consistent with subtlety for him to do it in such a way that—the comic emerges—that he himself cannot make head nor tail of it.”18 In examples of esoteric writing where other motives also apply, the telos is never the creation of confusion itself, but the communication of some truth. The obvious point of what Strauss calls “exoteric” writing is always already its “esoteric” content. The goal of any type of esoteric writing is that it will address its reader malgré tout. This is perhaps why Strauss’s scholarly commentators have abandoned his original terminology and now refer to the phenomenon almost exclusively as “esoteric” writing.19

Understood in this way, all esoteric writing is pedagogical. Strauss sug-gests such a reductio-ad-pedagogum by arguing that the character of all esoteric writing is that it communicates the truth “exclusively between the lines.”20 The goals of protective, defensive, and political esotericism are thus in a sense reducible to the pedagogical motivation, because all esoteric writing

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aims to convey some truth, and thus to change its reader. Melzer’s excellent chapter on the pedagogical motive in Philosophy Between the Lines points out that the pedagogical motivation arises as a way of addressing the difficul-ties endemic to the medium of writing itself: the fact that it fosters the “false presumption of wisdom,” creates an “enfeebling passivity,” and can lead to the “development of an excessive trust and dependence on the author.”21 Follow-ing Socrates’s critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, Melzer observes that all of these characteristics make writing incompatible with the intellectual independence required for the philosophical way of life. Esoteric books are thus written with the putatively unphilosophical character of writing firmly in mind. In order to facilitate the “turning around of the soul” characteristic of philosophy, esoteric writing thus “withhold[s] the answers,” “begin[s] by embracing received opinion,” “guide[s] the reader by way of hints and riddles” and “address[es] the different stages of understanding by writing on multiple levels.”22 Esoteric writing, in short, is writing which makes thinking “personal”: “‘thinking for oneself’ means not only that it is oneself that does the thinking but that one thinks for one’s own case, thinks from out of one’s own care, future, and fate.”23 Esoteric writing leads the reader to realize that she is not a detached observer, but a human being who has an active interest in the pursuit of the truth.

An emphasis on the pedagogical motivation of all esoteric writing, how-ever, should lead us to view it not as elitist, but as philanthropic.24 Strauss indeed counters the notion that the esoteric writer cannot guarantee that her audience—“trustworthy and intelligent readers”—will necessarily combine the former quality with the latter by curiously stating that “this literature would be impossible if the Socratic dictum that virtue is knowledge, and therefore that thoughtful men as such are trustworthy and not cruel, were entirely wrong.”25 From whence does their apparent confidence arise? Ei-ther the knowers who write secretly are imprudent, or else they believe in the good will of others on account of their good will toward their readers. Strauss thus somewhat elliptically suggests that a philanthropic, or at least philo-philosophical, motive informs all esoteric writing. This is indeed con-sistent with the very fact of choosing to write: the good willed is always the good of the reader.

Toward the end of the eponymous essay in Persecution we furthermore come across a conspicuously “terse and lively” statement about the goal of pedagogically-oriented esoteric writing that substantiates such a reading: “[Obtrusively enigmatic] features do not disturb the slumber of those who cannot see the wood for the trees, but act as awakening stumbling blocks for those who can. All books of that kind owe their existence to the love of the mature philosopher for the puppies of the race, by whom he wants to be loved in turn: all exoteric books are ‘written speeches caused by love.’”26 In the last analysis, Strauss suggests that the motivation of esoteric writing is

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not fear or resentment, but love and the desire to be loved. It is perhaps not too far to say that this desire for reciprocated loving is an attempt to enact a species of philosophical friendship. Esoteric writing is thus not a sinister means by which the elite attempt to control the many, but the art by which the more experienced sojourner helps the novice on the road to philosophy.27

Indeed, if we thus consider the exoteric teachings surrounding esoteric truths, we see that these, too, contribute to the pedagogical intent of such writing.28 If, as Strauss suggests, “opinion is the element of society,” then many, if not all, readers will approach esoteric literature bearing the assump-tions of the age.29 This means that the presentation of salutary truths is not merely a red herring for the hostile and the philosophically disinclined, but an invitation to consider the nature of one’s own cave. The “deception” is not done out of a cynical concern to keep “the many” in the dark, but out of the educational need to precipitate self-reflection and escape inherited opinions. Esoteric writing is liberating.30 Perhaps most importantly, if philosophy is not simply a set of doctrines but, as Strauss repeatedly maintains, a “way of life,” then the self-reflection engendered by the interaction between surface and depth in such a text leads us to similarly make the connection between what one thinks and how one lives.31 As we shall see, the ultimately pedagogical logic of Strauss’s presentation of esoteric writing resonates with Kierkegaard, who also characterizes his use of indirect communication as a certain “work” of love. For Kierkegaard, as for Strauss, esoteric writing is best understood as an art of “helping.”32

Directly Indirect: Kierkegaard on “Kierkegaard”While it is hotly debated whether Strauss himself wrote esoterically, it is undeniable that Søren Kierkegaard did so in his two pseudonymous author-ships.33 It is not my goal here to undertake the Herculean task of offering an interpretation of the authorships; instead, I turn to Kierkegaard’s own expla-nation of this quixotic literary choice in “On my Work as an Author” and in The Point of View for My Work as an Author to explore his understanding of indirect communication, or esoteric writing.34 Kierkegaard uses these direct communications, signed in his own name, to defend the religious intention of his first pseudonymous authorship, the “esthetic” books in the sequence including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Stages on Life’s Way, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. As a Christian writer, and one who experienced considerable public scrutiny,35 Kierkegaard felt compelled to defend his own practice of “deceiving into the truth,” to demonstrate its compatibility with his explicit goal of helping individuals to become Christians.36

In “On my Work as an Author,” he does this first by appealing to empirical history. Kierkegaard notes that the publication of each indirect work in his authorship coincided with a direct communication, the so-called “Upbuilding”

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or “Edifying” Discourses, published under his own name.37 Kierkegaard thus complements the pseudonymous authorship with a series of edifying treatises, some of which were delivered as sermons in Lutheran churches.38 He would in this way seem to “break off” the exoteric or edifying component of his esoteric writing from the beginning of his authorship, making his “evangelical” aim clear. Christianity differs from philosophy in the sense that the edifying or the salutary is also serious. This again begs the question of why he should bother with esoteric writing at all. After all, the New Testament injunction to preach the good news is an imperative, not a suggestion:39 what role could misdirection and obscurity have in the transmission of Christianity?40

Kierkegaard, in his way, confronts the tension head on. He states that in contradistinction to direct communication, indirect communication or “com-munication in reflection” means “to deceive into the truth.”41 Since the point of the movement it is ultimately to “become a Christian,” “the communica-tion in turn must sooner or later end in direct communication.”42 Esoteric writing thus opens the possibility for direct communication. Understood in this way, and in a complete inversion of the relative scholarly attention each group of writings receives, the pseudonymous authorship serves a propadeutic function for the direct communication of the edifying discourses. Consistent with pedagogical motivation for esoteric writing as described by Strauss and Melzer, Kierkegaard thereby suggests that his writing makes possible the communication of a truth that could not otherwise be received. The edifying “facts” can be directly communicated, but in order for this to be possible, one must first become Kierkegaard’s reader.43

The need for indirection arises because Christianity itself has been “cast into reflection.”44 Individuals living in officially Christian Denmark risk in-authenticity because they believe that “everyone” is “already” a Christian by dint of being born in their particular historical moment, even those who “never think about God, never name his name except when they curse!”45 Influential Danish Hegelians like Hans Lassen Martensen suggested that the ethical realm of the modern state mediates the content of Christian revelation such that the rigors of Christianity align with the duties of decent bourgeois existence.46 Christianity is therefore not viewed as something “infinitely high,” for which we might strive. Kierkegaard observes that we all-too-easily content ourselves with a Christianity that is undeniably less noble, “something lower,” and in this way also convince ourselves that nothing higher can exist.47 Rather than a totalizing and passionate way of life, Christianity in late modernity runs the risk of constituting just one more part of the mass identity of bourgeois society, or “the crowd,” as Kierkegaard derisively terms it. Kierkegaard thus posits the same fundamental tension between authentic religion and modern society that Strauss observes between philosophy and the city. Kierkegaard’s move to frustrate the development with esoteric writing is thus perfectly consistent with Strauss’s observations on the subject: both view its capac-

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ity to awaken and question convention as critical to precipitating a “turning around of the soul” to a different way of life.

Kierkegaard, like Strauss, suggests that it is only through indirect com-munication that one may remove this “illusion.” He suggests that the putative sophistication of modern people conceals our failure to recognize and live the radical claims made by Christianity. Kierkegaard’s “maieutic” indirection aims to throw Christianity “back into reflection, yet in such a way that it is completely taken back out of reflection into simplicity—that is . . . to reach to arrive at simplicity.”48 Kierkegaard thus aims to recover a primitive or fundamental understanding of Christianity through his authorship, one that would prepare his reader for the direct transmission of Christian doctrine. This “simple” understanding of Christianity is evidently taking the claims of Christianity seriously: to recognize that indifference to the claims of Christian revelation is not an option. This requires an earnest awakeness to one’s own situation, to understand the necessarily personal nature of thought. Kierkeg-aard’s understanding of the necessity and purpose of his writing thus aligns almost perfectly with the Straussian pedagogical motive.49

“The Entire Secret of the Art of Helping”When in The Point of View Kierkegaard attempts to describe his use of esoteric writing in greater detail, he admits he faces a dilemma: he cannot articulate precisely the point of his writing because he has already written it in the only way he knew. Indeed, given that his intention is itself dialectical “[i]f [he] qua author must first make declarations, [he] easily alter[s] all the writing, which from first to last is dialectical.”50 If one’s intention is to create a dialectical text, then this very intention is volatilized by the demand for full disclosure. As an author he can only tell us that his writing is indirect, and to a certain extent how and why. As an indirect writer, we furthermore have reason not to trust his explicit statements: how precisely do we know that the upbuild-ing discourses are not themselves only an exoteric ploy, a religious cover to keep us off the trail of a secret esthete? Kierkegaard points out we can only judge his authorship by the books themselves, especially insofar as he is attempting to disclose something that can only be communicated indirectly.

The persistent equivocation opened up by the existence of esoteric writing, however, beckons for straightforward disclosure, “a declaration” in order to “break the dialectical tension and knot.”51 In an amusing twist Kierkegaard says that such apparent probity is in fact the path of subtlety: as noted above, if he embraced mystification entirely for its own sake, it would be most consistent if even he could neither “make head nor tail of it.”52 The difference, Kierkegaard maintains, is that his use of “mystification” is motivated by earnestness and a concern for the truth. Kierkegaard’s writing thus aims at producing a “dialectical redoubling” in the service of earnest-ness, to “ward off misunderstanding and preliminary understandings, while

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the true explanation is available to the person who is honestly seeking.”53 Kierkegaard aims to reproduce his own earnestness in his readers through dialectical redoubling; that is, by creating frustration that can only be over-come through a self-referential concern for the relationship of the truth to one’s self. In “On My Work as an Author” he explains such earnestness “in working also to work against oneself”: one’s experience of the text thus works against easy or premature conclusions, because as one reads, one is forced not only to reflection, but to self-reflection. One begins to relate the self to itself. In the same note he evocatively compares this earnestness to the “pressure on a plough that determines the depth of the furrow.”54 The direct communication, he maintains, is “only a glossing-over,” and is rewarded only with “worldliness and homogeneity.”55 Kierkegaard thus shows us that even a relatively direct exposition of his method of writing requires one to return to his texts for verification: “[o]nce the requisite earnestness takes hold, it can solve it, but always only in such a way that the earnestness itself vouches for the correctness.”56 A person lacking earnestness will remain ever-dubious, as the “elasticity of the dialectical doubleness” is unmanageable for such a one. Kierkegaard frustrates the ironic with his irony.57

Kierkegaard specifically defends his publication of “esthetic” works, like the “Seducer’s Diary” from Either/Or. His goal is neither to glamorize “A,” the poetic personage whose diary we read, nor to fetishize the esthetic categories of worldly success and the pursuit of pleasure; rather, Kierkegaard writes from the perspective of an esthete because it is in that sphere of human life in which most people find themselves.58 Such works present perspec-tives other than Kierkegaard’s own to facilitate a return to the authentically religious. The illusion of Christendom is such that one cannot introduce Christianity directly; instead, “one under an illusion must be approached from behind”;59 and “only in this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true—by deceiving him.”60 Thus Kierkegaard understands that demonstrating the problems with the esthetic point of view from within is the only way of “deepening the furrow.” This, he maintains is the “secret in the entire art of helping”: “If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there.”61 Kierkegaard, recalling Strauss’s view of the role that received opinion plays in an esoteric text, understands the need to begin with common opinion not out of cynicism, but because beginning there is the only way to facilitate earnestness, and eventually conversion. Strauss’s analysis of esoteric writing as a type of helping or care is consequently a helpful lens by which to understand Kierkegaard’s intention.

Strauss and Kierkegaard: Faith, Philosophy, and SimplicityAs mentioned above, the goal of Kierkegaardian “earnestness” is the recovery of an understanding of oneself as a single individual forced to figure things

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out for oneself, and not as a member of the crowd, content with the easy answers of convention. In understanding oneself in this way, the “simple” account of Christianity, in which one understands the existential stakes of revelation, is once again possible. Toward the end of The Point of View, Kierkegaard refers to this method of writing as essentially Socratic: “in this respect I calmly stick to Socrates. True, he was no Christian, that I know, although I also definitely remain convinced that he has become one. But he was a dialectician and understood everything in reflection. And the question here is purely dialectical—it is the question of the use of reflection in Chris-tendom.”62 Socrates “has become Christian” because the use of reflection as a means a recovery of the basic existential claims of Christianity can itself be interpreted as a work of love.63 The crisis of Christendom is also a philo-sophical problem that needs to be addressed philosophically. Sophisticated or historicized Christianity must itself be cast into reflection to contest the distortions of historicist pseudo-philosophy. The Socratic use of reflection in Christendom allows faith to make common cause with philosophy against historicism.

Indeed, as the similarity between Strauss’s and Kierkegaard’s accounts of the pedagogical function of esoteric writing attests, the lives of authentic Christian faith and authentic Socratic philosophy are both incompatible with the sleepy life of convention. Thus Kierkegaard’s recourse to esoteric writing occurs on ground similar to Strauss’s recovery thereof. Kierkegaard attempts to restore “simple” Christianity in which the single individual recognizes the need for an earnest commitment to a way of life. Strauss, confronted by the pseudo-philosophies of scientism and historicism also attempts to restore the radical claims of the “natural” position of the philosophical way of life. On account of historicism, philosophy, too, has been “thrown into reflection” such that one comes to believe that one’s conventional views are superior to the most sophisticated minds of the past.64 Everyone in the scien-tific age believes him- or herself wise in much the same way as everyone in the Christian age considered him or herself to be a Christian. Both of these illusions are fostered by the historicist reduction of individual human lives to mere contingency or to a moment in a dialectic. Kierkegaard and Strauss, moreover, counter historicism through the awakening of the single individual through esoteric writing. From our analysis of the surprising similarity of Strauss’s and Kierkegaard’s accounts of esoteric writing we consequently notice a surprising similarity between faith and philosophy understood as ways of life: both require earnestness (or eros),65 independence from common opinion, and the understanding of the serious, totalizing nature of the com-mitment each requires. Some recent commentators on Strauss and esoteric writing might question such a conclusion. Melzer is, for instance, right to observe certain contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism constitute an attack on reason in a way that is anathema to Strauss’s intention; however,

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the encounter with Kierkegaard shows that such unreflective and frequently disingenuous conventionalism is threat to authentic Christianity as well.66 Esoteric writing is consequently not the exclusive domain of philosophy, but can also facilitate the recovery of earnest faith. However, it is through this connection that a deeper incompatibility emerges. While esoteric writ-ing can help reclaim the single individual for both faith and philosophy, the totalizing earnestness required by each pursuit ultimately means that these different ways of life are competitors, if friendly ones.67 Esoteric writing, however, helps us recognize the choice, and the urgent call of making it; esoteric writers demonstrate their love of humanity in helping us do so. Thus, in the last analysis, through their attempts to restore the prestige of the “art of helping,” Strauss and Kierkegaard model the common philanthropic core, which, despite the tensions between the two, ennobles both philosophy and faith as ways of life.

St Thomas University

Notes

1. Strauss never engages with Kierkegaard in a sustained manner, but in Natural Right and History identifies Kierkegaard as prosecuting a post-Hegelian attack on theory in the name of practice. Insofar as Kierkegaard succeeds in his metaphysical critique of Hegel, Strauss argues, he joins Nietzsche in destroying the very possibility of authentic thēoria, without which truly prudential practice is likewise impossible. In his correspon-dence with Eric Voegelin, Strauss criticizes Kierkegaard’s turn to Socrates as merely a “provisional” deployment against Hegel, and argues that the Platonic love of wisdom cannot be understood through Kierkegaard’s understanding of “existence.” Strauss later warns Voegelin that his (Voegelin’s) understanding of religious faith runs the risk of end-ing up marooned in the “desert of Kierkegaard’s subjectivism.” See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 321; Leo Strauss to Eric Voegelin, “Letter 26,” December 17, 1949, in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 62–63; and Leo Strauss to Eric Voegelin, “Letter 39,” June 4, 1951, in Faith and Political Philosophy, 88–89.

2. According to a recent definition of the term “Straussian,” as one who “works to a degree that cannot be entirely specified within a framework of Strauss’s question[s] and chief concepts and, if the scholar in question is concerned with textual studies, deploys Strauss’s methods of close reading,” we might even, through creative anachronism, be tempted to suggest that Kierkegaard should be considered a follower of Strauss, since Strauss is surely no follower of Kierkegaard. Michael Zuckert, “Straussians,” in The Cam-bridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Steven B. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 263–286.

3. The scholar who comes closest to addressing the relationship between Strauss and Kierkegaard on esoteric writing is M. G. Piety in “The Dangers of Indirection: Plato, Kierkegaard, and Leo Strauss.” Piety uses Strauss’s reading of Plato’s Republic as an

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example of the kind of problematic reading the use of esoteric writing can invite (164). She contrasts Strauss’s “unfortunate” reading of the Republic with what she views to be Alistair Hannay’s more successful interpretation of another indirect text, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Piety’s essay skirts the issue of the actual nature of esoteric writing in Plato, Kierkeggaard, and Strauss, instead focusing on the dangers of its use, and thus differs considerably from my focus here, which is on the compelling reasons why thinkers write esoterically, and the similarities between Strauss and Kierkegaard in this regard. See M. G. Piety, “The Dangers of Indirection: Plato, Kierkegaard, and Leo Strauss,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 162–174. Jacob Howland’s outstanding Kierkegaard and Socrates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Thomas Pangle’s seminal Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) both take some of Strauss’s questions, themes, and hermeneutics to the study of Kierkegaard, though neither explicitly addresses the theme of esoteric writing.

4. For an example of the first, see Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Exis-tentialism, 3rd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 175–206; and of the second, Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 5–14.

5. Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writ-ing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 4.

6. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 25. In keeping with scholarly orthodoxy, I have referred to such literature as “esoteric” rather than “exoteric” as Strauss does in Persecution and the Art of Writ-ing. This scholarly change, as we shall see, reflects an important ambiguity in Strauss’s presentation of the phenomenon in Persecution and elsewhere.

7. Ibid., 36.

8. Ibid., 24.

9. Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” Chicago Review 8(1) (Winter–Spring 1954): 65.

10. Michael L. Frazer, “Esotericism Ancient and Modern: Strauss Contra Strauss-ianism on the Art of Political-Philosophical Writing,” Political Theory 34(1) (February 2006): 35.

11. Paul J. Bagley, “On the Practice of Esotericism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53(2) (1992): 231–247.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4.

13. Strauss, Persecution, 36.

14. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, 3.

15. Ibid., 4.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

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18. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 34. This goal of self-mystification is, incidentally, the objective ascribed by Richard Rorty to Jacques Derrida on the subject of the latter’s Glas. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1989), chap. 6.

19. For more on this difference between Strauss and his commentators, see Frazer, “Esotericism Ancient and Modern,” 56–57, fn 5.

20. Strauss, Persecution, 25 (emphasis mine).

21. Melzer, Between the Lines, 213–215.

22. Ibid., 218.

23. Ibid., 215.

24. This analysis thus cuts against those who, following Shadia Drury, argue that Strauss aims to create an “arrogant, unscrupulous, and mendacious” elite through his own use of esotericism. See Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, Updated Edition (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), xiii. Strauss was, of course, aware that this would be the reception of his rediscovery; in fact, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing” addresses several early scholars who voiced such objections. Laurence Lampert’s translation and interpretation of Strauss’s letters to Jacob Klein during the first days of his recovery of esoteric writing show him to be gleefully aware of the “explosively” subversive charac-ter of his insights. See Laurence Lampert, “Strauss’s Recovery of Esotericism” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, 63–92.

25. Ibid., 25.

26. Ibid., 36.

27. Frazer and Catherine and Michael Zuckert also affirm some form of the centrality of pedagogy to Strauss. My suggestion is that, according to Strauss’s logic, all esoteric writing should at its core be understood as pedagogical in intent. See Frazer, “Esoteri-cism Ancient and Modern,” 55; and Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

28. Melzer also recognizes this.

29. Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” 64. Strauss also points out that this is a view shared by contemporary social scientists; a point as apt in our day as in his.

30. Strauss, Persecution, 36.

31. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 91.

32. Such an ethos is evident in Joseph Cropsey’s—Strauss’s literary executor—Plato’s World, which articulates what he sees to be a philosophical ethic of “care” in the esoterically-formulated philosophy of Plato. See Joseph Cropsey, Plato’s World: Man’s Place in the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

33. Strauss lists the use of pseudonyms as one of the potential strategies for esoteric writers concerned with philosophical pedagogy in Persecution. See Strauss, Persecution, 36.

34. I am also abstaining from commenting upon the views of Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus on the subject of direct and indirect communication, as Kierkegaard cannot be

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guaranteed to share those views. Some scholars assume the continuity of Climacus’s views with Kierkegaard’s own, and consequently label his thoughts on indirect communication as “inconsistent.” See, for example, J. Kellenberger, “Kierkegaard, Indirect Communication, and Religious Truth,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16(2) (1984): 153. For a reconciliation of the views of Kierkegaard with his pseudonym Climacus, see Jamie Turnbull, “Kierkegaard, Indirect Communication, and Ambiguity,” The Heythrop Journal 2009: 13–22.

35. Kierkegaard was the subject of extensive public castigation in what is now known as the “Corsair Affair.” See Hong and Hong, “Historical Introduction,” in Kierkegaard, The Point of View, xii.

36. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 7. Kierkegaard, both in “On My Work as an Au-thor” and in The Point of View, must go out of his way to demonstrate his sincerity, and that he is not attempting to weld a salutary religious purpose onto the esthetic authorship ex post facto (Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 29–30). This underscores Melzer’s obser-vation that already by the mid-nineteenth century, Western culture had begun to “forget” about the practice of esoteric writing. For more on this “forgetting” on the philosophical reasons precipitating it, see Melzer, Between the Lines, chap. 4, passim.

37. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 7. Hong and Hong’s “Historical Introduction” to The Point of View also includes a helpful timeline of the publication of the pseudonymous and upbuilding works. See “Historical Introduction” in Kierkegaard, The Point of View, xxiii–xxvii.

38. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 6, 8.

39. See, for example, Matthew 28:16–20.

40. The late Earnest Fortin, an admirer of Strauss, did much to improve our under-standing of this phenomenon in early Christian and Medieval writers. See Ernest Fortin, Ever Ancient, Ever New: Ruminations on the City, the Soul, and the Church, ed. Michael P. Foley (Lanham, Md.: Roman and Littlefield, 2007). Melzer also cites a variety of Christian writers in making the historical case for the existence of esoteric writing in Philosophy Between the Lines, including Kierkegaard. See for example, Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, 217.

41. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 7; italics in the original.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 9.

44. Ibid., 6.

45. Ibid., 41.

46. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2007), 57–69.

47. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 17. As is often observed, in this way Kierkegaard’s criticisim of Christendom anticipates Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s sketch of the “last human being.”

48. Ibid., 6.

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49. Melzer, too, notices the potential for esoteric writing to challenge inauthenticity. He claims that the inauthenticity derided by Kierkegaard might have come as a protec-tive consequence of our “forgetting” the esoteric tradition and the protection it offers to common opinion. See Melzer, Between the Lines, 203.

50. Ibid., 33.

51. Ibid., 34.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., footnote to page 9.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 34.

57. In this way, Kierkegaard’s status as an esoteric writer short-circuits the contentions of Poole and Garff through its appeal to earnestness. In this judgment, I agree with Mark A. Tietjen’s excellent analysis in Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 67–70.

58. Kierkegaard famously divides human life into “stages”; the esthetic should be eventually supplanted by the ethical, and eventually the religious.

59. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 43.

60. Ibid., 53.

61. Ibid., 45.

62. Ibid., 54.

63. Mark McCreary persuasively shows how Kierkegaard’s use of indirection can be interpreted, in Kierkegaard’s own terms, as a Christian “work of love.” See Mark L. McCreary, “Deceptive Love: Kierkegaard on Mystification and Deceiving into the Truth,” Journal of Religious Ethics 39(1) (2011): 25–47.

64. Strauss, Persecution, 155–160. See Melzer, Between the Lines, chap. 10.

65. The “common erotic core” of faith and philosophy is the focal point of Howland’s analysis of Kierkegaard and Socrates. My understanding of this relationship is indebted to him.

66. Melzer, Between the Lines, 326–332.

67. I therefore question Lampert’s suggestion that Strauss artificially weakens the claims of reason and strengthens the claims of revelation; this analysis of Strauss and Kierkegaard suggests that esoteric writing responds to the deep human need for earnestness, common to both faith and philosophy. See Lampert, “Strauss’s Recovery of Esotericism,” 90–92.