Just as you cannot tell a book by its cover, you can’t always tell a book by its title. This book, Leo Strauss on Religion, could easily lead the prospective reader to expect a treatise or synthetic account of Strauss’s many different statements on the title subject. That is not what we get. The chief attraction of the book is, no doubt, a series of “writings” by Strauss, composed of previously unpublished notes from the Strauss archives, of unpublished lectures he gave, largely at the University of Chicago Hillel House, and in one case, of an extract from the transcript of a seminar on Rousseau. Many of the other “notes” were also clearly connected to his teaching. In addition to Strauss’s “writings” there are also “interpretations,” that is to say, interpretive essays by scholars on the extracts printed here, or on closely related topics.

Nowhere, except in the editors’ introduction, do we find the sort of synthetic statement of Strauss’s views on religion we might expect from the title. But even in that place we find the editors admitting that “this short introduction is neither the place nor is it our intention in this book to resolve this complex question and to put an end to the controversy around Strauss’s view of religion.” Instead, they mean to provide “supplementary material to study this question if not to fan the flames of the debate in the scholarship” (xxiii). The Strauss materials are indeed accurately characterized as “supplementary,” for most are clearly related to well-known larger writings by Strauss. Although the editors have not given us an account of their principle of selection of materials to include, they have succeeded in supplying a sampling of the range and variety of Strauss’s lifelong grappling with the question of religion. The editors have arranged the materials in the chronological order in which Strauss prepared them but if we look at them in the historical order of their subject matter, we can more readily see the range of his interests.

The oldest subject matter in the Strauss extracts is his notes on Plato’s Symposium, the locus, according to Strauss, for “the Platonic Theology,” being the only dialogue devoted to a god and the one in which the question quid sit deus is asked and answered by Socrates. Among other things, Strauss says in one of the texts: “Agathon lets us see that eros as a self-subsisting being is nothing, since he has come to being out of nothing; he is only by virtue of the poet, i.e., the tragic poet, and this is true of all gods” (211). But, we must ask, is it true of the biblical god as well as the pagan gods?

The sets of writings on medieval (Jewish) authors perhaps gives some answer, for one of these, on Abraham and Moses as treated by Maimonides, is particularly germane in examining the being of God as these two biblical figures present it. Also among the medieval sources Strauss interprets is Halevi’s Kuzari. Here is a case where Strauss’s notes are not (to this reader at least) very helpful, but where the appended interpretive essay, this one by Ralph Lerner, supplements Strauss’s notes with some very provocative and ultimately unsettling reflections on Strauss’s marvelous essay, “The Law of Reason in Halevi’s Kuzari.” Lerner leaves us with little doubt of where he believes Strauss stands on Halevi’s text and the question about God, but then throws the whole up in the air again by raising considerations about Halevi’s poetry of Zionist longing. Is this meant to lead us to a rereading of Strauss contra Lerner’s own extraction of Strauss’s esoteric reading, or is it meant as a gentle critique of Strauss? Or is it rather a reminder to us that Strauss’s thoughts on religion seem to have changed over time, perhaps in response to the so-called “shipwreck” of the 1940s? It is one of the virtues of the book that it organizes its materials in chronological order so that we readers can be alert to possible changes in Strauss’s position.

One of the Strauss texts particularly relevant to the “shipwreck” is a series of notes on Pascal, dating from 1947, when he taught a course on Reason and Revelation with Pascal’s Pensées as a major text. These notes are printed here as an appendix, differing from other parts of the book in that there is no interpretive essay accompanying them. These notes strongly remind one of the materials Heinrich Meier reprinted in his Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem but are more extensive and in a thoroughly dialectical or argumentative form. As the editor labels this part of the book, it gives us “Strauss’s confrontation with Pascal,” in which Strauss confronts Pascal’s defense of revelation and the life of faith against rationalism and the philosophic life. In my opinion, these are the most valuable of the Strauss writings to be found in the book.

So far as Strauss appeals to any of the rationalist philosophers in his debate with Pascal, it is to Spinoza. One insight this collection of hitherto unpublished material supports is the ongoing importance of Spinoza for Strauss’s thinking on “the theological-political problem.” Confirmation of that comes in another of the documents, a six- or seven-page sketch for a “fresh study” of Spinoza, that is, one that does “not repeat” what he had earlier said in print. The occasion seems to be the seminar he taught on Spinoza in 1959. The editor suggests that the “fresh study” may have been relevant to Strauss’s autobiographical introduction to the English translation of his early Spinoza book as well. As Steven Frankel brings out in his very fine interpretive essay, the earlier book had as its aim “to evaluate [Spinoza’s] critique of Scripture … In contrast, Strauss justifies this new ‘fresh study’ by emphasizing politics rather than theology” (158). As Frankel also brings out, Strauss seems to conceive of the new study as more fundamental than his earlier book in that it treats “the ways in which Spinoza’s broader political project shapes his theology” (160).

The last philosopher to whom Strauss attended in any detail in the documents reprinted here is Rousseau. The Strauss material in this case consists of excerpts from his 1962 seminar on Rousseau. The focus here is on the famous profession of faith of the Savoyard Vicar in Rousseau’s Emile. Strauss presses the question of whether the Vicar speaks for Rousseau in the sense that he expresses Rousseau’s beliefs. In a word, Strauss’s answer is no.

Finally, the book also contains a 1963 lecture, again delivered at Hillel House. This one is titled “Religion and the Commonweal in the Tradition of Political Philosophy.” This lecture was perhaps spurred by the then-recent Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale, a controversial case, for it declared school prayer in public schools unconstitutional. In the talk Strauss reviewed the place of what one might call civil religion in the history of political philosophy with an eye to showing the generally favorable opinion the philosophers had toward civil religion.

Such is the content of the book. It should be fairly obvious from my description of the contents that this is a book for scholars, in particular for scholars of Strauss’s thought. Strauss addressed the topics and thinkers covered in almost all cases in much larger and well-developed writings. Does this collection add anything to what is to be found in those larger writings? With a few exceptions the writings will add little to a reader not thoroughly immersed in the relevant Strauss larger text. How much it can add will depend on careful study and comparison. Without engaging in that for this review I can say that the materials in the book do, at least some of the time, bring more to the fore themes that might not stand out as well in the longer books or articles. This was particularly true for me in the materials on The Symposium. There are surely occasions in these materials where Strauss is more explicit in stating his conclusions or indicating his reasoning than in his published writings. Many of these were, after all, prepared for his private use, and contained his developing insights as he worked over one or another text. So, for the right reader, this could be a most valuable text. But it is most definitely not a text for beginners.