Why does Joshua Parens say we need to look to Leo Strauss to recover the thought of Moses Maimonides, among others? The simple answer has to do with what's wrong with the currently fashionable expression “Jewish philosophy.” According to Strauss—and Maimonides—it is a contradiction in terms. The contradiction does not show up in the corresponding term “Christian philosophy,” since as Parens (following Strauss) points out, Christianity and philosophy can be said to be in harmony and therefore amenable to a synthesis. Christianity is at bottom a religion of belief, whereas Judaism (like Islam) is a religion of law. Thomas Aquinas calls philosophy a “handmaid” to revealed theology; his Summa Theologiae justifies revealed theology before the bar of philosophy—something prima facie inconceivable within the bounds of Jewish law. The Torah claims to be comprehensive yet is silent about philosophy; biblical Hebrew does not even have a word for “nature,” Genesis 1 and Job 38 notwithstanding. Any synthesis between Jewish law and philosophy like that between Christian belief and philosophy is thus ruled out. Parens quotes Strauss saying as much: “Jews of the competence of Halevi and Maimonides took it for granted that being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive” (49). Again, “The philosopher… asserts the superiority of contemplation as such to action as such: from the philosopher's point of view, goodness of character and goodness of action is essentially not more than a means toward, or a by-product of, the life of contemplation. … Moral man as such is the potential believer” (50). And from Maimonides directly: “[The perfection of moral virtues] is, as it were, only the disposition to be useful to people; consequently it is an instrument for someone else” (ibid.). Parens also cites Strauss on how Maimonides shows that the divide between Jews and philosophers over whether the world is created or eternal is irresolvable by demonstration, so that Jews must adhere to what the prophetic books teach about creation more or less literally (ibid.).

To alert readers to the blind spots, pitfalls, and shortcomings of approaching Maimonides by way of “Jewish philosophy,” Strauss introduces conspicuous and at the same time more illuminating and penetrating terms. These include “enlightened kalām,” “esoteric writing,” and the philosophic “solitary.” Parens calls attention to them frequently during the course of his Strauss–Maimonides argument. His aim in doing so is less to provide a historical overview of Maimonides via Strauss, than to show a navigable entryway into Maimonides as made possible here and now by Strauss. What Parens says about each of the aforementioned terms is as follows.

Strauss distinguishes enlightened kalām from vulgar or typical kalām. “Kalām” in Maimonides's Judeo-Arabic means dialectical theology, and typically its practitioners, the mutakallimūn, aim at vindicating revelation against the arguments of the philosophers by, as Parens says, “using any means fair or foul,” even, as Maimonides says, violating the “nature of existence” as discovered by the philosophers (4, 23, 90, 121). Maimonidean kalām, in contrast, attacks the vulgar mutakallimūn rather than the philosophers—”a very strange form of kalām indeed,” comments Parens (120). Maimonides justifies God's existence, unity, and incorporeality by adopting the philosophical claim that the world is eternal. But isn't Maimonides then synthesizing philosophy with revelation, we might ask contra Strauss? Not at all, Parens implies while indicating how Maimonides repurposes a notion integral to the vulgar kalām’s creation arguments—”particularization.” Unlike vulgar mutakallimūn, Maimonides refrains from arguing that physics and metaphysics need supplementing by revealed doctrines to account for nature's particulars. Instead he argues, more naively perhaps, that since the various particular placements and movements of the heavenly bodies can be described mathematically but not accounted for astronomically inasmuch as they appear disorderly, therefore, in Parens's words, “a God with a particularizing will must somehow be responsible for the apparent disorder” (121). This argument, Parens cautions, is not meant to prove what cannot be proved within the parameters of the “nature of existence,” namely, an omnipotent Creator—whose existence Maimonides qua Jew tacitly assumes as a matter of course. In short, Strauss calls Maimonides's kalām “enlightened”—or “intelligent” as opposed to merely imaginative or imaginary—for its knowingly preserving the mutual independence of philosophy and revelation despite their kalām-abetted tendencies to encroach on each other. How these disparate features of enlightened kalām fit together, Parens shows, comes out in Strauss's treatment of Maimonides's esotericism.

What Strauss calls enlightened kalām, argues Parens, is the exoteric surface of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, though not its esoteric depth, which turns out to be political philosophy. That is, as Parens emphasizes, the overall argument of the Guide does not collapse into Aristotle's physics and/or metaphysics, despite Maimonides's identifying these respectively with the Torah's highest mysteries, the “account of creation” (Genesis 1) and “account of the chariot” (Ezekiel 1 and 10); nor into so-called Jewish theology, since Maimonides identifies theology exclusively with (Aristotle's) metaphysics. Strauss says the connection between enlightened kalām and political philosophy in the Guide makes itself known only “between the lines” (4). Parens puts his finger on why and how. The divine law as law requires a defense. Yet openly using political philosophy to defend it would be inapt. Noting that Maimonides sometimes seems to argue that a community that has received a divine law does not need such outside help (as in Guide 2.39 and Art of Logic, chap. 14; MGP 378–81, MPP 181–82 or TAL, with WIPP 155–69), Parens encourages us to “wonder what more pressing purpose the revelation at Sinai might have than to relieve man of the responsibility of developing a political philosophy,” especially since the latter “cannot take its lead from any tradition, no matter how authoritative”; hence “the tension between the authoritative opinion of one's community and the questioning of that opinion by the philosopher” remains “basic” (4–5). What then does Parens find Strauss saying that Maimonides sees about how that tension may be both negotiated and respected so that political philosophy can offer an “intelligent” defense of the divine law after all? Maimonides, he observes, deliberately makes the political-philosophical character of the Guide elusive (126–27). He intentionally inserts contradictions into its argument, especially contradictory premises whose contradictoriness is concealed by, for example, putting at some distance the conclusions drawn from them. These, according to Strauss's Maimonides, are meant to be noticed and questioned only by a properly pious yet incipiently philosophic reader who—acting in “solitary,” as it were—may begin to ponder them on his own and infer their political-philosophical reasons and consequences at his own pace (cf. PAW 48–49, 53–54, 57–58, 73–74, 93–94, MGP xvii–xx).

Parens indicates how the theme of the solitary permeates the Guide’s political-philosophical vindication of the divine law as promulgated by a prophet—what Strauss calls Maimonides's “prophetology” (25–26, 122–23). At Guide 2.40, the center of its overall argument, is a deceptively simple account of what makes a divine law truly divine. Namely, a divine law, in contrast to a law as understood by ancient political philosophy, is said to aim at cultivating the intellect rather than merely caring for the body. Contained in this account are two problems, however, that Parens, with Strauss, finds Maimonides taking the rest of the Guide to unfold. One problem is what it means to cultivate the intellect when the beliefs enjoined by the law “fall far short of the intellectual perfection [Maimonides] envisions.” Here Parens remarks parenthetically how remote Maimonides's view is from the more familiar Christian view that faith-based belief can save. The other problem is how to distinguish beliefs the law enjoins for the body's sake from those enjoined for the soul's sake, that is, for the sake of knowledge as such. This problem, Parens warns, is not solved simply by Maimonides's identifying the body's well-being with communal well-being, as he does in Guide 2.40, since the possibility remains that all the beliefs enjoined by the Torah, even those regarding God's attributes and particular providence, are merely for their beneficial communal consequences. Subsequently, Parens notes, Maimonides contradicts the insinuation at Guide 2.40 that the Torah aims at intellectual perfection as such. Guide 3.34 limits the aim of law as law to benefiting the majority rather than unique or solitary individuals—who, it goes without saying, may include the “solitary” philosophical addressee of the Guide. The contradiction that emerges between Guide 3.34 and 2.40, Parens infers, testifies to the ongoing tension between law and philosophy perhaps even more importantly than the disagreement mentioned earlier over whether the order of the heavenly bodies is rationally explicable or instead provided for by the particular providence of an omnipotent God—an inference Parens corroborates by citing Strauss on how Maimonides extracts providence from being part of God's justice as understood by his Jewish-mutakallim ū n predecessors, and reroots it in the Guide’s prophetology as understood by comparison with, i.e. in terms of, ancient political philosophy. Parens concludes this line of thought with the terse but clarifying observation that “only a philosophically revised divine law [as in Maimonides's prophetology per Strauss] can combine these dissonant ends—the well-being of the [religious-political community] and the highest well-being of the individual” (26, 123).