Disturbing Proximity

8 But Ranieri is miles ahead of Strauss's apologists who read the Second Cave as a critique of historicism rather than Revelation.9 Despite his repeated and perfectly appropriate insistence on the illegitimacy of Strauss's "silence with regard to the New Testament" (p. 173, also 11-13), Ranieri overlooks the anti- Jewish implications of Strauss's post- Platonic image of the recovery of "natural ignorance" (p. 24) 10 through a Nietzsche-inspired (p. 24) " emancipation from the tradition of Revelation.12 It is interesting to ponder exactly why an anti-Christian Strauss should be so much more palatable than an anti- Jewish version.13 But for someone who once accepted14 - and never subsequently repudiated - the truth of Nietzsche's claims about the Jewish origins of Christianity,15 Strauss's obvious anti-Christianity doesn't ipso facto disprove the hypothesis of his covert anti-Judaism. [...]this quarrel tends to disappear because Ranieri's own critique of Voegelin's approach to the biblical world,33 an approach that validates "experiences of transcendence" only to the extent that they can be expressed in terms of Greek philosophy,34 ultimately vindicates Strauss's claim that one's loyally must either be to Athens or Jerusalem.35 Although he never attacks Voegelin's ongoing domestication of divine transcendence as merely one of two poles indissolubly united in the metaxy of a human being's noetic or pneumatic experience,36 Ranieri's evident sympathy for "the biblical orientation" invites the reader to recognize just how uncomfortable Voegelin really is with the reality of divine transcendence.37 Naturally there is nothing disturbing about this discomfort per se: it is the fact that Voegelin, despite this discomfort, nevertheless continue*) to apeak the language of transcendence58 that creates a disturbing proximity to National Socialism once it is recognized as a "political religion.\n But it is not by the brute analogy that Scholem most disturbs: it is in the parenthesis.