4

Objections, Resistance, and Blindness to Esotericism

Everyone is forward to complain of the prejudices that mislead other men or parties, as if he were free and had none of his own. This [inconsistency] being objected on all sides, it is agreed that it is a fault and a hindrance to knowledge. What now is the cure? No other but this, that every man should let alone others’ prejudices and examine his own.

—JOHN LOCKE, Conduct of the Understanding

We have seen substantial testimony showing that—for some reason or other—philosophers frequently engaged in esoteric writing. And then we have examined their reasons for doing so. It remains to ask: what are our reasons for feeling that they could not have done so? For, a crucial part of our effort to understand esotericism sympathetically is to understand our long lack of sympathy with it.

That readers should have questions about and objections to the arguments presented here is to be expected. I will try to address some of them in the present chapter, others later. But the phenomenon at issue here extends well beyond routine reservations. As we have partly seen, there are various signs and indications that modern culture harbors a powerful resistance to esotericism that lies deeper than facts and arguments. It is this above all that must be addressed before we can usefully move on.

ESOTERICISM AND MODERN CULTURE

What are the “signs and indications” of this resistance? For starters, as the evidence for philosophical esotericism slowly accumulates and one begins to truly take seriously the possibility that it is, after all, real—and more than real, a major historical phenomenon—one is likely to be struck, eventually, by the following reflection. How could there possibly have been such an important, almost universal practice going on in the world and we didn’t even know about it? How could we have missed something so big? Of course, if the evidence for esotericism were extremely obscure, there would be no puzzle. But it is not. It has been sitting there in relative plain sight for centuries. So why have we not seen it? One is all but compelled to wonder: Has something been impeding our vision? Is there something wrong with the way that we look at the world?

This hypothesis grows stronger when one reflects on the fact that we were not always unaware of esotericism: it became unknown in the course of the nineteenth century (as Goethe was reporting). But how does a whole culture suddenly lose awareness of a practice that was, until relatively recently, so widespread, so openly discussed, so long enduring, so crucially important, and so thoroughly documented in the historical record? It is not easy to think of a comparable episode of philosophical forgetting, of intellectual expungement. Mustn’t powerful cultural forces of some kind be at work here?

Then there is the next twist in the unfolding story: In the mid-twentieth century, Leo Strauss and others attempt to revive the understanding of esotericism. And, again, we see something unusual: these efforts are met with a resistance that seems to go beyond the usual sorts of scholarly disagreement and skepticism. To be fair, there were important exceptions: Alexandre Kojève, Arnaldo Momigliano, Gershom Scholem, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and a few others expressed real interest and admiration for Strauss’s discoveries.¹ But for the most part—and especially in the Anglo-American world—the idea was treated as wrongheaded in the extreme, not to say crazy. We confine ourselves to scholars who in other respects express real appreciation for Strauss’s work. Stephen Holmes writes: “We can confidently assume that Strauss’s obsession with esotericism and persecution had its roots not in scholarship, but in the unthinkable tragedy of his generation [i.e., the holocaust].”² Gregory Vlastos sadly laments Strauss’s “delusion that the classics of political philosophy were meant to be read as palimpsests—strange aberration in a noble mind.”³ And George Sabine fears that esotericism simply amounts to “an invitation to perverse ingenuity.”⁴ These are honest assessments by thoughtful scholars who, in their dismissive characterizations of esotericism—“obsession,” “delusion,” “aberration,” “perverse”—give accurate expression to the predilections of our time concerning this issue.⁵

But the clearest evidence pointing to a unique resistance in modern culture emerges from the comparison of our attitudes toward esotericism with those of other places and times—the comparative study of “esotericism reception.” It is a simple, empirical fact, such comparisons show, that no other culture has shared our peculiarly negative instincts in this matter—our firm disapproval and disbelief.

This was the clear finding, for example, of the intercultural communication literature discussed in chapter 1. Virtually all societies outside the modern West embrace a “high context” communicative style that emphasizes indirection and speaking between the lines. We, by contrast, are a uniquely “low context” culture that not only rejects indirect communication for ourselves but tends to regard those who do practice it with incomprehension bordering on denial.

The exact same picture emerges from the historical evidence. The examination of the philosophical testimony regarding esotericism expressed over the last two millennia of Western history shows that the broad rejection of the reality of esotericism is a thesis unique to late Western modernity. (And it is not as if we have a lot of important new information on the subject to justify this break with the judgment of all other ages.)

What is in some ways even more striking is that, in the two millennia of Western philosophy prior to 1800, not only is the denial of esotericism extremely rare, but no one even expresses great dislike or disapproval of the practice either. To be sure, here and there, one finds concern about the dishonesty involved or the potential for abuse or the difficulty created for interpretation. But nowhere does this rise to the level of outright condemnation or the refusal to practice it. During the long history of Western thought prior to our time, amid all the changes of politics, religion, and culture, virtually everyone essentially approves of or accepts esotericism. The long, angry list of objections to it—be detailed momentarily—that forms the ground of our confidence that this repugnant practice could not possibly have been widespread somehow did not affect the people of earlier times in the same way.

In short, both the denial and the strong disapproval of esotericism—which feel to us so natural and self-evident—actually turn out to be rather local attitudes, the unique and quite eccentric response of our tiny little corner of history. While all other ages seem naturally to appreciate that the philosophers typically approach the act of writing with a good deal of caution, irony, and artfulness, we alone scrutinize their manuscripts with earnest literal-mindedness. For some reason, when it comes to this particular issue, we moderns, in all our sophistication, play the rubes and clueless provincials, with everyone else, as it were, chuckling behind our backs. We clearly have issues here.

THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS’ PARABLES

Given the importance of this phenomenon, it will help to consider a concrete illustration. It concerns the most famous practitioner of riddling speech in the Western tradition—although not a philosopher.

As everyone knows, the New Testament depicts Jesus as employing a very specific form of rhetoric in addressing the people (as distinguished from his disciples): he speaks in parables. “He did not speak to them [the people] without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.”⁶ Yet parables can be used to make things either more clear and concrete or more obscure and challenging. We today would of course assume that Jesus had only the former intention. Surely he must have sought to make himself as clear and accessible as possible to everyone. But our faith in plainspeaking openness is by no means as universally self-evident as we blithely assume. Typically, prophets do not share that faith. In a very different spirit, Jesus sternly declared: “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine” (Matt. 7:6). In Matthew and elsewhere, he explicitly states his reason for speaking as he does—and it is not to make things more clear and accessible:

Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to [the people] in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matt. 13:10–12; see also Matt. 7:6, 19:11, 11:25; Col. 1:27; 1 Cor. 2:6–10; 1 John 2:20, 2:27; Prov. 23:9; Isa. 6:9–10)

Again, in Mark 4:11, Jesus tells the disciples: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables.” In a similar spirit, Jesus “strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ [i.e., the messiah]” (Matt. 16:20; see Matt. 12:16; Mark 8:30; Luke 9:21). Even with the disciples, Jesus was not completely open: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). Moreover, we can easily see for ourselves the truth of what Jesus claims about the parables, for most of them are indeed not clarifying but rather difficult to understand. Even the disciples are depicted as having great trouble interpreting them. We have, then, extensive, unambiguous, and uncontested textual evidence that Jesus spoke to the people in a riddling, esoteric manner (even if his precise reasons for doing so remain somewhat unclear).

Now, in addition to these biblical texts, we also have a second, very large body of texts showing how earlier ages read and interpreted the first set. This is what we are particularly interested in. We want to see concretely how readers of very different periods reacted to these same biblical texts, with their explicit claims of esotericism. Did they find them plausible? Did they accept or deny, approve or disapprove of esotericism? The long, unbroken tradition of biblical commentary that we possess enables us to conduct this experiment in esotericism reception over a period of almost two thousand years.

Thus, to begin with Thomas Aquinas, in an article of the Summa Theologica entitled “Whether Christ Should Have Taught All Things Openly?” he explains that the people to whom Jesus spoke were “neither able nor worthy to receive the naked truth, which He revealed to His disciples” and that is why he “spoke certain things in secret to the crowds, by employing parables in teaching them spiritual mysteries which they were either unable or unworthy to grasp.”⁷ Similarly, Calvin, in his Commentaries, remarks:

Christ declares that he intentionally spoke obscurely, in order that his discourse might be a riddle to many, and might only strike their ears with a confused and doubtful sound. . . . Still it remains a fixed principle, that the word of God is not obscure, except so far as the world darkens it by its own blindness. And yet the Lord conceals its mysteries, so that the perception of them may not reach the reprobate.⁸

Grotius explains:

He spoke to the people through the indirectness of parables, that those who heard Him might not understand, unless, that is, they should bring thereto such earnestness of mind and readiness to be taught as were required.⁹

In addition, Augustine maintains:

the Lord’s meaning was therefore purposely clothed in the obscurities of parables, that after His resurrection they [the parables] might turn them to wisdom with a more healthy penitence.¹⁰

And, for one more example, John Locke, emphasizing the political element, argued that Jesus “perplex[ed]” his meaning to avoid being arrested before he could complete his mission:

For how well the chiefs of the Jews were disposed towards him, St. Luke tells us, chap 11:54, “Laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him,” which may be a reason to satisfy us of the seemingly doubtful and obscure way of speaking, used by our Savior in other places—his circumstances being such, that without such a prudent carriage and reservedness, he could not have gone through the work which he came to do.¹¹

From these very brief excerpts, we see that there was some ongoing and lively disagreement about the precise purpose of Jesus’ practice of esotericism but that there was no trace of dispute concerning its existence. This was accepted as beyond question.

If one expanded this brief survey to include the entire two-thousand-year tradition of Bible commentary, essentially the same results would be found—until, that is, one gets to the last century and a half. For, as soon as one crosses over into our strangely enchanted era, everything suddenly changes. Now, for the first time in history, one finds the widespread denial of Jesus’ esotericism—notwithstanding the extremely solid textual basis for it and the concurrence of virtually all commentators of all previous ages. Our experts float one loosely grounded philological speculation after another—primarily conjectures concerning the adulteration of the texts—in an effort to prove that Jesus actually spoke as we modern-day Westerners would have expected him to, with plainspeaking openness. Here the alien, outlier status of our anti-esoteric culture becomes plain for all to see, clearly marked out in the single densest, richest, and longest tradition of textual commentary in Western history.

As the distinguished literary critic Frank Kermode remarked with some wonder in his 1978 Charles Eliot Norton lectures on the hermeneutics of biblical commentary:

For the last century or so there has been something of a consensus among experts that parables of the kind found in the New Testament were always essentially simple, and always had the same kind of point, which would have been instantly taken by all listeners, outsiders included. Appearances to the contrary are explained as consequences of a process of meddling with the originals [i.e., textual alteration] that began at the earliest possible moment. The opinion that the parables must originally have been thus, and only thus, is maintained with an expense of learning I can’t begin to emulate, against what seems obvious, that “parable” does and did mean much more than that. When God says he will speak to Moses openly and not in “dark speeches,” the Greek for “dark speeches” means “parables.” . . . “Speak in parables” is the opposite of “openly proclaim.”¹²

Without knowing it, what Kermode has run up against here, to his bewilderment and chagrin, is our eccentric modern resistance to esotericism. His simple observations of how, with a vast “expense of learning,” modern experts strive to overturn the obvious, driven by “the opinion that the parables must originally have been” simple and transparent—all of this is paradigmatic for our unique age.¹³ Wherever it is a matter of esotericism, in the sphere of religion no less than in philosophy, our age stands stubbornly in opposition—and utterly alone against all the rest of history.

In view of all this, it becomes necessary to turn the spotlight around, so to speak, and momentarily shift the focus from esotericism to ourselves and our habits of thought—in the hope of identifying, confronting, and overcoming the sources within us of this resistance.

But this effort at self-examination is also vitally important for its own sake—not just to understand esotericism but, even more, to know ourselves. For the blindness to esotericism—which has deep theoretical roots—is actually one of the most profound and revealing features of modern thought as such. In other words, if the modern mind (like the mind of every age) wears certain blinders of which it is unaware, it has no means to discover those blinders except by bumping into some important reality that it has been unable to see. The phenomenon of esotericism serves that function. It constitutes, for us, a kind of disclosive device that lights up many of the concealed assumptions that have long conditioned and limited our thinking. It provides, strange to say, a unique window on our souls.

It should be kept clearly in mind, however, that the question under examination here is not why we ourselves do not write esoterically (or whether we are correct in making this choice), but why we feel so certain that others did not do so. What is the source of our resistance to the historical reality of esotericism?

THE SOURCES IN MODERN CULTURE OF THE DENIAL OF ESOTERICISM

There is a long list of reasons, some obvious, some less so, why the idea of esotericism strikes us instinctively–that is, prereflectively and profoundly—as something unsavory or harmful or, at any rate, fundamentally implausible.

The most profound (but least obvious) reason concerns, not the visible characteristics or consequences of esotericism, but its source, its essential premise—the antagonistic view of theory and praxis. Somehow, there is something essential to the modern mind that stands in indignant opposition to this view. Let me sketch out a suggestion for how to understand this.

Consider, for a starting point, the oft-repeated observation that modern man lacks a sense of tragedy. If true, this would constitute a crucial blinder, hindering access to the conflictual posture, which obviously has much in common with the tragic view of life. Sophocles’s Oedipus tyrannus, arguably the most powerful and representative of ancient Greek tragedies, was precisely a tragedy of theory and praxis, of the incurable conflict of truth and political life. It tells of a wise king, a man of unique vision, who, having been led to violate the most sacred taboos, brings a plague upon the political community until finally he ends it—by blinding himself. Today, while people are often intrigued by this play, it does not seem to speak to them, to address a problem that they themselves address. Quite the opposite: for us, “Oedipus” names a classic psychological disorder, present at our imperfect beginnings but more or less curable through the science of psychotherapy, through the life-healing power of truth. This reversal of the tragic tale is typically modern: the very idea that life could have an incurable problem at its core—that the two essential elements of our nature, rationality and sociality, could be permanently at war—strikes people today as simply too tragically disordered to be true.¹⁴

So where does this modern resistance to tragedy—and thus to conflictualism and therewith to esotericism—come from? Why do we find fundamental disorder implausible? Certainly not because of a naive idealism of some kind, a faith in the divine or natural order of the universe—“it all fits together.” For a tough-minded realism about the accidental and radically imperfect character of the world is another prominent feature of modern thought. Somehow, we are just as inclined to be skeptical of idealism as of tragedy—of order as of disorder.

The source of our resistance to tragedy would thus seem to be something new and more complex: a novel kind of idealism that emerges precisely on the basis of modern realism—secular humanism. It is the faith, not in God, and not in nature, but in man—in his ability to triumph, sooner or later, over the grave imperfections of his received condition. It is the faith in progress and human conquest. The humanist mind rejects the vision of a fixed order—as well as of fixed disorder. The vision that defines it is rather this: the world has an original disorder that can progressively be controlled and cured through human effort.

If we continue to seek the source, in turn, of this new humanistic posture, we find that it is plausible and attractive from a number of different points of view. But this precise formula would seem to be crucial above all for the anticlerical and secularizing quest to liberate us from the rule of a higher power. For if the world is originally well ordered, then God is needed to explain that order. And if it is incurably disordered, then God is needed to save us from that disorder. Only if life is originally bad but fixable through human effort is it the case that God is neither a necessary hypothesis nor a fundamental need. That is why this specific humanistic posture seems to be the product, not so much of some new discovery about the world, as of a need, a demand, an imperative. The humanist credo that life has no fundamental problems that we cannot cure has the character less of a calm, settled belief than of a mixture of hope and insistence.¹⁵ This secularizing imperative, then, would seem to be the ultimate ground of our determined disbelief in the tragic view of life, in the antagonistic relation of theory and praxis, and therewith in the reality of philosophical esotericism.

Some simple evidence for these admittedly large claims can be seen in the basic trajectory of modern philosophy. When we look back at the origins of modern thought, one of the most striking things is that its enthusiastic embrace of the project to harmonize theory and praxis was based more on a leap in the dark than on any solid evidence that it was reasonable and likely of success. In the realm of natural philosophy, for example, when thinkers like Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes proclaimed their intention to redirect contemplative philosophy to the practical end of the “relief of man’s estate” (Bacon) by making man “the master and owner of nature” (Descartes), they did so long before the progress of science proved that such far-reaching technological mastery was actually possible.

One sees the same leap in political philosophy: the early Enlightenment thinkers eagerly embarked on their unprecedented effort to enlighten and rationalize the political world well before there was any solid historical evidence that such a radical transformation of public consciousness would be possible or salutary.

What is more, as this enlightening effort proceeded, it soon became clear that, notwithstanding its partial successes, it was indeed dangerous in a variety of ways to social health, as the thinkers of the counter-Enlightenment thunderously proclaimed. Yet once again one sees something remarkable: these latter thinkers, obsessed as they were with the dangers of Enlightenment harmonism, were nevertheless not tempted to return to the conflictual view and to classical esotericism. Still driven by the spirit of humanist harmonism, they chose instead to continue the pursuit of unity—only in the reverse manner by subordinating theory to practice. They willingly replaced the rationalization of politics with the politicization of reason. But of course this move involved great dangers of its own, culminating eventually in the radical historicist view that wholly relativizes reason. So powerful, in other words, is the modern harmonist imperative that, rather than return to classical dualism and esotericism, one philosopher after another pursued this goal even at the price of gravely undermining the claims of reason.

It seems clear, in sum, that there exists in modern thought a fundamental resistance to classical esotericism—and fundamental in two respects. It is modern thought at its deepest level—the secularizing, humanist, progressivist, solutionist, “antitragic” project—that stands in direct opposition to esotericism at its deepest level: the tragic, conflictual position on theory and praxis. We not only reject the esoteric view for ourselves but indignantly resist the thought that the great minds of earlier ages could ever have embraced it either. We quietly erase it from the history of philosophic thought.¹⁶

FURTHER SOURCES OF DENIAL

If the progressive, activist spirit of modern thought has tended to close our minds to the phenomenon of classical esotericism, that spirit nevertheless remains compatible with, indeed productive of, modern, political esotericism—the combination of manipulative and defensive rhetoric needed by the early modern thinkers in their dangerous efforts to transform and rationalize the political world. So the second most important source of the forgetting of esotericism, especially in the last two centuries, has been the gradual success of the modern movement, which finally rendered this activist and defensive esotericism unnecessary.

What is more, the success of this movement created a new world—one in which it is particularly easy to forget that such rhetoric was ever necessary. We in the modern West have been blessed, for many generations now, to live under liberal democratic regimes that defend freedom of speech and thought as a matter of principle. But great blessings enjoyed over long periods often carry a curse: the loss of appreciation and even of understanding of the blessings one has been given. Coddled by good fortune, we forget—in our bones if not our minds—that the natural condition of “thought” is grave weakness and insecurity, as one sees virtually everywhere else in history. Philosophy, in particular, has always dwelled in extreme danger. Thus in all prior ages, people have instinctively understood the necessity of (at a minimum) defensive esotericism. Only we, cursed by unique good fortune, have lost palpable touch with this old necessity and so incline to deny that it was ever much of an issue.

Furthermore, unimpressed by the necessity for such esotericism, we have naturally been more struck with the inherent and undeniable problems with it—problems that have also become particularly magnified in our eyes because we see them through the lens of various other aspects of our unique liberal-democratic-Enlightenment worldview. Indeed, the idea of esotericism would seem to systematically violate every cherished moral and intellectual ideal of our time.

Its evident elitism offends our democratic egalitarianism.

Its secrecy contradicts our liberal commitment to openness and transparency, as well as the Enlightenment project of demystification and disenchantment.

Its dishonesty violates our moral code of truthfulness, our scholarly and scientific code of the open sharing of results, as well as our cultural ideal of sincerity or authenticity.

Its caution or “prudence” in making such great accommodation to the demands of censors and persecuting authorities strikes us as cowardly in comparison with the modern ideal of the Enlightenment intellectual, risking everything to speak truth to power.

Its intentional embrace of obscurity sins against our scientific culture of literalness, clarity, and systematic rigor.

Its effort to cloister knowledge for the appreciation of the elite few, while leaving prejudice and illusion unmolested in their reign over everyone else, contradicts the great project for the universal dissemination of knowledge and enlightenment that is inseparable from the modern ideal of progress—moral, social, and intellectual.

The curious childishness of its playing with puzzles and riddles clashes with our ideal of philosophical seriousness and gravity.

Finally, the claim that, between the lines, the philosophers reject the reigning ideas of their society, even though these ideas are strongly embraced on the surface of their writings, collides with our historicist or contextualist certainty that no mind is able to free itself from the background assumptions and shared commitments of its time and place.

It would be difficult indeed to point to another institution that offends us in so many different ways.

Still, if the institution in question concerned the historical activities of kings, aristocrats, generals, or businessmen, then its extreme offensiveness would not necessarily incline us intellectuals to deny its reality. Quite the contrary. But esotericism concerns the intellectual life—our life. And many of us pursue that life precisely in the hope of finding something more honest, something purer and loftier. Thus to charge philosophers, of all people, with esotericism—with behavior that we find so childish, cowardly, deceitful, elitist, inauthentic, and so forth—strikes us intellectuals as both demeaning and implausible in the extreme. Surely esotericism is a practice to be expected of mystics, astrologers, and alchemists, not genuine philosophers.

Moreover, esotericism appears not only demeaning to the intellectual life in all these ways, but also dangerous to it, because so easily abused—and this by both writers and readers alike. In the case of writers, this practice can only encourage intellectual charlatans of all kinds who will use it to conceal their fraud and vanity behind high-sounding nonsense. This fact has led one scholar, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, to venture the following assertion: “Would it not be true to say that all the normal motives for esotericism—for instance self-aggrandizement, power-mongering, snobbery and fraud—are bad and vicious?”¹⁷

But esotericism will be abused not only by writers, but by readers and interpreters. For this theory destroys all possibility of exactness and certainty in the interpretation of texts. And this uncertainty would have the further result of leaving the door permanently open to every young genius with an active imagination and conspiratorial turn of mind. The whole theory is, to repeat Sabine’s remark, an open invitation to “perverse ingenuity.”

Furthermore, for a variety of reasons, we live in an age of extreme hermeneutical pessimism. We despair of the possibility of reaching the “true interpretation” of even the simplest of texts. In such an environment, the idea that earlier thinkers wrote esoterically is a most unwelcome suggestion, threatening to burden the practice of scholarship with all kinds of new and intractable demands. Exactly how is one to read “between the lines,” and how is one ever to know that one has reached the author’s true, esoteric teaching? Every such difficulty, real as it may be, grows in our eyes into a sheer impossibility. In our hermeneutical malaise, this theory feels to us altogether unmanageable, unbearable, unacceptable.

Finally, the idea of esotericism has, ironically, been tarnished to some extent by association with its principal rediscoverer, Leo Strauss. Many of his writings (especially the later ones) are extremely obscure, often more so than the works they are meant to gloss—a poor advertisement for his interpretive methods. More generally, Strauss’s obscurity when put together with the inherently suspect topic of esotericism has—perhaps inevitably—made people rather suspicious. Scholars might have been less reluctant to give a serious hearing to his theory, as radical and unconventional as it is, if he had given them a clearer idea of exactly where he was going with it. But as it is, with all this dark emphasis on hidden teachings and noble lies, people understandably wonder: exactly what are Strauss and his followers trying to do? Speculation has proliferated, most of it political, some of it rather extravagant and conspiratorial—what Peter Minowitz ventures to call Straussophobia.¹⁸

With so many and such powerful forces arrayed against it, it is perhaps no wonder that the understanding of esotericism has been all but expunged from the Western mind over the last two hundred years. In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to respond to some of these objections. Others will be better addressed in other chapters where they can be examined side by side with the very different attitudes that moved earlier thinkers to embrace esotericism.¹⁹

THE STRAUSS PROBLEM

To begin with the last stated issue, one certainly does not have to be a Straussian, even a fellow traveler, to believe in the reality of esoteric writing—any more than one needs to be a particular admirer of Columbus to believe in the existence of America. The arguments and evidence for esotericism stand (or fall) on their own. Indeed, some of the best recent research on this topic has been done by non-Straussian scholars.²⁰ So, if you don’t like Strauss, well, just try not to think about him.

It is definitely possible to solve the Strauss problem in this genial manner. But it is not altogether optimal. One does not need Strauss to see the reality, historical pervasiveness, and basic importance of esotericism, but in the end, one does need him—or so I would argue—if one wants to explore the fullest philosophical meaning of this phenomenon and especially its relevance for us today, its crucial significance for the trajectory of modern and postmodern thought. I will examine Strauss’s rather complex views on these issues in some detail at the end, in the tenth chapter. Naturally, not everyone will find them persuasive. But, in the time-honored language of dust jacket blurbs, I believe that they do constitute “essential reading” on this particular subject.

So it is not so easy to sidestep Strauss altogether. But it is my hope that by the time readers reach that final chapter, having been convinced of the essential correctness of the once-despised theory of esotericism, they may incline to view Strauss too with somewhat less suspicion. But to that end, it would also help to furnish here a preliminary reply—however summary and unargued—to the main question animating that widespread suspicion: with his mysterious obsession with secrets and lies, just what was Strauss really up to?

It is true that Strauss was up to something. He wasn’t just writing books about things that chanced to interest him. There is a single, unified purpose—a project—that he pursued throughout his career and in all his farflung researches, from Plato, Thucydides, and Aristophanes, to Alfarabi, Maimonides, and Marsilius, to Spinoza, Burke, and Heidegger.

But the beginning of wisdom regarding Strauss is to realize that this project concerned not politics, as is almost universally assumed, but philosophy. Indeed, his project involved precisely the effort to overturn the pervasive modern tendency to subordinate philosophy to politics. It is true that he was a “political philosopher,” a fact upon which he laid great emphasis. But he understood this pursuit in the classical way, not as the philosophical guidance of politics (which is only minimally possible), but as the political pathway to and defense of philosophy. In other words, the highest subject of “political philosophy” is not, as we today would assume, the political life. On the contrary:

The highest subject of political philosophy is the philosophic life: philosophy—not as a teaching or as a body of knowledge, but as a way of life—offers, as it were, the solution to the problem that keeps political life in motion.²¹

Political passion is only the necessary first rung in a ladder of dialectical and pedagogical ascent, the last rung of which is philosophical passion. This view of ancient political thought derives from Strauss’s esoteric reading of works like the Republic—a reading akin to the one we saw illustrated in chapter 2. It will of course be objected that this paradoxically “apolitical” understanding of classical political philosophy seems implausible and surely runs counter to the prevailing scholarly view. But our purpose at the moment is to establish what Strauss thought, not whether it is true or false. Moreover, the very unconventionality of his view only strengthens my point: the radical subordination of politics to philosophy is one of the most distinctive and defining themes of Strauss’s thought.

Thus, Strauss’s preoccupation with esotericism in particular has nothing to do with a political agenda. If you read Persecution and the Art of Writing from cover to cover, his most thematic discussion of the issue, you will find that it is not at all about the use of “noble lies” by rulers to control the people (although that is a genuine phenomenon), but about the use of esoteric writing by philosophers to escape control by the rulers. More generally, in his view, the truest purpose of esotericism, which is found in its highest form in Plato, is precisely to separate philosophy and politics, theory and praxis—to insulate each from the other, that being best for both. For most of the evils of the modern world, in Strauss’s view, ultimately stem from the improper relation of theory and praxis, specifically from the compulsion to bring them together, which eventually deforms each, producing ideologized politics and politicized philosophy. That is why he admiringly wrote of Plato’s esotericism:

Plato composed his writings in such a way as to prevent for all time their use as authoritative texts. . . . His teaching can never become the subject of indoctrination. In the last analysis, his writings cannot be used for any purpose other than for philosophizing. In particular, no social order and no party which ever existed or which ever will exist can rightfully claim Plato as its patron.²²

Strauss’s writings, too, were for the sake of philosophizing—not any political party. Of course, even philosophers have to live in political communities, and thus, as a citizen, Strauss had serious political concerns and opinions—primarily conservative—which he expressed sparingly, but forcefully. But they were not the subject of his guiding intellectual project, not what he was “up to”—and definitely not the source of his preoccupation with esotericism.

This fact should be obvious from his writings: he wrote about fifteen books and not a single one of them was about the contemporary political scene and what should be done. The same is true of his courses at the University of Chicago and elsewhere (which are now being made available on line).²³ If you compare him to some of his well-known contemporaries like Hannah Arendt or Herbert Marcuse, it is obvious that he was much less politically engaged than they. His project, to say it again, was philosophical—and directed, in particular, at the reasoned liberation of philosophy from politics, with all its distorting hopes and illusions.

What, then, more specifically, was his philosophical project? The starting point of Strauss’s path of thought was the observation that in our time the whole legitimacy of western science, philosophy, and rationalism was being radically challenged—and at the hands of two opposite but mutually reinforcing movements: the “postmodern” force of historicism or cultural relativism and the ancient force of religious orthodoxy, now newly emboldened by reason’s self-destruction. This is the great intellectual predicament of our age, the “crisis of modernity.”

Strauss’s project was simply to defend philosophy or rationalism—albeit, a minimalist, skeptical, Socratic rationalism—from this twin attack. His thought falls under the category of “philosophic apologetics”: he was less concerned to elaborate a philosophical system (still less, a political one) than to ground the legitimacy of rationalism as such. He saw this as the first and deepest philosophical issue.

In his view, the rediscovered phenomenon of esotericism constituted the great key to mounting a new, more successful defense against rationalism’s two, near-victorious opponents—and that in a variety of different ways. To give one example—one prepared by the previous chapter—historicism and esotericism are ultimately rival answers to the same fundamental question: what is the relation between theory and praxis. The theory of esotericism (in its classical form) argues for the inherent and inescapable tension between reason and society. As such, it constitutes a critique of the historicist assumption of their underlying unity, of the inherent subordination of reason to society and its fundamental commitments. Esotericism thus challenges historicism at its core.

Strauss is so “obsessed” with esotericism, in sum, because he is engaged in the philosophical project of defending rationalism, and he believes that his recovery of this long-forgotten phenomenon has suddenly opened up new paths of thought that offer the best hope for overcoming the contemporary crisis of reason.

Needless to say, after hearing him out at length, some will be sympathetic to Strauss’s project and others not. Some will reject the whole problematic of crisis upon which it rests. But, at a minimum, it should be clear—in response to the various suspicions that surround him—that his great preoccupation with esotericism was not for the sake of any political scheme.²⁴

And, to end where we began, it should always be firmly kept in mind that whatever one’s final view of the complex philosophical issues raised by Strauss, both the historical existence and the scholarly importance of esotericism are facts that stand squarely on their own.

THE SCHOLARLY MISGIVINGS ABOUT ESOTERICISM

Let us turn to the more substantive aspects of our difficulty with esotericism. There is first of all the vexing question of exactly how one is to read a text between the lines. Can this really be done in a responsible manner? This is a necessary and difficult question. It will be taken up at length in the ninth chapter, which offers an introductory guide to esoteric reading, where I hope to show that it can be addressed in a reasonably nonarbitrary way, especially by continuing our reliance, where possible, upon the explicit testimony of past writers and readers.

Yet even if it is granted, for the moment, that esoteric interpretation can be conducted in a responsible way, it still remains the case that such interpretations rarely if ever permit of a great degree of certainty. This is surely true and very unfortunate. But it is not a problem that can be escaped. For if a book has been written esoterically and if, to avoid uncertainty, we refuse to read it that way, then we will surely misunderstand it. That is, if you like, the one certainty here.

Someone might reply, however, that this statement would be more compelling if the converse were also true: if we do read the book esoterically, then we are guaranteed—or at least likely—to understand it. But this is far from the case. And if we do a particularly bad job of esoteric reading, we may well misunderstand the book more grossly than if we had stuck to a strictly literal reading. For, esoteric interpretation is unusually difficult to do right and very easy to get wrong—very wrong. By freeing readers from the literal meaning of the text, it exposes them to various inevitable temptations and corruptions. It will open the door to Sabine’s “perverse ingenuity.”

To this charge, one can only reply: indeed it will. It must. It already has. And if the present work is successful in winning broader recognition for the necessity of this manner of reading, it will surely contribute to an increase in the number of bad esoteric interpretations—that being the price to be paid for a few good ones. It cannot be denied that this is a grave disadvantage.

But to continue in this spirit of realism, it should also be acknowledged that the strictly literal approach to the reading of texts in the history of philosophy (and literature) has not succeeded in producing much agreement and certainty either. For some puzzling reason, grave and nagging problems of interpretation have always continued to exist. And over the last century in particular, these problems have led to a dizzying proliferation of nonliteral interpretive approaches: Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian, Jungian, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist, deconstructive, new historicist, and so forth. And it is fair to say, I believe, that the great majority of these new approaches are also invitations to uncertainty and to perverse ingenuity.²⁵

In fact, aren’t they even more so than the theory of esotericism? For if the latter, like all its rivals, releases the reader from the authority of the literal text, still, it does so, unlike all its rivals, only in the name of finding a still more authoritative and intelligent level of the text, and one that is still attributable to the author in his or her wisdom and artfulness. Thus, the theory of esotericism is ultimately quite hermeneutically conservative in that it produces a heightened level of deference toward the text—of caution, exactness, and mastery of detail. It just sees the text as a multileveled phenomenon, artfully produced by the author’s multileveled intention. By contrast, most of the other hermeneutical theories encourage a sense of liberation from the text as a whole, and certainly from its author’s intentions; and they allow (where they do not positively celebrate) a more freewheeling sense that the text is ours to make of what we will.²⁶

There is also another important way in which, from the standpoint of these criteria of certainty and scholarly sobriety, the theory of esotericism is superior to its rivals: it is not simply rooted in theory. It—and it alone—is susceptible of empirical proof. The claim that many older thinkers wrote esoterically can be factually demonstrated through reference to the explicit testimony of those thinkers. And at least some of the techniques for esoteric reading can be similarly grounded.

Here is a statement by Rousseau, for example, expressly telling us how he wrote—and thus how we should read—his First Discourse:

It was only gradually and always for few readers that I developed my ideas. . . . I have often taken great pains to try to put into a sentence, a line, a word tossed off as if by chance the result of a long sequence of reflections. Often, most of my readers must have found my discourses badly connected and almost entirely rambling, for lack of perceiving the trunk of which I showed them only the branches. But that was enough for those who know how to understand, and I have never wanted to speak to the others.²⁷

With an explicitness and clarity that could hardly be improved upon, Rousseau confirms here the basic points of the theory of esotericism. First, he did not think of all his readers as alike, but made a fundamental distinction between the “few readers”—that is, “those who know how to understand”—and “most of my readers.” Second, in his writing, he was trying to speak to the former and to exclude the latter, to whom he “never wanted to speak.” And third, he sought to accomplish this feat of saying different things to different readers within one work by obscuring and merely hinting at his true ideas in such a way that “most of my readers” would merely see a text full of problems—“badly connected and almost entirely rambling”—but that the “few” would succeed in perceiving the “trunk.”

Thus, one can say with virtually complete certainty that at least for the interpretation of this work of Rousseau’s, the esoteric method is absolutely proper and necessary. This conclusion is not based on abstract literary theory; it is Rousseau’s own explicit assertion (although no such certainty would attach, of course, to the particular result of that interpretive effort). This kind of confirmatory evidence is possible for the theory of esotericism—and it alone—because esotericism explains the difficulties in the text through reference to the author’s conscious intention, which he may choose to openly reveal, as Rousseau does here. It is in the nature of almost all the other prevailing hermeneutical theories—which are far more skeptical of authors and which rely upon unintentional or unconscious forces to explain the text—that they can never bring forward in their own justification anything like this kind of empirical, testimonial evidence. They are inescapably theoretical.

One can go still further: the empirical evidence available to support esotericism also tends at the same time to undermine these theoretical arguments for the other nonliteral interpretive methods. When people argue in justification of these other methods, they must all ultimately begin from the same crucial beginning point: the failure of the literal interpretation. Without that, they have no right to get started. It is the manifest problems in the surface argument of the text—the contradictions, the missing connections, the lack of order—that legitimate the quest for other, hidden causes of the text, such as the author’s religious upbringing, cultural milieu, political class, economic position, psychological makeup, sexual orientation, gender identity, the problems inherent in language and in writing, and so forth. But in the above passage, the author, Rousseau, demonstrates that these problems do not in fact derive from unconscious forces—because he himself accurately describes them. And then he explains where they do come from: he has deliberately created them as part of his effort to communicate esoterically. In thus explaining away the surface problems of the text, Rousseau is denying legitimacy to all these other interpretive approaches—at least until it can be shown that there are still other major problems in the text, which are not attributable to his esotericism.

In other words, the empirical evidence for esotericism points also to the following possibility. Perhaps it has been the esotericism of the philosophers—which works precisely by intentionally planting suggestive problems in the text—that has been primarily responsible all along for the famous failure of the literal approach to interpretation. And thus, ironically, it is the practice of esoteric writing that has also given rise to all these other, rival interpretive theories, which were invented to explain the source of these textual problems once their true source in esotericism had been forgotten. There is some evidence for this suggestion in the very curious fact that, although these problem-laden texts have existed for centuries, even millennia, it is only in the last two centuries or so—only in the period of the forgetfulness of esotericism—that scholars were suddenly moved by the textual problems to formulate these new theories of interpretation. There is only one nonliteral hermeneutical theory that preexists this period—and that is the theory of esotericism, which is twenty-five hundred years old. Without denying, then, that a great and problematic uncertainty attaches to all nonliteral interpretive approaches, we have strong grounds for suggesting that the theory of esotericism is at least more firmly grounded than its major nonliteral rivals.

OF RESISTANCE AND BLINDNESS

Strictly speaking, however, all of the arguments just made are completely beside the point. For even if they were wrong, even if the disadvantages of esotericism for scholarship were every bit as grave as is claimed, exactly what would follow? That thinkers of the past therefore did not write esoterically?

Obviously, the proper response to all of the objections raised above, moral as well as scholarly, should be this: the question before us is not whether we like the practice of esotericism (still less whether we like Leo Strauss or his students) but simply whether, in fact, it is real. And precisely if, for the long list of reasons recounted above, we have a deeply rooted aversion to the practice of esotericism, we have a good reason to be suspicious, not of the historical reality of esotericism, but of ourselves—of the very real danger that we have, for two hundred years now, been denying the truth about it.

To further this salutary suspicion and self-criticism, it is helpful to think about exactly how this denial works. If we have objections to esotericism or find it repugnant, it is easy to see how that would lead us to avoid practicing it ourselves, but precisely how does it cause us to deny that earlier thinkers ever practiced it either? We abhor slavery but do not deny that it ever existed. There would seem to be two different routes to this further conclusion.

The first is “resistance.” Not wishing philosophy, which we admire, to be tainted with this practice, which we despise, or, conversely, this practice to be legitimated by philosophy, we avert our eyes from the facts. From simple wishful thinking, we seize upon every opportunity to question, discount and dismiss the evidence. The cure for this resistance is simply to bring our various motives and biases to the surface, to fuller awareness—as this chapter has been trying to do.

The second and more profound form of denial is “blindness.” Here, the flaw is not wishful but anachronistic thinking. We take our own particular aversions and ahistorically or ethnocentrically impute them to earlier ages; then we reason that the great thinkers of the past could hardly have engaged in such obviously repugnant behavior. We wouldn’t do it, therefore they couldn’t have done it. But in reasoning this way, we underestimate the historical uniqueness of our world, forget how far we have drifted from the attitudes and beliefs of past times. Owing to this drift, our own objections and aversions turn out to be surprisingly untrustworthy guides to past attitudes, especially in the matter of esotericism. Indeed, earlier ages do not seem to have felt as we do about virtually any of the fervent objections to esotericism listed above, or so I will argue. The cure, then, to the problem of blindness and ethnocentrism is again a greater knowledge of ourselves in our uniqueness, our historical particularity—which then frees us for a more genuine and accurate understanding of the past, whose distinct attitudes and actions we are trying to understand.

With all of this in mind, let us consider the three most obvious and potent of our moral objections to the practice of esotericism: the issues of elitism, secrecy, and dishonesty.

THE INEGALITARIANISM OF THE OLD WORLD

The first thing that puts people off from esotericism is its snooty, almost cartoonish elitism. When it is gravely explained that an esoteric book is one written to secretly address “the few” or “the wise,” while excluding “the many” or “the vulgar,” who today can bear such talk? We live in a democratic age and view the world through an egalitarian lens. In such times, as Tocqueville points out, “the general idea of the intellectual superiority that any man whatsoever can acquire over all the others is not slow to be obscured.”²⁸ We naturally incline to dismiss the whole theory of esotericism as impossibly arrogant and elitist.

But of course, only a few short centuries ago, all the world was ruled by monarchs and aristocrats. Most of the philosophers, too, held that the best form of government was some sort of aristocracy. In these ages, a vast chasm separated the leisured, educated elite from the toiling and illiterate masses. A sense of rank and inequality suffused every aspect of life. It is oddly anachronistic to think that this earlier world, exquisitely elitist, would, like us, have recoiled in egalitarian horror at the idea of esotericism.

If we incline to this mistake, it is because, while it is easy to see that the past was more inegalitarian than the present, it is very hard to take the full measure of this fact. For in democracies, as Tocqueville points out, people tend to stare obsessively at the few inequalities still remaining while ignoring the vast world of inequalities overcome.²⁹ This means that egalitarian societies incline to misunderstand themselves: they systematically underestimate their own egalitarianism. Thus, they underestimate, in particular, how utterly different all their perceptions and sensibilities have become from those of earlier, nonegalitarian ages. In other words, we citizens of the modern West have gradually undergone a great democratization of the mind of which we are scarcely aware. This hinders us from appreciating how very different—how shockingly different—attitudes were in earlier, inegalitarian times. Consider a few examples.

“In an aristocratic people,” Tocqueville explains, “each caste has its own opinions, sentiments, rights, mores, and separate existence. . . . They do not have the same manner of thinking or of feeling, and they scarcely believe themselves to be a part of the same humanity.”³⁰ Thus, Pierre Charron does not hesitate to assert that a wise man “is as far above the common sort of men as a common man is above the beasts.”³¹ “To speak of the people,” remarks Guicciardini, “is really to speak of a mad animal, gorged with a thousand and one errors and confusions, devoid of taste, of pleasure, of stability.”³² Livy affirms that “nothing is so valueless as the minds of the multitude.”³³ Spinoza speaks of “the masses whose intellect is not capable of perceiving things clearly and distinctly.”³⁴ And Cicero goes so far as to claim that the very faculty of reason is “disastrous to the many and wholesome to but few.”³⁵

Naturally, these great inequalities were seen as having crucial consequences for the issue of communication. According to Montaigne, “Aristo of Chios had reason to say long ago that philosophers harmed their listeners, inasmuch as most souls are not fit to profit by such instruction.”³⁶Galen, the Greek physician and philosopher, wrote: “My discourse in this book is not for all people; my discourse is for a man among them who is equal to thousands of men, or rather tens of thousands.”³⁷ Similarly, Maimonides declares in the introduction to the Guide of the Perplexed that he “could find no other device by which to teach a demonstrated truth other than by giving satisfaction to a single virtuous man while displeasing ten thousand ignoramuses—I am he who prefers to address that single man by himself, and I do not heed the blame of those many creatures.”³⁸ In a similar spirit is the famous verse of Horace: “I loathe the mob impure and forbid it place. Let tongues be silent!”³⁹ Again, Synesius of Cyrene asks: “For what do the many and philosophy have to do with one another? The truth must be left secret and unspoken, for the multitude are in need of another state of mind.”⁴⁰ Similarly, Seneca quotes Epicurus as having said: “I have never wished to cater to the people; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.” But Seneca then goes on to remark: “this same watchword rings in your ears from every sect—Peripatetic, Academic, Stoic, Cynic.”⁴¹ La Mettrie expresses a similar attitude:

Whatever may be my speculation in the quiet of my study, my practice in society is quite different. . . . In the one place, as a philosopher, I prefer the truth, while in the other, as a citizen, I prefer error. Error is more within everyone’s grasp; it is the general food of minds of all ages and in all places. What indeed is more worthy of enlightening and leading the vile herd of mindless mortals? In society I never talk about all those lofty philosophical truths which were not made for the masses.⁴²

Nietzsche translates these observations into a crucial—but counterintuitive—generalization about writing:

On the question of being understandable—One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audiences when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.” All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance,” understanding, as said above—while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.⁴³

Finally, bringing this all back to the issue of equality, Nietzsche speaks of

[t]he difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly known to philosophers—among the Indians as among the Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights.⁴⁴

One might object, of course, that, this list of quotations notwithstanding, there were also exceptions to this inegalitarian bent in Western philosophy. Indeed, there were. But in the period prior to 1800, which is at issue here, egalitarian voices were relatively few, and, more to the point, even they do not seem to have opposed esotericism on egalitarian grounds. In this period, the most open, heartfelt, and determined egalitarian was doubtless Rousseau. Therefore, he makes a good test case in the effort to determine whether in fact any earlier thinkers can be found who, like us, reject esotericism as too elitist. But of course the results are already in. Rousseau has stated as plainly and unabashedly as one could want that he is a proudly esoteric writer who seeks to address the “few,” “those who know how to understand,” while excluding all the others.

Clearly it is an anachronistic fallacy, then, to project our own egalitarian objections to esotericism back on earlier ages. Truth to tell, earlier ages seem for the most part to have regarded the elitist character of this practice as a point in its favor.

That said, it should also be pointed out that three of the four motives for esotericism—the desire to escape persecution, promote political change, and teach in a Socratic way—can all be defended in essentially egalitarian terms. It is only protective esotericism—the hiding of dangerous truths from those not ready for them—that is inherently elitist.

THE NORMALITY AND UBIQUITY OF SECRECY

The theory of esotericism also strikes us as manifestly improbable because it involves attributing to the great philosophers of the past behavior that is secretive and mysterious. Such behavior strikes the contemporary mind as both immoral and childish. When we picture in our minds men of the stamp of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, or Descartes, gravely bent over their writing desks, we simply cannot imagine that they were hard at work playing hide and seek with their most treasured insights. The whole suggestion is bizarre and demeaning.

But once again, this objection presupposes that earlier ages viewed the phenomena of hiddenness, secrecy, and reserve in essentially the same way we do—and, once again, this is a very unhistorical assumption. As soon as one looks beyond the narrow borders of our liberal-democratic universe to what may loosely be called “traditional society,” one finds a world that is steeped in secrecy and that honors reserve and indirection (as one can already see in many of the above quotations).

We live in and cherish the “open society,” where secrecy and reserve are fundamentally suspect phenomena. We practice a morality, an epistemology, even a metaphysics of liberal democratic openness, attributing the highest value, the truest knowledge, and the greatest reality to that which is public, disclosed, and available to all. In politics we seek “transparency,” in business “publicity,” in academics “publication.” And as to our personal lives, we live in an increasingly expressive society—a sincerity culture, also a therapeutic culture—where people bare their hearts to strangers on a plane or on live television or on the internet. We enthusiastically celebrate openness—partly as confession, partly as exhibitionism—full of strange hopes that it will grant us healing and connection. And we have gotten so used to all of this that we can imagine no legitimate alternative. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

We are thus profoundly estranged from the traditional inclination for reserve and concealment. This inclination strikes us as something requiring treatment. It is almost beyond our capacity to comprehend that in many earlier societies, indeed in much of contemporary India and Japan, husbands and wives, parents and children can pass their whole lives without ever once openly saying: I love you.

Conversely, most traditional cultures would find it difficult to comprehend the modern idea that if one has come into the possession of some profound knowledge, one should lay it open for the perusal of every passing eye. That would seem both foolish and unseemly. Indeed, during most of history, what would have raised skeptical glances—what would have required lengthy tomes of apology, explanation, and proof like this one—is not the practice of esotericism, but our modern, Western concepts of openness and publication.

In a traditional society, after all, the highest knowledge both concerns and derives from the divine, and such sacred knowledge is not to be profaned by being disclosed to the unworthy. According to an account of the Pueblo Indians, “one reason often adduced for secrecy by Pueblo leaders is that religious ceremonies lose their power if they are known by the wrong people. This is certainly an attitude commonly encountered in many parts of the world.”⁴⁵ And as we have just seen, this instinct for reserve is not only to be found among pagans and polytheists: “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine.”

Strabo, the Greek geographer and historian, explains this widespread inclination to religious secrecy as follows: “it is in accordance with the dictates of nature that this should be so.” For secrecy “induces reverence for the divine, since it imitates the nature of the divine, which is to avoid being perceived by our human senses.”⁴⁶ Does it not, in short, make a kind of perfect sense that the proper condition of the highest knowledge, like that of the highest Being, is to be hidden?⁴⁷

At the same time, on a more secular and utilitarian level, if knowledge is power, then secrecy is the husbanding and maintenance of power. The rulers, the priests, the warriors, the craftsmen and fine artists, the healers and medicine men, the merchants, the medieval guilds—all had and needed their trade secrets. Rare indeed is the man who finds his interest in freely telling everything he knows.⁴⁸

In premodern society, in a direct reversal of our instincts, when something is “published” or openly disclosed, it becomes in important respects diminished in power and worth. Thus, traditional life was suffused with reserve, exclusion, and concealment. Not openness, but secrecy—the compartmentalization of knowledge—was the normal state of things, the default position. Here, one needed a special reason to be open amid so many instincts and habits of secrecy.

In such a world, the secretive practice of philosophical esotericism—though it strikes us as childish, immoral, and thus highly implausible—had the character less of an exception than of a rule. Of course the philosophers had their secrets too.

Consider only one brief example—the representative example of the philosophic life in the Western tradition: Socrates. In the Platonic dialogues, he is depicted as renowned throughout Athens for never giving anyone a straight answer. Indeed, he has gone down in history as a man with a form of irony named after him.

With the issue of secrecy, just as with that of elitism, we have clearly been misled by the anachronistic assumption that earlier generations shared our own moral habits and instincts. Think about it: the two greatest teachers of the Western tradition were Jesus and Socrates. And both were famous for their secrecy and indirect speech.

ON SALUTARY LYING

Esotericism is fundamentally dishonest. Is it really believable that the greatest truth seekers of the past were in actuality all bald-faced liars? This is perhaps the most disturbing challenge to esotericism.

It is one that our age, to its credit, regards with particular seriousness. In his classic History of European Morals, W. E. H Lecky argues that “veracity is usually the special virtue of an industrial nation,” because in market societies with great economic specialization people are so interdependent that trustworthiness becomes the paramount virtue.⁴⁹ A related point is made by Hannah Arendt, who points out that “except for Zoroastrianism, none of the major religions included lying as such, as distinguished from ‘bearing false witness,’ in their catalogues of grave sins.” This changed only in modern times, she continues, owing largely to the rise of intellectual specialization, that is, “the rise of organized science, whose progress had to be assured on the firm ground of the absolute veracity and reliability of every scientist.”⁵⁰ To this, one could add that in a democratic regime, one that is also an “information society” and that is faced with complex issues of monumental proportions, like nuclear warfare and environmental degradation, it is more important than ever that scientists and experts speak truth to the public in as clear and scrupulously honest a manner as possible. We are rightly disturbed, then, by the dishonesty of esotericism.

In the particular case of defensive esotericism, where writers are driven by the fear of persecution or even execution, most people would grant that the use of deception can be legitimate. The far more difficult case concerns the propriety of so-called “salutary” or “noble” lies, where one deceives others for their own benefit, whether ideological, pedagogical, or political. Can these ever be legitimate? Fortunately, the task before us here is to settle not this complex moral question but rather the relatively simple historical question of how thinkers of the past tended to answer that moral question.

It is fairly easy to show that a very large and wide-ranging group of earlier thinkers regarded the use of salutary lies or at least of concealment of some portion of the truth as just or allowable under the right circumstances. This is not unrelated, of course, to their much greater belief in human inequality as well as their respect for secrecy.

For starters, the position of Plato and (his) Socrates on the propriety of noble lies is well known. Regarding Xenophon, Dio Chrysostom writes that from a very careful reading of his Anabasis one will learn how “to deceive one’s enemies to their harm and one’s friends to their advantage, and to speak the truth in a way that will not pain those who are needlessly disturbed by it.”⁵¹ As for the Stoics, Plutarch quotes Chrysippus as saying: “Often indeed do the wise employ lies against the vulgar.”⁵² And Grotius writes: “If we may trust Plutarch and Quintillion the Stoics include among the endowments of the wise man the ability to lie in the proper place and manner.”⁵³

In the medieval period, we find Maimonides declaring:

These matters [of theology] are only for a few solitary individuals of a very special sort, not for the multitude. For this reason, they should be hidden from the beginner, and he should be prevented from taking them up, just as a small baby is prevented from taking coarse foods and from lifting heavy weights.⁵⁴

Averroes, in his commentary on Plato’s Republic, writes:

The chiefs’ lying to the multitude will be appropriate for them in the respect in which a drug is appropriate for a disease. . . . That is true because untrue stories are necessary for the teaching of the citizens. No bringer of a nomos [law] is to be found who does not make use of invented stories, for this is something necessary for the multitude to reach their happiness.⁵⁵

In the early modern era, Erasmus states:

While it can never be lawful to go against the truth, it may sometimes be expedient to conceal it in the circumstances. . . . Theologians are agreed on some things among themselves which it is not expedient to publish to the common herd.⁵⁶

Thomas Burnet writes on the subject at some length:

What just or pious man ever scrupled to deceive children or lunaticks, when thereby they contributed to their safety and welfare? And why should not the rude and untractable multitude be dealt with after the same manner? . . . It is a crime to use dissimulation to the prejudice of another: but we innocently deceive, and are deceived, for the public good, and the supporting of the weak. There is something more sacred and inviolable in the nature of goodness, than in that of truth, and when it is impossible to join them together, the latter must give place to the former.⁵⁷

Here is Rousseau, that apostle of the modern ideal of sincerity: the great founder of a nation, whose “sublime reason . . . rises above the grasp of common men,” must place his wise commandments “in the mouth of the immortals in order to convince by divine authority those who cannot be moved by human prudence.”⁵⁸ Again, in the Encyclopedia itself, there is an article by Diderot entitled “Mensonge officieux”—unofficial or salutary lie—which promotes the “wise maxim that the lie that procures good is worth more than the truth that causes harm.”⁵⁹ And David Hume, pulling no punches, writes: “It is putting too great a Respect on the Vulgar, and on their Superstitions, to pique oneself on Sincerity with regard to them. Did ever one make it a point of honor to speak truth to Children or Madmen?”⁶⁰ Consider also Descartes’s statement:

I would not want to criticize those who allow that through the mouths of the prophets God can produce verbal untruths which, like the lies of doctors who deceive their patients in order to cure them, are free of any malicious intent to deceive.⁶¹

But let us cut straight to the hardest case. Most people would probably agree with Sissela Bok’s assertion, in her classic work on lying, that of all the major thinkers of the Western tradition (with the possible exception of Kant), Augustine is the one who takes the strongest position against lying.⁶² Yet since his position does not preclude concealment, here is Augustine’s view of esoteric writing (which we have quoted once before): the pure stream of philosophy should be

guided through shady and thorny thickets, for the possession of the few, rather than allowed to wander through open spaces where cattle [i.e., the “common herd”] break through, and where it is impossible for it to be kept clear and pure. . . . I think that that method or art of concealing the truth is a useful invention.⁶³

To say it again, we may find this view offensive, immoral, and even dangerous, especially in the contemporary world. But precisely if we value truthfulness, we must not allow our own moral sentiments or the new imperatives of our democratic and technological age to obscure the plain fact that, among philosophers of the past, the legitimacy of salutary lying or concealment was very widely accepted.⁶⁴

In the preceding chapters, I have tried to rush into place—as quickly as intelligibility would allow—the key pieces of the big picture concerning esotericism: the testimonial evidence supporting it, the theoretical arguments explaining it, and the contemporary resistance obscuring it. For only in close conjunction with each other do these three pieces make full sense. For the sake of dispatch, I have abstracted from a host of details, above all the distinct forms into which esotericism is divided. But with this initial outline now in place, we may examine the phenomenon in a more leisurely and fine-grained manner, separating out the distinct kinds of and motives for esotericism—defensive, protective, pedagogical, and political.