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This is something that I haven't managed to untangle, but I know from gossip and Strauss's own notes, that he spent a great deal of time reading Nietzsche in the 20s when he was in his twenties. (Below is all speculation, so it could be way off...)
Naturally I spent a good deal of time reading Nietzsche in my 20s. But honestly, while I enjoyed the great rage against the machine of modernity, I didn't have much sympathy with N. I didn't like his rants on the herd---common people. I had already made up my own mind about God and morality, and I was not enthalled with him. In fact, he made me sick (existentially nauseated) in a strange intellectual way. I thought what a fabulous mind, somehow poisioned by its own erudition. There is something sad about Nietzsche. I came to think of Nietzsche as a kind of warning. Beware.
Later, after reading Thomas Mann, Malraux, and others, I came to see that Nietzsche's most important contribution was to the literature of the age that followed his.
What was Strauss looking for in Nietzsche? We forget that Nietzsche was essentially what we would call a classics professor. He taught Greek literature and philosophy, so it is possible that theme was what Strauss sought. On the other hand, the classics were part of the core German education system, and it was an area that was forbidden to Jewish professors who tended to be concentrated as unpaid dozents in mathematics, physics, and some of the newer sciences---departments that were just beginning to become `important.'
The other theme involved here is the flow of 19thC history where the dialogue over modernity was conducted through the arts as a battle between the painters of romanticism, realism, and later impressionism---over and against the classical inspired artist like David and Ingre---which was turned into academic painting---those endless historical portraits and scenes of national heros like Napoleon or Bismark or Wilhelm or whoever.
I had to read a book for my German lit class that I still have, Eric Heller, The Disinherited Mind, essays on Goethe, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Rilke, Spengler, Kafka, Krauss. (I have yet to re-read it...) For at least the first five, you can see a common thread. These were all writers intensely engaged with the problem of resolving Greek antiquity with their own idea of modernity. The great promise of the liberated, rational, and secular human spirit was seen as the consumate achievement of antiquity. Such a pinacle was lost during the dark ages and only resurfaced in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The revival of classicism became part of the great promise of modernity and a return to ancient roots, and the true center of the human spirit (add Gobineau for the dark side). This formed a core belief system in all of the above along with Kant, Hegel, and most of the 19thC luminaries (even Marx to a limited extent).
Nietzsche saw Christianity as a kind of perversion of antiquity, which of course it was. I suspect it was some where within this tightly bound historical moment that most of Strauss's world view was formed. In his early work, I think he was looking to find some way to resusciate Judaism's ancient Hellanistic roots in neo-platonism. I suspect Strauss saw Judaism aligned with classicism, through his imaginary ideal as a balance between the rationalism of antiquity and a modern scepticism (in his Zionist writings anyway).
I will probably get an enormous amount of shit for saying this, but I suspect that Judaism was almost a dead religion by the late 19thC and that it was literally brought back from historical oblivion. I think Judaism was rescued most especially by German Zionism. Whether the orthodox agreed or not, (and they mostly disagreed), Zionism put Judaism back into history. As I went through Guttmann's Philosophies of Judaism, I was struck by the undertone of urgency in Rosenzweig, Cohen and of course Guttmann himself.
But I am mentioning this impression only to give Strauss some benefit of the doubt. He must have felt a similar threat---the doors could close on an entire world. It was possible, given the sweeping changes that were gathering on the horizon of modernity, that one day here would be no living memory of what it had meant to be Jewish and live in a traditional community. (I am thinking of the late 19thC to say late 20s before the Third Reich)
So, if you are following this, then that was Strauss's attraction to Nietzsche, who was kind of a grand rhetorician of lost worlds. The pronouncement that God was dead, was in effect a statement that the soul of Christianity was dead. But of course also an affirmation, we are free to re-invent the world.
Well, first time as tragedy, second round as farce. I think (but have no way of actually knowing) that the Islamic world has been undergoing a deeply related transformation. Of course the Christians and Jews are engaged in some nth round of similar rivivals.
I don't know Charles. I think all these people are out of their fucking minds. I obviously don't believe any of this bullshit. On the other hand, it is nice to live a city where I pass by old Churchs, an old Synagogue done in the Bzyantine style, or a Mosque with its dome in gold. It makes me feel like I live in a civilized world. I don't begruge any of that. I just don't what to hear their crap on the news.
Speaking of which, it sounds like Ratzinger is a neo-con.
CG