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3 4 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3and revelation. 94 The summum bonum has had a salutary effect: philosophyhas the capability of teaching political moderation. Expelling philosophyfrom the city, from humanity, would mean to exorcise moderation itself. 95Though the tension between reason and revelation cannot be resolved, classicalphilosophy always had a dose of skepticism associated with it. The classicalphilosopher knows that he does not know. This skepticism not only providesa motive to pursue things the mind wonders about, but it also allows revelationto challenge philosophy. 96 The converse is also true: since revelationmay be misunderstood and turned into a convention-based extremism, themind’s ability to know tempers the irrational expressions of the theologian.The modern rejection of reason by the partisans of revelation was notedby Mark Noll in his work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Though he didnot try to flesh out the reason for rejection of philosophy in many modernreligious colleges, he understood the consequence: “the scandal of the evangelicalmind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” 97 Evangelicalsin particular played down the role of the intellect in favor of a narrow theologyand fideism. As a result, they became at worst hostile to reason and the mind,at best suspicious of them. This led to a crisis in Christian formation of theperson because the mind of the person was excluded. Ambassador CharlesHabib Malik said at Wheaton College that “the greatest danger confrontingAmerican evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.” 98Piety alone (reason alone) is insufficient and denies human beings a pivotaltool to order the soul. His remedy was for Christians to spend years poringover Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. According to Malik, the recovery of theChristian mind was the province of the American university.His call was not heeded. Many evangelical colleges remained suspiciousof philosophy and mistrusted reason’s ability to know. The rejection of philosophy,and hence man’s ability to reason, is, in essence, a misunderstanding of94Harry V. Jaffa, The American Founding as the Best Regime: The Bonding of Civil and ReligiousLiberty (Claremont, CA: Claremont Institute, 1990), 15–16, 20. For the importance of the gods to theancient city, see Charles Kesler, Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 277, and of course, Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges, The Ancient City(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 5.95There is a nice discussion of this in Ivan Kenneally, “The Use and Abuse of Utopianism: On LeoStrauss’s Philosophic Politics,” Perspectives on Political Science 36, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 146.96Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 270. A nice summary is in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski,editors’ introduction to Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, 11–12.97Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 3.98Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, November 1980, 40.