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Book Review: Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn3 5 3(which in turn further enraged and embittered the latter), does not seem evento realize it, but does see he has been put in a bad spot by having to admitthat Lessing probably was some kind of Spinozist. First, this can only aid theorthodox who have been saying this sort of thing all along during the Reimarus“Fragments” dispute, and second, it turns out, humiliatingly, that Lessingtold the relatively insignificant Jacobi important secrets that he had never letMendelssohn in on. So he downplays the importance of what, after all, is ananecdote, and notes that Lessing was a fan of paradox and conversationalextremism on occasion. So one should not make too much of this. AfterJacobi persists, Mendelssohn comes up with a new idea (Strauss is insistent,and argues persuasively, that there is plenty of evidence that Mendelssohncooked up the explanation ad hoc and had never thought of it before [91–92,94, 96–97]), which, however, he calls an old one, namely that he’d alwaysknown that Lessing was a kind of Spinozist, but not, in the end, a really, fully,wholly atheistic one, so that all this is not such a big deal after all. That is, hedoes his best to muddy the waters. Jacobi, however, rips him to pieces, andMendelssohn, very ill at the time anyway, dies. Though Strauss’s philosophicalsympathies are always with Jacobi he is at pains to let the reader know thatas a human being he vastly prefers Mendelssohn (see 64, 76, 107–8).More specifically (but not very specifically—who wants the often fascinatingand even occasionally perverse details must read Strauss, as wellas Yaffe’s very clear guide to them), Jacobi drew materialist and atheisticconsequences from Spinoza’s denial that infinite substance (God) has intellectio(understanding), though he admits it does think (i.e., uses cogitatio).By contrast, Mendelssohn wanted to understand Spinoza as thinking thatfinite things do not exist outside of divine understanding (88–89). This ledhim eventually to come across an early essay of Lessing’s which presentedwhat Mendelssohn could claim was a “purified” version of Spinoza. That versiondiffers from what Mendelssohn now acknowledges is the true Spinoza,where the necessary being consists “in the sum of infinitely many contingentbeings,” but (quoting Strauss quoting Mendelssohn) “teaches rather ‘thatthe one necessary being must be infinite in its unity and in accord with itspower’” (99). The difference would appear to be that for Spinoza, the infinite,or God, is a polite title for the accumulation of a meaningless mass of stuff,whereas for Mendelssohn’s Lessing’s Spinoza, God is a lot more than that. Inother words, Lessing had indeed been a pantheist, but not an atheist. Mendelssohnpresented this argument in The Morning Hours, a book originallyintended as a popular presentation of the arguments for the existence of God,but one which now he wanted to extend to a critique of Spinozism and, only