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1 4 8 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2the Enlightenment’s fate seems destined to be the same as that of the ancientTower of Babel. Furthermore, as once again stressed by both Dostoyevsky andStrauss, eroding religious faith, philosophical reason opens the path to moralrelativism and practical nihilism. As shown by Dostoyevsky’s man fromthe underground, the first of a series of Dostoyevskyan nihilist heroes whoreproduce Nietzsche’s conclusions, individual reason ultimately dissolvesinto individual will, which must not be “virtuous” or “sensibly advantageous,”but simply “independent.” 126 Of course, one could rightly argue thatfor Strauss there is no necessary evolution from philosophy to theoretical andpractical nihilism. Indeed, strictly from a philosophical point of view, Straussviews dogmatic nihilism as being in no way superior to dogmatic religiousfaith, and adherence to either one of them means the cessation of philosophy.The problem is that while philosophy erodes the authority of religion, it isincapable of providing a decisive refutation of nihilist theory and practice,which, until proved contrary, must be regarded as one of the many equivalentoptions in a world in which, to paraphrase Ivan Karamazov, everything ispermitted because, without a transcendent authority, everything, both goodand evil, is reduced to equivalent value judgments, none of which is obviouslysuperior to the others. But according to Strauss, the argument, formulated inresponse to this crisis, that one needs “revelation as a myth” “is either stupidor blasphemous,” and, interestingly enough, Strauss credits Dostoyevsky forclarifying this issue in Demons. 127 If faith is nothing more than the denialof nihilism, then “the blind choice” of faith, having no other content thanthe need to reject nihilism, becomes rather the final confirmation of nihilism.128 Faith certainly has to be something more than that. However, beyondthe conflict between reason and revelation, which for Strauss remains suspendedat this level, from a political point of view, and taking into account hisreflections on the relation between radical historicist thought and fascism,Strauss must certainly have been impressed by the way in which, in the samenovel mentioned above, Dostoyevsky analyzes the process through which anihilistic tyranny is born and grows in the midst of a society from which therestraint of traditional religion has disappeared.Ultimately, if modern anarchy has been caused by the Enlightenment’sdissolution of the theological authority, then the reestablishment of the latter126Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Hugh Aplin (London: Hesperus, 2006),29–30.127Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 299. See the conversation between Shatov and Stavrogin in Demons,290–91.128Pranchère, L’autorité contre les Lumières, 434.