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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 4 9represents the necessary premise for ending the modern crisis. However,another problem arises at this point. For according to Strauss, there is a connectionbetween Christianity’s proclamation of the equality of all people andthe Enlightenment’s ambition of making all people philosophers. In Christianity,the basis of this equality is the idea that all people are capable of moralaction, which the biblical tradition, unlike classical philosophy, regards assuperior to philosophical understanding. 129 Although Strauss has seriousreservations with regard to the Hegelian secularization theory, stressinginstead the anti-Christian intentions of the founders of the modern project,he nevertheless admits that the modern world has also been shaped by Christianity,as has been, up to a certain point, the very anti-Christian action ofthe founders of modernity. 130 Intending to defeat Christianity with its ownweapon, namely propaganda, Machiavelli implicitly jettisoned the classicaldistinction between philosophers and nonphilosophers, operating instead inthe logic of a religion that insisted that the revealed truth should be preachedto all human beings, who are all called to practice what the church fathersconsidered to be the “true philosophy,” 131 namely the knowledge of the Godwho revealed himself, knowledge which is not philosophic speculation butlove manifested as obedience to God’s commands (1 John 2:3–5). 132 Moreover,as underlined by Daniel Tanguay, Strauss is of the opinion that, inasmuch asintellectual honesty is a biblical value of no concern for classical philosophy(motivated instead by love of truth, which is something different), the tragicallynihilistic atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as opposed to the joyfullyhedonistic atheism of the founders of modern liberalism, could also be tracedback to biblical revelation. 133 These are problems of which Dostoyevsky’s129Tanguay, Leo Strauss, 116, 140.130Daniel Tanguay, “Colère anti-théologique et sécularisation: Quelques remarques surl’interprétation straussienne de la rupture moderne,” Science et Esprit 51, no. 2 (1999): 185–86, 191–92.131St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 21, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310221.htm. AccessedNovember 20, 2014.132Of course, the biblical tradition does not sanction democratic egalitarianism if by this oneunderstands the relativistic equality of choices deduced from the natural equality of individuals whorecognize no natural finality and no religious authority. Obviously, while all are called to live accordingto God’s commandments, and, at least in accordance with Catholic and Orthodox doctrine, noone is refused the grace to do so, not all live in this way and not all do so to the same extent. Therefore,it is more adequate to speak of a change of axiological hierarchy corresponding to the replacement ofwisdom with righteousness as the highest virtue.133Tanguay, Leo Strauss, 42. “Honest and intransigent atheism,” Nietzsche argues, is “one of thelast evolutionary phases…of a discipline in truth that has lasted for two millennia and which nowprohibits the lie implicit in monotheistic belief. …The Christian ethics with its key notion, ever morestrictly applied, of truthfulness” and “the casuistic finesse of the Christian conscience, translated andsublimated into the scholarly conscience, into intellectual integrity to be maintained at all costs,” have