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God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars

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Lazier's "intellectual history" opens with Arendt's apology of nature as Mother Earth in the aftermath of the repudiation of God the Father in heaven: Earth is capitalized; heaven is not.

Lazier argues as follows. Is this not because Earth includes heaven? God the Father is merely posited in heaven, whereas He belongs to Earth. The Father is abstracted out of the Mother. God is Earth. Earth is the Nature of God. God is life itself: EXISTENCE. Is it possible to avert the loss of Earth in the aftermath of the death of the heavenly Father? Or must we end up with total war?

In speaking of Strauss, Jonas and Scholem, Lazier writes:
"All three revived an ancient Greek distinction: they set law and convention (NOMOS) against teleological notions of nature (PHYSIS), and for the most part they adjudicated this context in favor of the latter" (16).

Even setting aside the problem that <notions> ARE <nomoi>, Lazier says nothing about the fact that the Greek habit of setting NOMOS against PHYSIS was peculiar to the SOPHISTS opposed by Socrates. Nor is Socrates' way compatible with the habitual practice of modern sophistry to <use> NOMOS in the interests of Mother Earth.

Lazier appears to be arguing that nature is "good" because or in the sense that the Earth is good. Perhaps we need God the Father merely to take care of the Mother: we can use NOMOS to cultivate PHYSIS, especially now that the Father is no longer in Heaven. We can (or might be able to) rebuild or sustain the City of Man starting from a divinized Earth (a composite of Earth and God).

Is this not one of the projects--if not the foremost project--Strauss objected to throughout his writings and life?
While on the surface Lazier pits his authors against gnosticism and heresy, under the surface or between the lines he seems to draw them within the range of gnostic and heretical impulses. Indeed he proposes to read Strauss, Jonas and Scholem as assuming the following: "Life is anarchic. It is wild and ungovernable. It defies in the end every effort to bring it to order, to subdue it to the dictates of law, any law. It is the wellspring of lawlessness, a primal earthly force" (187). "The antinomian impulse in Jonas and Strauss" (ibid.) was not outright antinomianism, only insofar as these authors learned how to make "good" use of law, i.e. only insofar as they were...Machiavellian. But was Strauss really a Machiavellian?