My late professor, Leo Strauss, alerted us to an often overlooked dimension of political life when he wrote of “persecution and the art of writing” — the art of “writing between the lines.”   Many of the grand works in political philosophy were not written in liberal political orders. They were written with an awareness of a censor not far away, in an authoritarian or despotic political regime. Strauss’s thesis provoked controversy, but an even livelier argument ensued on the question of whether this need to write between the lines could become necessary even in the most liberal countries. For it could be explosive for the philosopher to lay bare the premises on which even the liberal polity has been provisionally settled.

Strauss had observed that when a skilled writer falls into a mistake or contradiction that would embarrass a schoolboy, that may be a sign that the contradiction is quite deliberate. The writer may be drawing in the close reader, to read even more closely yet. And the reader may find there the deeper teaching that the writer, for one reason or another, has decided not to trumpet in public. His deeper teaching he holds back in prudence from a wider public not prepared to understand and receive it.

Read the article “Pope Francis Writing ‘Between the Lines’” on thecatholicthing.org.