 If this is Maimonides’ reason, what is Strauss’s? Strauss is willing to make the seemingly immoral and indecent move of revealing the secrets of an esoteric text in order to save those secrets. The secret that Strauss seeks to save is insight into the political, philosophical, and theological meaning of what he calls “a forgotten type of writing.” But why does Strauss care about this forgotten type of writing? We can only answer this question by looking to Strauss’s published work as a whole and to the place of Persecution and the Art of Writing within this whole and to do so it is necessary to understand Strauss’s most basic question, which concerns what he calls the “theologico-political predicament of modernity.”