Athens and Jerusalem. Lev Shestov

Shestov brooded incessantly over what he called, in a letter to Bulgakov, “the nightmare of godlessness and unbelief which has taken hold of humanity.” He was convinced that only through “the utmost spiritual effort,” as he termed it, could men free themselves from this nightmare. His own life was concentrated on a passionate struggle against the “self-evident” truths of speculative philosophy and positivistic science which had come to dominate the mind of European man and made him oblivious to the rationally ungrounded but redeeming truths proclaimed in the Bible. This struggle is most fully reflected in his last and greatest book, the monumental Athens and Jerusalem, on which he worked for many years and completed just a year before his death.

      Athens and Jerusalem is the culmination of Shestov’s entire lifetime of intellectual inquiry and spiritual striving. It brings together all the diverse strands that had appeared in his earlier writings. His largely negative work of thirty years before, such as The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, may be regarded in retrospect as prolegomena and preparation for the positive message of the great work on which Shestov’s permanent fame as a religious thinker will undoubtedly rest. In it he set himself the task of critically examining the pretension of human reason to possession of the capacity for attaining ultimate truth—a pretension first put forth by the founders of Western philosophy in Athens two and a half millennia ago, maintained ever since by most of the great metaphysicians of Europe, and still defended by many philosophers today. This pretension, he concluded, must be firmly rejected. Reason and its by-product, scientific method, have their proper use and their rightful place in obtaining knowledge concerning empirical phenomena, but they cannot and must not be allowed to determine the directions of man’s metaphysical quest or to decide on the ultimate issues—issues such as the reality of God, human freedom and immortality.

      The scientists and most of the philosophers, Shestov repeatedly insists in Athens and Jerusalem as well as in some of his earlier works,¹⁷ have been concerned with discovering self-evident, logically consistent, or empirically verifiable propositions which they take to be eternal and universal truths. For them, man is merely another link in the endless chain of phenomena and lives in a universe totally governed by the iron laws of causal necessity. They assume, whether they say so explicitly or not, that human liberty is largely an illusion, that man’s freedom to act and his capacity for self-determination are sharply limited by the network of unchangeable and necessary causal relationships into which he has been cast and which exercise an insuperable power over him. Consequently, the path of both virtue and wisdom for man, they believe, lies not in useless rebellion against necessity but in submissive obedience and resignation.

      European man, according to Shestov,¹⁸ has languished for centuries in a hypnotic sleep induced by the conviction that the entire universe is ruled by eternal, self-evident truths (such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction) discoverable by reason, and by an everlastingly unalterable and indifferent power which determines all events and facts. This power is commonly known as “necessity.” God Himself, for a thinker like Spinoza, has no power to transcend the necessary structures that express His being. And Spinoza is only the culmination of the mechanistic philosophy that has dominated European metaphysics since Aristotle. To be sure, there have been solitary figures here and there, Shestov points out,¹⁹ who have protested against the pretensions of reason and its self-evident truths and have stubbornly refused to accept the dictates of the natural sciences concerning what is possible and what is impossible, but theirs were voices crying in the wilderness.” Tertullian’s was such a voice, and so also was St. Peter Damian’s. In modern times, Shestov declares,²⁰ it is Dostoevsky who, in his passionate Notes from the Underground, has presented the strongest and most effective “critique of reason.” The world as logic and science conceive it, governed by universal and immutable laws and constrained by the iron hand of necessity, is for Dostoevsky a humanly uninhabitable world. It must be resisted to the utmost, even if the struggle seems a senseless beating of the head against a stone wall. Shestov finds an immense nobility and heroism in the cry of Dostoevsky’s protagonist in his Notes from the Underground:

      But, good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four! Of course, I won’t be able to breach this wall with my head if I’m not strong enough. But I don’t have to accept a stone wall just because it’s there and I don’t have the strength to breach it.

      As if such a wall could really leave me resigned and bring me peace of mind because it’s the same as twice two makes four! How stupid can one get? Isn’t it much better to recognize the stone walls and the impossibilities for what they are and refuse to accept them if surrendering makes one too sick?²¹

      To resist the self-evident truths of science and philosophy, to stop glorifying and worshipping them, however, is not necessarily an exercise in futility. If man will attend to the ancient message of the Bible, Shestov maintains, he will find there a conception of God, of the universe and of himself that not only lends meaning to such resistance but also makes of it the first and most essential step in becoming reconciled with God and regaining his freedom. For the Bible, in opposition to Western science and philosophy, proclaims that God is the omnipotent One for whom literally nothing is impossible and whose power is absolutely without limits, and that He stands not only at the center but at the beginning and end of all things. God, according to the Bible, created man as well as a universe in which there is no defect, a universe which—indeed—He saw to be “very good.” Having created man, God blessed him, gave him dominion over all the universe and bestowed upon him the essentially divine and most precious of all gifts, freedom. Man is not, unless he renounces his primordial freedom (as all men, in fact, tend to do in their obsession with obtaining rational explanation and scientific knowledge) under the power of universal and necessary causal laws or unalterable empirical facts. Unlike both traditional philosophy and science, which have sought to transform even single, nonrecurring facts or events into eternal and unchangeable truths, the Bible refuses to regard any fact as ultimate or eternally subsistent but sees it rather as under the power of God who, in answer to man’s cry, can suppress it or make it not to be. For biblical faith, knowledge—whether it is concerned with what have been called “truths of reason” or “truths of fact”—is not, as it is for traditional philosophy and science, the supreme goal of human life. Against their assumption that knowledge justifies human existence, the existential philosophy which takes its rise from the Bible will insist that it is from man’s living existence and experience that knowledge must obtain whatever justification it may have.²²

      There can be no reconciliation, Shestov contends,²³ between science and that philosophy which aspires to be scientific, on the one side, and biblical religion, on the other. Tertullian was right in proclaiming that Athens can never agree with Jerusalem—even though for two thousand years the foremost thinkers of the Western world have firmly believed that a reconciliation is possible and have bent their strongest and most determined efforts toward effecting it. The biblical revelation not only cannot be harmonized with rationalist or would-be “scientific” metaphysics but is itself altogether devoid of support either from logical argument or scientific knowledge. For biblical man based his life totally and unreservedly on faith, which is not, as has often been suggested, a weaker form of knowledge (knowledge, so to speak, “on credit,” for which proofs, though presently unavailable, are anticipated at some future time), but rather a completely different dimension of thought. The substance of this faith, emphatically denied both by science and philosophy, is the daring and unsupported but paradoxically true conviction that all things are possible. Shestov was haunted for years by the biblical legend of the fall. As he interpreted it, when Adam ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, faith was displaced by reason and scientific knowledge. The sin of Adam has been repeated by his descendants, whose relentless pursuit of knowledge has led not to ultimate truth but to the choking of the springs of life and the destruction of man’s primordial freedom.

      According to Shestov, speculative philosophy beginning in wonder or intellectual curiosity and seeking to “understand” the phenomena of the universe, leads man to a dead end where he loses both personal freedom and all possibility of envisioning ultimate truth. It is, in a sense, the Original Lie which has come into the world as a consequence of man’s disobedience of God’s