When his philosophy has taught man to reject all veritates aeternae as illusions, to confront unflinchingly the horrors of his historical existence, to experience his despair authentically and without evasion, to realize his mortality and his insignificance in a universe that seems bent on his destruction, then it may perhaps succeed in preparing him for that act of spiritual daring which is faith and which can bring him to the God who will restore to him not only a center of meaning for his life but also his primordial freedom. As Shestov states it in Athens and Jerusalem:
. . . to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason, with all its physical and moral constraints, and go to another source of truth. In Scripture this source bears the enigmatic name “faith,” which is that dimension of thought where truth abandons itself fearlessly and joyously to the entire disposition of the Creator: “Thy will be done!” The will of Him who fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer, in turn, his lost power: “. . . what things so ever you desire . . . you shall have them.” (Mark 11:24)25
Faith, for Shestov, is audacity, the daring refusal to accept necessary laws, to regard anything as impossible. It is the demand for the absolute, original freedom which man is supposed to have had before the fall, when he still found the distinction between truth and falsehood, as well as between good and evil, unnecessary and irrelevant. Through faith, Shestov seems to suggest, man may become, in a sense, like God himself for whom neither intellectual nor moral grounds and reasons have any reality. “Groundlessness,” he writes,
is the basic, most enviable, and to us most incomprehensible privilege of the Divine. Consequently, our whole moral struggle, even as our rational inquiry—if we once admit that God is the last end of our endeavors—will bring us sooner or later (rather later, much later, than sooner) to emancipation not only from moral evaluations but also from reason’s eternal truths. Truth and the Good are fruits of the forbidden tree; for limited creatures, for outcasts from paradise. I know that this ideal of freedom in relation to truth and the good cannot be realized on earth—in all probability does not need to be realized. But it is granted to man to have prescience of ultimate freedom.
Before the face of eternal God, all our foundations break together, and all ground crumbles under us, even as objects—this we know—lose their weight in endless space, and—this we shall probably learn one day—will lose their impermeability in endless time.26
But Shestov’s God—the God of whom the Bible speaks and before whom all human foundations crack and crumble—is not the God of Spinoza or of Kant or of Hegel. Against all metaphysical and rationalist theologies, Shestov declares, “We would speak, as did Pascal, of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether He be conceived as a material or ideal principle, carries with Him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force.”27 The God of the Bible is not to be found as the conclusion of a syllogism. His existence cannot be proved by rational argument or inferred from historical evidence. “One cannot demonstrate God. One cannot seek Him in history. God is ‘caprice’ incarnate, who rejects all guarantees. He is outside history, like all that people hold to be to timôtaton.”28 How shall one arrive at this Deus absconditus, this hidden God? “The chief thing,” says Shestov, “is to think that, even if all men without exception were convinced that God does not exist, this would not mean anything, and that if one could prove as clearly as two times two makes four that God does not exist, this also would not mean anything.”29 To the complaint that it is not possible to ask men to take a position which negates a universal conviction of the race and flies in the face of logic, Shestov replies, “Obviously! But God always demands of us the impossible . . . It is only when man wishes the impossible that he remembers God. To obtain that which is possible he turns to those like himself.”30
Shestov suggests, as we have already indicated, that modern man can perhaps reach the God of the Bible only by first passing through the experience of his own nothingness and by coming to feel, as did Nietzsche and others, that God is not. This feeling is a profoundly ambiguous one, capable of leading men in diametrically opposite directions.
Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakens, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge, but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?31
Our task, if we would enter upon the road which leads to true reality and ultimately to the God revealed in Scripture, consists “in the Psalmist’s image, in shattering the skeleton which lends substance to our old ego, melting the ‘heart in our bowels.’”32 Experiencing the abyss that opens before him when all his laws, his “eternal truths” and his self-evident certainties are taken away, the desperate soul feels that “God is not, man must himself become God, create all things out of nothing; all things; matter together with forms, and even the eternal laws.”33 When he has experienced this complete abandonment to himself and to boundless despair, then a man—as such irreconcilable enemies as St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Luther, the renegade monk, both have testified—may, through faith, direct his eyes toward ultimate reality and see the true God who will restore to him the limitless freedom with which he was created and again make all things possible for him.
Man, Shestov concludes, must choose: Athens or Jerusalem. He cannot have both. Athens—with its constraining principles, its eternal truths, its logic and science—may bring man earthly comfort and ease but it also stupefies, if it does not kill, the human spirit. Jerusalem—with its message of God and man for both of whom nothing is impossible, with its proclamation that creativity and freedom are the essential prerogatives of both the divine and human—terrifies man, but it also has the power of liberating him and ultimately transforming the horrors of existence into the joys of that paradisiacal state which God originally intended for His creatures.
IV
Shestov has been dismissed by some critics as a wild irrationalist, a willful protagonist of the absurd, who wished to abandon reason entirely in order to make room for a trans-rational revelation. But the case is hardly so simple as this. His polemics against scientific knowledge and reason, as even the most superficial reading of his work reveals, are themselves peculiarly lucid and rational. They are also based on a masterful knowledge of the entire Western philosophical tradition. Shestov, as Athens and Jerusalem and his other books powerfully attest, was completely at home in the thought of all the great European philosophers from Heraclitus to Husserl. Furthermore, given his predilection for irony and overstatement and his proclaimed intent forcibly to awaken his readers, to drive them through shock out of comfortable ruts into new and unfamiliar