In addition to the partial and preliminary truths of science and logic, Shestov wished to make it clear, there are infinitely more significant “personal” and “subjective” truths which can neither be objectively demonstrated nor empirically verified, and among these are the biblical affirmations concerning God and human freedom. If the latter are declared absurd before the bar of reason and experience, then the truths approved by these judges are themselves foolishness before God.
What Shestov was fundamentally concerned with doing throughout his lifetime was to criticize the timidity and lack of imagination of traditional philosophy, with its view that metaphysical truth flows solely from obedience and passive submission to the structures of being given in experience, and to insist instead that ultimate reality transcends the categories of rationalist metaphysics and scientific method and that the truth about it is to be discovered through the untrammeled soaring of the spirit and through daring flights of the imagination. It may be said that so to insist is to abandon philosophy for poetry and art, but Shestov himself always maintained that philosophy is indeed, or rather should be, more art than science.
Shestov criticized science because it subordinates man to impersonal necessity. But it is fairly clear that he did not mean to question the preliminary value and significance of scientific knowledge in everyday life. What he insisted, rather, was that the limits of science must be clearly understood and that the scientists and the would-be scientific philosophers must not pretend that their essentially “soulless and indifferent truths”34 alone will satisfy the ultimate needs of the human spirit. More than anything else Shestov was troubled by the tendency of the scientists and the rationalist philosophers to bless and glorify their “constraining truths.” Granted that there is a great deal of physical constraint in the world, why must man worship and adore it? Why should he not rather fiercely resent and ceaselessly challenge its authority? To sing praises not only to that measure of necessity and constraint that obviously exists but to go further and maintain that everything in the universe is necessarily and eternally as it is—this tendency of rationalist thought, he contended, does the greatest violence to the spirit. Furthermore the belief, inculcated by scientism and rationalism, in an eternally necessary and unchangeable order of things is, in a sense, a “self-fulfilling” conviction. Men who accept it will do nothing to affirm even that degree of creative freedom which they have within the limits of natural necessity, much less expand it; and their freedom, as well as their capacity for attaining that realm of authentic being which—Shestov believed—lies forever beyond “reasonable explanation,” will consequently atrophy and disappear. That true, existential philosophy must be a continuous and agonizing struggle against constraint, against the immoderate pretensions of the logically self-evident, against the deliverances of common consciousness, is one of the dominant as well as one of the most valuable motifs in Shestov’s thought.
Shestov also performed a useful service in forcibly and repeatedly drawing our attention to the fact that not all questions are of the same kind.35 A physical question such as “What is the speed of sound?” differs essentially and in kind from a metaphysical question such as “Does God exist?” Against the positivists he maintained that questions such as the latter are genuine and, indeed, of ultimate importance, but that their significance lies precisely in the fact that they do not admit of ordinary answers, that such answers kill them.
In the specifically religious thought of his mature and final period, Shestov seems to have been motivated basically by an unremitting awareness of what Mircea Eliade has appropriately called “the terror of history.” He was obsessed by the fact that Socrates, the best and wisest of men, was poisoned by the Athenians and that, in the understanding of historicist and rationalist philosophies, this fact is on the same level as the poisoning of a mad dog. The despair which an awareness of the terror of history entails can be overcome, he concluded, only through faith. In this he was in complete agreement with Eliade who has written:
Since the “invention” of faith, in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word (for God all is possible), the man who has left the horizon of archetypes and repetition can no longer defend himself against that terror except through the idea of God. In fact, it is only by presupposing the existence of God that he conquers, on the one hand, freedom (which grants him autonomy in a universe governed by laws or, in other words, the “inauguration” of a mode of being that is new and unique in the universe) and, on the other hand, the certainty that historical tragedies have a trans-historical meaning, even if that meaning is not always visible for humanity in its present condition. Any other situation of modern man leads, in the end, to despair.36
Faith in God was, for Shestov, the ultimate source of man’s deliverance from despair and the guarantee of his own freedom in a universe all of whose energies seem bent on denying it. Such faith, he held, as we have seen, lies beyond proofs and is in no way affected by logical argument.37 In this he was surely right. Like Kierkegaard, he recognized that faith can no more be destroyed by logical impossibility than it can be created by logical possibility. If faith is not pre-existent, if it does not precede all of a man’s reasoning and argumentation, then these will never lead him to God. Scripture itself, he pointed out, does not demand faith; it presupposes it.38
But the question may be raised—How is faith obtained? By man’s own wishing and striving for it? Though Shestov’s definition of faith as “audacity” seems to suggest that it is produced by an affirmation of human will, he plainly denied that man can by himself obtain faith.39 Faith is a gift of God, a manifestation of His grace. Echoing the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and applying it to faith, Shestov seems to have believed that it is mysteriously given to some and denied to others by God. Even one to whom it is given may, of course, reject it, but none by his own unaided endeavor can obtain it. Must it be sought in order to be found? Yes, according to Shestov. The first movement of faith, he wrote, involves “a spiritual exertion”40 on the part of man and, as we have already heard him say, “to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason.”41 Man must begin by questioning all laws, by refusing to regard them as necessary and eternal. But whether Shestov believed that even this can be done without the grace of God is something that is not altogether clear.
For modern man—Shestov, as we have seen,42 suggested—God may perhaps be reached only by first passing through the experience of despair, through a sense of utter abandonment. But if one 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”—what guarantee is there that this will not end in pagan titanism? Is there any assurance that man will not arrogantly put himself in the place of God, or that he will go beyond self-exaltation and recognize God as his own and the universe’s Lord and Creator? Indeed, Shestov himself seems at times to blur any ultimate distinction between God and the individual who is in the condition of faith. Through faith, he appears to have believed, man becomes—in an important sense—like God. For the man of faith, too, “all things are possible,” and this, according to him,43 is the operational definition of God.
Has this notion of radical, unlimited freedom, this conception that all things may become possible for man, any validity or significance? We may agree with Shestov that science and rationalist philosophy have, indeed, often exceeded their proper bounds and manifested an unjustified tendency to pronounce arbitrary judgment over what is possible and what is impossible. We may agree also that science has deliberately overlooked “miracles” and willfully ignored much that is fortuitous, extraordinary, and incapable of being assimilated into its accepted categories of explanation. But does this entitle us to go to the opposite extreme and deny, as Shestov at times appears to do, that there are any norms, principles or laws governing the phenomena of the universe? Shestov may also be right in holding that scientific knowledge has often tended to enslave man or at least diminish his freedom to act, and we may concur in his suggestion that, by transcending science and returning to the biblical outlook, man may find