Why should creation not be perfect? Who suggested this idea to Leibniz, who imposed it on him? To this question we will not find any answer in Leibniz, just as we will not find in any philosopher an answer to the question how a truth of fact is transformed into an eternal truth. In this respect, the enlightened philosophy of modern times is hardly to be distinguished from the philosophy of the “benighted” Middle Ages. The eternal truths constrain and persuade all thinking beings equally. When in the Middle Ages the voice of Peter Damian rang out, proclaiming that God could bring it about that that which had been had not been, it seemed like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. No one, neither of our time nor even of the Middle Ages, dared to admit that the biblical “very good” corresponded to reality, that the world created by God had no defect. Even more: it may be said that medieval philosophy, and even the philosophy of the Church Fathers, was the philosophy of people who, having assimilated Greek culture, thought and wished to think sub specie aeternitatis vel necessitatis. When Spinoza says, in ecstasy, “the love for the eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, and this itself is free from every sorrow, which is greatly to be wished and striven after with every power,” he is only summing up the teaching of the philosophers of the Middle Ages who had passed through the severe school of the great Greek thinkers. The only difference is that Spinoza, in order to trace the way which would lead him to res aeterna et infinita, believed that it was his duty as a thinker to sharply separate himself from Scripture, while the scholastics made superhuman efforts to save for the Bible the authority which belonged to it as a divinely inspired book.
But the more men occupied themselves with the authority of the Bible, the less they took account of the content of the sacred book; for, indeed, authority demands finally nothing but respect and veneration. Medieval philosophy never stopped repeating that philosophy is only the handmaid of theology and always referred to biblical texts in its reasonings. And yet as competent a historian as Gilson is obliged to recognize that the medieval philosopher, when he read Scripture, could not fail to recall Aristotle’s words about Homer, “The poets lie a great deal.” Gilson also cites the words of Duns Scotus: “I believe, Lord, what your great prophet has said, but if it be possible, make me understand it.” So the doctor subtilis, one of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, speaks. When he hears the words, “Rise, take up your bed and go,” he replies, “Give me my crutches that I may have something upon which to lean.” And yet Duns Scotus surely knew the words of the Apostle, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin,” as well as the biblical account of the fall of the first man, who renounced faith in order to attain knowledge. But, just as later on in the case of Kant, there never occurred to him the thought of seeking in the biblical legend the “critique of reason,” the critique of the knowledge which pure reason brings to man. Is it possible that knowledge leads to the biblical “you shall die” while faith leads to the tree of life? Who will dare admit such a “critique?”12 The truth that knowledge is above faith, or that faith is only an imperfect kind of knowledge—is not this an “eternal truth,” a truth to which Leibniz’s words, “it not only constrains but also persuades,” could be applied par excellence! This truth had already seduced the first man, and ever since, as Hegel very rightly says, the fruits of the tree of knowledge have become the source of philosophy for all time. The constraining truths of knowledge subdue and persuade men, while the free truth of revelation, which has not and does not seek any “sufficient reason,” irritates men, just as experience irritates them. The faith which, according to Scripture, leads us to salvation and delivers us from sin introduces us, in our view, into the domain of the purely arbitrary, where human thought no longer has any possibility of orienting itself and where it cannot lean upon anything.
And even if the biblical “critique” of reason is right, even if knowledge, by introducing itself into being, leads inevitably to all the horrors of existence and to death—even then, the man who has once tasted the forbidden fruits will never consent to forget them and will not even have the power to do so. Such is the origin of Spinoza’s rule: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. To “understand” we must turn away from all the things to which our joys, our sadnesses, our hopes, our anxieties, and so on are bound. We must renounce the world and that which is in the world. “Constrained by the truth itself,” Spinoza, following the example of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, turns away from the world created by God; everything that exists in the world is reduced for him to “wealth, honors and sensuality.” Everything that exists in the world passes away, is condemned to disappear. Is it worth the trouble to hold on to such a world? Were not the ancient and medieval philosophers, who preferred the ideal world created by human reason to the world created by God and who saw in the former the “greatest good” of man, right? Amor erga rem aeternam is the only thing that can be called “very good,” that is, capable of justifying being in the eyes of man.
There is then, on the one side, Socrates with his “knowledge” who has withdrawn into his ideal world and, on the other side, the biblical legend of the fall of the first man and the Apostle who interprets this legend by declaring that “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” The task which I have set for myself in this book, Athens and Jerusalem, consists in putting to proof the pretensions to the possession of truth which human reason or speculative philosophy make. Knowledge is not here recognized as the supreme goal of man. Knowledge does not justify being; on the contrary, it is from being that it must obtain its justification. Man wishes to think in the categories in which he lives, and not to live in the categories in which he has become accustomed to think: the tree of knowledge no longer chokes the tree of life.
In the first part, “Parmenides in Chains” (Parmenidês desmôtês), I try to show that, in pursuing knowledge, the great philosophers lost the most precious of the Creator’s gifts—freedom; Parmenides was not a free man but one enchained. The second part, the most difficult, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” reveals the indestructible bond between knowledge, as philosophy understands it, and the horrors of human existence. The immoralist Nietzsche glorifies unpitying cruelty and swears eternal fidelity to fate with all its ineluctabilities; and he rejoices and prides himself on the bargain of his submission to fate, forgetting his “beyond good and evil,” his “will to power,” and all that he had said about the fall of Socrates: the praises and threats of morality have seduced him also. In Kierkegaard mild Christianity loses its mildness and is impregnated with a ferocity which transforms it by ancient destiny—away from the moment where the “fact” has obtained the sovereign right of determining both the will of man and of the Creator. In the third part, “Concupiscentia Invincibilis,” the fruitless efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile the revealed truth of the Bible with the Hellenistic truth are dealt with. The fourth part, “On the Second Dimension of Thought,” begins by assuming that the truths of reason perhaps constrain us but are far from always persuading us and that, consequently, the ridere, lugere, et detestari and the flere which flows from them not only do not find their solution in the intelligere but, when they attain a certain tension, enter into a struggle against the intelligere—a terrible, desperate struggle—and sometimes overthrow and destroy it. Philosophy is not a curious looking around, not Besinnung, but a great struggle.
A similar purpose underlies all four parts of the book: to throw off the power of the soulless and entirely indifferent truths into which the fruits of the tree of knowledge have been transformed. The “universality and necessity” to which the philosophers have always aspired so eagerly and with which they have always been so delighted awaken in us the greatest suspicion; in them the threatening “you will die” of the biblical critique of reason is transparent. The fear of the fantastic no longer holds us in its power. And the “supreme being,” transformed by speculation into a deus ex machina, no longer signifies for us the end of philosophy but rather that which alone can give meaning and content to human existence and consequently lead to the true philosophy. To speak as did Pascal: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether he be a material or ideal principle, carries with him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force. That is why speculation has always so obstinately defended the universality and necessity of its truths. The truth spares no one, no one can escape it; it is this, this alone, that has enticed the