But Jerusalem holds only to this truth. The constraining truths, and even the truths which seek the approbation and fear the reprobation of autonomous ethics—those eternal truths which, according to Leibniz, were introduced into the mind of God without asking His permission—not only do not persuade Jerusalem but are, on the contrary, the abomination of desolation. Within the “limits of reason” one can create a science, a sublime ethic, and even a religion; but 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, on his side, fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer his lost power: . . . “what things soever ye desire . . . ye shall have them.”13
It is here that there begins for fallen man the region, forever condemned by reason, of the miraculous and of the fantastic. And, indeed, are not the prophecy of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, “the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all,” and what the New Testament tells of the fulfilment of this prophecy, fantastic? With a sublime daring and unheard power Luther says of this in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians: “All the prophets saw this in the spirit: that Christ would be the greatest robber, thief, defiler of the Temple, murderer, adulterer, etc.—such that no greater will ever be in the world.” The same thought was expressed by Luther in a still plainer, more naked, and truly biblical fashion in another passage of the same commentary: “God sent his only begotten son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying: ‘Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer and doer of violence; David, that adulterer; that sinner who ate the apple in paradise; that thief on the cross—in sum, be thou the person who committed the sins of all men.’”
Can we “understand,” can we grasp, what the prophets and the apostles announce in Scripture? Will Athens ever consent to allow such “truths” to come into the world? The history of humanity—or, more precisely, all the horrors of the history of humanity—is, by one word of the Almighty, “annulled”; it ceases to exist, and becomes transformed into phantoms or mirages: Peter did not deny; David cut off Goliath’s head but was not an adulterer; the robber did not kill; Adam did not taste the forbidden fruit; Socrates was never poisoned by anyone. The “fact,” the “given,” the “real,” do not dominate us; they do not determine our fate, either in the present, in the future or in the past. What has been becomes what has not been; man returns to the state of innocence and finds that divine freedom, that freedom for good, in contrast with which the freedom that we have to choose between good and evil is extinguished and disappears, or more exactly, in contrast with which our freedom reveals itself to be a pitiful and shameful enslavement. The original sin—that is to say, the knowledge that what is is necessarily—is radically uprooted and torn out of existence. Faith, only the faith that looks to the Creator and that He inspires, radiates from itself the supreme and decisive truths condemning what is and what is not. Reality is transfigured. The heavens glorify the Lord. The prophets and apostles cry in ecstasy, “O death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory?” And all announce: “Eye hath not seen, non ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”14
The power of the biblical revelation—what there is in it of the incomparably miraculous and, at the same time, of the absurdly paradoxical, or, to put it better, its monstrous absurdity—carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities which that comprehension admits. For God, however, the impossible does not exist. God—to speak the language of Kierkegaard, which is that of the Bible—God: this means that there is nothing that is impossible. And despite the Spinozist interdictions, fallen man aspires, in the final analysis, only to the promised “nothing will be impossible for you”; only for this does he implore the Creator.
It is here that religious philosophy takes its rise. Religious philosophy is not a search for the eternal structure and order of immutable being; it is not reflection (Besinnung); it is not an understanding of the difference between good and evil, an understanding that falsely promises peace to exhausted humanity. Religious philosophy is a turning away from knowledge and a surmounting by faith, in a boundless tension of all its forces, of the false fear of the unlimited will of the Creator, that fear which the tempter suggested to Adam and which he has transmitted to all of us. To put it another way, religious philosophy is the final, supreme struggle to recover original freedom and the divine valde bonum [very good] which is hidden in that freedom and which, after the fall, was split into our powerless good and our destructive evil. Reason, I repeat, has ruined faith in our eyes; it has “revealed” in it man’s illegitimate pretension to subordinate the truth to his desires, and it has taken away from us the most precious of heaven’s gifts—the sovereign right to participate in the divine “let there be”—by flattening out our thought and reducing it to the plane of the petrified “it is.”
This is why the “greatest good” of Socrates—engendered by the knowledge that what is is necessarily—no longer tempts or seduces us. It shows itself to be the fruit of the tree of knowledge or, to use the language of Luther, bellua qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (the monster without whose killing man cannot live). The old “ontic” critique of reason is re-established: homo non potest vivere, which is nothing but the “you will die” of the Bible, unmasks the eternal truths that have entered into the consciousness of the Creator, or rather of the creation, without asking leave. Human wisdom is foolishness before God, and the wisest of men, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however unlike each other, both perceived, is the greatest of sinners. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin. As for the philosophy that does not dare to rise above autonomous knowledge and autonomous ethics, the philosophy that bows down will-lessly and helplessly before the material and ideal “data” discovered by reason and that permits them to pillage and plunder the “one thing necessary”—this philosophy does not lead man towards truth but forever turns him away from it.
Lev Shestov
Boulogne s. Seine
April, 1937
I
Parmenides in Chains
[On the Sources of the Metaphysical Truths]
“Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.”
—Aristotle, Met., 1015A, 32
“The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of its own powerlessness and of the impossibility of fighting against Necessity.”
—Epictetus, Dissert., II, 11
I
We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life. Of all the things that we here on earth are the witnesses, this is obviously the most absurd and meaningless, the most terrible, almost unnatural, thing—which forces us irresistibly to conclude either that there is something that is not right in the universe, or that the way in which we seek the truth and the demands that we place upon it are vitiated in their very roots.
Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes’ clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness). Now, reality here shows us only an eternal, impenetrable mystery—as if, even before the creation of the world, someone had once and for all forbidden man to attain that which is most necessary and most important to him. What we call the truth, what we obtain through thought, is found to be, in a certain sense,