We are like sleepwalkers in a world whose logic and a priori principles seem unsurpassable and prevent us from seeing the incongruities and arbitrary connections which make up the fabric of our daily lives. It takes an extraordinary effort of the will to break the spell of self-evident truths and awaken from the nightmare of one’s powerless submission to misfortune, injustice, suffering, and death. Being able to reject Spinoza’s Stoical injunction “do not laugh, do not curse or mourn, but understand” amounts to a radical choice: a choice confronting every individual who has become aware of the unbearable nature of the human condition. One can either try to come to terms with the “logical necessity” of death or refuse to accept the a priori law of temporal existence and adopt instead the contradictory belief that man is destined for a “higher lot,” and that he can overcome death. This opposition between two modes of thinking and two philosophical traditions is perfectly captured by Tertullian’s famous dictum (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”), which serves as a springboard for Shestov’s argument in his final and most compelling “essay of religious philosophy.”
Written over a period of twelve years and published shortly before the author’s death in 1938, Shestov’s philosophical testament, Athens and Jerusalem, sets up a gripping confrontation between the two symbolic poles of ancient wisdom: “Athens” (i.e., Greek thought as source of Western European philosophy) and “Jerusalem” (i.e., the Judeo-Christian tradition based on Biblical revelation). Before Shestov made it his favorite theme of reflection, the tension between rational analysis and faith had been a subject of theological debate and literary writing from the early Fathers of the Church to the founder of modern existential philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard. Shestov’s project of a study devoted to the philosophy of religion and inspired by Tertullian’s remark dates back to 1909–10, when Shestov was writing his article on Tolstoy (entitled “Destroyer and Builder of Worlds”) and working on a book on Luther, Sola Fide, which he never finished (due to the outbreak of World War I), but whose arguments and themes were later incorporated into Potestas Clavium (1923), a critique of the Catholic doctrine of salvation through works in opposition to the doctrine of salvation through “faith alone.” The circumstances in which Shestov first discovered Tertullian’s antirationalist statement of belief (“I believe because it is absurd”) are also indicative of the evolution of his thought prior to his encounter with Husserl’s phenomenology and his polemic against the rising scientific strand in philosophical enquiry.
According to the recollection of his friend and disciple Benjamin Fondane, Shestov came across the famous passage from the treatise on the incarnation (De Carne Christi) in his youth, most probably in the 1900s, given that the earliest mention of Tertullian crops up in Shestov’s controversial volume of aphorisms, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905), subtitled “Essay in Adogmatic Thinking,” which was published in English translation as All Things Are Possible (1920):
I was young, I was searching, I lacked daring. And then I found that text by Tertullian (Et mortuus est Dei filius: non pudet quia pudendum est. Et sepultus resurrexit: certum est quia impossibile—“and the son of God died: we are not ashamed, because it is shameful; he was buried and rose again: I believe it because it is absurd.”) You know where I found it? In a big book by Harnack, in the footnote, at the bottom of the page. Harnack cites it as some sort of oddity—good enough for the basement, not good enough to insert in the main text.1
In his preface to All Things Are Possible, D. H. Lawrence highlighted the gaping rift between Russian “rootless” vitalism and European culture that Shestov’s free-spirited critique of Western idealism brought into view. The less conspicuous opposition between Greek rationalism and Biblical revelation, which subtended the ideological and stylistic dismantling of the Western metaphysical discourse in Shestov’s collection of aphorisms, came across indirectly in Lawrence’s recurrent reference to the radical alterity of Russian religious thought: “[Russia’s] genuine Christianity, Byzantine and Asiatic, is incomprehensible to us. So with her true philosophy.” If “Russia will certainly inherit the future,” in Lawrence’s view, it is because the paradoxical message Russia brings comes from outside the tradition of Western speculative thought and testifies to the existence of an alternative tradition, a “rootless” and “nomad” undercurrent of philosophical reflection, which includes not only Tertullian but also Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche. More recently, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also remarked on the figure of the “nomad” (in “Treatise on Nomadology”2) and on the striking discontinuity that Shestov’s Russian brand of paradoxical thinking introduces in the European tradition of rationalist discourse. Within the lineage of “private thinkers” (alongside Nietzsche and Kierkegaard), Shestov’s use of aphoristic style corresponds to the subversive strategy of a “thought from the outside” (as first Foucault and then Deleuze have termed the attempts at overcoming the Western metaphysical discourse and setting “the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge”3 in relation to an irreducible exteriority). Some of Shestov’s assertions in All Things Are Possible (The Apotheosis of Groundlessness) fully justify D. H. Lawrence’s odd contention that Russia has been “infected” with the virus of European culture and has struggled to assimilate and overcome it before articulating its distinctive, if dissonant, message:
Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar. Culture is an age-long development, and sudden grafting of it upon a race rarely succeeds. To us in Russia, civilization came suddenly, whilst we were still savages. At once she took upon herself the responsibilities of a tamer of wild animals, first working with decoys and baits, and later, when she felt her power, with threats. We quickly submitted. In a short time we were swallowing in enormous doses those poisons which Europe had been gradually accustoming herself to, gradually assimilating through centuries.4
Subsequently, Shestov has often used the metaphor of the “savage,” ignorant dissenter, epitomized by Dostoevky’s “underground man,” to designate the resistance to European civilization and its tradition of Greek speculative thought. From this perspective, Tertullian, the North African Christian apologist, belongs to the “savage” camp, along with maverick European personalities such as Luther, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, given that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem relates to an all-pervasive inner antinomy of speculative philosophy when confronted with biblical revelation. The process that led to the gradual suppression of the biblical strand of reflection in European culture is described by Shestov with reference to the “Hellenization of Christianity”