The elaboration of the third part of Athens and Jerusalem, concerning the philosophy of the Middle Ages, dates back to 1934 and reflects Shestov’s interest in the work of Etienne Gilson, following from the analysis he devoted to dogmatic theology and to its relationship to speculative philosophy in Potestas Clavium. In the Foreword, Shestov summarizes the intent of this section: “In the third part, [subtitled] ‘Concupiscentia Invincibilis’ [Invincible desire], the fruitless efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile the revealed truth of the Bible with the Hellenistic truth are dealt with.”42 The presence of a number of arguments that featured in Shestov’s unfinished book on Plotinus, which he started writing in 1923 and partially published in the magazine Versti [Miles] in Paris, as well as in the Russian and German editions of his book In Job’s Balances, printed in 1929, indicates the slow elaboration of a critique of the Greek heritage of medieval philosophy that gained momentum during the polemic with Jean Hering on the incompatibility between revelation and Husserl’s phenomenological method. The possibility of a religious philosophy that breaks with the tradition of scholastic thought and decides to oppose Athens and Jerusalem consists in the decision to replace self-evident, immutable truth with the notion of “created truth,” as Shestov argued:
Only such a philosophy can call itself Judaeo-Christian, a philosophy which proposes not to accept but to overcome the self-evidences and which introduces into our thought a new dimension—faith. . . . This is why the Judaeo-Christian philosophy can accept neither the fundamental problems nor the principles nor the technique of thought of rational philosophy.43
Just as the difference between Descartes and Damian consisted in the former’s dismay at offending reason (even when he admitted the possibility that God could have created man so that his limited understanding cannot allow for the existence of a mountain without a valley), Duns Scotus’s and William of Occam’s attacks against the edifice of Greek wisdom aimed to restore God’s omnipotence without fear of the “wicked and lawless arbitrariness” of the rationally unkownable Creator. However, it was not until the Reformation that the extent to which Greek thought had taken over the medieval conception of faith and salvation fully came to light:
And yet Luther is strictly connected to the medieval philosophy, in the sense that the very possibility of his appearance presupposes the existence of a Judaeo-Christian philosophy which, setting as its task to proclaim the idea—hitherto unknown—of a created truth, continued to cultivate the fundamental principles and technique of the ancient thought.44
The fourth and final part of Athens and Jerusalem, composed of sixty-six aphorisms in the German and French first editions of 1938, though including two more short texts in the posthumous Russian edition (YMCA-Press, 1951), was the first one to be elaborated, starting with 1925, as indicated by the date inscribed on the manuscript notebooks kept in the Shestov Archives at the Sorbonne. All the aphorisms in “The Second Dimension of Thought” were published in various magazines: in Russian in Chisla [Numbers], no. 1, 1930, and Sovremennye zapiski [Contemporary papers], no. 43, 1930; in French and English in Forum philosophicum (no. 1, 1930), which mainly gathered the aphorisms related to Shestov’s polemic with Husserl. One of the two aphorisms which were not included in the French, English, and German editions of Athens and Jerusalem, entitled “The Choice,” was also published in the same issue of Forum philosophicum. This is aphorism LXIV in the Russian edition, whose first few lines recall the opposition between the two originary myths of mankind, one which conceives individual life as illegitimate daring leading to inevitable destruction, the other which sets particular being under the protection of divine creation: “The appearance of man on earth is an impious audacity. God created man in His own image and likeness and, having created him, blessed him.”45 In fact the same text features twice, in slightly modified versions and with two different titles (LXIV “The Choice” and XXVIII “On the Sources of ‘Conceptions of the World’”), in the Russian edition, whereas the English and the French editions include only the final version, which is also the most elaborate.46
In contrasting the Greek myth of the origin of mankind (as illustrated by Anaximader’s conception) and the biblical story of Genesis, Shestov highlights the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem or, more specifically, between the rational explanation of life and its source in God’s creation. The same topic had been dealt with in the third part of In Job’s Balances, which provides a critique of the Greek conception of the origin of evil as “audacious” and unforgivable birth of particular beings doomed to disappear in order to expiate their sin.47 The biblical account of man’s creation in God’s image, of the advent of the God-Man, of his death and resurrection, proposes an alternative, soteriological view of individual existence after the fall, which is also present in Dostoevsky’s often misunderstood writings:
Everyone is convinced, in fact, that Dostoevsky wrote only the several dozen pages devoted to starets Zosima, to Alyosha Karamazov, etc. and the articles in the Journal of a Writer where he explains the theories of the Slavophiles. As for Notes from the Underground, as for The Idiot, as for The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, as for the nine-tenths of all that constitutes the complete works of Dostoevsky—all that was not written by him but by a certain “personage with a regressive physiognomy”48 and only in order to permit Dostoevsky to cover him with shame.49
The only aphorism that was not reproduced in the English, French, or German editions of Athens and Jerusalem is entitled “The Fourth Gospel” and deals with the Hellenization of Christianism starting from the doctrine of the Logos, which finds its source in 1 John 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In Potestas Clavium Shestov had already exposed the speculative argument that led to the identification of God as Logos to reason and Greek wisdom, in line with the conception of Philo, the Hellenized Jew.50 It is also noteworthy that this question played a significant part in Shestov’s polemic with Jean Hering concerning the sources of truth and the object of philosophical enquiry. When the Protestant theologian quotes the “words of the Logos-Messiah” in order to underpin his defense of Husserlian phenomenology, Shestov replies:
It is true that God is called logos in the Gospel, but can the logos of the Gospel be equated with that of the philosophers? [ . . . ] Husserl’s argument is based on self-evident truths; has it then a right to enlist the support of the Gospel commandments? Dostoevsky was able to take the passage in Saint John (12:24) as motto for his Brothers Karamazov; but Dostoevsky is hardly a fitting mate for Husserl.51
The famous line in the Fourth Gospel about “the kernel of wheat that falls to the ground and dies,” which has a special place in Shestov’s work, crops up in a philosophical argument seemingly dominated by the rational, speculative grounding of faith. The conclusion of the aphorism devoted to the Gospel of John in the Russian edition of Athens and Jerusalem emphasizes the link between the conceptual approach to religion and the doctrine of the Logos:
And we must not forget that theologians draw mainly on the Fourth Gospel. Theology is a science of faith. But a science must prove its statements and, therefore, cannot do without rational arguments, or in other words, it reduces “revelation” to rational arguments: theology does not need God, but verbum Dei and Deus dixit [God’s word and God said].52
It is also interesting to note Shestov’s significant and deliberate misquotation of a phrase he often liked to mention to Fondane as his “literary will.” In the preliminary drafts of the aphorism on the Fourth Gospel, Verlaine’s well-known “prends l’éloquence et tords-lui le cou” [take eloquence and break its neck] becomes “prends la raison et tords-lui son cou” [take reason and break its neck],53 which aptly renders the equivalence between the “logos” and speculative discourse, or “eloquence” and “reason,” according