To be sure, there was much here that did not please him—Kierkegaard, he felt, did not go far enough and at crucial moments had “lost his nerve”—but, on the whole, he found him deeply congenial.
The fruit of Shestov’s study of the founder of modern religious existentialism was one of his finest works, Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy: Vox Clamantis in Deserto, published in France in 1936 by a committee of eminent French and Russian émigré men of letters organized to honor the author on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
That year also saw the fulfillment of one of Shestov’s long-cherished dreams. At the invitation of the Cultural Department of the Histadrut, he traveled to Palestine, where his grandfather lay buried on the Mount of Olives, to deliver a series of lectures. His appearances in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa evoked an enthusiastic response from audiences who recognized the aged Shestov as one of the great Jewish philosophers of the century.
Shestov’s home in Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he moved in 1930, was the meeting place of a considerable number of distinguished representatives of the French as well as the Russian émigré literary and philosophical worlds, but he had few intimate friends or genuine disciples with the exception of Benjamin Fondane, a talented young Rumanian Jewish poet and essayist with whom he became acquainted a few years after settling in Paris. Fondane was to be Shestov’s most appreciative pupil and closest confidant during the last years of his life. The notes he kept of his meetings with the philosopher and his correspondence with him provide valuable insights into Shestov’s intellectual interests and motivations. They were found among Fondane’s papers after his death at the hands of the Nazis in the gas chambers of Birkenau in 1944.16
Shestov’s last years were shadowed by the approach of war, but he continued his work until the very end. He had finished the manuscript of his major work, Athens and Jerusalem, in the spring of 1937 at Boulogne-sur-Seine and had personally supervised the preparation of French and German translations of the Russian text. The German language edition was barely published in Graz and distributed to libraries throughout Europe before Hitler annexed Austria.
The summer of 1938 was spent in Châtel-Guyon which had been Shestov’s much loved vacation home for a number of years, but he went there a tired and sick man and returned to Paris in the fall already mortally ill. Despite his illness and fatigue, however, Shestov persisted in the last weeks of his life in working on an article on Husserl who had just died and, when he was too tired to write, whiled away the hours by reading Indian philosophy. On November 14 he was taken to the Boileau Clinic in Paris and there, six days later, died peacefully. At his bedside was an open Bible and the Deussen translation of the Vedas open at the chapter “Brahma als Freude” where he had underlined the following passage: Nicht trübe Askese kennzeichnet den Brahmanwisser, sondern das freudig hoffnungsvolle Bewusstsein der Einheit mit Gott [It is not somber asceticism that marks a sage but a confident and joyous awareness of unity with God]. He was buried in the mausoleum of the new cemetery at Boulogne-Billancourt, where his mother and brother lay, on November 22, 1938.
III
In his last years Shestov brooded incessantly over what he called, in a letter to Bulgakov, “the nightmare of godlessness and unbelief which has taken hold of humanity.” He was convinced that only through “the utmost spiritual effort,” as he termed it, could men free themselves from this nightmare. His own life was concentrated on a passionate struggle against the “self-evident” truths of speculative philosophy and positivistic science which had come to dominate the mind of European man and made him oblivious to the rationally ungrounded but redeeming truths proclaimed in the Bible. This struggle is most fully reflected in his last and greatest book, the monumental Athens and Jerusalem, on which he worked for many years and completed just a year before his death.
Athens and Jerusalem is the culmination of Shestov’s entire lifetime of intellectual inquiry and spiritual striving. It brings together all the diverse strands that had appeared in his earlier writings. His largely negative work of thirty years before, such as The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, may be regarded in retrospect as prolegomena and preparation for the positive message of the great work on which Shestov’s permanent fame as a religious thinker will undoubtedly rest. In it he set himself the task of critically examining the pretension of human reason to possession of the capacity for attaining ultimate truth—a pretension first put forth by the founders of Western philosophy in Athens two and a half millennia ago, maintained ever since by most of the great metaphysicians of Europe, and still defended by many philosophers today. This pretension, he concluded, must be firmly rejected. Reason and its by-product, scientific method, have their proper use and their rightful place in obtaining knowledge concerning empirical phenomena, but they cannot and must not be allowed to determine the directions of man’s metaphysical quest or to decide on the ultimate issues—issues such as the reality of God, human freedom and immortality.
The scientists and most of the philosophers, Shestov repeatedly insists in Athens and Jerusalem as well as in some of his earlier works,17 have been concerned with discovering self-evident, logically consistent, or empirically verifiable propositions which they take to be eternal and universal truths. For them, man is merely another link in the endless chain of phenomena and lives in a universe totally governed by the iron laws of causal necessity. They assume, whether they say so explicitly or not, that human liberty is largely an illusion, that man’s freedom to act and his capacity for self-determination are sharply limited by the network of unchangeable and necessary causal relationships into which he has been cast and which exercise an insuperable power over him. Consequently, the path of both virtue and wisdom for man, they believe, lies not in useless rebellion against necessity but in submissive obedience and resignation.
European man, according to Shestov,18 has languished for centuries in a hypnotic sleep induced by the conviction that the entire universe is ruled by eternal, self-evident truths (such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction) discoverable by reason, and by an everlastingly unalterable and indifferent power which determines all events and facts. This power is commonly known as “necessity.” God Himself, for a thinker like Spinoza, has no power to transcend the necessary structures that express His being. And Spinoza is only the culmination of the mechanistic philosophy that has dominated European metaphysics since Aristotle. To be sure, there have been solitary figures here and there, Shestov points out,19 who have protested against the pretensions of reason and its self-evident truths and have stubbornly refused to accept the dictates of the natural sciences concerning what is possible and what is impossible, but theirs were voices crying in the wilderness.” Tertullian’s was such a voice, and so also was St. Peter Damian’s. In modern times, Shestov declares,20 it is Dostoevsky who, in his passionate Notes from the Underground, has presented the strongest and most effective “critique of reason.” The world as logic and science conceive it, governed by universal and immutable laws and constrained by the iron hand of necessity, is for Dostoevsky a humanly uninhabitable world. It must be resisted to the utmost, even if the struggle seems a senseless beating of the head against a stone wall. Shestov finds an immense nobility and heroism in the cry of Dostoevsky’s protagonist in his Notes from the Underground:
But, good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four! Of course, I won’t be able to breach this wall with my head if I’m not strong enough. But I don’t have to accept a stone wall just because it’s there and I don’t have the strength to breach it.
As if such a wall could really leave me resigned and bring me peace of mind because it’s the same as twice two makes four! How stupid can one get? Isn’t it much better to recognize the stone walls and the impossibilities for what they are and refuse to accept them if surrendering makes one too sick?21
To resist the self-evident truths of science and philosophy, to stop glorifying and worshipping them, however, is not
