of God, of the universe and of himself that not only lends meaning to such resistance but also makes of it the first and most essential step in becoming reconciled with God and regaining his freedom. For the Bible, in opposition to Western science and philosophy, proclaims that God is the omnipotent One for whom literally nothing is impossible and whose power is absolutely without limits, and that He stands not only at the center but at the beginning and end of all things. God, according to the Bible, created man as well as a universe in which there is no defect, a universe which—indeed—He saw to be “very good.” Having created man, God blessed him, gave him dominion over all the universe and bestowed upon him the essentially divine and most precious of all gifts, freedom. Man is not, unless he renounces his primordial freedom (as all men, in fact, tend to do in their obsession with obtaining rational explanation and scientific knowledge) under the power of universal and necessary causal laws or unalterable empirical facts. Unlike both traditional philosophy and science, which have sought to transform even single, nonrecurring facts or events into eternal and unchangeable truths, the Bible refuses to regard any fact as ultimate or eternally subsistent but sees it rather as under the power of God who, in answer to man’s cry, can suppress it or make it not to be. For biblical faith, knowledge—whether it is concerned with what have been called “truths of reason” or “truths of fact”—is not, as it is for traditional philosophy and science, the supreme goal of human life. Against their assumption that knowledge justifies human existence, the existential philosophy which takes its rise from the Bible will insist that it is from man’s living existence and experience that knowledge must obtain whatever justification it may have.22
There can be no reconciliation, Shestov contends,23 between science and that philosophy which aspires to be scientific, on the one side, and biblical religion, on the other. Tertullian was right in proclaiming that Athens can never agree with Jerusalem—even though for two thousand years the foremost thinkers of the Western world have firmly believed that a reconciliation is possible and have bent their strongest and most determined efforts toward effecting it. The biblical revelation not only cannot be harmonized with rationalist or would-be “scientific” metaphysics but is itself altogether devoid of support either from logical argument or scientific knowledge. For biblical man based his life totally and unreservedly on faith, which is not, as has often been suggested, a weaker form of knowledge (knowledge, so to speak, “on credit,” for which proofs, though presently unavailable, are anticipated at some future time), but rather a completely different dimension of thought. The substance of this faith, emphatically denied both by science and philosophy, is the daring and unsupported but paradoxically true conviction that all things are possible. Shestov was haunted for years by the biblical legend of the fall. As he interpreted it, when Adam ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, faith was displaced by reason and scientific knowledge. The sin of Adam has been repeated by his descendants, whose relentless pursuit of knowledge has led not to ultimate truth but to the choking of the springs of life and the destruction of man’s primordial freedom.
According to Shestov, speculative philosophy beginning in wonder or intellectual curiosity and seeking to “understand” the phenomena of the universe, leads man to a dead end where he loses both personal freedom and all possibility of envisioning ultimate truth. It is, in a sense, the Original Lie which has come into the world as a consequence of man’s disobedience of God’s command to refrain from eating of the tree of knowledge. Its narrowness, its lack of imagination, its preoccupation with “objectivity” and its wish to extrude from thought all human emotion, its conviction that there is nothing in the world that is essentially and forever mysterious and rationally inexplicable, its refusal even to entertain the possibility of a universe in which the rules of traditional logic (such as the principles of non-contradiction and identity) do not hold sway—all this condemns it to sterility. If philosophy is to serve the human spirit rather than destroy it, it must—Shestov maintains24—abandon the method of detached speculation and disinterested reflection (what Husserl called Besinnung); it must become truly “existential” in the sense of issuing out of man’s sense of helplessness and despair in the face of the stone walls of natural necessity. When philosophy becomes, as it must, a passionate and agonized struggle against the self-evident, necessary truths that constrain and crush the spirit, when it refuses, for instance, to refrain from drawing any distinction between the propositions, “the Athenians have poisoned Socrates” and “a mad dog has been poisoned” and to regard both with the same “philosophic” indifference—then it may make man receptive to the supernatural revelation of Scripture and to the possibility of redemption that is to be found there. “Out of the depths I cried unto Thee, O Lord” and “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”—the experience reflected in these agonized cries of the Psalmist, Shestov maintains, must be the starting point of true philosophy.
When his philosophy has taught man to reject all veritates aeternae as illusions, to confront unflinchingly the horrors of his historical existence, to experience his despair authentically and without evasion, to realize his mortality and his insignificance in a universe that seems bent on his destruction, then it may perhaps succeed in preparing him for that act of spiritual daring which is faith and which can bring him to the God who will restore to him not only a center of meaning for his life but also his primordial freedom. As Shestov states it in Athens and Jerusalem:
. . . 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 fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer, in turn, his lost power: “. . . what things so ever you desire . . . you shall have them.” (Mark 11:24)25
Faith, for Shestov, is audacity, the daring refusal to accept necessary laws, to regard anything as impossible. It is the demand for the absolute, original freedom which man is supposed to have had before the fall, when he still found the distinction between truth and falsehood, as well as between good and evil, unnecessary and irrelevant. Through faith, Shestov seems to suggest, man may become, in a sense, like God himself for whom neither intellectual nor moral grounds and reasons have any reality. “Groundlessness,” he writes,
is the basic, most enviable, and to us most incomprehensible privilege of the Divine. Consequently, our whole moral struggle, even as our rational inquiry—if we once admit that God is the last end of our endeavors—will bring us sooner or later (rather later, much later, than sooner) to emancipation not only from moral evaluations but also from reason’s eternal truths. Truth and the Good are fruits of the forbidden tree; for limited creatures, for outcasts from paradise. I know that this ideal of freedom in relation to truth and the good cannot be realized on earth—in all probability does not need to be realized. But it is granted to man to have prescience of ultimate freedom.
Before the face of eternal God, all our foundations break together, and all ground crumbles under us, even as objects—this we know—lose their weight in endless space, and—this we shall probably learn one day—will lose their impermeability in endless time.26
But Shestov’s God—the God of whom the Bible speaks and before whom all human foundations crack and crumble—is not the God of Spinoza or of Kant or of Hegel. Against all metaphysical and rationalist theologies, Shestov declares, “We would speak, as did Pascal, of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether He be conceived as a material or ideal principle, carries with Him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force.”27 The God of the Bible is not to be found as the conclusion of a syllogism. His existence cannot be proved by rational argument or inferred from historical evidence. “One cannot demonstrate God. One cannot seek Him in history. God is ‘caprice’ incarnate, who rejects all guarantees. He is outside history, like all that people hold to be to timôtaton.”28 How shall one arrive at this Deus absconditus, this hidden God? “The chief thing,” says Shestov, “is to think that,
