not mean anything, and that if one could prove as clearly as two times two makes four that God does not exist, this also would not mean anything.”29 To the complaint that it is not possible to ask men to take a position which negates a universal conviction of the race and flies in the face of logic, Shestov replies, “Obviously! But God always demands of us the impossible . . . It is only when man wishes the impossible that he remembers God. To obtain that which is possible he turns to those like himself.”30
Shestov suggests, as we have already indicated, that modern man can perhaps reach the God of the Bible only by first passing through the experience of his own nothingness and by coming to feel, as did Nietzsche and others, that God is not. This feeling is a profoundly ambiguous one, capable of leading men in diametrically opposite directions.
Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakens, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge, but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?31
Our task, if we would enter upon the road which leads to true reality and ultimately to the God revealed in Scripture, consists “in the Psalmist’s image, in shattering the skeleton which lends substance to our old ego, melting the ‘heart in our bowels.’”32 Experiencing the abyss that opens before him when all his laws, his “eternal truths” and his self-evident certainties are taken away, the desperate soul feels that “God is not, man must himself become God, create all things out of nothing; all things; matter together with forms, and even the eternal laws.”33 When he has experienced this complete abandonment to himself and to boundless despair, then a man—as such irreconcilable enemies as St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Luther, the renegade monk, both have testified—may, through faith, direct his eyes toward ultimate reality and see the true God who will restore to him the limitless freedom with which he was created and again make all things possible for him.
Man, Shestov concludes, must choose: Athens or Jerusalem. He cannot have both. Athens—with its constraining principles, its eternal truths, its logic and science—may bring man earthly comfort and ease but it also stupefies, if it does not kill, the human spirit. Jerusalem—with its message of God and man for both of whom nothing is impossible, with its proclamation that creativity and freedom are the essential prerogatives of both the divine and human—terrifies man, but it also has the power of liberating him and ultimately transforming the horrors of existence into the joys of that paradisiacal state which God originally intended for His creatures.
IV
Shestov has been dismissed by some critics as a wild irrationalist, a willful protagonist of the absurd, who wished to abandon reason entirely in order to make room for a trans-rational revelation. But the case is hardly so simple as this. His polemics against scientific knowledge and reason, as even the most superficial reading of his work reveals, are themselves peculiarly lucid and rational. They are also based on a masterful knowledge of the entire Western philosophical tradition. Shestov, as Athens and Jerusalem and his other books powerfully attest, was completely at home in the thought of all the great European philosophers from Heraclitus to Husserl. Furthermore, given his predilection for irony and overstatement and his proclaimed intent forcibly to awaken his readers, to drive them through shock out of comfortable ruts into new and unfamiliar paths, it may be doubted that he meant categorically to reject objective knowledge, i.e., logic and science, as such. His real concern seems to have been rather to emphasize that these are hardly the unmixed blessing they have commonly been taken to be and that they assuredly do not exhaust the possible approaches to truth. What they tend, rather, to do is to lead those who concentrate on them away from the ultimate reality given in revelation.
In addition to the partial and preliminary truths of science and logic, Shestov wished to make it clear, there are infinitely more significant “personal” and “subjective” truths which can neither be objectively demonstrated nor empirically verified, and among these are the biblical affirmations concerning God and human freedom. If the latter are declared absurd before the bar of reason and experience, then the truths approved by these judges are themselves foolishness before God.
What Shestov was fundamentally concerned with doing throughout his lifetime was to criticize the timidity and lack of imagination of traditional philosophy, with its view that metaphysical truth flows solely from obedience and passive submission to the structures of being given in experience, and to insist instead that ultimate reality transcends the categories of rationalist metaphysics and scientific method and that the truth about it is to be discovered through the untrammeled soaring of the spirit and through daring flights of the imagination. It may be said that so to insist is to abandon philosophy for poetry and art, but Shestov himself always maintained that philosophy is indeed, or rather should be, more art than science.
Shestov criticized science because it subordinates man to impersonal necessity. But it is fairly clear that he did not mean to question the preliminary value and significance of scientific knowledge in everyday life. What he insisted, rather, was that the limits of science must be clearly understood and that the scientists and the would-be scientific philosophers must not pretend that their essentially “soulless and indifferent truths”34 alone will satisfy the ultimate needs of the human spirit. More than anything else Shestov was troubled by the tendency of the scientists and the rationalist philosophers to bless and glorify their “constraining truths.” Granted that there is a great deal of physical constraint in the world, why must man worship and adore it? Why should he not rather fiercely resent and ceaselessly challenge its authority? To sing praises not only to that measure of necessity and constraint that obviously exists but to go further and maintain that everything in the universe is necessarily and eternally as it is—this tendency of rationalist thought, he contended, does the greatest violence to the spirit. Furthermore the belief, inculcated by scientism and rationalism, in an eternally necessary and unchangeable order of things is, in a sense, a “self-fulfilling” conviction. Men who accept it will do nothing to affirm even that degree of creative freedom which they have within the limits of natural necessity, much less expand it; and their freedom, as well as their capacity for attaining that realm of authentic being which—Shestov believed—lies forever beyond “reasonable explanation,” will consequently atrophy and disappear. That true, existential philosophy must be a continuous and agonizing struggle against constraint, against the immoderate pretensions of the logically self-evident, against the deliverances of common consciousness, is one of the dominant as well as one of the most valuable motifs in Shestov’s thought.
Shestov also performed a useful service in forcibly and repeatedly drawing our attention to the fact that not all questions are of the same kind.35 A physical question such as “What is the speed of sound?” differs essentially and in kind from a metaphysical question such as “Does God exist?” Against the positivists he maintained that questions such as the latter are genuine and, indeed, of ultimate importance, but that their significance lies precisely in the fact that they do not admit of ordinary answers, that such answers kill them.
In the specifically religious thought of his mature and final period, Shestov seems to have been motivated basically by an unremitting awareness of what Mircea Eliade has appropriately called “the terror of history.” He was obsessed by the fact that Socrates, the best and wisest of men, was poisoned by the Athenians and that, in the understanding of historicist and rationalist philosophies, this fact is on the same level as the poisoning of a mad dog. The despair which an awareness of the terror of history entails can be overcome, he concluded, only through faith. In this he was in complete agreement with Eliade who has written:
Since the “invention” of faith, in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word (for God all is possible), the man who has left the horizon of archetypes and repetition can no longer defend himself against that terror except through the idea of God.
