freedom (which grants him autonomy in a universe governed by laws or, in other words, the “inauguration” of a mode of being that is new and unique in the universe) and, on the other hand, the certainty that historical tragedies have a trans-historical meaning, even if that meaning is not always visible for humanity in its present condition. Any other situation of modern man leads, in the end, to despair.36
Faith in God was, for Shestov, the ultimate source of man’s deliverance from despair and the guarantee of his own freedom in a universe all of whose energies seem bent on denying it. Such faith, he held, as we have seen, lies beyond proofs and is in no way affected by logical argument.37 In this he was surely right. Like Kierkegaard, he recognized that faith can no more be destroyed by logical impossibility than it can be created by logical possibility. If faith is not pre-existent, if it does not precede all of a man’s reasoning and argumentation, then these will never lead him to God. Scripture itself, he pointed out, does not demand faith; it presupposes it.38
But the question may be raised—How is faith obtained? By man’s own wishing and striving for it? Though Shestov’s definition of faith as “audacity” seems to suggest that it is produced by an affirmation of human will, he plainly denied that man can by himself obtain faith.39 Faith is a gift of God, a manifestation of His grace. Echoing the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and applying it to faith, Shestov seems to have believed that it is mysteriously given to some and denied to others by God. Even one to whom it is given may, of course, reject it, but none by his own unaided endeavor can obtain it. Must it be sought in order to be found? Yes, according to Shestov. The first movement of faith, he wrote, involves “a spiritual exertion”40 on the part of man and, as we have already heard him say, “to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason.”41 Man must begin by questioning all laws, by refusing to regard them as necessary and eternal. But whether Shestov believed that even this can be done without the grace of God is something that is not altogether clear.
For modern man—Shestov, as we have seen,42 suggested—God may perhaps be reached only by first passing through the experience of despair, through a sense of utter abandonment. But if one 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”—what guarantee is there that this will not end in pagan titanism? Is there any assurance that man will not arrogantly put himself in the place of God, or that he will go beyond self-exaltation and recognize God as his own and the universe’s Lord and Creator? Indeed, Shestov himself seems at times to blur any ultimate distinction between God and the individual who is in the condition of faith. Through faith, he appears to have believed, man becomes—in an important sense—like God. For the man of faith, too, “all things are possible,” and this, according to him,43 is the operational definition of God.
Has this notion of radical, unlimited freedom, this conception that all things may become possible for man, any validity or significance? We may agree with Shestov that science and rationalist philosophy have, indeed, often exceeded their proper bounds and manifested an unjustified tendency to pronounce arbitrary judgment over what is possible and what is impossible. We may agree also that science has deliberately overlooked “miracles” and willfully ignored much that is fortuitous, extraordinary, and incapable of being assimilated into its accepted categories of explanation. But does this entitle us to go to the opposite extreme and deny, as Shestov at times appears to do, that there are any norms, principles or laws governing the phenomena of the universe? Shestov may also be right in holding that scientific knowledge has often tended to enslave man or at least diminish his freedom to act, and we may concur in his suggestion that, by transcending science and returning to the biblical outlook, man may find the scope of his liberty greatly enlarged and discover that many things he formerly believed impossible are quite possible. But does his freedom thereby become, as Shestov seems to believe, absolute and unlimited? Faith, he claims, gives man absolute freedom. But how? By what means does faith produce this astounding result? And can Shestov, or anyone else who accepts the literal truth of the promise proclaimed in Mark 11:23–24, point to anyone either in the past or present in whom this promise has been fully actualized? And furthermore, should he not in all fairness have conceded that while science (or rather, an excessive worship of science) may have at times enslaved man, it has also given him a greater measure of power over nature and thereby broadened the range of his freedom?
Faith, Shestov maintained, results in the liberation of man not only from all physical compulsion but also from all moral constraint. In faith man, to employ the terminology of Nietzsche, moves “beyond good and evil.” He is freed from subjection to all ethical principles and moral valuations, and returns to the paradisiacal state in which the distinction between good and evil and between right and wrong is non-existent. But, granted that man’s awareness of moral distinctions imposes heavy burdens upon him and restricts his freedom, is a return to the condition of Adam before the fall possible? And granted also that the God of the Bible is degraded and, indeed, denied if He is reduced to the position of guarantor of bourgeois morality, with the selfishness and cruelty that it has often served to cloak, can it be denied that the biblical God is in fact represented as a Lawgiver who has a moral will for man and that man’s freedom in the Bible is understood as his capacity to respond affirmatively or negatively to God’s call? Aside from the question whether he has, in his concept of “moral freedom,” fairly portrayed the character of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of whom he purported to speak, it may be asked of Shestov whether it makes any sense to assert that man can live entirely without ethical norms or principles. Or was it, perhaps, his belief that a life “beyond good and evil” cannot be lived in man’s present existence but only in some transcendent realm? On this he is not clear. In any case, the tendency to formless anarchism that is to be discerned in his friend Berdyaev and that seems to have been part of the mental furniture of a good many other Russian thinkers and writers of his time did not leave him untouched.
For all its ambiguities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, Shestov’s work remains of vital contemporary significance. Here was a thinker thoroughly schooled in the Western philosophical tradition who rejected that tradition with passionate intensity when he discovered the deadly threats to the human spirit implicit in it and who, in the style of the prophet, not the theologian or religious apologist, summoned men to turn away from Athens and seek their salvation in Jerusalem.
Not only to the irreligious and non-religious man of the Twentieth Century, but also to him who claims to live by the faith of the Bible yet whose understanding of that faith has inevitably been encumbered and distorted by centuries of rationalist philosophical and theological commentary, Shestov offers a fresh appreciation of the terror and promise of the biblical message. In his own lifetime his was “a voice crying in the wilderness,” but it is time that this voice be heard again.
Bernard Martin
Western Reserve University
January, 1966
Athens & Jerusalem
FOREWORD
Wisdom and Revelation
“The greatest good of man is to discourse daily about virtue.”
—Plato, Apology, 38A
“Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”
—St. Paul, Romans 14:23
I
A foreword is basically always a post-word. This book, developed and written over a long period of time, is at last finished. The foreword now seeks only to formulate as briefly as possible what has given direction to the author’s thought over the course
