where human thought no longer has any possibility of orienting itself and where it cannot lean upon anything.
And even if the biblical “critique” of reason is right, even if knowledge, by introducing itself into being, leads inevitably to all the horrors of existence and to death—even then, the man who has once tasted the forbidden fruits will never consent to forget them and will not even have the power to do so. Such is the origin of Spinoza’s rule: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. To “understand” we must turn away from all the things to which our joys, our sadnesses, our hopes, our anxieties, and so on are bound. We must renounce the world and that which is in the world. “Constrained by the truth itself,” Spinoza, following the example of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, turns away from the world created by God; everything that exists in the world is reduced for him to “wealth, honors and sensuality.” Everything that exists in the world passes away, is condemned to disappear. Is it worth the trouble to hold on to such a world? Were not the ancient and medieval philosophers, who preferred the ideal world created by human reason to the world created by God and who saw in the former the “greatest good” of man, right? Amor erga rem aeternam is the only thing that can be called “very good,” that is, capable of justifying being in the eyes of man.
There is then, on the one side, Socrates with his “knowledge” who has withdrawn into his ideal world and, on the other side, the biblical legend of the fall of the first man and the Apostle who interprets this legend by declaring that “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” The task which I have set for myself in this book, Athens and Jerusalem, consists in putting to proof the pretensions to the possession of truth which human reason or speculative philosophy make. Knowledge is not here recognized as the supreme goal of man. Knowledge does not justify being; on the contrary, it is from being that it must obtain its justification. Man wishes to think in the categories in which he lives, and not to live in the categories in which he has become accustomed to think: the tree of knowledge no longer chokes the tree of life.
In the first part, “Parmenides in Chains” (Parmenidês desmôtês), I try to show that, in pursuing knowledge, the great philosophers lost the most precious of the Creator’s gifts—freedom; Parmenides was not a free man but one enchained. The second part, the most difficult, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” reveals the indestructible bond between knowledge, as philosophy understands it, and the horrors of human existence. The immoralist Nietzsche glorifies unpitying cruelty and swears eternal fidelity to fate with all its ineluctabilities; and he rejoices and prides himself on the bargain of his submission to fate, forgetting his “beyond good and evil,” his “will to power,” and all that he had said about the fall of Socrates: the praises and threats of morality have seduced him also. In Kierkegaard mild Christianity loses its mildness and is impregnated with a ferocity which transforms it by ancient destiny—away from the moment where the “fact” has obtained the sovereign right of determining both the will of man and of the Creator. In the third part, “Concupiscentia Invincibilis,” the fruitless efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile the revealed truth of the Bible with the Hellenistic truth are dealt with. The fourth part, “On the Second Dimension of Thought,” begins by assuming that the truths of reason perhaps constrain us but are far from always persuading us and that, consequently, the ridere, lugere, et detestari and the flere which flows from them not only do not find their solution in the intelligere but, when they attain a certain tension, enter into a struggle against the intelligere—a terrible, desperate struggle—and sometimes overthrow and destroy it. Philosophy is not a curious looking around, not Besinnung, but a great struggle.
A similar purpose underlies all four parts of the book: to throw off the power of the soulless and entirely indifferent truths into which the fruits of the tree of knowledge have been transformed. The “universality and necessity” to which the philosophers have always aspired so eagerly and with which they have always been so delighted awaken in us the greatest suspicion; in them the threatening “you will die” of the biblical critique of reason is transparent. The fear of the fantastic no longer holds us in its power. And the “supreme being,” transformed by speculation into a deus ex machina, no longer signifies for us the end of philosophy but rather that which alone can give meaning and content to human existence and consequently lead to the true philosophy. To speak as did Pascal: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether he be a material or ideal principle, carries with him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force. That is why speculation has always so obstinately defended the universality and necessity of its truths. The truth spares no one, no one can escape it; it is this, this alone, that has enticed the philosophers. Leibniz’s “persuasion” was only a hypocritical mask behind which the longed-for “constraint” hid itself. It is said in Scripture, “You shall receive according to your faith.” Would Leibniz or any other philosopher have ever had the audacity to say, “You shall receive according to your truth”? Athens could not bear such a truth. It does not constrain, it does not constrain at all; it will never obtain ethical approval. How could human reason be enticed by it?
But Jerusalem holds only to this truth. The constraining truths, and even the truths which seek the approbation and fear the reprobation of autonomous ethics—those eternal truths which, according to Leibniz, were introduced into the mind of God without asking His permission—not only do not persuade Jerusalem but are, on the contrary, the abomination of desolation. Within the “limits of reason” one can create a science, a sublime ethic, and even a religion; but 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, on his side, fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer his lost power: . . . “what things soever ye desire . . . ye shall have them.”13
It is here that there begins for fallen man the region, forever condemned by reason, of the miraculous and of the fantastic. And, indeed, are not the prophecy of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, “the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all,” and what the New Testament tells of the fulfilment of this prophecy, fantastic? With a sublime daring and unheard power Luther says of this in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians: “All the prophets saw this in the spirit: that Christ would be the greatest robber, thief, defiler of the Temple, murderer, adulterer, etc.—such that no greater will ever be in the world.” The same thought was expressed by Luther in a still plainer, more naked, and truly biblical fashion in another passage of the same commentary: “God sent his only begotten son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying: ‘Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer and doer of violence; David, that adulterer; that sinner who ate the apple in paradise; that thief on the cross—in sum, be thou the person who committed the sins of all men.’”
Can we “understand,” can we grasp, what the prophets and the apostles announce in Scripture? Will Athens ever consent to allow such “truths” to come into the world? The history of humanity—or, more precisely, all the horrors of the history of humanity—is, by one word of the Almighty, “annulled”; it ceases to exist, and becomes transformed into phantoms or mirages: Peter did not deny; David cut off Goliath’s head but was not an adulterer; the robber did not kill; Adam did not taste the forbidden fruit; Socrates was never poisoned by anyone. The “fact,” the “given,” the “real,” do not dominate us; they do not determine our fate, either in the present, in the future or in the past. What has been becomes what has not been; man returns to the state of innocence and finds that divine freedom, that freedom for good, in contrast with which the freedom that we have to choose between good and evil is extinguished and disappears, or more exactly, in contrast with which our freedom reveals itself to be a pitiful and shameful enslavement. The original sin—that is to say, the knowledge that what is is necessarily—is radically uprooted and torn out of existence. Faith, only the faith that looks to the Creator and that He inspires, radiates from itself the supreme and decisive truths
