search for mathematical certainty in the gradual confinement of philosophical investigation to abstract, logical matters, which culminated in Husserl’s phenomenology. “Philosophy as rigorous science” (defined along the principles of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) not only confirmed the nonexistence of real, temporal entities, from the point of view of scientific thought, but also restated the equivalence between thought and true being, on the one hand, and true being and meaning, on the other. Within this framework, the search for truth becomes a search for meaning (achieved through intentional constitution), and whatever cannot be “constituted” in the same manner as mathematical objects (e.g., the rule of “2 x 2 = 4”), or concepts (such as the idea of “table” in general), falls outside the category of true being and has no intelligible meaning and no place in philosophical discourse. Shestov sought to restore the rights of the living individual against the rise of the scientific mentality that discarded insoluble metaphysical questions and viewed life in a necessary relationship to death and destruction.
If he frequently recalled Plato’s definition of philosophy as “practice for death” and meditation on dying, Shestov did so in order to remind readers and contemporary philosophers that reflection on ultimate realities is not a disinterested pursuit of knowledge but a constant struggle against the logical certainty of one’s fleeting passage through time and eventual annihilation. Philosophy, in Shestov’s view, is more akin to a combat strategy, a “fight against self-evidence” (which echoes the revolt of Dostoevsky’s underground man against the rule of “2 x 2 = 4” as a principle of death), and leads to spiritual awakening. The notion of “awakening,” which Shestov takes up from Plotinus, corresponds to the “second sight” that man acquires when “the corporeal eyes begin to lose their sharpness” (according to Plato’s Symposium 219A). This metaphorical description of a shift in one’s thinking points to the fact that the soul lies sleeping in the body, and that it takes a considerable effort to change the way one normally sees the world, a process which Shestov compares with the experience of a dreamer struggling to awaken from a nightmare. Two contradictory, yet equally convincing, perceptions of reality are confronted in the dreamer’s consciousness: one places the subject in an impersonal environment, which is indifferent to human suffering and desires, and within which events pursue their course in an implacable manner; the other opens up the possibility of freeing oneself from logical principles and awakening to a reality in which the cries of Job and of the Psalmist are heard and answered. However curious this may seem, as Shestov remarks, the impression of internal consistency and necessity accompanies not only the dreamer’s absurd experience of the world (as he imagines, for instance, that “he is the Emperor of China and that . . . he is engraving monograms on the surface of a sphere with one dimension only”) but also the perception of the world of the man who “is only guided by reason” in the waking state and who cannot conceive the existence of a reality unfettered by the laws of causality, temporal irreversibility, and death.
We are like sleepwalkers in a world whose logic and a priori principles seem unsurpassable and prevent us from seeing the incongruities and arbitrary connections which make up the fabric of our daily lives. It takes an extraordinary effort of the will to break the spell of self-evident truths and awaken from the nightmare of one’s powerless submission to misfortune, injustice, suffering, and death. Being able to reject Spinoza’s Stoical injunction “do not laugh, do not curse or mourn, but understand” amounts to a radical choice: a choice confronting every individual who has become aware of the unbearable nature of the human condition. One can either try to come to terms with the “logical necessity” of death or refuse to accept the a priori law of temporal existence and adopt instead the contradictory belief that man is destined for a “higher lot,” and that he can overcome death. This opposition between two modes of thinking and two philosophical traditions is perfectly captured by Tertullian’s famous dictum (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”), which serves as a springboard for Shestov’s argument in his final and most compelling “essay of religious philosophy.”
Written over a period of twelve years and published shortly before the author’s death in 1938, Shestov’s philosophical testament, Athens and Jerusalem, sets up a gripping confrontation between the two symbolic poles of ancient wisdom: “Athens” (i.e., Greek thought as source of Western European philosophy) and “Jerusalem” (i.e., the Judeo-Christian tradition based on Biblical revelation). Before Shestov made it his favorite theme of reflection, the tension between rational analysis and faith had been a subject of theological debate and literary writing from the early Fathers of the Church to the founder of modern existential philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard. Shestov’s project of a study devoted to the philosophy of religion and inspired by Tertullian’s remark dates back to 1909–10, when Shestov was writing his article on Tolstoy (entitled “Destroyer and Builder of Worlds”) and working on a book on Luther, Sola Fide, which he never finished (due to the outbreak of World War I), but whose arguments and themes were later incorporated into Potestas Clavium (1923), a critique of the Catholic doctrine of salvation through works in opposition to the doctrine of salvation through “faith alone.” The circumstances in which Shestov first discovered Tertullian’s antirationalist statement of belief (“I believe because it is absurd”) are also indicative of the evolution of his thought prior to his encounter with Husserl’s phenomenology and his polemic against the rising scientific strand in philosophical enquiry.
According to the recollection of his friend and disciple Benjamin Fondane, Shestov came across the famous passage from the treatise on the incarnation (De Carne Christi) in his youth, most probably in the 1900s, given that the earliest mention of Tertullian crops up in Shestov’s controversial volume of aphorisms, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905), subtitled “Essay in Adogmatic Thinking,” which was published in English translation as All Things Are Possible (1920):
I was young, I was searching, I lacked daring. And then I found that text by Tertullian (Et mortuus est Dei filius: non pudet quia pudendum est. Et sepultus resurrexit: certum est quia impossibile—“and the son of God died: we are not ashamed, because it is shameful; he was buried and rose again: I believe it because it is absurd.”) You know where I found it? In a big book by Harnack, in the footnote, at the bottom of the page. Harnack cites it as some sort of oddity—good enough for the basement, not good enough to insert in the main text.1
In his preface to All Things Are Possible, D. H. Lawrence highlighted the gaping rift between Russian “rootless” vitalism and European culture that Shestov’s free-spirited critique of Western idealism brought into view. The less conspicuous opposition between Greek rationalism and Biblical revelation, which subtended the ideological and stylistic dismantling of the Western metaphysical discourse in Shestov’s collection of aphorisms, came across indirectly in Lawrence’s recurrent reference to the radical alterity of Russian religious thought: “[Russia’s] genuine Christianity, Byzantine and Asiatic, is incomprehensible to us. So with her true philosophy.” If “Russia will certainly inherit the future,” in Lawrence’s view, it is because the paradoxical message Russia brings comes from outside the tradition of Western speculative thought and testifies to the existence of an alternative tradition, a “rootless” and “nomad” undercurrent of philosophical reflection, which includes not only Tertullian but also Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche. More recently, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also remarked on the figure of the “nomad” (in “Treatise on Nomadology”2) and on the striking discontinuity that Shestov’s Russian brand of paradoxical thinking introduces in the European tradition of rationalist discourse. Within the lineage of “private thinkers” (alongside Nietzsche and Kierkegaard), Shestov’s use of aphoristic style corresponds to the subversive strategy of a “thought from the outside” (as first Foucault and then Deleuze have termed the attempts at overcoming the Western metaphysical discourse and setting “the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge”3 in relation to an irreducible exteriority). Some of Shestov’s assertions in All Things Are Possible (The Apotheosis of Groundlessness) fully justify D. H. Lawrence’s odd contention that Russia has been “infected” with the virus of European culture and has struggled to assimilate and overcome it before
