you will find a Tartar. Culture is an age-long development, and sudden grafting of it upon a race rarely succeeds. To us in Russia, civilization came suddenly, whilst we were still savages. At once she took upon herself the responsibilities of a tamer of wild animals, first working with decoys and baits, and later, when she felt her power, with threats. We quickly submitted. In a short time we were swallowing in enormous doses those poisons which Europe had been gradually accustoming herself to, gradually assimilating through centuries.4
Subsequently, Shestov has often used the metaphor of the “savage,” ignorant dissenter, epitomized by Dostoevky’s “underground man,” to designate the resistance to European civilization and its tradition of Greek speculative thought. From this perspective, Tertullian, the North African Christian apologist, belongs to the “savage” camp, along with maverick European personalities such as Luther, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, given that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem relates to an all-pervasive inner antinomy of speculative philosophy when confronted with biblical revelation. The process that led to the gradual suppression of the biblical strand of reflection in European culture is described by Shestov with reference to the “Hellenization of Christianity” started by Philo of Alexandria (25 BCE–50CE), a Jewish thinker and educator who strove to reconcile Greek philosophy and biblical exegesis in an attempt at emancipating the Jewish population and protecting their civil rights. As the apex of Jewish-Hellenic synchretism, Philo is diametrically opposed to Tertullian, whose view of the conflicting aims of the Greek and Jewish traditions focused on the Old Testament source of biblical revelation. The importance that Shestov attached, for instance, to the story of the Maccabees, the leaders of the successful Jewish revolt against the Hellenization of Judea,5 bears out well his defiant philosophical disengagement with Greek wisdom.
In Athens and Jerusalem, Tertullian’s contradictory statement “I believe because it is absurd” is referred back to its biblical source, and in particular to St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (14:23), which Shestov quotes in the foreword to bring out the opposition between Greek wisdom, according to which virtue is the “highest good,” and revelation, which condemns the speculative substitution of the living God with the moral idol, as well as any notion of salvation in the absence of faith:
The fundamental opposition of biblical philosophy to speculative philosophy shows itself in particularly striking fashion when we set Socrates’ words, “The greatest good of man is to discourse daily about virtue” (or Spinoza’s gaudere vera contemplatione—“to rejoice in true contemplation”) opposite St Paul’s words, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”6
In citing Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Pauline conception of faith in the second part of Athens and Jerusalem (“the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith” and “the opposite of freedom is guilt”7), Shestov sets into question the speculative interpretation of the Fall of Man from the point of view of Hegel’s philosophy. Given the absence of a genuine “critique of pure reason” within the history of modern thought, Shestov’s position consists in tracing back the fundamental link between knowledge and death to its origin in the story of Genesis (2:17):
The words that God addressed to Adam, “As for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it, for on the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die,” are in complete disagreement with our conception of knowledge as well as our conception of good and evil. But their meaning is perfectly clear and admits of no tortured interpretation. I repeat once more: they constitute the only true critique of pure reason that has ever been formulated here on earth. God clearly said to man that he must not put his trust in the fruits of the tree of knowledge, for they carry with them the most terrible dangers.8
The opposition between faith and knowledge does not refer in this case to the distinction between the virtue of obedience and the transgression that led to the fall, but signals the chasm that separates the freedom beyond good and evil before the fall and the condition of the man subjected to the laws of reason and ethics. In Shestov’s view, man traded his status as being created in God’s image, sharing in God’s creative power and divine free will, for the status of a slave to necessity:
The serpent said to the first man: “You shall be like God, knowing good and evil.” But God does not know good and evil. God does not know anything, God creates everything. And Adam, before his fall, participated in the divine omnipotence. It was only after the fall that he fell under the power of knowledge and at the same moment lost the most precious of God’s gifts—freedom. For freedom does not consist in the possibility of choosing between good and evil, as we today are condemned to think. Freedom consists in the force and power not to admit evil into the world.9
Similarly, in quoting a passage on the transient nature of knowledge from 1 Corinthians 13 in the preface to Potestas Clavium, Shestov traces back the tension between Athens and Jerusalem not to the polemics between Greek philosophers and Christian theologians (which marked the evolution of Western metaphysics throughout the early Middle Ages and beyond) but to its biblical sources:
If I speak the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. . . . Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.10
The announced disappearance of knowledge, which will give way to agàpe (brotherly love or charity), the most important of the three Christian virtues (faith, hope, and charity), heralds the victory of Jerusalem over the wisdom of Athens. However, within the realm of temporal existence, the only vision that fallen man can have of transcendent reality is reminiscent of the shadows cast on the wall of the cave in Plato’s Republic, and Shestov aptly comments in the first part of Athens and Jerusalem that “Plato would hardly need to change a single word to his myth of the cave. . . . The world would remain for him, ‘in the light’ of our ‘positive’ sciences, what it was—a dark and sorrowful subterranean region—and we would seem to him like chained prisoners.”11 In St Paul’s words, the distance that separates man from the sources of truth after the fall alters the image of reality in the manner of an obscure reflection glimpsed in a mirror: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror [per speculum in enigmate—through a glass darkly]; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” [1 Corinthians 13:12].
The meaning of the apostle’s analogy implies a complete reversal of our conception of knowledge and of our hierarchy of values, which is similar to Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” and which occurs, according to Shestov, only at a time of great spiritual upheaval or in a limiting situation when all our certainties and hopes begin to crumble. The encounter with death, as well as any catastrophic event that undermines the foundation of our speculative reasoning, plays the role of a catalyst and an eye-opener. Shestov often makes reference to Tolstoy’s Master and Man and The Death of Ivan Ilitch as an example of the radical transformation of convictions that the author himself had gone through. He talks about this process in his book The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900) but also in his article published on the great novelist’s eightieth birthday and entitled “Destroyer and Builder of Worlds.”12 Published the year before Shestov’s visit to Iasnaia Poliana, in 1910, this article analyzes the effects of the tragic experience that Tolstoy went through and of his two encounters with death, which led him to believe that “it suffices to know that God exist in order to live; and it suffices to forget him, no longer to believe in him, in order to die,” or in other terms, that “faith is an intelligence of the meaning of life which prompts man not to destroy himself, but to live. Faith is the source of life.”13
Shestov then cites a passage from Luther’s Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians that he later
