words, in his reason as a means of salvation, which God must break with a hammer. The malleus Dei, which falls on the foundation of autonomous ethics, on the principles of sufficient reason, as bellua qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (this beast without whose killing man cannot live),14 acts as a liberating force. As long as man remains a prisoner of appearances and places his trust in his ability to reach truth and find salvation “through reason alone,” divine grace intervenes in a paradoxically violent manner to smash and annihilate “the stubborn and impenitent beast,” whose archetype is none other than the serpent of the Bible, and the desire engendered by the fruits of the tree of knowledge. The meaning of the crisis and the transformation of convictions that Tolstoy, as well as Dostoevsky and Chekhov, have gone through at some point in their lives is thus related to the violent irruption of a transcendent force in personal existence. The sudden collapse of rational certainties is accompanied by a complete reversal of values resulting from the trangression of the limit posed to human temporal reflection. The article marking Tolstoy’s eightieth anniversary is preceded by a motto that takes on an immense significance in Shestov’s critique of scientific knowledge over the years and in his polemic with Husserl: “The time is out of joint”15 becomes the epitome of the sudden inner transformation that man experiences in contact with the radical alterity of God or in a limiting situation (extreme suffering, madness, death).
The idea of the liberating potential of near-death experiences runs through Shestov’s entire work from his article on Tolstoy to his first writings in exile, and in particular his landmark work on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky entitled “The Revelations of Death,”16 whose foreword alludes to the famous passage from Plato’s Phaedo (64A), to which Shestov returns in the first part of Athens and Jerusalem:17 “those who pursue philosophy study nothing but dying and being dead,” and whose motto is a quotation from Euripides: “Who knows if life is not death and death life?” According to Gorky’s recollection, it was with reference to Shestov’s book on the idea of the good that Tolstoy made his well-known remark about the source of genuine philosophical reflection (which resonates with Plato’s meletê thanatou—“practice for death”): “If only a man has learnt to think, whatever the object of his thoughts may be, he always thinks of his own death. It has been like this for all philosophers. And what truth can there be if there is death?”18 In Athens and Jerusalem, Shestov takes up the Platonic definition of philosophy as “practice for death” and makes it the focus of the preface and of the first part of his book, “Parmenides in Chains,” which deals with the absence of freedom within the realm of our rational experience of reality, and the possibility of “awakening” or acquiring a “second sight” through philosophical reflection, following a tragic descent into the depths of human despair:
But the philosopher who has arrived at the boundaries of life and passed through the school of death, the philosopher for whom apothnêskein (dying) has become the present reality and tethnanai (death) the reality of the future, has no fear of threats. He has accepted death and become intimate with it, for dying and death, by weakening the corporeal eye, undermine the very foundation of the power of Necessity, which hears nothing, as well as of the evident truths which depend on this Necessity. The soul begins to feel that it is given to it not to submit and obey but “to lead and govern.” [Phaedo, 80A] In fighting for this right it does not fear to pass beyond the fateful limit where what is clear and distinct ends and the Eternal Mystery begins. Its sapientia (wisdom) is no longer a meditatio vitae (meditation on life) but a meditatio mortis (meditation on death).19
Death, which forces man to abandon the well-trodden path of rational analysis and wander off into the underground or the desert, acts in the same violent and paradoxical manner as the malleus Dei: it both destroys man’s self-righteousness and restores his freedom. As in the legend of the Angel of Death, which Shestov mentions in the first part of his book on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,20 man is endowed with a second pair of eyes following the limiting experience of a near-death experience. The courage or the paradoxical weakness needed to accept the destruction of one’s old world and the birth of a new vision of reality (a process that Tolstoy captures in his description of Brekhunov’s death in Master and Man) is in fact the source of a transformation that closely resembles the terrifying, yet marvellous, metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly:
But in Tolstoy, just as in Plato and Plotinus, the thought of death is accompanied by a particular sentiment, by a kind of consciousness that, even while horror rose before them, wings were growing in their backs. Probably something similar happens with the chrysalis when it begins to gnaw at its cocoon. It gnaws because it is growing wings.21
If, as Shestov remarked, “the entire history of philosophy, and philosophy itself, should be and often has been simply a ‘wandering through human souls,’”22 death is not a value in itself, and the author of “The Revelations of Death” opposed the philosophies of finitude, which define being in relation to its temporal limitation and, consequently, freedom as Freiheit zum Tode (freedom toward death).
In attempting to reverse the rational judgment of living beings as inessential and linked to inevitable destruction, Shestov traces Tertullian’s remarks on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ back to their biblical source, and to the prophet Isaiah and Saint Paul’s refusal to reconcile Greek wisdom (Athens) and revelation (Jerusalem).23 The Christian allegory of the chrysalis that depicts the paradoxical destruction leading to the liberation of the soul after death takes on the meaning of a profound transformation of beliefs (similar to Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values”), whereby an individual reverses his judgement of Greek wisdom as “the highest good” and discovers the self-affirming power of “madness” and biblical revelation as source of truth. In discussing Nietzsche’s attacks on classical metaphysics and epistemology, Shestov does not hesitate to relate Luther’s interpretation of malleus Dei to the notion of “philosophizing with a hammer,” and goes as far as to say, “Does not then Nietzsche’s Will to Power express under another form Luther’s sola fide?”24 For it is the human will that has been paralyzed by the drive toward knowledge, and it is the will that needs to be freed by the destructive-creative intervention of an alternative type of thinking—the “philosophy of tragedy” (in Shestov’s terms) or “philosophy with a hammer” (according to Nietzsche). “A great struggle awaits us,” Nietzsche wrote with reference to the Eternal Return. “For it is required a new weapon, the hammer, to bring on a terrible decision” (The Will to Power §1054).25 Breaking the causal connection between events and overcoming temporal irreversibility is the actual aim of the thought of Eternal Return, and not the endless mechanical repetition of the same, as Shestov pointed out in comparing Nietzsche’s and Luther’s revolt against the idolatry of reason and autonomous ethics:
Behind Nietzsche’s Eternal Return is hidden, it seems, a force of infinite power that is also prepared to crush the horrible monster who rules over human life and over all being: Luther’s Creator omnipotens ex nihilo faciens omnia. The omnipotent creator is not only beyond good and evil but also beyond truth and falsehood. Before his face (facie in faciem), both evil and falsehood cease to exist and are changed into nothingness, not only in the present but also in the past. They no longer are and never have been, despite all the testimonies of the human memory.26
Philosophy, as “the second dimension of thought” according to Shestov, is not the disinterested contemplation of the impersonal laws that dictate the conditions of being, but an actual fight against the “supernatural enchantment and slumber” (as Pascal qualified it) that has taken over the human mind after the fall:
Religious philosophy is not the search for the eternal structure and order of immutable being; it is not reflection (Besinung); it is not an understanding of the difference between good and evil. . . . Religious philosophy is the final supreme struggle to recover original freedom and the divine valde bonum (very good) which is hidden in that freedom and which, after the fall, was split into our powerless
