of speculative thought, Lev Shestov’s final work can be ultimately understood as an essay devoted to the question of freedom. In terms of its elaboration and structure, Athens and Jerusalem is an argumentative and stylistic tour de force that effortlessly combines more discursive, historical forms of exegesis and shorter, aphoristic fragments, strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche. The preface, as often is the case, was written last, in April 1937. As Shestov himself explained: “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 to formulate as briefly as possible what has given direction to the author’s thought over the course of several years.”28 The short introductory essay, entitled “Wisdom and Revelation,” is indeed a synthesis of the arguments in Shestov’s major preceding works of the exile period (namely, Potestas Clavium, In Job’s Balances, and Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy). The epigraph to the foreword, composed of two citations from Plato (Apology, 38A) and Saint Paul (Romans, 14:23), encapsulates the opposition between Greek wisdom and biblical revelation that provides the guiding thread for the ensuing “essay in religious philosophy.” In refusing to reduce the essential interrogation over the meaning of life to a question of moral justification, Shestov chooses to oppose faith and knowledge, while recalling the distance that has always separated “the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob” from the “God of philosophers.” The power to suspend the reign of immutable ethical principles and to transcend temporal irreversibility belongs to the Creator alone and remains inaccessible to the idol with which human morality and reason have replaced the Living God. Shestov thus refers the notion of “created truth” to Peter Damian’s conception that “God could bring it about that that which had been had not been.” And from this point of view, not only the fall of man but the entire
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 . . . : 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.29
In his preliminary study of Tertullian’s work, Shestov drew attention to the significance of the rift between knowledge and life which was clearly brought to light by the first pages of Genesis: “‘Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?’—Tertullian exclaimed—and, of course, he was right: the truth of Athens has not been reconciled and cannot be reconciled with the truth of Jerusalem, in the same way in which the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil could only block man’s access to the tree of life.”30
In the first part of the volume, “Parmenides in Chains (On the Sources of Metaphysical Truths),” Shestov focused precisely on the link between knowledge and man’s loss of freedom. The elaboration of this long section of the book starts in 1926, when Shestov was writing In Job’s Balances. The essay on Pamenides initially was intended for a series of conferences at the University of Frankfurt and at the Kant-Gesellschaft in Halle in 1930. It was first published in French in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (July–August 1930, no. 7/8), then in Russian, as a brochure, with YMCA-Press, in 1931.
The first chapter of “Parmenides in Chains” deals with the same topic as the last two aphorisms in Athens and Jerusalem (“Looking Backwards” and “Commentary on That Which Precedes”), which in turn correspond to the philosophical debate between Shestov and Husserl. If, from Shestov’s point of view, “philosophy is a struggle, the ultimate struggle” for recovering the freedom before the fall and the sources of life opposed to the knowledge of good and evil, according to Husserl “philosophy is reflection” on the foundation of scientific truth. In June 1930 Shestov gave a paper on this topic to the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft, which was published, alongside fourteen aphorisms from Athens and Jerusalem, under the title “Kampf und Besinnung” [Fight and reflection] in the magazine Neue Rundschau in October 1930.
Shestov and Husserl met for the first time at a conference in Amsterdam, in 1928, and then at regular intervals over the following decade. In the obituary31 that Shestov completed in 1938, only a couple of months before he himself died, the author of Athens and Jerusalem remembers that, despite their radically opposed views on the sources of truth and the aims of philosophy, Husserl recommended “Parmenides in Chains” for publication in the prestigious German periodical Logos.32 Echoes of their initial debate and of their ensuing discussion during Husserl’s visit to the Sorbonne in 1929 (which Shestov helped organize) resonate through the inaugural lecture that Heidegger gave the same year at the University of Freiburg, entitled “Was ist Metaphysik?” [What is metaphysics?]. The meetings and correspondence between Shestov, Husserl, and Heidegger at this time are particularly important for the elaboration of Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard and existential philosophy (first published in 1936), whose problematics is equally evoked in the second part of Athens and Jerusalem. According to Shestov’s recollection of his first meeting with Heidegger in Freiburg, in 1928, their discussion turned around aspects of the existential critique of speculative thought, which the author of Being and Time had borrowed from Kierkegaard (something which Shestov ignored as he had not yet read the Danish philosopher):
When I met Heidegger at Husserl’s, I quoted a few of his texts which, as I thought, ought to have shattered his system. I was absolutely certain. I had no idea then that these texts reflected Kierkegaard’s influence and that Heidegger’s input consisted in his determination to fit these ideas into the Husserlian framework. After Heidegger left, Husserl approached me and made me promise that I would read Kierkegaard. I couldn’t understand why he was so adamant about it—Kierkegaard’s thought has nothing to do with Husserl’s, and I don’t think Husserl even liked him. Today I think that he probably wanted me to read Kierkegaard so I may better understand Heidegger.33
In the first part of Athens and Jerusalem, Shestov brings out the contrast between two conceptions of truth, with reference to their positioning in relation to the famous equivalence which Parmenides first established between being and thought (εἶναι—einai and νοεἶν—noein):
Philosophy has always meant and wished to mean reflection, Besinung, looking backward. Now it is necessary to add that “looking backward,” by its very nature, excludes the possibility and even the thought of struggle. “Looking backward” paralyzes man. He who turns around, who looks backward, must see what already exists, that is to say, the head of the Medusa; and he who sees Medusa’s head is inevitably petrified, as the ancients already knew. And his thought, a petrified thought, will naturally correspond to his petrified being.34
Contrary to Hegel’s conception, which draws on the equivalence between being and thought established by Parmenides, religious philosophy starts from the premise that being is not “situated entirely and without residue on the level of resasonable thought,”35 and that the fight against self-evidences aims to retrieve the “irrational residue of being”36 that the entire history of speculative thought has sought to obliterate—that is, the living individual as well as the living God.
The title of the second part of Athens and Jerusalem, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” refers to the story of Phalaris (570–540BCE), the tyrant of Agrigento (in Sicily), whose reputation of extreme cruelty was derived from the punishment he devised for his victims, who were roasted alive by being shut in a brazen bull, beneath which a fire was kindled. In Shestov’s philosophical argument, the criticism of the Stoical attitude, which advises the calm contemplation of all misfortunes and suffering, often points to the remarks on self-restraint and endurance in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7. Stoicism is contrasted with Job’s revolt, and his decision to confront God while refusing to accept the unjust suffering he is condemned to endure. “The second part, the most difficult, as Shestov remarks in the Foreword, reveals the indestructible bond between knowledge, as philosophy understands it, and the horrors of human existence.”37
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