The last three chapters in the second part of Athens and Jerusalem correspond to Shestov’s first article on the Danish philosopher, which was also included in a slightly modified version in the central section of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, where Shestov writes:
Kierkegaard asked that men imitate Christ in their own lives, and seek from life, not joy, but sorrow. The Greek katharsis could be summed up, without exaggeration, as an imitation of Socrates, and the Greeks taught of the wise man’s bliss in the bull of Phalaris.38
The meditation on necessity and freedom in Athens and Jerusalem leads to a surprising parallel interpretation of Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s conceptions in light of Luther’s critique of dogmatic theology. If Nietzsche’s notions of the Eternal Return and “the will to power” seem to abolish necessity and recover the free will of the Creator omnipotens, in agreement with Luther’s own view of salvation, it is nevertheless apparent that any attempt at providing a speculative foundation to such unsystematic, subversive reflections on time and self-awareness prompts a return to ethical reasoning, and to “amor fati”:
And Nietzsche could not escape the fate of all; the idea of Necessity succeeded in seducing him also. He bowed his own head, and called all men to prostrate themselves, before the altar or throne of the “monster without whose killing man cannot live.”39
Kierkegaard’s similar evolution, from his initial faith in the Absurd (which he took up from Tertullian), to his later submission to Socratic ethical principles, brings out the fallen man’s inability to save himself as he “puts all his trust in knowledge, while it is precisely knowledge that paralyzes his will and leads him inexorably to his downfall.”40 The existential philosoper, according to Shestov, should aspire to think in the categories in which he lives, rather than constantly strive to do the opposite. Autonomous ethics renders the idea of God in man’s image, that is to say within the bounds of bare reason. From Luther’s point of view, de servo arbitrio [the bondage of the will] concerned only man, whereas “for Kierkegaard, as for Socrates and Spinoza, de servo arbitrio extends likewise to God.”41 The second part of Athens and Jerusalem was initially published in several isues of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, from January to April 1933.
The elaboration of the third part of Athens and Jerusalem, concerning the philosophy of the Middle Ages, dates back to 1934 and reflects Shestov’s interest in the work of Etienne Gilson, following from the analysis he devoted to dogmatic theology and to its relationship to speculative philosophy in Potestas Clavium. In the Foreword, Shestov summarizes the intent of this section: “In the third part, [subtitled] ‘Concupiscentia Invincibilis’ [Invincible desire], the fruitless efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile the revealed truth of the Bible with the Hellenistic truth are dealt with.”42 The presence of a number of arguments that featured in Shestov’s unfinished book on Plotinus, which he started writing in 1923 and partially published in the magazine Versti [Miles] in Paris, as well as in the Russian and German editions of his book In Job’s Balances, printed in 1929, indicates the slow elaboration of a critique of the Greek heritage of medieval philosophy that gained momentum during the polemic with Jean Hering on the incompatibility between revelation and Husserl’s phenomenological method. The possibility of a religious philosophy that breaks with the tradition of scholastic thought and decides to oppose Athens and Jerusalem consists in the decision to replace self-evident, immutable truth with the notion of “created truth,” as Shestov argued:
Only such a philosophy can call itself Judaeo-Christian, a philosophy which proposes not to accept but to overcome the self-evidences and which introduces into our thought a new dimension—faith. . . . This is why the Judaeo-Christian philosophy can accept neither the fundamental problems nor the principles nor the technique of thought of rational philosophy.43
Just as the difference between Descartes and Damian consisted in the former’s dismay at offending reason (even when he admitted the possibility that God could have created man so that his limited understanding cannot allow for the existence of a mountain without a valley), Duns Scotus’s and William of Occam’s attacks against the edifice of Greek wisdom aimed to restore God’s omnipotence without fear of the “wicked and lawless arbitrariness” of the rationally unkownable Creator. However, it was not until the Reformation that the extent to which Greek thought had taken over the medieval conception of faith and salvation fully came to light:
And yet Luther is strictly connected to the medieval philosophy, in the sense that the very possibility of his appearance presupposes the existence of a Judaeo-Christian philosophy which, setting as its task to proclaim the idea—hitherto unknown—of a created truth, continued to cultivate the fundamental principles and technique of the ancient thought.44
The fourth and final part of Athens and Jerusalem, composed of sixty-six aphorisms in the German and French first editions of 1938, though including two more short texts in the posthumous Russian edition (YMCA-Press, 1951), was the first one to be elaborated, starting with 1925, as indicated by the date inscribed on the manuscript notebooks kept in the Shestov Archives at the Sorbonne. All the aphorisms in “The Second Dimension of Thought” were published in various magazines: in Russian in Chisla [Numbers], no. 1, 1930, and Sovremennye zapiski [Contemporary papers], no. 43, 1930; in French and English in Forum philosophicum (no. 1, 1930), which mainly gathered the aphorisms related to Shestov’s polemic with Husserl. One of the two aphorisms which were not included in the French, English, and German editions of Athens and Jerusalem, entitled “The Choice,” was also published in the same issue of Forum philosophicum. This is aphorism LXIV in the Russian edition, whose first few lines recall the opposition between the two originary myths of mankind, one which conceives individual life as illegitimate daring leading to inevitable destruction, the other which sets particular being under the protection of divine creation: “The appearance of man on earth is an impious audacity. God created man in His own image and likeness and, having created him, blessed him.”45 In fact the same text features twice, in slightly modified versions and with two different titles (LXIV “The Choice” and XXVIII “On the Sources of ‘Conceptions of the World’”), in the Russian edition, whereas the English and the French editions include only the final version, which is also the most elaborate.46
In contrasting the Greek myth of the origin of mankind (as illustrated by Anaximader’s conception) and the biblical story of Genesis, Shestov highlights the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem or, more specifically, between the rational explanation of life and its source in God’s creation. The same topic had been dealt with in the third part of In Job’s Balances, which provides a critique of the Greek conception of the origin of evil as “audacious” and unforgivable birth of particular beings doomed to disappear in order to expiate their sin.47 The biblical account of man’s creation in God’s image, of the advent of the God-Man, of his death and resurrection, proposes an alternative, soteriological view of individual existence after the fall, which is also present in Dostoevsky’s often misunderstood writings:
Everyone is convinced, in fact, that Dostoevsky wrote only the several dozen pages devoted to starets Zosima, to Alyosha Karamazov, etc. and the articles in the Journal of a Writer where he explains the theories of the Slavophiles. As for Notes from the Underground, as for The Idiot, as for The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, as for the nine-tenths of all that constitutes the complete works of Dostoevsky—all that was not written by him but by a certain “personage with a regressive physiognomy”48 and only in order to permit Dostoevsky to cover him with shame.49
The only aphorism that was not reproduced in the English, French, or German editions of Athens and Jerusalem is entitled “The Fourth Gospel” and deals with the Hellenization of Christianism starting from the doctrine of the Logos, which finds its source in 1 John 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
