386 - Lev Shestov: A Russian Jewish Existentialist

Lev Shestov: A Russian Jewish Existentialist
By Bernard Martin

"What Shestov was fundamentally concerned with throughout his lifetime was to criticize the timidity and lack of imagination of traditional philosophy, with its view that metaphysical truth flows solely from obedience and passive submission to the structures of being given in experience, and to insist instead that ultimate reality transcends the categories of rationalist metaphysics and scientific method and that the truth about it is to be discovered through the untrammeled soaring of the spirit and through daring flights of the imagination. It may be said that so to insist is to abandon philosophy for poetry and art, but Shestov himself always maintained that philosophy is indeed, or rather should be, more art than science."

THE Work of Lev Shestov entitles him to a high place in any list of the first-rank religious thinkers of the twentieth century.¹ To date, Shestov's stature has not been generally recognized nor has his work been widely studied. Even in Europe-where his

Bernard Martin is Abba Hillel Silver Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He has served as an army chaplain in Japan and as a rabbi in Champaign, Ill., Chicago, and St. Paul, Minn. He is the translator of Lev Shestov' s Athens and Jerusalem, scheduled for publication by the Ohio University Press. The present article is a revision of the Introduction to that translation.
¹ Born in Kiev in 1866, Shestov was educated at the universities of his native city and of Moscow. His early works, dealing with the thought of Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky,
received wide criticalacclaim in Russia, and once translated into French and German, on the entire continent.In 1905, he published The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (an English version of this work, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence, appeared in London and New York in 1920 under the title All Things Are Possible), a brilliant collection of "existentialist" aphorisms and pensées on philosophy, science, literature, and art. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Shestov emigrated with his family to France where he spent the last twenty years of his life teaching at the Institut des Études Slaves in Paris, lecturing at philosophical meetings all over Europe, and writing a series of remarkable volumes in which he developed his supra-rationalistic, existentialist, and biblically-founded philosophy: The Power o fthe Keys (1923), In Job's Balances (1929), Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (1936), and his magnum opus-Athens and Jerusalem (1938), He died in Paris in 1938.

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genius was acclaimed by such figures as Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov in Russia, Julles de Gaultier, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Albert Camus in France, and D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry in England-he did not enjoy any great popularity in his lifetime and now, nearly thirty years after his death, his writings are little read. In America his name is virtually unknown to the general public, and even many professional philosophers and theologians are unacquainted with his work.

It is regrettable that this is so, and yet the fact itself is hardly surprising. Shestov established no school and had no real disciples to carry on his work² He did not believe that he had created any clearly defined, positive body of philosophic or religious thought that could simply be handed on to students, to be expounded and taught. Whatever insights or wisdom his own life-long spiritual striving had brought him could not be transmitted by intellectual processes to others; their appropriation of his existentially acquired "truths" could come about only through the same kind of intensive personal struggle and search on their part. But perhaps an even more important reason for the relative obscurity into which Shestov has fallen is the fact that he is stubbornly and unrelentingly anti-modern. The gods of nineteenth and twentieth century man-science, technology, the idea of inevitable historical progress, autonomous ethics, and, most of all, rationalist systems of philosophy- were for him idols, devoid of ultimate meaning but terrible in their potentiality for destruction.

I

It is Shestov's revolt against scientism and philosophic rationalism, a revolt carried on with immense polemical passion and extraordinary dialectical skill, that has drawn attention to his work but at the same time repelled most readers. Some, to be sure, have found that what Shestov has to say is extremely important and worth listening to. His diatribes against the untested assumptions of rationalist metaphysics and positivist science, as well as his superb and penetrating analyses of the singular, the inexplicable, and the

² With the exception of Benjamin Fondane, a talented young Rumanian Jewish poet and essayist who died at the hands of the Nazis in the gas chambers of Birkenau in 1944. Fondane's manuscript Surles rives de l'Illissus, containing accounts of his visits and philosophical conversations with Shestov, has not yet been published in full. Some excerpts appeared in the June 1964 issue of Mercure de France under the title "Rencontres avec Léon Chestov."

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extraordinary in the human psyche: made a profound impression on at least a few of the important figures of the French existentialist movement who were developing their philosophical outlook at the time when his works were appearing in France. Albert Camus, for example, noted the intensity and concentrated power of his work in this connection.

Shestov ... throughout a wonderfully monotonous work, constantly straining toward the same truths, tirelessly demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism, always stumbles eventually on the irrational of human thought. None of the ironic facts or ridiculous contradictions that depreciate reason escapes him. One thing only interests him, and that is the exception, whether in the domain of the heart or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences of the condemned man, the exacerbated adventures of the Nietzschean mind, Hamlet's imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen, he tracks down, illuminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses reason its reasons, and begins to advance with some decision only in the middle of that colorless desert where all certainties have become stones.³

For Shestov, however, his rebellion against rationalism and scientism was only, as Camus recognized, a preliminary step.⁴ It was a clearing of the way for his bold and fervent affirmation, in the mature and final phase of his life, of the truth of the biblical message. Only a reappropriation of the faith of Scripture-which proclaims that man and the universe are the creation of an omnipotent, personal God and that this God made man in his own image, endowing him with freedom and creative power-could, Shestov came to believe, liberate humanity from the horrors of existence. But such faith, in the face of the mechanist and rationalist assumptions underlying modern scientific and philosophical thought and now entirely dominating the mentality of western man, is attainable only through agonized personal struggle against what has come to be regarded as "self-evident" truth. Shestov undertook to show the way by his own battle against the self-evident. With a mastery not only of the entire western philosophic tradition but also of modern European literature, he used his vast erudition as well as the ardent passion

³ The Myth of Sisyphus, New York, 1955, Vintage Books (originally published in France in 1942 by Librairie Gallimard), p. 19.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 24-28. Camus here discusses what he calls Shestov's "leap" towards God, a leap which he himself rejects as an "escape" from an authentic awareness of the reality of the absurd.

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of his entire being and his extraordinary literary talents (D. S. Mirsky says of Shestov's writing that "it is the tidiest, the most elegant, the most concentrated-in short, the most classical prose-in the whole of modern Russian literature"),⁵ to forge a blazing indictment of rationalist and scientist metaphysics in order to regain for man what he considered the most precious of human gifts: the right to God and to the primordial freedom which God has given man.

American readers, to whom the life and work of this great Russian Jewish thinker are now virtually unknown, can profit from becoming acquainted with him.⁶ For, as William Barrett has said of Shestov's work, "it can show us what the mind of western Europe, the heir of classicism and rationalism, look like to an outsider-particularly to a Russian outsider who will be satisfied with no philosophic answers that fall short of the total and passionate feelings of his own humanity."⁷

^II

In the last two decades of his life, Shestov brooded incessantly over what he called, in a letter to Sergei Bulgakov, "the nightmare of godlessness and unbelief which has taken hold of humanity." He was convinced that only through "the utmost spiritual effort," as he termed it, could men free themselves from this nightmare. His own work was concentrated on a passionate struggle against the "self-evident" truths of speculative philosophy and positivistic science which had come to rule the mind of European man and made him oblivious to the rationally ungrounded but redeeming truths proclaimed in the Bible. This struggle is most fully reflected in his last and greatest book, the monumental Athens and Jerusalem, on which he worked for many years and completed shortly before his death.

Athens and Jerusalem is the culmination of Shestov's entire lifetime of intellectual inquiry and spiritual striving. It brings together all the diverse strands that had appeared in his earlier writings, which might appropriately be regarded in retrospect as prolegomena and

⁵ History of Russian Literature (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, Fifth Printing, 1964), p. 426.
⁶ Though three of his books--All Things Are Possible, Penultimate Words and Other Essays (or, in the London edition, Anton Chekhov and Other Essays), and In Job's Balances- were translated into English and published in America or Great Britain, they seem to have made almost no impact when they first appeared many years ago and have long been out of print.
⁷ Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Doubleday and Company, Garden City, New York, 1958), p. 14.

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preparation for the positive message of the great work on which Shestov's permanent fame as a religious thinker will undoubtedly rest. In it he sets himself the task of critically examining the pretension of human reason to possession of the capacity for attaining ultimate truth-a pretension first put forth by the founders of western philosophy in Athens two and a half millennia ago, maintained ever since by most of the great thinkers of Europe, and still defended by many philosophers today. This pretension, he concludes, must be firmly rejected. Reason and its by-product, the scientific method, have their proper use and rightful place in obtaining knowledge of empirical phenomena, but they cannot and must not be allowed to determine the directions of man's metaphysical quest or to decide on the ultimate issues-issues such as the reality of God, human freedom, and immortality.

The scientists and most of the philosophers, Shestov repeatedly insists in Athens and Jerusalem as well as in some of his earlier works,⁸ have been concerned with discovering self-evident, logically consistent, or empirically verifiable propositions which they take to be eternal and universal truths. As far as they are concerned, man is merely another link in the endless chain of phenomena and lives in a universe totally governed by the iron laws of causal necessity. They assume, whether they say so explicitly or not, that human liberty is largely an illusion, that man's freedom to act and his capacity for self-determination are sharply limited by the network of unchangeable and necessary causal relationships into which he has been cast and which exercise ail insuperable power over him. Consequently, they believe, the path of both virtue and wisdom for man lies not in useless rebellion but in submission and obedience.

European man has, according to Shestov, languished for centuries in a hypnotic sleep induced by the conviction that the entire universe is ruled by eternal, self-evident truths discoverable through reason (such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction) and by an everlastingly unalterable and indifferent power which determines all events and facts.⁹ This power is commonly known as

⁸ Especially the essays and aphorisms in the collection entitled In Job's Balances (English translation by Camilla Coventry and C. A. McCartney, J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., London, 1932).
⁹ See the essay "Science and Free Inquiry" which serves as the Foreword to In Job's Balances, especially pp. xxvff. Cf. also, the first part of Athens and Jerusalem, entitled "Parmenides in Chains," pp. 7ff. (This and all other references to Athens and Jerusalem in the present essay are to the French edition, Athènes et Jérusalem, J. Vrin, Paris, 1938) where Shestov discusses the idea of Necessity under its Greek name Anankê.

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"Necessity." God himself, for a thinker like Spinoza, has no power to transcend the necessary structures that express his being. And Spinoza is only the culmination of the mechanistic philosophy that dominated European metaphysics since Aristotle. To be sure, there have been solitary figures here and there, Shestov points out,¹⁰ who have protested against the pretensions of reason and its self-evident truths and have stubbornly refused to accept the dictates of the natural sciences concerning what is possible and what is impossible, but theirs were voices "crying in the wilderness." Tertullian's was such a voice, and so also was St. Peter Damian's. In modern times, Shestov declares,¹¹ "it was Dostoevsky who, in his passionate Notes from the Underground, presented the strongest and most effective "critique of reason." The world as logic and science conceive it, governed by universal and immutable laws and constrained by the iron hand of necessity, was for Dostoevsky a humanly uninhabitable world. It had to be resisted with every particle of energy, even if the struggle seemed a senseless beating of the head against a stone wall. Shestov finds an immense nobility and heroism in the cry of Dostoevsky's protagonist in his Notes From the Undergound:

But, good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four! Of course, I won't be able to breach this wall with my head if I'm not strong enough. But I don't have to accept a stone wall just because it's there and I don't have the strength to breach it.

As if such a wall could really leave me resigned and bring me peace of mind because it's the same as twice two makes four! How stupid can one get? Isn't it much better to recognize the stone walls and the impossibilities for what they are and refuse to accept them if surrendering makes one too sick?¹²

To resist the self-evident truths of science, and philosophy, to stop bowing down before them and glorifying them, is not necessarily, however, an exercise in futility. If man will listen to the ancient message of the Bible, Shestov maintains, he will find there a conception of God, of the universe, and of himself that not only lends meaning to such resistance but also makes of it the first and

¹⁰ Athènes et Jérusalem, p, xxxvi.
¹¹ Ibid., p. xxviii. Cf. In Job's Balances, pp. 34ff.
¹² Notes From the Underground (translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew, The New American Library, 1961), p. 99.

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most essential step in becoming reconciled with God and regaining his human freedom. For the Bible, in opposition to western science and philosophy, proclaims that God is the omnipotent One, for whom literally nothing is impossible and whose power is absolutely without limits, who stands not only at the center but at the beginning and end of all things. God, according to the Bible, created man as well as a universe in which there is no defect, a universe which-indeed-He saw to be "very good." Having created man, God blessed him, gave him dominion over all the universe and bestowed upon him the essentially divine and most precious of all gifts, freedom. Man is not, unless he renounces his primordial freedom (as all men, in fact, tend to do in their obsession with obtaining rational explanation and scientific knowledge) under the power of universal and necessary causal laws or unalterable empirical facts.

Unlike both traditional philosophy and science, which have sought to transform even single, non-recurring facts or events into eternal and unchangeable truths, the Bible refuses to regard any fact as ultimate or eternally subsistent but sees it rather as under the power of God who, in answer to man's cry, can suppress it or make it not to be. For biblical faith, knowledge-whether it is concerned with what have been called "truths of reason" or "truths of fact"-is not, as it is for classical philosophy and science, the supreme goal of human life. Against their assumption that knowledge justifies human existence, the existential philosophy which takes its rise from the Bible will insist that it is from man's living existence and experience that knowledge must obtain whatever justification it may have.¹³

There can be no reconciliation, Shestov contends,¹⁴ between science and that philosophy which aspires to be scientific, on the one side, and biblical religion, on the other. He follows Tertullian in proclaiming that Athens can never agree with Jerusalem-even though for two thousand years the foremost thinkers of the western world have firmly believed that a reconciliation is possible and have bent their strongest and most determined efforts towards effecting it. The biblical revelation not only cannot be harmonized with rationalist or would-be "scientific" metaphysics but is itself altogether devoid of support either from logical argument or scientific

¹³ Athènes et Jéusalem, pp. xxii-xxx.
¹⁴ Ibid., pp. xxxiiff.

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knowledge. For biblical man based his life totally and unreservedly on faith, which is not, as has often been suggested, a weaker form of knowledge (knowledge, so to speak, "on credit," for which proofs, though presently unavailable, are anticipated at some future time), but rather a completely different dimension of thought. The substance of this faith, emphatically denied both by science and philosophy, is the daring and unsupported but paradoxically true conviction that all things are possible.

Shestov was haunted for years by the biblical legend of the fall. As he interpreted it, when Adam ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, faith was displaced by reason and scientific knowledge. The sin of Adam has been repeated by his descendants, whose relentless pursuit of knowledge has not led to ultimate truth but to the choking of the springs of life and the destruction of man's primordial freedom.

According to Shestov, speculative philosophy beginning in wonder or intellectual curiosity and seeking to "understand" the phenomena of the universe, brings man to a dead end where he loses both personal freedom and all possibility of envisioning ultimate truth. It is, in a sense, the Original Lie which has come into the world as a consequence of man's disobedience to God's command to refrain from eating of the tree of knowledge. Its narrowness, its lack of imagination, its preoccupation with "objectivity" and its wish to extrude from thought all human emotion, its conviction that there is nothing in the world that is essentially and forever mysterious and rationally inexplicable, its refusal even to entertain the possibility of a universe in which the rules of traditional logic (such as the principles of non-contradiction and identity) do not hold sway all this condemns it to sterility. If philosophy is to serve the human spirit rather than destroy it, it must-Shestov maintains-abandon the method of detached speculation and disinterested reflection (what Husserl called Besinnung); it must become truly "existential," in the sense of issuing out of man's sense of helplessness and despair in the face of the stone walls of natural necessity.¹⁵ When philosophy becomes, as it should, a passionate and agonized struggle against the self-evident, necessary truths that constrain and crush the spirit, when it refuses, for instance, to refrain from drawing any distinction between the proposition "the Athenians have poi-

¹⁵ Athènes et Jerusalem, pp. xxxi, 465.

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soned Socrates" and "a mad dog has been poisoned" and to regard both with the same "philosophic" indifference-then it may make man receptive to the supernatural revelation of Scripture and to the possibility of redemption that is to be found there. "Out of the depths I cried unto Thee, O Lord' and "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" -the experience reflected in these agonized utterances, Shestov maintains, must be the starting point of true philosophy.

III

When his philosophy has taught man to reject all veritates aeternae as illusions, to confront unflinchingly the horrors of his historical existence, to experience his despair authentically and without evasion, to realize his mortality and his insignificance in a universe that seems bent on his destruction, then it may perhaps succeed in preparing him for that act of spiritual daring which is faith and which can bring him to the God who will restore to him not only a center of meaning for his life but also his primordial freedom. As Shestov puts it in Athens and Jerusalem:

... to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason, with all its physical and moral constraints, and go to another source of truth. In Scripture this source bears the enigmatic name "faith," which is that dimension of thought where truth abandons itself fearlessly and joyously to the entire disposition of the Creator: "Thy will be done!" The will of Him who fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer, in turn, his lost power: ... What things so ever ye desire ... ye shall have them" (Mark 11: 24).¹⁶

Faith, for Shestov, is audacity, the daring refusal to accept necessary laws, to regard anything as impossible. It is the demand for the absolute, original freedom which man had before the fall, when he still found the distinction between truth and falsehood, as well as between good and evil, unnecessary and irrelevant. Through faith, Shestov suggests, man may become, in a sense, like God himself for whom neither intellectual nor moral grounds and reasons have any reality. "Groundlessness," he writes,

is the basic, most enviable, and to us most incomprehensible privilege of the Divine. Consequently, oar whole moral struggle, even

¹⁶ Ibid., p. xxxii.

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as our rational inquiry-if we once admit that God is the last end of our endeavors-will bring us sooner or later (rather later, much later, than sooner) to emancipation not only from moral evaluations but also from reason's eternal truths. Truth and the Good are fruits of the forbidden tree; for limited creatures, for outcasts from paradise. I know that this ideal of freedom in relation to truth and the good cannot be realized on earth-in all probability does not need to be realized. But it is granted to man to have prescience of ultimate freedom.

Before the face of eternal God, all our foundations break together, and all ground crumbles under us, even as objects-this we know-lose their weight in endless space, and-this we shall probably learn one day-will lose their impermeability in endless time.¹⁷

But Shestov's God-the God of whom the Bible speaks and before whom all human foundations crack and crumble-is not the God of Spinoza or of Kant or of Hegel. Against all metaphysical and rationalist theologies, Shestov declares: "We would speak, as did Pascal, of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether He be conceived as a material or ideal principle, carries with Him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force."¹⁸ The God of the Bible is not to be found as the conclusion of a syllogism. His existence cannot be proved by rational argument or inferred from historical evidence. "One cannot demonstrate God. One cannot seek him in history. God is 'caprice' incarnate, who rejects all guarantees. He is outside history, like all that people hold to be to timôtaton."¹⁹ How shall one arrive at this Deus absconditus, this hidden God? "The chief thing," says Shestov, "is to think that, even if all men without exception were convinced that God does not exist, this would not mean anything, and that if one could prove as clearly as two times two makes four that God does not exist, this also would not mean anything."²⁰ To the complaint that it is not possible to ask men to take a position which negates a universal conviction of the race and flies in the face of logic, Shestov replies, "Obviously! But God always demands of us the impossible.... It is only when man wishes the impossible that he remembers God. To obtain that which is possible he turns to those like himself."²¹

¹⁷ In Job'sBalances, p. 218.
¹⁸ Athèneset Jérusalem, p. xxxi.
¹⁹ In Job's Balances, p. 82.
²⁰ Athèneset Jérusalem, p. 456.
²¹ Loc. cit.

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Shestov suggests that modern man perhaps can reach the God of the Bible only by first passing through the experience of his own nothingness and by coming to feel, as did Nietzsche and others, that God is not. This feeling is a profoundly ambiguous one, capable of leading men in diametrically opposite directions.

Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakens, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge, but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?²²

Our task, if we would enter upon the road which leads to true reality and ultimately to the God revealed in Scripture, consists "in the Psalmist's image, in shattering the skeleton which lends substance to our old ego, melting the 'heart in our bowels.'"²³ Experiencing the abyss that opens before him when all his laws, his eternal truths, and his self-evident certainties are taken away, the desperate soul feels that "God is not, man must himself become God, create all things out of nothing; all things; matter together with forms, and even the eternal laws."²⁴ When he has experienced this complete abandonment to himself and to boundless despair, then a man-as such irreconcilable enemies as St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Luther, the renegade monk, both have testified-may, through faith, direct his eyes toward ultimate reality and see the true God who will restore to him the limitless freedom with which he was created and again make all things possible for him.

Man, Shestov concludes, must choose: Athens or Jerusalem. He cannot have both. Athens-with its constraining principles, its eternal truths, its logic and sciences--may bring man earthly comfort and case but it also stupefies, if it does not kill, the human spirit. Jerusalem-with its message of God and man for both of whom nothing is impossible, with its proclamation that creativity and freedom are the essential prerogatives of both the divine and human-terrifies man, but it also has the power of liberating him and ultimately transforming the horrors of existence into the

²² In Job's Balances, p. 141.
²³ Ibid., p. 230.
²⁴ Loc. cit.

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joys of the paradisical state which God originally intended for his creatures.

IV

Shestov has been dismissed by some critics as a wild irrationalist, a willful protagonist of the absurd, who wished to abandon reason entirely in order to make room for transrational revelation. But the case is hardly so simple as this. His polemics against scientific knowledge and reason, as even the most superficial reading of his work reveals, are themselves peculiarly lucid and rational. Furthermore, given his predilection for irony and overstatement and his proclaimed intent forcibly to awaken his readers, to drive them through shock out of comfortable ruts into new and unfamiliar paths, it may be doubted that he meant categorically to reject objective knowledge, i.e., logic and science, as such. His real concern seems to have been rather to emphasize that these are hardly the unmixed blessings they have commonly been taken to be and that they assuredly do not exhaust the possible approaches to truth. What they tend, rather, to do is to lead those who concentrate on them away from the ultimate reality given in revelation.

In addition to the partial and preliminary truths of science and logic, Shestov wished to make it clear, there are infinitely more significant "personal" and "subjective" truths which can neither be objectively demonstrated nor empirically verified, and among these are the biblical affirmations concerning God and human freedom. If the latter are declared absurd before the bar of reason and experience, then the truths approved by these judges are themselves foolishness before God.

What Shestov was fundamentally concerned with throughout his lifetime was to criticize the timidity and lack of imagination of traditional philosophy, with its view that metaphysical truth flows solely from obedience and passive submission to the structures of being given in experience, and to insist instead that ultimate reality transcends the categories of rationalist metaphysics and scientific method and that the truth about it is to be discovered through the untrammeled soaring of the spirit and through daring flights of the imagination. It may be said that so to insist is to abandon philosophy for poetry and art, but Shestov himself always maintained that philosophy is indeed, or rather should be, more art than science.

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Shestov criticized science because it, subordinates man to impersonal necessity. But it is fairly clear that he did not mean to question the preliminary value and significance of scientific knowledge in everyday life. What he insisted, rather, was that the limits of science must be clearly understood and that the scientists and would be scientific philosophers must not pretend that their "essentially soulless and indifferent truths"²⁵ alone will satisfy the ultimate needs of the human spirit. More than anything else Shestov was troubled by the tendency of the scientists and rationalist philosophers to bless and glorify their "constraining" truths. Granted that there is a great deal of physical constraint in the world, why must man worship and adore it? Why should he not rather fiercely resent and ceaselessly challenge its authority? To sing praises not only to that measure of necessity and constraint that obviously exists but to go further and maintain that everything in the universe is necessarily and eternally as it is-this tendency of rationalist thought, he contended, does the greatest violence to the spirit. Furthermore the belief, inculcated by scientism and rationalism, in an eternally necessary and unchangeable order of things is, in a sense, a "self-fulfilling" conviction. Men who accept it will do nothing to affirm even that degree of creative freedom which they have within the limits of natural necessity, much less expand it; and their freedom, as well as their capacity for attaining that realm of authentic being which-Shestov believed-lies forever beyond "reasonable explanation," will consequently atrophy and disappear. That true, existential philosophy must be a continuous and agonizing struggle against constraint, against the immoderate pretensions of the logically self-evident, against the deliverances of common consciousness, is one of the dominant as well as one of the most valuable motifs in Shestov's thought.

Shestov, doubtless, performed a useful service in forcibly and repeatedly drawing our attention to the fact that not all questions are of the same nature.²⁶ A scientific question such as "What is the

²⁵ So he calls them in Athènes et Jérusalem, p. xxxi. In InJjob's Balances, Shestov insists that, though it has given us many gifts, science cannot give us ultimate truth for-in refusing to recognize the unique, the unrepeatable, the fortuitous-it has turned away from the realm in which real truth lies. "There is no need to renounce the gifts of the earth but we must not forget heaven for their sakes. However much we may have attained in science, yet we must remember that science can give us no truth because, by its very nature, it will not and cannot seek for tile truth. The truth lies there where science sees the 'nothing,' in that single, uncontrollable, incomprehensible thing which is always at war with explanation, the 'fortuitous'" (p. 193).
²⁶ Athènes et Jérusalem, pp. 389-91, 456-58.

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speed of sound?" differs essentially and in kind from a metaphysical question such as "Does God exist?" Against the positivists, he maintained that questions such as the latter are genuine and, indeed, of ultimate importance, but that their significance lies precisely in the fact that they do not admit of ordinary answers, that such answers kill them.

In the specifically religious thought of his mature and final period, Shestov seems to have been motivated basically by an unremitting awareness of what Mircea Eliade has named "the terror of history." He was obsessed by the fact that Socrates, the best and wisest of men, was poisoned by the Athenians and that, in the understanding of historicist and rationalist philosophies, this fact is on the same level as the poisoning of a mad dog. The despair which an awareness of the terror of history entails can be overcome, he concluded, only through faith. In this he was in complete agreement with Eliade who has written:

Since the "invention" of faith, in the Judaeo-Christian sense of the word (= for God all is possible), the man who has left the horizon of archetypes and repetition can no longer defend himself against that terror except through the idea of God. In fact, it is only by presupposing the existence of God that he conquers, on the one hand, freedom (which grants him autonomy in a universe governed by laws or, in other words, the "inauguration" of a mode of being that is new and unique in the universe) and, on the other hand, the certainty that historical tragedies have a trans-historical meaning, even if that meaning is not always visible for humanity in its present condition. Any other situation of modern man leads, in the end, to despair.²⁷

Faith in God was, for Shestov, the ultimate source of man's deliverance from despair and the guarantee of his own freedom in a universe all of whose energies seem bent on denying it. Such faith he held, as we have seen, to lie beyond proofs and to be in no way affected by logical argument.²⁸ In this he was surely right. Like Kierkegaard, he recognized that faith can no more be destroyed by logical impossibility than it can be created by logical possibility. If faith is not pre-existent, if it does not precede all of man's reasoning and argumentation, these will never lead him to God. Scripture itself, he pointed out, does not demand faith; it presupposes it.²⁹

²⁷ Cosmos and History (Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1959), pp. 161-62.
²⁸ Cf. Athènes et Jérusalem, pp. 413-14.
²⁹ Ibid., p. 76,

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But one must raise the question, How is faith reached? By man's own wishing and striving for it? Though Shestov's definition of faith as "audacity" seems to suggest that it is produced by an affirmation of human will, he plainly denied that man can by himself obtain faith.³⁰ Faith is a gift of God, a manifestation of his grace. Echoing the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and applying it to faith, Shestov seems to have believed that it is mysteriously given to some and denied to others. Even one to whom it is given may, of course, reject it, but none by his own unaided endeavor can obtain it. Must it be sought in order to be found? Yes, according to Shestov. The first movement of faith, he wrote, involves "a spiritual exertion"³¹ on the part of man. Further, as we have heard him say, "to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason."³² Man must begin by questioning all laws, by refusing to regard them as necessary and eternal. But whether Shestov believed that even this can be done without the grace of God is something that is not altogether clear.

For modern man, Shestov suggested, God can perhaps be reached only by first passing through the experience of despair, through a sense of utter abandonment. But if one feels that "God is not, man must himself become God, create all things out of nothing; all things; matter together with forms, and even the eternal laws" what guarantee is there that this will not end in a pagan titanism? Is there any assurance that man will not arrogantly put himself in the place of God, or that he will go beyond self-exaltation and recognize God as his own and the universe's Lord and Creator? Indeed, Shestov himself seems at times to blur any ultimate distinction between God and the individual who is in the condition of faith. Through faith, he appears to have believed, man becomes-in a genuine and important sense-like God. For the man of faith, too, "all things are possible," and this, according to him,³³ is the operational definition of God.

V

Has this notion of radical, unlimited freedom, this conception that all things are possible for man, any validity or significance?

³⁰ Loc. cit.
³¹ InJjob's Balances, p. 239
³² Athènes et Jérusalem, p. xxxii (italics mine).
³³ Athènes et Jérusalem, p. xxxiv.

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We may agree with Shestov that science and rationalist philosophy have, indeed, often exceeded their proper bounds and manifested an unjustified tendency to pronounce arbitrary judgment over what is possible and what impossible. We may agree also that science has deliberately overlooked "miracles" and willfully ignored much that is fortuitous, extraordinary, and incapable of being assimilated into its accepted categories of explanation. But does this entitle us to go to the opposite extreme and deny, as Shestov at times appears to do, that there are any norms, principles, or laws (even if these be understood only as statistical probabilities) governing the phenomena of the universe? Shestov may also be right in holding that scientific knowledge has often tended to enslave man or at least diminish his freedom to act, and we may concur in his suggestion that, by transcending science and returning to the biblical outlook, man may find the scope of his liberty greatly enlarged and discover that many things he formerly believed impossible are not so at all. But does his freedom thereby become absolute and unlimited? Faith, Shestov claims, gives man absolute freedom. But how? By what means does faith produce this result? And can Shestov, or anyone else who accepts the literal truth of the promise proclaimed in Mark 11: 23-24, point to anyone either in the past or present in whom this promise has been actualized? And furthermore, should he not have conceded that while science (or rather, an excessive worship of science) may have at times enslaved man, it has also given him a greater measure of power over nature and thereby broadened the range of his freedom?

Faith, Shestov maintained, results in the liberation of man not only from all physical compulsion but also from all moral constraint. In faith, man, to employ the terminology of Nietzsche, moves "beyond good and evil." He is freed from subjection to all ethical principles and moral valuations and returns to the paradisical state in which the distinction between good and evil and between right and wrong is non-existent. But, granted that man's awareness of moral distinctions imposes heavy burdens upon him and restricts his freedom, is a return to the condition of Adam before the Fall possible? And granted also that the God of the Bible is degraded and, indeed, denied if he is reduced to the position of guarantor of bourgeois morality, with the selfishness and cruelty that has often served to cloak, can it be denied that the biblical God is in fact

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represented as a Lawgiver who has a moral will for man and that man's freedom is understood by the Bible as his capacity to respond affirmatively or negatively to God's call? Aside from the question whether he has, in his concept of "moral freedom," fairly portrayed the character of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of whom he purported to speak, it may be asked of Shestov whether it makes any sense to assert that man can live entirely without ethical norms or principles. Or was it, perhaps, his belief that a life "beyond good and evil" can not be lived in man's present existence but only in some transcendent realm? On this he is not clear. In any case, the tendency to formless anarchism that is to be discerned in his friend Berdyaev and that seems to have been part of the mental furniture of a good many other Russian thinkers and writers of the time did not leave him untouched.

For all its ambiguities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, Shestov's work remains of vital contemporary significance. Here was a thinker thoroughly schooled in the western philosophical tradition who rejected that tradition with passionate intensity when he discovered the deadly threats to the human spirit implicit in it and who, in the style of the prophet, not the theologian or religious apologist, summoned men to turn away from Athens and seek their salvation in Jerusalem.

Not only to the irreligious and non-religious man of the twentieth century, but also to him who claims to live by the faith of the Bible yet whose understanding of that faith has inevitably been encumbered and distorted by centuries of rationalist philosophical and theological commentary, Shestov offers a fresh appreciation of the terror and promise of the biblical message. In his own lifetime his was a "voice crying in the wilderness." It is time that this voice be heard again.