Athens and Jerusalem. Lev Shestov
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 good and our destructive evil.27
From the point of view of the existential critique of the ethical foundation 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.