“Athens and Jerusalem” by Lev Shestov

This is a deep work in which Shestov contrasts the knowledge of Athens, philosophy governed by reason, with the knowledge of Jerusalem, faith in revelation. Shestov begins, “the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.” He quotes Spinoza, who he considers a second embodiment of Socrates, the paragon of Greek philosophy, “Contentment with one’s self can spring from reason, and that contentment which springs from reason is the highest possible.” Shestov recounts, “when Leibniz set out on the search for truth, he always armed himself with the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.” Shestov contrasts reason with Kant’s conception of individual experience, “It tells us indeed what is but it does not tell us that it must necessarily be so and not otherwise. Therefore it does not give us any true universality, and reason which aspires so avidly to this kind of knowledge is more irritated than satisfied by it.” Shestov continues, “Reason avidly seeks the universal and the necessary…. But Kant thinks only of pleasing reason, to which God, the soul and free will matter little—provided only that one does not offend Necessity! The positive sciences have justified themselves in the eyes of Necessity.” Kant himself states, “Necessity and strict universality are sure signs of a priori knowledge.” Hegel agrees, “Man must raise himself to the abstract generality in which it is really indifferent to him whether he does or does not exist.” Aristotle comments, “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, it does not even listen.” Shestov concludes, “Not only the good but the truth as well wishes man to bow down before it…. We are asked not only to submit to Necessity but to adore it: such always has been, and such is still, the fundamental task of philosophy.”

Shestov questions this quest for knowledge as the only legitimate means to truth. “In the world where the fruits of the tree of knowledge became the principle not only of all philosophy but of being itself, thinking humanity dreamed of the possibility of the greatest victories and conquests…. According to the wisdom of Socrates, the greatest good for man is to feed on the fruits of the tree of knowledge…. Socrates repeats Adam…. The philosopher is obliged, like everyone else, to accept reality; before reality the philosopher finds himself as impotent as anyone. The only thing then that the philosopher can and must do is to teach men how they should live in the midst of this nightmarish reality from which one cannot awaken because it is the only reality. What this means is that the aim of truth is not truth but edification, or, to put it differently, not the fruits of the tree of life but the fruits of the tree of knowledge.”

Shestov contrasts Socrates’ quest with the work of Luther. “The virtue and happiness of the man who by his own powers can turn neither to God nor to immortality, for reason has enchained his will and obliged him to go where Necessity pushes him, appeared to Luther as the fall of man, as original sin.” Luther states, “Thus the gospel leads us beyond and above the light of law and of reason into the darkness of faith, where light and reason have nothing to do…. So let the conscience be free from the law, but let the body obey it.” Nietzsche puts it somewhat differently, “The freedom of thought of our scientists is in my eyes only a jest—they lack in these things my suffering, my passion.” Kierkegaard expounds, “Innocence is ignorance. In the state of innocence man is determined not as mind but as soul, in unmediated union with his nature. The mind is still dormant in man. This idea is in harmony with the Bible which denies to man in the state of innocence knowledge of the difference between good and evil.” Shestov continues the thought, “The Bible says, on the contrary, that all misfortunes of man come from knowledge…. In its very essence knowledge, according to the Bible, excludes faith and is the sin par excellence or the original sin.” This constitutes “the only true critique of pure reason that has been formulated here on earth.” Shestov goes on, “freedom does not consist in the possibility of choosing between good and evil, as we today are condemned to think. Freedom consists in the force and power not to admit evil into the world.”

For Shestov this all goes back to philosophy’s worship of necessity. “The horror of the fall, the horror of the original sin of which Nietzsche and Luther have told us, consists precisely in the fact that man seeks his salvation just where his ruin awaits him. Necessity does not offend the fallen man. He loves it, he venerates it, and this veneration is in his eyes the testimony of his own grandeur and virtue, as Nietzsche who reproved Socrates’ decadence has himself confessed. And Spinoza, following the thought of the wisest of men, sings the glory of Necessity. The capacity “to endure with equanimity” everything that fate decrees no longer offends him, it even rejoices him…. Knowledge and virtue have paralyzed our will and have plunged our spirit into a somnolence such that we see our perfection in impotence and submission.”

Shestov continues by describing the debate in the Middle Ages reconciling the philosophy of the ancient Greeks with the truth of the Bible. He states that “the essential thing for metaphysics is not only to present us with truths but to do it in such a way that these truths are irrefutable and that there be no place beside them for other truths contradicting them.” In contrast, “all the fundamental truths of revelation have come to man without “a shadow, without a trace of proof.”… The God of Scripture is above the truth as well as the good.” Aquinas states, “The meaning of knowledge is that, of what is known, it is believed impossible for it to be otherwise.” Aristotle teaches in his Metaphysics, “For the practical man well knows the ‘that’ but not the ‘why’; but the theoretical man knows the why and the causal relationship.”

Shestov again recounts the story of the fall of man. ““Your eyes will be opened,” says the serpent. “You shall die,” says God. The metaphysics of knowledge in Genesis is strictly tied to the metaphysics of being. If God has spoken truly, knowledge leads to death; if the serpent has spoken truly, knowledge makes man like God…. The Gnostics declared openly that it was God and not the serpent who had deceived man. In our age Hegel was not at all embarrassed to say that the serpent had spoken the truth to the first man and that the fruits of the tree of knowledge became the source of philosophy for all time.” Going back to Aristotle, Shestov continues on the journey of man, “the “that” (hoti) did not suffice for him; he desired the “why” (dioti).” In contrast to the eternal truths of knowledge, Tertullian proclaimed, “The son of God was crucified: it does not shame because it is shameful; and the son of God died: it is absolutely credible because it is absurd; and having been buried, he rose from the dead; it is certain because it is impossible.” Shestov writes, “Tertullian’s declaration must serve as the introduction or prolegomenato the organon of the Judeo-Christian philosophy, which was called to proclaim to the world the new notion, completely ignored up until then, of “created truth.””

Shestov contrasts this “created truth” with Greek philosophy’s two pillar principles, 1# “There is no greater misfortune for a man, we read in the Phaedo, than to become a hater of reason, a misologos. [2#] The holy is not holy because the gods love it, but it is precisely because the holy is holy that the gods love it, says Socrates in the Euthyphro.” This is a view that Augustine, Aquinas, and later Christian philosophers struggled to reconcile with their faith. When put to the test, they often submitted God’s will to reason and necessity. However, there were Christian philosophers who adamantly disagreed. Duns Scotus wrote, “As God therefore can act otherwise, so can he also give another law as right which becomes right if it is given by God, for no law is right except insofar as it is accepted by the divine will…. There is no cause why His will willed this except that His will is His will.” William of Occam concurred, “God can be obliged to nothing and therefore the occurrence of what God wishes is just.” Kierkegaard stated, “I have faith by virtue of the Absurd, for to God everything is possible.”

Shestov returns to the juxtaposition of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. “The basic objection that the Greeks, as well as St. Augustine and later the Scholastics, made to the fruits of the tree of life was that these fruits are not in our power: the possibility of obtaining them, and still more of preserving them, does not depend on us.” Life is up to fate and/or contingency. Therefore, for the Greek philosophers “to escape from the Necessity which rules the world, there is no other means of salvation…. than to turn toward the intelligible world. It is there that the wise man seeks refuge against the sufferings, the horrors, the injustices of the real world…. For our reason faith is darkness, it is the lower degree which must be transcended in order to obtain clear and distinct knowledge. The apostles and the prophets were content with faith; the philosopher wishes more—he wishes to know.” Pascal does not deny this distinction, but comes to the opposite conclusion, “Nothing is more strongly opposed to faith than law and reason, nor can these two be overcome without great effort and labor; yet they must be overcome if you wish to be saved.” Kant (somewhat disingenuously) declares in his preface to The Critique of Pure Reason, “I had to renounce knowledge (Wissen) in order to make room for faith (Glauben).” Spinoza writes, “Philosophy has no end in view but truth, faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.” Descartes tries to reconcile the eternal and created truths, “If I affirm that there cannot be a mountain without a valley, this is not because it is really impossible that it should be otherwise, but simply because God has given me reason which cannot do other than assume the existence of a valley wherever there is a mountain.”

Shestov recounts the story of Moses coming face to face with God on top of Mount Sinai. “Where God is there is no law, there is freedom.” He also explains the revolutionary nature of Abraham. “In Abraham faith was a new dimension of thought that the world had not known before, that did not find any place on the level of ordinary consciousness, and that exploded all the “constraining truths” which our “experience” and our “reason” have whispered to us. Only such a philosophy can call itself Judeo-Christian, a philosophy which proposes not to accept but to overcome the self-evidences and which introduces into our thought a new dimension—faith.” Dostoevsky, too, would rebel against the bounds of necessity. “Two times two makes four (that is, the self-evident truths) is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. In any case, man has always been afraid of the two times two makes four and I am still afraid of it now…. Of course, I shall not break the wall with my head, if I really have not the power to break it, but I shall not accept it, I shall not resign myself to it, merely because it is a stone wall and I lack power. As if such a stone wall were an appeasement and contained but a word of peace merely because it is two times two makes four…. I wish to live according to my foolish will and not according to the rational will.” 

Shestov states that man must make a choice- it is either Jerusalem or Athens. “It is necessary to choose between Abraham and Socrates, between him whom Scripture declared a righteous man and him whom the pagan god proclaimed the wisest man.” Kierkegaard states, “Faith is the paradox that the individual as individual is above the universal.” Shestov continues, “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. Reason, I repeat, has ruined faith in our eyes; it has “revealed” in it man’s illegitimate pretension to subordinate the truth to his desires, and it has taken away from us the most precious of heaven’s gifts—the sovereign right to participate in the divine “let there be”—by flattening out our thought and reducing it to the plane of the petrified “it is.”… Human wisdom is foolishness before God and the wisest of men…. is the greatest of sinners. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Shestov concludes, “Philosophy must not, then, be a looking around, a turning backwards (Besinnen), as we have become accustomed to think—to look backward is the end of all philosophy—but it must go forward fearlessly, without taking account of anything whatever, without turning around to look at anything whatever…. Philosophy is not Besinnen but struggle.”

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (translated by John E. Woods)

This tome is considered by most to be Mann’s magnum opus. It would be fair to say it is a philosophical novel. It has little in the way of action, although it might be unfair to say it has absolutely no plot. There is intrigue, clandestine love affairs, and even a near death experience in a blizzard. But most of the story takes place inside a tuberculosis sanatorium up in the mountains. Mann introduces the novel’s protagonist with a philosophical flair, “A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries…. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”

Mann’s novel plays with the idea of the subjectivity of time. “Looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long. It seemed everything to him, in fact, except how it really was—always presuming, of course, that time is part of nature and that it is therefore permissible to see it in conjunction with reality.” Castorp originally had intended to merely visit his cousin Joachim, who was a patient at the sanatorium, for a three week vacation, but Castorp ends up staying for quite awhile longer, after being admitted as a patient himself. “We would like to suggest that Hans Castorp would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.”

While staying at the sanatorium, Castorp meets a fellow patient, an Italian humanist named Settembrini, who takes him under his wing and warns him of the dangers of staying too long up in the mountains. A bit of a pedagogue, he also tries to impart a bit of his enlightened rationality and humanist philosophy on his young pupil. Settembrini expresses, “A man of the West, despite all other propositions, has only one concern: reason, analysis, deeds, progress.” His sparring partner, a Jesuit named Naphta, attempts to sway Castorp in a different direction, “Allow me to remark, that every sort of torture, every bit of bloody justice, that does not arise from a belief in the next world is bestial nonsense. And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the teachings of nineteenth-century science and economics have omitted nothing, absolutely nothing, that seemed even vaguely useful for furthering such degradation, beginning with modern astronomy—which turned the focal point of the universe, that sublime arena where God and Satan struggled to possess the creature whom they both ardently coveted, into an unimportant little planet.” Debate after debate between the two combatants ensues and, needless to say, things eventually become a little more heated. Herr Settembrini will have the last word, “The duel, my friend, is not just any ‘arrangement.’ It is the final arrangement, a return to the primal state of nature, only slightly moderated by certain chivalrous, but purely superficial rules. The essence of the situation remains what it has been since the beginning, a physical struggle, and it is each man’s duty, however far he may be from nature, to keep himself equal to the situation. Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Lamentations” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction with some basic facts, “The only reasonably safe conclusion one can draw about the origins of the Book of Lamentations is the likelihood that it was composed in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E.” Next, he delves into its format, “Lamentations is unique among books of the Bible in that four of its five chapters are composed as alphabetic acrostics, with the third chapter being a triple acrostic…. It is unclear why the alphabetic acrostic form was felt appropriate for these laments. Could it be that the progress from aleph to taw was felt to imply a comprehensive listing of all the disasters that had befallen the people?” Finally, Alter delves into Lamentations’s modern liturgical usage, “One readily understands why it is that Jewish tradition fixed the recitation of these five laments as an annual ritual, not merely in commemoration of the destruction of the First Temple or the Second but also as a way of fathoming the ghastly recurrent violence that has darkened two millennia of history.”

In Lamentations 1:21, Alter details a poetic formula common in much biblical verse, “May they be like me. This line and the preceding one incorporate an implied causal sequence: first the enemies gloat over the destruction of Judah; then the speaker registers the fact that the catastrophe was God’s doing and the foe was only His instrument; finally, the speaker hopes that the same dire fate will overtake Zion’s conquerers. This is in fact a recurrent idea in Prophetic literature: that Judah’s enemies may be God’s “rod” of punishment but will in turn suffer for the terrible harm they have inflicted on Judah.”

Alter describes the clever use of metaphor in Lamentations 4:1, “How has gold turned dull. The first two verses of this lament are an interesting instance of literal statement that is then revealed to be a metaphor. Verse 1 appears to present a concrete image of precious materials debased—gold tarnished, gems spilled to the ground. Then, in verse 2, with the representation of Zion’s children “worth their weight in gold” (literally, “weighed in gold”), it becomes evident that they are the treasures now counted as worthless.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Ruth” (translated by Robert Alter)

The provenance of this short book of the Bible is somewhat disputed. Alter weighs in in his introduction, “Is Ruth in fact a Late Biblical book? Although this is the consensus of biblical scholars, there are some vocal dissenters. These tend to take at face value the assertion of the opening verse that we are reading a story that goes back to the period of the Judges…. But style is actually the clearest evidence of the lateness of Ruth. The writer took pains to create a narrative prose redolent of the early centuries of Israelite history, but it is very difficult to execute such a project of archaizing without occasional telltale slips…. There are at least a dozen terms that reflect distinctive Late Biblical usage…. The other strong sign of Ruth’s composition in the period after the return from Babylonian exile in the fifth century B.C.E. is its genre…. Harvesting and agriculture are a palpable presence in the story. Unlike the narratives from Genesis to Kings, where even pastoral settings are riven with tensions and often punctuated with violence, the world of Ruth is a placid bucolic world, where landowner and workers greet each other decorously with blessings in the name of the Lord.” Alter also throws in a bit of history, “Ruth’s Moabite origins have led many interpreters—convincingly, in my view—to see this story as a quiet polemic against the opposition of Ezra and Nehemiah to intermarriage with the surrounding peoples when the Judahites returned to their land in the fifth century B.C.E.”

In Ruth 1:1, Alter details the historic setting for the book and thus the dispute of its provenance, “when the judges ruled. The “judges” (shoftim) are tribal chieftains, as in the Book of Judges. This initial notice led the Septuagint and the Christian canon afterward, to place the Book of Ruth in the Former Prophets, after Judges.” In Ruth 1:17, Alter describes a common Biblical literary technique, “Wherever you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. Ruth’s moving speech, with its fine resonance of parallel clauses, appropriately ends on the note of death: she will always remain with Naomi in the trajectory of a whole life until death. The procedure of biblical narrative of defining character by his or her initial speech is vividly deployed here, showing Ruth as the perfect embodiment of loyalty for her mother-in-law.”

Alter details another striking literary detail in relating Ruth 2:11, “you left your mother and your father and the land of your birth. These words are the most significant literary allusion in the book. They explicitly echo God’s first words to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house.” Now it is a woman, and a Moabite, who reenacts Abraham’s long trek from the east to Canaan. She will become the founding mother of the nation as he was the founding father.” Finally in Ruth 4:18, Alter again reflects on Ruth’s future progeny, “And this is the lineage of Perez. In careful emulation of the Book of Genesis, the writer weaves together narration with genealogy to pointed thematic purpose. Here he aligns the son Ruth bears both back to Judah’s son, Perez, and forward to the founder of the divinely authorized dynasty, David.”