The critical philosophy did not overthrow the fundamental ideas of Spinoza; on the contrary, it accepted and assimilated them. The Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus remain alive, though implicitly, in the thought of German idealism quite as much as in the thought of Leibniz: the Necessity which determines the structure and order of being, the ordo et connexio rerum, does not constrain us but persuades us, draws us along, seduces us, rejoices us, and bestows upon us that final contentment and that peace of soul which at all times have been considered in philosophy as the supreme good. "Contentment with one's self can spring from reason, and that contentment which springs from reason is the highest possible." Men have imagined, it is true - and certain philosophers have even supported them in this - that man constitutes in nature a kind of state within a state. "After men have persuaded themselves that everything that happens happens for their sakes, they must consider as most important in everything that which is for them most useful, and they must value most that by which they would be best affected." Consequently, flent, ridunt, contemnunt vel quod plerumque fit, detestantur (they weep, laugh, scorn or - what happens most of the time - curse). It is in this, according to Spinoza, that there lies the fundamental error of man - one could almost say man's original sin, if Spinoza himself had not so carefully avoided all that could recall the Bible even if only externally.

     The first great law of thought which abolishes the biblical interdiction against the fruits of the tree of knowledge is non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand). Everything is then transformed before our eyes. In contemplating life "under the aspect of eternity or necessity," we accept whatever we encounter on our road with the same tranquility and the same feeling of good will. "Even if these things are inconvenient, they are nevertheless necessary and have determinate causes through which we seek to understand their nature, and the mind rejoices just as much over their true contemplation as over the knowledge of those things that are pleasing to the senses."

     In contemplating the necessity of everything that happens in the universe, our mind experiences the highest joy. How does this differ from the statement of Kant, who says that our reason aspires eagerly to universal and necessary judgments? Or from Leibniz's affirmation that the truths not only constrain but persuade? Or even from the famous Hegelian formula, "All that is real is rational?" And is it not evident that for Leibniz, Kant and Hegel - quite as much as for Spinoza - the pretensions that man makes of occupying a special, privileged place in nature are ungrounded and absolutely unjustified, unless recourse is had to a "supreme being" who does not exist and has never existed? It is only when we forget all "supreme beings" and repress, or rather tear out of our soul, all the ridere, lugere, et detestari, as well as the absurd flere which flows from them and which comes to the ears of no one - it is only when we recognize that our destiny and the very meaning of our existence consist in the pure intelligere, that the true philosophy will be born.

     Neither in Leibniz nor in Kant do we find, to be sure, the equivalent of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus which established what is now called "biblical criticism," but this does not mean that they had taken any less care than Spinoza to protect themselves from the biblical contamination. If everything that Kant said about Schwärmerei and Aberglauben (fanaticism and superstition) or that Leibniz wrote on the same subject were brought together, one would completely recover the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. And conversely, all the effort of the Tractatus is bent to ridding our spiritual treasury of the ideas which Scripture had introduced there and which nothing justifies.

     The non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere of Spinoza, who abrogated the ban placed by the Bible on the fruit of the tree of knowledge, constitutes at the same time a reasonable reply to the De profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi (out of the depths I cried unto Thee, O God) of the Psalmist. The Psalmist could cry to God, but the man qui sola ratione ducitur (who is led by reason alone) knows well that it is absolutely useless to cry to God from the depths. If you have fallen into an abyss, try to get out of it as best you can, but forget what the Bible has told us throughout the centuries - that there is somewhere, "in heaven," a supreme and omnipotent being who is interested in your fate, who can help you, and who is ready to do so. Your fate depends entirely on the conditions in which chance has placed you. It is possible, in some measure, to adapt yourself to these conditions. You may, for example, prolong your earthly existence by working to earn your bread or by taking it away from others. But it is a question only of prolongation, for it is not given anyone to escape death. An ineluctabie eternal truth says: "Everything that has a beginning has also an end." The man of the Bible was unwilling to accept this truth; it did not succeed in "persuading" him. But this shows only that he did not allow himself to be led "by reason alone," that he was deeply bogged down in Schwärmerei and Aberglauben. The man who has been enlightened - a Spinoza, a Leibniz, a Kant - thinks quite otherwise. The eternal truths do not simply constrain him; they persuade him, they inspire him, they give him wings. Sub specie aeternitatis vel necessitatis - how solemnly these words resound in Spinoza's mouth! And his amor erga rem aeternam (love for the eternal) - does not one feel ready to sacrifice for this the entire universe, created (if one may believe the doubtful, or rather, quite frankly, false teachings of this same Bible) by God for man? And then there is Spinoza's "we feel and experience that we are eternal," and the statement which crowns his Ethics: "Happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself." Are these words not worth our abandoning all the passing and changing goods which life promises us?

     We touch here precisely upon that which deeply distinguishes the biblical philosophy, the biblical thought - or, better, the mode of biblical thought - from the speculative thought that the vast majority of the great philosophers of historic humanity represent and express. The ridere, lugere, and detestari along with the accompanying flere that are rejected by Spinoza, the most audacious and sincere of these philosophers, constitute that dimension of thought which no longer exists, or more accurately, which bas been completely atrophied in the man "who is led by reason alone." One could express this still more strongly: the prerequisite of rational thought consists in our willingness to reject all the possibilities that are bound up with ridere, lugere, et detestari and especially with flere. The biblical words "And God saw that it was very good" seem to us the product of a fantastic imagination, as does the God who reveals Himself to the prophet on Mount Sinai. We, enlightened men, put all our trust in autonomous ethics; its praises are our salvation, its reproofs our eternal damnation. "Beyond" the truths which constrain, "beyond" good and evil, all interests of the mind come, in our opinion, to an end. In the world ruled by "Necessity" the fate of man and the only goal of every reasonable being consist in the performance of duty: autonomous ethics crowns the autonomous laws of being.

     The fundamental opposition of biblical philosophy to speculative philosophy shows itself in particularly striking fashion when we set Socrates' words, "The greatest good of man is to discourse daily about virtue" (or Spinoza's gaudere vera contemplatione - "to rejoice in true contemplation") opposite St. Paul's words, "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." The precondition of Socrates' "greatest good," or of Spinoza's "true contemplation," is the willingness of the man "who knows" to renounce God's "blessing" by virtue of which the world and everything that is in the world were destined for man's use. The ancients already had seen the "eternal truth" that man is only one of the links of the chain, without beginning or end, of phenomena; and this eternal truth - constraining, of course, and coming from the outside - in antiquity already had at its disposal the power of constraining the philosophical intelligence and also of seducing it, or, as Leibniz puts it, persuading it. And it is here that there arises the essential philosophical question, which unfortunately did not attract the attention of philosophers - neither of Leibniz nor of all those who, before or after him, considered implicite or explicite that the eternal truths not only constrain but also persuade. It is the question of knowing what is essential in our relationship to the truths: is it the fact that they constrain or the fact that they persuade? To put the matter in another way: if the truth which constrains does not succeed in persuading us, does it thereby lose its status as truth? Is it not enough for the truth to have the power of constraining? As Aristotle says of Parmenides and the other great philosophers of antiquity, they are "con-strained by the truth itself." (hyp' autês alêtheâs anankazomenoi) It is true that he adds, with a sigh, tên anankên ametapeiston ti einai, "Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded," as if he were replying in advance to Leibniz, who said that the truth does more than constrain, that it persuades. But Aristotle ended by repressing his involuntary sigh and began to glorify the constraining truth, as if it were not content to constrain but also persuaded.

     In modern philosophy, such expressions as Leibniz's "persuasion" or Spinoza's vera contemplatione gaudere constitute, in a way, a substitute for the flere and for the biblical "God blessed," a substitute smuggled into the domain of objective thought which seemed to have been so carefully and once for all cleansed of all the Schwärmerei and Aberglauben to be found in the neighborhood of Scripture and its revelations.

     But this was not enough for philosophy, or, more precisely, for the philosophers; they wished, and still wish, to think, and they try by all means to suggest to others, to make them think, that their truths possess the gift of persuading all men without exception and not only themselves who have uttered them. Reason recognizes as true only these truths. They are the truths that it seeks. It is these alone that it calls "knowledge." If someone had proposed to Spinoza, Leibniz or Kant that they limit their pretensions, in the sense of recognizing that the truths are true only for those whom they persuade and cease to be truths for those whom they do not succeed in persuading, would the truths of Leibniz, Spinoza and Kant have retained their earlier charm in the eyes of these philosophers? Would they have continued to call them truths?

     Here is a concrete example (the fundamental opposition between Hellenistic and biblical thought bursts forth fully only in concrete examples): The Psalmist cries to the Lord out of the depths of his human nothingness, and all his thought is oriented - just as the truths that he obtains are determined - not by what is "given," by what "is," by what one can "see" be it even by means of the eyes of the mind (oculi mentis), but by something quite different - something to which what is given, what is, remains, despite its self-evidence, subordinate. Thus, the immediate deliverances of consciousness do not circumscribe the goal of the Psalmist's searchings; the facts, the given, experience - these do not constitute for him the final criterion which serves to distinguish truth from falsehood. A fact is for him something which rose one day, which had a beginning, and consequently may, if not must, have an end. We know from history that almost twenty-five hundred years ago Socrates was poisoned in Athens. "The man who is led by reason alone" must bow down before this "fact," which not only constrains but also persuades him; he will feel calm only when reason will have guaranteed that no force in the world could destroy this fact, i.e., when he will have perceived in it the element of eternity or necessity. It seems to him that by succeeding in transforming even that which happened only once into an eternal truth, he acquires knowledge, the true knowledge which concerns not what begins and ends, what changes and passes, but what is forever immutable. Thus he elevates himself to the understanding of the universe sub specie aeternitatis vel necessitatis. He attains, with a flap of his wings, the regions where truth lives. And what this truth brings with it is then altogether indifferent to him, whether it be the poisoning of the wisest of men or the destruction of a mad dog. The important thing is that he obtain the possibility of contemplating eternal, immutable, unshakable truth. The mind rejoices over the eternity of truth; as for its content, to this it remains quite indifferent. Amor erga rem aeternam fills the human soul with happiness, and the contemplation of the eternity and necessity of everything that happens is the greatest good to which man can aspire.

     If someone had taken it into his head to tell Spinoza, Leibniz, or Kant that the truth "Socrates was poisoned" exists only for a definite term and that sooner or later we shall obtain the right to say that no one ever poisoned Socrates, that this truth, like all truths, is in the power of a supreme being who, in answer to our cries, can annul it - Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant would have considered these words a sacrilegious attack on the sacred rights of reason, and they would have been indignant, just as Leibniz was when he recalled Descartes' mountain without a valley. The fact that on earth righteous men are poisoned like mad dogs does not at all trouble the philosophers, for they believe it in no way threatens philosophy. But to admit that a "supreme being" can rid us of the nightmare of the eternal truth "Socrates was poisoned" - this would appear to them not only absurd but revolting. This would not satisfy or persuade them but, on the contrary, irritate them to the last degree. 0f course, they would have preferred that Socrates had not been poisoned but, since he was poisoned, it is necessary to submit and to be content with thinking up some theodicy; this, even if it does not make us completely forget the horrors which fill human existence, will perhaps succeed in somewhat weakening their impression. To be sure a theodicy - Leibniz's or anyone else's - must rely on some eternal truth which, in the final analysis, reduces itself to Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis vel necessitatis. It will be said that everything that is created cannot be perfect by reason of the very fact that it was created and that, consequently, the world that was created can only be the "best of all possible worlds"; we must then expect to find in it many bad things, even very bad things.

     Why should creation not be perfect? Who suggested this idea to Leibniz, who imposed it on him? To this question we will not find any answer in Leibniz, just as we will not find in any philosopher an answer to the question how a truth of fact is transformed into an eternal truth. In this respect, the enlightened philosophy of modern times is hardly to be distinguished from the philosophy of the "benighted" Middle Ages. The eternal truths constrain and persuade all thinking beings equally. When in the Middle Ages the voice of Peter Damian rang out, proclaiming that God could bring it about that that which had been had not been, it seemed like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. No one, neither of our time nor even of the Middle Ages, dared to admit that the biblical "very good" corresponded to reality, that the world created by God had no defect. Even more: it may be said that medieval philosophy, and even the philosophy of the Church Fathers, was the philosophy of people who, having assimilated Greek culture, thought and wished to think sub specie aeternitatis vel necessitatis. When Spinoza says, in ecstasy, "the love for the eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, and this itself is free from every sorrow, which is greatly to be wished and striven after with every power," he is only summing up the teaching of the philosophers of the Middle Ages who had passed through the severe school of the great Greek thinkers. The only difference is that Spinoza, in order to trace the way which would lead him to res aeterna et infinita, believed that it was his duty as a thinker to sharply separate himself from Scripture, while the scholastics made superhuman efforts to save for the Bible the authority which belonged to it as a divinely inspired book.

     But the more men occupied themselves with the authority of the Bible, the less they took account of the content of the sacred book; for, indeed, authority demands finally nothing but respect and veneration. Medieval philosophy never stopped repeating that philosophy is only the handmaid of theology and always referred to biblical texts in its reasonings. And yet as competent a historian as Gilson is obliged to recognize that the medieval philosopher, when he read Scripture, could not fail to recall Aristotle's words about Homer, "The poets lie a great deal." Gilson also cites the words of Duns Scotus: "I believe, Lord, what your great prophet has said, but if it be possible, make me under-stand it." So the doctor subtilis, one of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, speaks. When he hears the words, "Rise, take up your bed and go," he replies, "Give me my crutches that I may have something upon which to lean." And yet Duns Scotus surely knew the words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin," as well as the biblical account of the fall of the first man, who renounced faith in order to attain knowledge. But, just as later on in the case of Kant, there never occurred to him the thought of seeking in the biblical legend the "critique of reason," the critique of the knowledge which pure reason brings to man. Is it possible that knowledge leads to the biblical "you shall die" while faith leads to the tree of life? Who will dare admit such a "critique?" [1] The truth that knowledge is above faith, or that faith is only an imperfect kind of knowledge - is not this an "eternal truth," a truth to which Leibniz's words, "it not only constrains but also persuades," could be applied par excellence? This truth had already seduced the first man, and ever since, as Hegel very rightly says, the fruits of the tree of knowledge have become the source of philosophy for all time. The constraining truths of knowledge subdue and persuade men, while the free truth of revelation, which has not and does not seek any "sufficient reason," irritates men, just as experience irritates them. The faith which, according to Scripture, leads us to salvation and delivers us from sin introduces us, in our view, into the domain of the purely arbitrary, where human thought no longer has any possibility of orienting itself and where it cannot lean upon anything.

     And even if the biblical "critique" of reason is right, even if knowledge, by introducing itself into being, leads inevitably to all the horrors of existence and to death - even then, the man who bas once tasted the forbidden fruits will never consent to forget them and will not even have the power to do so. Such is the origin of Spinoza's rule: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. To "understand" we must turn away from all the things to which our joys, our sadnesses, our hopes, our anxieties, and so on are bound. We must renounce the world and that which is in the world. "Constrained by the truth itself," Spinoza, following the example of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, turns away from the world created by God; everything that exists in the world is reduced for him to "wealth, honors and sensuality." Everything that exists in the world passes away, is condemned to disappear. Is it worth the trouble to hold on to such a world? Were not the ancient and medieval philosophers, who preferred the ideal world created by human reason to the world created by God and who saw in the former the "greatest good" of man, right? Amor erga rem aeternam is the only thing that can be called "very good," that is, capable of justifying being in the eyes of man.

     There is then, on the one side, Socrates with his "knowledge" who has withdrawn into his ideal world and, on the other side, the biblical legend of the fall of the first man and the Apostle who interprets this legend by declaring that "whatsoever is not of faith is sin." The task which I have set for myself in this book, Athens and Jerusalem, consists in putting to proof the pretensions to the possession of truth which human reason or speculative philosophy make. Knowledge is not here recognized as the supreme goal of man. Knowledge does not justify being; on the contrary, it is from being that it must obtain its justification. Man wishes to think in the categories in which he lives, and not to live in the categories in which he has become accustomed to think: the tree of knowledge no longer chokes the tree of life.

     In the first part, "Parmenides in Chains" (Parmenidês desmôtês), I try to show that, in pursuing knowledge, the great philosophers lost the most precious of the Creator's gifts - freedom; Parmenides was not a free man but one enchained. The second part, the most difficult, "In the Bull of Phalaris," reveals the indestructible bond between knowledge, as philosophy understands it, and the horrors of human existence. The immoralist Nietzsche glorifies unpitying cruelty and swears eternal fidelity to fate with all its ineluctabilities; and he rejoices and prides himself on the bargain of his submission to fate, forgetting his "beyond good and evil," his "will to power," and all that he had said about the fall of Socrates: the praises and threats of morality have seduced him also. In Kierkegaard mild Christianity loses its mildness and is impregnated with a ferocity which transforms it by ancient destiny - away from the moment where the "fact" has obtained the sovereign right of determining both the will of man and of the Creator. In the third part, "Concupiscentia Invincibilis," the fruitless efforts of the Middle Ages to reconcile the revealed truth of the Bible with the Hellenistic truth are dealt with. The fourth part, "On the Second Dimension of Thought," begins by assuming that the truths of reason perhaps constrain us but are far from always persuading us and that, consequently, the ridere, lugere, et detestari and the flere which flows from them not only do not find their solution in the intelligere but, when they attain a certain tension, enter into a struggle against the intelligere - a terrible, desperate struggle - and sometimes overthrow and destroy it. Philosophy is not a curious looking around, not Besinnung, but a great struggle.

     A similar purpose underlies all four parts of the book: to throw off the power of the soulless and entirely indifferent truths into which the fruits of the tree of knowledge have been transformed. The "universality and necessity" to which the philosophers have always aspired so eagerly and with which they have always been so delighted awaken in us the greatest suspicion; in them the threatening "you will die" of the biblical critique of reason is transparent. The fear of the fantastic no longer holds us in its power. And the "supreme being," transformed by speculation into a deus ex machina, no longer signifies for us the end of philosophy but rather that which alone can give meaning and content to human existence and consequently lead to the true philosophy. To speak as did Pascal: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not the God of the philosophers. The God of the philosophers, whether he be a material or ideal principle, carries with him the triumph of constraint, of brutal force. That is why speculation has always so obstinately defended the universality and necessity of its truths. The truth spares no one, no one can escape it; it is this, this alone, that has enticed the philosophers. Leibniz's "persuasion" was only a hypocritical mask behind which the longed-for "constraint" hid itself. It is said in Scripture, "You shall receive according to your faith." Would Leibniz or any other philosopher have ever had the audacity to say, "You shall receive according to your truth"? Athens could not bear such a truth. It does not constrain, it does not constrain at all; it will never obtain ethical approval. How could human reason be enticed by it?

     But Jerusalem holds only to this truth. The constraining truths, and even the truths which seek the approbation and fear the reprobation of autonomous ethics - those eternal truths which, according to Leibniz, were introduced into the mind of God without asking His permission - not only do not persuade Jerusalem but are, on the contrary, the abomination of desolation. Within the "limits of reason" one can create a science, a sublime ethic, and even a religion; but 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, on his side, fearlessly and with sovereign power returns to the believer his lost power: . . . "what things soever ye desire . . . ye shall have them." [2]

     It is here that there begins for fallen man the region, forever condemned by reason, of the miraculous and of the fantastic. And, indeed, are not the prophecy of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, "the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all," and what the New Testament tells of the fulfillment of this prophecy, fantastic? With a sublime daring and unheard power Luther says of this in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians: "All the prophets saw this in the spirit: that Christ would be the greatest robber, thief, defiler of the Temple, murderer, adulterer, etc. - such that no greater will ever be in the world." The same thought was expressed by Luther in a still plainer, more naked, and truly biblical fashion in another passage of the same commentary: "God sent his only begotten son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying: 'Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer and doer of violence; David, that adulterer; that sinner who ate the apple in paradise; that thief on the cross - in sum, be thou the person who committed the sins of all men.'"

     Can we "understand," can we grasp, what the prophets and the apostles announce in Scripture? Will Athens ever consent to allow such "truths" to come into the world? The 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, and becomes transformed into phantoms or mirages: 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; Socrates was never poisoned by anyone. The "fact," the "given", the "real," do not dominate us; they do not determine our fate, either in the present, in the future or in the past. What has been becomes what has not been; man returns to the state of innocence and finds that divine freedom, that freedom for good, in contrast with which the freedom that we have to choose between good and evil is extinguished and disappears, or more exactly, in contrast with which our freedom reveals itself to be a pitiful and shameful enslavement. The original sin - that is to say, the knowledge that what is is necessarily - is radically uprooted and torn out of existence. Faith, only the faith that looks to the Creator and that He inspires, radiates from itself the supreme and decisive truths condemning what is and what is not. Reality is transfigured. The heavens glorify the Lord. The prophets and apostles cry in ecstasy, "O death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory?" And all announce: "Eye hath not seen, non ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him."[3]

     The power of the biblical revelation - what there is in it of the incomparably miraculous and, at the same time, of the absurdly paradoxical, or, to put it better, its monstrous absurdity - carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities which that comprehension admits. For God, however, the impossible does not exist. God - to speak the language of Kierkegaard, which is that of the Bible - God: this means that there is nothing that is impossible. And despite the Spinozist interdictions, fallen man aspires, in the final analysis, only to the promised "nothing will be impossible for you"; only for this does he implore the Creator. It is here that religious philosophy takes its rise. Religious philosophy is not a search for the eternal structure and order of immutable being; it is not reflection (Besinnung); it is not an understanding of the difference between good and evil, an understanding that falsely promises peace to exhausted humanity. Religious philosophy is a turning away from knowledge and a surmounting by faith, in a boundless tension of all its forces, of the false fear of the unlimited will of the Creator, that fear which the tempter suggested to Adam and which he has transmitted to all of us. To put it another way, religious philosophy is the final, supreme struggle to recover original freedom and the divine "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."

     This is why the "greatest good" of Socrates - engendered by the knowledge that what is is necessarily - no longer tempts or seduces us. It shows itself to be the fruit of the tree of knowledge or, to use the language of Luther, bellua qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (the monster without whose kiling man cannot live). The old "ontic" critique of reason is re-established: homo non potest vivere, which is nothing but the "you will die" of the Bible, unmasks the eternal truths that have entered into the consciousness of the Creator, or rather of the creation, without asking leave. Human wisdom is foolishness before God, and the wisest of men, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however unlike each other, both perceived, is the greatest of sinners. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin. As for the philosophy that does not dare to rise above autonomous knowledge and autonomous ethics, the philosophy that bows down will-lessly and helplessly before the material and ideal "data" discovered by reason and that permits them to pillage and plunder the "one thing necessary" - this philosophy does not lead man towards truth but forever turns him away from it.


Lev Shestov


Boulogne s. Seine
April, 1937