Athens and Jerusalem

Lev Shestov (1866-1938) belongs to the small company of truly great religious philosophers of our time and his work deserves the closest attention of all who are seriously concerned with the problems of religious thought. Unfortunately, Shestov's stature has not hitherto been generally recognized nor has his work been widely studied. Even in Europe - where his genius was acknowledged by such figures as Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov in Russia, Jules de Gaultier, Lucien Lйvy-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, a quarter of a century after his death, his writings are little read. In America his name is practically 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 disciples1 to carry on his work. 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 hisexistentially 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.