Lev Shestov Quotes on God
Lev Shestov (Lev Isaakovich Shvartsman, 1866–1938) — the Russian Jewish philosopher whose long Paris exile from 1921 onward made him one of the principal twentieth-century philosophical voices of religious irrationalism — gave Russian religious philosophy its most uncompromising critique of the rationalist traditions of natural theology. The central thesis, developed across Athens and Jerusalem (1938), Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1936), and the polemical confrontations with Husserl, Spinoza, and the Greek philosophical tradition, is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God before whom the impossible becomes possible — cannot be accommodated within the necessitarian categories of the Greek philosophical tradition that has dominated Western theology, and that the proper philosophical-religious response is the leap of faith into the absurd that Shestov found in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and the Hebrew Bible. The framework shaped subsequent Russian and broader European religious existentialism through Berdyaev, Levinas, and the wider twentieth-century engagement with the limits of philosophical rationalism.
Quotes
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“Athens and Jerusalem cannot be reconciled.”
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“Reason has its limits; faith begins where reason ends.”
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Attributed to Lev Shestov:
“All things are possible to him who believes.”
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“Spinoza’s formula, “Deus=natura=substantia”, like all conclusions drawn from it in his Ethics and his earlier works, simply means that there is no God. This discovery of Spinoza’s became the starting point for modern philosophical thought. Foreword p. xxxix”
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“Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides’ words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematic as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. P. 6”
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“There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no “good work” can open the doors to man’s “perpetual confinement”. Dostoievsky’s barrack vows of “improvement” now appeared to him as a sacrilege. He experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther’s when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent. P. 10”
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