INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION BY RAMONA FOTIADE
1. Benjamin Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, comp. and ed. Nathalie Baranoff and Michel Carassou (Paris: Editions Plasma, 1982), p. 129 (all translations from the French are mine unless otherwise stated). Editions Non Lieu of Paris published a new edition in 2016. Fondane had entrusted the manuscript of the book to his friend Victoria Ocampo before his arrest and deportation in 1944, and the published work was compiled and edited by Shestov’s daughter in collaboration with Fondane’s copyright holder.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” chap. 12 in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 387–467.
3. Michel Foucault, “La pensée du dehors,” Critique, no. 229 (June 1966): 523–46; translated as “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside” by Brian Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987).
4. Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible, trans. S. S. Koteliansky, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence (London: Martin Secker, 1920), part I, §22.
5. The family copy of the Septuagint or Greek Old Testament, included in the list of books in Shestov’s personal library compiled by Nathalie Baranoff-Chestov, includes a number of handwritten annotations on 2 Maccabees 13, which recounts the victory of Judas Maccabeus against the Greek troops in 163 BCE (cf. Vetus Testamentum, ex versione Septuaginta interpretum olim ad fidem, vol. II, ex officina J. Heideggeri & Soc., 1731, in the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris).
6. Lev Shestov, “Foreword,” in Athens and Jerusalem, below, p. 59.
7. Lev Shestov, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” chap. XIV, below, p. 197.
8. Ibid., p. 198.
9. Ibid., pp. 198–199.
10. 1 Corinthians 13, quoted in “A Thousand and One Nights (By Way of a Preface),” in Potestas Clavium, trans., with an introduction, by Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1968), pp. 24–25.
11. Lev Shestov, “Parmenides in Chains,” chap. I, below, p. 71.
12. Lev Shestov, “Разрушающий и созидающий миры. (По поводу 80-летнего юбилея Толстого)” [Destroyer and creator of worlds. (On Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday anniversary)] in Russkaia mysl, no. 1 (January 1909): 25–40.
13. Ibid., §6.
14. See, for instance, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” chap. VIII, below, p. 159; 205; 268: “Because man is presumptuous and imagines himself to be wise, righteous and holy, it is necessary that he be humbled by the law, that thus that beast—his supposed righteousness—without whose killing man cannot live, be put to death” (Luther, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 3:23); “Therefore God must have a strong hammer to break the rocks, and a fire blazing to the middle of the heavens to overthrow the mountains, that is, to subdue that stubborn and impenitent beast—presumption—in order that man, reduced to nothing through his contrition, should despair of his power, his righteousness and his works” (Luther, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 3:23).
15. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 5. Shestov quotes this verse in his obituary of Husserl, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher,” published posthumously in Russian in Russkie zapiski, no. 12 (1938), and in French in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, no. 1–2 (January–February 1940), and recalls the conversations he had on this topic with Husserl in Paris in 1928: “Almost all of my conversations with Husserl revolved about these themes. When he visited me at my home in Paris, immediately after dinner (which he seemed not even to have noticed), he took me into another room and immediately plunged into philosophical discussion. At that time I was working on the first part of my book Athens and Jerusalem,—the section called ‘Parmenides in Chains.’” See “In Memory of a Great Philosopher,” in Speculation and Revelation, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), p. 271.
16. This essay, which was originally part of Shestov’s unfinished book on Luther, Sola fide, was first published in Russian in Sovremennye zapiski in 1920, then in French in 1923, with Editions Plon, and finally reprinted in the volume In Job’s Balances (1929 for the Russian edition and 1932 for the first English edition, published by Dent & Sons; reprinted by Ohio University Press with a new introduction by Bernard Martin in 1975).
17. See Shestov, “Parmenides in Chains,” chap. V, below, p. 69ff.
18. Maxim Gorki, “Souvenirs sur Tolstoï” [Memories of Tolstoy], in La nouvelle revue française 87 (1 December 1920), p. 894; the same passage is cited in Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, p. 177.
19. Shestov, “Parmenides in Chains,” chap. VI, below, p. 97–98.
20. The first chapter of The Revelations of Death was initially published in French translation in La nouvelle revue française, no. 101 (February 1922): 134–58, as an article entitled “Dostoievsky et la lutte contre les évidences” [Dostoevsky and the fight against the self-evident], which established Shestov’s reputation in Parisian intellectual circles and earned him a number of accolades from prestigious writers and philosophers such as André Gide, Charles Du Bos, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Daniel Halévy.
21. Lev Shestov, “A Letter from Lev Shestov to His Daughters,” 13 April 1921, in In Job’s Balances, trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney, with an introduction by Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), p. viii. Reprinted from the French edition of the volume published in 1971 with Flammarion.
22. Lev Shestov, “Children and Stepchildren of Time: Spinoza in History,” in In Job’s Balances, trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney, with an introduction by Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), part III, “On the Philosophy of History,” p. 257.
23. Lev Shestov, “On the Philosophy of the Middle Ages,” chap. III, below, p. 220–21.
24. Shestov, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” chap. IX, below, p. 165.
25. Ibid., chap. X, p. 171.
26. Idem.
27. Shestov, “Foreword,” below, p. 66–67.
28. Ibid., p. 51.
29. Ibid., part II, p. 66.
30. Unpublished notes on Tertullian, in MS2107, Fasc. 60 of the Shestov Archives, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne.
31. See note 15 (Shestov, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl,” in Speculation and Revelation, trans. Bernard Martin).
32. The article, “Der gefesselte Parmenides: Über die Quellen der metaphysischen Wahrheiten” [Parmenides in chains: On the sources of metaphysical truth], was published in Logos, no. 1 (1931): 17–87.
33. Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, 114. [“In another conversation, Shestov adds: ‘I don’t know if Heidegger’s lecture What is metaphysics? is a follow-up to our encounter but in any case it does seem that something has shattered. I am still waiting for it . . .’”].
34. Shestov, “Parmenides in Chains,” chap. III, below, p. 81.
35. Ibid., chap. IX, p. 110.
36. See the eponymous aphorism, “The Irrational Residue of Being,” in the second part of In Job’s Balances, “Revolt and Submission,” § XLIII, pp. 221–25.
37. Shestov, “Foreword,” part II, below, p. 64.
38. Lev Shestov, “The Autonomy of the Ethical,” chap. XIV, in Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Elinor Hewitt (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969). The first drafts of chapters 14, 15, and 16 in the book on Kierkegaard date from 1930 to 1933. See also Nathalie Baranoff-Chestov, Vie de Léon Chestov, trans. from the Russian by Blanche Bronstein-Vinaver, vol. 2: Les dernières années (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1993), pp. 101–2.
39. Shestov, “In the Bull of Phalaris,” chap. X, below, p. 177.
40. Ibid., p. 175.
41. Ibid., chap. XIV, p. 196.
42. Shestov, “Foreword,” part II, below, p. 64.
43. Lev Shestov, “On the Philosophy of the Middle Ages,” chap. X, below, p. 280.
44. Ibid., chapter IX, p. 267.
45. Lev Shestov, “On the Sources of ‘Conceptions of the World,’” aphorism XXVIII in Athens and Jerusalem, part IV, “On the Second Dimension of Thought,” below, p. 303.
46. Cf. The aphorisms XXVIII “Ob istochnikah ‘mirovozzrenia’” [On the sources of “Conceptions of the World”] and LXIV “Vybor” [The choice], in Lev Shestov, Afini i Ierusalim [Athens and Jerusalem], Sochinenia, vol. II (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), pp. 631–32; 659–60. See also “On the Sources of ‘Conceptions of the World,’” in Athens and Jerusalem, below, pp. 303–4; and the first version of the same aphorism: “Le choix,” in Lev Shestov, “Look Back and Struggle,” in Forum philosophicum, no. 1 (1930): 107–11.
47. Cf. Shestov, part III, “Children and Stepchildren of Time,” chap. 2, in In Job’s Balances, pp. 253–59.
48. A reference to the “gentleman of retrograde and jeering physiognomy” in Notes from the Underground who mounts a virulent attack against reason in the name of individual freedom: “Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all the logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!”
49. Shestov, “On the Sources of ‘Conceptions of the World,’” below, p. 304.
50. Shestov, “A Thousand and One Nights,” in Potestas Clavium, pp. 3–26. See also aphorism 15, “Rules and Exceptions,” in the first part: “Philo was the first to insist on the rationality of Biblical doctrine. The logos of Greek philosophy, its eternal reason, is already completely contained in the revelation given to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai. God is rational, the essence of God is reason” (pp. 99–100).
51. Lev Shestov, “What Is Truth?” in Potestas Clavium, p. 361.
52. Lev Shestov, “Tchetvertoe Evangelie” [The fourth Gospel], in Sochinenia, vol. II (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), pp. 649–50.
53. See Shestov’s letter to Fondane (31 July 1938), reproduced in Nathalie Baranoff-Chestov, Vie de Léon Chestov II, p. 212; and manuscript MS2107, Fasc. 57 page 24bis, in the Shestov Archives at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne.
54. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 376–77.
INTRODUCTION BY BERNARD MARTIN
1. With the exception of Benjamin Fondane who, because of his own early and tragic death, did not—as he might otherwise have done—succeed in publicizing his master’s work.
2. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage Books, 1955; originally published in France in 1942 by Librairie Gallimard), p. 19.
3. Ibid., pp. 24–28. Camus here discusses what he calls Shestov’s “leap” towards God, a leap which he himself rejects as an “escape” from an authentic awareness of the reality of the absurd.
4. History of Russian Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Fifth Printing, 1964), p. 426.
5. Although three of his books—All Things Are Possible, Penultimate Words and Other Essays (or, in the London edition, Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays), and In Job’s Balances—were translated into English and published in the United States or Great Britain, they seem to have made hardly any impact when they first appeared many years ago and have long been out of print.
6. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1958), p. 14.
7. For the facts of Shestov’s life I have relied on Lowtzky’s article “Lev Shestov as I Remember Him,” published in Russian in the review Grani, no. 45 (1960) and no. 46 (1961) in Frankfurt-am-Main, and on personal conversation and correspondence with Shestov’s daughters, Madame Natalie Baranov and Madame Tatiana Rageot of Paris.
8. Sergei Bulgakov’s “Elements of the Religious Outlook of Lev Shestov” in Sovremennye zapiski, no. 68, Paris, 1939. Written on the occasion of Shestov’s death.
9. Published in the journal Kievskoe slovo on February 22, 1895.
10. All Things Are Possible (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1920), pp. 10–11.
11. Ibid., p. 9.
12. Penultimate Words (Boston: John W. Luce and Co., 1916), p. xi.
13. Ibid., p. xiii.
14. Quoted in Donald A. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 34.
15. All three essays are included in the collection entitled In Job’s Balances, translated by Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney and published in London in 1932. In Job’s Balances also contains important essays on Plotinus and Spinoza as well as fifty-two trenchant aphorisms on philosophy, science and religion collected under the heading “Revolt and Submission.”
16. Fondane’s manuscript Sur les rives de l’Illisus, containing accounts of his visits with Shestov, has not yet been published in full. Some excerpts appeared in the June 1964 issue of Mercure de France under the title Rencontres avec Léon Chestov. (The book was later published under that title by Editions Plasma in 1982; a new edition came out in 2016 with Editions Non Lieu, Paris. Fondane had entrusted the manuscript of the book to his friend Victoria Ocampo before his arrest and deportation in 1944, and the published work was compiled by Shestov’s daughter Natalie Baranov and Fondane’s copyright holder, Michel Carassou. [R.F.])
17. Especially the essays and aphorisms in the collection entitled In Job’s Balances.
18. See the essay “Science and Free Inquiry” which serves as the Foreword to In Job’s Balances, especially pp. xxv ff. Cf. also the first part of Athens and Jerusalem, entitled “Parmenides in Chains,” below, pp. 69 ff.
19. Below, p. 62.
20. Below, p. 350, Foreword note 12. Cf. In Job’s Balances, pp. 34 ff.
21. Notes from the Underground, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: The New American Library, 1961), p. 99.
22. Below, pp. 60 ff.
23. Below, pp. 65 ff.
24. Below, pp. 66 ff.
25. Below, pp. 64–66.
26. In Job’s Balances, p. 218.
27. Below, p. 65.
28. In Job’s Balances, p. 82.
29. Below, p. 324–25.
30. Loc. cit.
31. In Job’s Balances, p. 141.
32. Ibid., p. 230.
33. Loc. cit.
34. So he calls them in Athens and Jerusalem. See below, p. 43. In In Job’s Balances Shestov insists that, though it has given us many gifts, science cannot give us ultimate truth for—in refusing to recognize the unique, the unrepeatable, the fortuitous—it has turned away from the realm in which real truth lies. “There is no need to renounce the gifts of the earth but we must not forget heaven for their sakes. However much we may have attained in science, yet we must remember that science can give us no truth because, by its very nature, it will not and cannot seek for the truth. The truth lies there where science sees the ‘nothing,’ in that single, uncontrollable, incomprehensible thing which is always at war with explanation, the ‘fortuitous’” (p. 193).
35. Below, pp. 286–87, 325–26.
36. Cosmos and History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), pp. 161–62.
37. Cf. below, p. 300.
38. Below, p. 109.
39. Loc. cit.
40. In Job’s Balances, p. 239.
41. Italics mine. [B.M.]
42. Pp. 40–44, above.
43. Below, p. 66.
FOREWORD BY LEV SHESTOV
1. Spinoza, Ethics, V, Proposition XXXIII: “third kind of knowledge is eternal.” [R.F.]
2. “Truths of reason” are similar to Descartes’ eternal truths, because they are perfectly necessary and cannot be denied without contradiction, whereas “truths of fact” are merely contingent and can be subject to dispute. The central insight of Leibniz’s system is that all existential propositions, based on experience, are truths of fact, not truths of reason. [R.F.]
3. Kant underlines on faith.
4. The expression, literally meaning “God from the machine,” was coined from the Greek phrase ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός (apò mēkhanês theós), which designated the machine used to bring the actors playing the gods onto the stage. By extension, the term has evolved to mean a plot device, whereby an unsolvable problem (such as the existence of the world) is suddenly resolved by the contrived intervention of a character (which in the case of Leibniz’s “pre-established harmony” corresponds to God’s intervention). [R.F.]
5. Spinoza, Ethics, part IV, proposition 52. [R.F.]
6. Ibid., part III, preface. [R.F.]
7. Spinoza, Political Treatise I, 4. [R.F.]
8. Spinoza, Ethics, part IV, proposition 68. [R.F.]
9. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, §1. [R.F.]
10. Spinoza, Ethics, part V, proposition 23, note. [R.F.]
11. Ibid., proposition 42. [R.F.]
12. Dostoevsky dared to do this. I have already indicated many times that the critique of reason was given us for the first time by Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, whereas everyone believes that it is to be sought in Kant.
13. Mark 11:24.
14. 1 Corinthians 2:9.
I: PARMENIDES IN CHAINS
1. Republic, 533C.
2. Metaphysics, 984b, 10.
3. Metaphysics, 1015a, 28 ff.
4. Psalms 137:5–6.
5. Theaetetus, 196D.
6. Enneads, II, 5, 3.
7. Plato, Republic, 476C.
8. Plato, Protagoras, 345D.
9. Timaeus, 41B.
10. Enneads, VI, 7, 41.
11. Ethics, IV, LXVII.
12. Ethics, IV, LII.
13. Republic, 519A.
14. Phaedo, 83D.
15. Phaedo, 80A.
16. Republic, 509B.
17. Republic, 582C.
18. Republic, 585E, 586A.
19. Metaphysics, 1072b, 23.
20. Gorgias, 484B.
21. Timaeus, 47B.
22. Eth. Nic., 1139b, 10.
23. Italics mine. [L.S.]
24. Matthew 17:20.
25. Epictetus was far more candid in this matter. “The beginning of philosophy,” he said, “is the recognition of its own powerlessness and of the impossibility of fighting against Necessity.”
26. See Richard Kroner’s outstanding book, From Kant to Hegel, the best of all that have been written on the history of German idealism.
II: IN THE BULL OF PHALARIS
1. Ethics, II, 49.
2. “If the heavens should collapse over him, the ruins would strike him unafraid” (Horace).
3. 1 Corinthians 15:32.
4. Apology, 38A.
5. Ethica Nicomachea, 1153b, 20.
6. Enneads, I, IV, 7, 8, 9.
7. Ethica Nicomachea, 1153b, 32.
8. Metaphysics, 980a, 21.
9. Tract. Theo.-Polit., XV, 19f.
10. Ethics, I, App.
11. Ethics, IV, Praef.
12. Ethics, I, 33.
13. Ethics, I, 17.
14. Ethics, V, 36.
15. Tract. Theol.-Polit., XIV.
16. Tract. Theol.-Polit., XIV.
17. Gr. Gal. Komm., WA I.S., 483.
18. Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 225.
19. Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 68.
20. Principia Philosophiae, Ed. 1678, I. 49.
21. The Will to Power, Book IV.
22. Why I Am So Clever.
23. No matter what certain commentators may think, the term “the Absurd” which is so characteristic of him was borrowed by Kierkegaard not from the German philosophers but from Tertullian, whom he greatly admired and to whom he attributed, as did almost everyone in the nineteenth century, the famous credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd].
24. Italics mine. [L.S.]
25. Italics mine. [L.S.]
26. See the last chapter of my book In Job’s Balances.
27. Speaking of the world of the “good” created by Socrates, I said in my book Potestas Clavium: “This world does not know frontiers and limits. It offers shelter to millions of men and fills them with a spiritual nourishment that satisfies all. All who wish to enter it are received like dear and longed for guests . . . There miraculous metamorphoses take place. The weak become powerful, the artisan a Philosopher, the poor rich, the ugly wondrously beautiful.” When I wrote these lines about Socrates, I still knew nothing of Kierkegaard.
III: ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES
1. Italics mine. [L.S.]
2. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, 49.
3. Ibid., p. 54.
4. Ibid., p. 71.
5. Ibid., p. 50.
6. Ibid., p. 71.
7. One could also refer to the passage of the Stromata where Clement says that if the knowledge of God could be separated from eternal salvation and if he had to choose between them, he would decide for the knowledge of God.
8. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 205–6.
9. Ibid., I, p. 213.
10. Ibid., I, p. 224.
11. Ibid., II, p. 224.
12. Metaphysics, 981a, 26.
13. Cf. Eth. Nic., 1140b, 31: “Scientific knowledge is intellectual perception of the universal and necessary.” That is why “all true knowledge can be taught and its content transmitted to others.” (Ibid., 1139b, 25.)
14. Summa Th. II, 1, 5, ad quartum.
15. L’esprit de la philosophie medievale, I, 63. The remarkable works of Meyerson are particularly significant in this respect. He also represents the human reason as being “obsessed” by the desire to subordinate everything to the principle of contradiction. Reason knows that this task is unrealisable, it knows that to wish the impossible is madness, but it is incapable of overcoming itself. This is no longer the raison déraisonable [unreasonable reason] of Montaigne—it is reason somehow become mad.
16. Ibid., I, p. 43.
17. Ibid., I, pp. 35–36.
18. De Civ. Dei, XIV, 12.
19. Italics mine. [L.S.]
20. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, 122.
21. Cf. Parmenides in Chains.
22. See Enneads, V, III.12.
23. See, for example, R. Seeberg’s Die Theologie des Joh. D. Scotus, from whom I have borrowed the expression “schlechthinnige und regellose Willkür.” According to him, although Scotus flinches from such reproaches when he denies that anything can be good in itself for the creature or throws out other scholastic quips of the same kind, the arbitrariness of God is in him limited by His bonitas.
24. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 64.
25. And, referring to St. Augustine, Duns Scotus wrote: “The books of the holy canon are not to be believed except insofar as one must first believe the church which approves and authorizes those books and their content.”
26. Italics mine. [L.S.]
27. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, 37.
28. Summa Th. II, Q. 4, 8, 3
29. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 220.
30. Ibid., I, p. 24. Italics mine. [L.S.]
31. This is perhaps the moment to recall Kierkegaard’s words: “to believe against reason is martyrdom.”
32. Dogmengeschichte, II, 226.
33. Summa Th. I, Q. 25, 2.
34. Cf. Eth. Nic., 1139b, 9.
35. Matthew 3:9.
36. Gilson, L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, 140.
37. Ibid., II, p. 133.
38. Metaphysics, 1004a, 34.
39. Eth. Nic., 1141a, 17.
40. Metaphysics, 1005b, 25.
41. Romans 8:20–21.
42. I call attention in this connection to Kierkegaard’s remarkable book, Repetition. When Kierkegaard found himself confronting the question of the limits of God’s omnipotence, he left the famous philosopher Hegel who was also “maestro di coloro che sanno” (master of all those who knew), and went to the “private thinker,” Job. That Kierkegaard dared to include Job among the “thinkers” already appears to us as a gross presumption. But through Job Kierkegaard arrived at his Absurd and at the fundamental principle of his existential philosophy: God—this means that all things are possible. [R.F.]
43. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, 14.
44. Cf. his letters to Mersenne of 15 April and 27 May 1630. We read in the latter: “He (God) was also free to bring it about that it not be true that all the lines drawn from the center to the circumference of a circle are equal, just as He was free not to create the world.”
45. Cf. the fragment of Tertullian quoted above.
46. Damian in another place says: “As we can therefore rightly say that God could bring it about that Rome, before it was built, not have been built, so we can say no less without contradiction that God may also bring it about that Rome, after it was built, not be built.” It is also interesting that he allows himself to argue with Saint Jerome, from whom he borrows the example of the virgo corrupta: the hand of God means more to him than Saint Jerome.
47. S. c. gent. I, VII.
48. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, 238. At the end of his second volume (pages 214–218), Gilson returns once again to the idea of the biblical serpent and to those who wished to create a philosophy that should not be bound by the Greek principle and declares “the object of their wishes does not belong to the order of the possible.” This, of course, is certain if one admits in advance that it is given to the Greek speculation to determine once for all the limits of the possible and that the biblical “revelation” does not pass beyond the limits of what appeared possible to the Greeks.
49. Summ. Th. I, Q. 47, 3 ad pr.
50. Phaedus, 82D.
51. Apology, 22C.
52. Phaedo, 82C.
53. St. Augustine at times allowed himself to become infected with the “foolishness” of St. Paul’s faith. He did not write, it is true, the phrase that is so often attributed to him, virtutes gentium splendida vitia sunt, but potius vitia sunt. The idea is there, nevertheless.
54. Cf. Eth. Nic. (1111b, 20): “Man does not aspire to the impossible, and if he does, everyone will consider him weak in mind.” From this follows: “to aspire only to what is in our power.”
55. It is known that the text of Exodus (X, 20), “The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” gave a great deal of trouble not only to the theologians but also to the philosophers, and particularly to Leibniz.
56. Notes from the Underground, 1st Part, Chapter III.
57. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 99.
58. Eth. Nic. 1178b, 21. When Karl Werner said of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his tremendous work written with so much respect and love, that his conception of beatitude is only the transcription into Christian language of the Aristotelian conception of the beatitude of contemplative activity, he had certainly in mind this passage of the Ethics that I have just quoted as well as certain corresponding passages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
59. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 85.
60. Theaet., 176A.
61. It would not be exaggerated to regard Kierkegaard as the spiritual double of Dostoevsky. If in my former writings I have not mentioned Kierkegaard in speaking of Dostoevsky, it is only because I still did not know him; I have known Kierkegaard’s works only in the last few years.
62. Cf. de Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, p. 474: “The tone of his (St. Thomas’) refutations in the De unitate intellectus is of a vehemence that is not elsewhere met in his works.”
63. De Anima III, 430a, 17.
64. When St. Thomas Aquinas writes (S. Th. I, 16, 7): “no created truth is eternal, but only the truth of the divine intellect which alone is eternal and from which its truth is inseparable” or “it must be said that the laws of the circle and that two and three make five have eternity in the divine mind” etc., it is difficult not to see in this the intellectus separatus (or emancipatus) a Deo.
65. From this comes Spinoza’s “we feel and experience ourselves to be eternal.”
66. L’esprit de la philosophic médiévale, I, 123.
67. Ibid., I, p. 124.
68. Ibid., I, p. 117. Italics mine. [L.S.]
69. Ibid., I, p. 124. Italics mine. [L.S.]
70. As in Spinoza: “Contentment with oneself can arise from reason and that contentment which arises from reason is the highest possible.”
71. Eth. Nic., 1098b, 2.
72. Summa Th. I, 84, 5, concl.
73. Two historians as different as J. Tixeron and Harnack, who both, however, had the greatest admiration for St. Augustine, cannot prevent themselves from emphasizing “his habit of reflecting on his faith” (Histoire des dogmes, II, P. 362) and to remark that in him, “the moral point of view dominates the religious point of view” (Harnack, III, 216).
74. Summa Th. I, 1 and 2.
75. Summa Th. I, 96 ad sec.
76. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 70.
77. Ibid., p. 71.
78. Ethics, V, XXXVI.
79. Gilson cites (II, 222 and 278) some examples of the crude fashion in which Luther treated Aristotle. But we must not forget that Luther was the son of the declining Middle Ages and that the writers of the Middle Ages expressed themselves very crudely. We read, for example, in Duns Scotus: “What the Saracens, the most common swine, the pupils of Mohammed—as their scriptures make clear—expected when they awaited beatitude is that which is appropriate to swine, namely, gluttony and whoring.”
80. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, II, 221.
81. ad. Galatas, II, 14.
82. Ibid., p. 18.
83. Theodicy, sec. 37.
84. Nouveaux essais IV, Ch. XVII, sec. 25.
85. Nouveaux essais IV, Ch. XVIII, sec. 5.
86. Confessions, VI, 5, 7.
87. Theodicy, II, sec. 121.