Lev Shestov
1866-1938 · Russian Religious Thought · Little-known
Shestov was a Russian Jewish existentialist who set Jerusalem against Athens. Athens wants necessity, the rule that things could not have gone otherwise; Jerusalem wants a God who can do anything, and he took Jerusalem. Biblical faith refuses the consolation that reason offers. Reason tells you that what has happened can never be undone, and he called that the deepest despair. Faith for him is the power to believe the impossible, that even the past can be revoked.
Signature
The position Shestov is most identified with in the Profiler:
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable
- Paradox
- Existential Leap
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable (75 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Multiplicity (71 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- War
- leans Militarism (83 on a 0–100 scale from Pacifism to Militarism)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Shestov refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Non-Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Freedom / Union with God
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Personal Judgment
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Phenomenalism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Grounded in God / Skepticism
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Divine Command
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Radical Freedom / Synergism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Creation ex Nihilo
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Kairotic
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Divine Revelation
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Paradox
- Existential Leap
What is the status of paradox? - Law
- Divine Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Human Nature
- Redeemably Corrupted
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?