Athens and Jerusalem
"For more than two thousand years, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the irreconcilable opposition between Greek rationality (Athens) and biblical revelation (Jerusalem). In Athens and Jersusalem, Lev Shestov -- an inspiration for the French existentialists and the foremost interlocutor of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber during the interwar years -- makes the gripping confrontation between these symbolic poles of ancient wisdom his philosophical testament, an argumentative and stylistic tour de force. Although the Russian-born Shestov is little known in the Anglophone world today, his writings influenced many twentieth-century European thinkers, such as Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Czesław Miłosz, and Joseph Brodsky. Athens and Jerusalem is Shestov's final, groundbreaking work on the philosophy of religion from an existential perspective. This new, annotated edition of Bernard Martin's classic translation adds references to the cited works as well as glosses of passages from the original Greek, Latin, German, and French. Athens and Jerusalem is Shestov at his most profound and most eloquent and is the clearest expression of his thought that shaped the evolution of continental philosophy and European literature in the twentieth century. "
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What Hacker News says
- A short list of books that cost some candles after I reached 40 (has been very picky about books since then). I not only read them into late night but also went back to them whenever I need some mental boost.
- The Soul of a New Machine
- Showstoppers
- iWoz
- Athens and Jerusalem (Shestov)
I'm devouring many F & SFs (right now reading Arthur Clarke) but so far nothing really sticks. A lot of them are interesting but I'm keeping counting the pages I read. I used to burn candles reading them back in the day, but the magic was lost. I'm going to try out some recommendations I got on HN and see what happens.
- "Brother Karamazov", "Jean-Christophe" and "Athens and Jerusalem".
I come back to these books from time to time. All three give me some kind of inner peace or more mental strength.
- No need, I have read David Bentley Hart's sources: Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian [1], Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas †. Great thinkers, the "fathers", they really did a bang-up job merging Judaism and Greek Neoplatonism. Can't say you can't hear Plotinus' One every time Christians speak of God's Unity 3-in-1 and Filioque [2]. Lev Shestov's classical Athens and Jerusalem is a good summarization of the whole process.
My absolute bang-up theologian is however Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, he/they really took Plotinus to the max: "God is not only the cause of all being, but also of all non-being.", "The Divine Names", Chapter IV, section 7. That Greek ouden, non-being, taken shamelessly from the thoughts of Anaxagoras and Parmenides.
However, all these great Generative Pre-trained Transformer ramblings of the theologians (ChatGPT is the best theologian of all times, it can go on and on, till the gods come home) have nothing to do with the practice of religion. For all the books that I have read and hoarded, all the major religions, and some minor ones, would burn me at the stake, they are very jealous of each other.
The fact of the matter remains: for the past 3-4,000 years, probably as a side effect of humans coming together in such large numbers (5,000 years ago, the city Uruk had 50-80,000 inhabitants, absolutely unimaginable how they lived), this mental parasite, this bug (as in software) of a "Beyond", probably a remnant from the hundreds of thousand of years of searching for food beyond that hill, has plagued everything about us: our behaviour, our mores, our concepts. And in more recent times, it has allowed for the most vile of us to control all of us, from the Borgias to the House of Saud, not forgetting the local pedophile priest.
† I have also read Mr. Hart, of course, his best work is probably his thesis "Beauty, Violence, and Infinity: A Question Concerning Christian Rhetoric", all the core ideas are there: the atemporal fall, the salvation as free for all eschaton.
[1] I particularly remember this quote from Isaac the Syrian: "There will be a time when even the word 'god' will be forgotten". In one of his Ascetical Homilies.
[2] "The One is the absolute principle of all things, the ultimate ground of being, the transcendent source of all existence. It is the beginning and end of all things, the unchanging and eternal reality that underlies all that is mutable and transitory." (Enneads, V.3.1) The Enneads were written around the year 240, 400 years before Maximus the Confessor.
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%B4%CE%AD%C...
