André Desilets

This article offers an introduction to the thought of the Russian-Jewish religious philosopher Leon Shestov (1866-1938), whose work constitutes a radical critique of Western rational philosophy. Through an analytical study drawing on Shestov's principal texts, André Desilets sets out this thinker's fundamental approach: the refusal to submit human existence to the rational necessity inherited from Aristotle and Spinoza. Confronted with evil and the horrors of history, Shestov opposes faith as the only power capable of overcoming the inevitable, asserting that God makes "all things possible." The contribution of this article lies in its illumination of the theological significance of this paradoxical philosophy: by challenging the omnipotence of reason, Shestov opens a propaedeutic to faith, which Father Zenkowsky considered indispensable to any serious theological reflection, and which converges with contemporary currents that transcend established philosophical and religious ideologies.