According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), in a theological dispute with him Shade said that, when he was small, he thought Original Sin meant Cain killing Abel:
SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon. (note to Line 549)
In his book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1936) Lev Shestov says that sin began with something that is quite dissimilar from what we have been told about Adam and Eve; that it did not even begin with Adam, but, let us say, with Cain, who murdered his brother:
Киргегард не решается принять рассказ Книги Бытия о падении первого человека без оговорок и поправок. Он отводит библейского змея, он не может допустить, что неведение первого человека открывало ему истину и что знание добра и зла заключает в себе грех. Но ведь тот же Киргегард говорил нам, что грех есть обморок свободы, что противоположное понятие греху есть не добродетель, а свобода (или – он и это говорит – противоположное понятие греху и есть вера), и что свобода не есть, как обычно думают, возможность выбора между добром и злом – а возможность и, наконец: Бог значит, что все возможно. Как же вышло, что человек все же променял свободу на грех, отказался от безграничных возможностей, предоставленных ему Богом, и принял те ограниченные возможности, которые ему предложил разум? На этот вопрос Киргегард не отвечает – но он ставит его, хотя совсем в иной форме. «Если мне дозволено высказать свое пожелание, я бы пожелал, чтоб никто из читателей не вздумал проявлять свое глубокомыслие, предлагая вопрос: что было бы, если бы Адам не согрешил? В тот момент, как полагается, действительность, возможность отходит в сторону как некое ничто, и это соблазняет всех не любящих думать людей. И почему такая наука (пожалуй, лучше было сказать знание!) не может решиться держать людей в узде и понять, что ей самой положены пределы! Но когда вам предлагают глупый вопрос – берегитесь отвечать на него: станете таким же глупцом, как и вопрошающий. Нелепость этого вопроса не столько в нем самом, сколько в том, что его обращают к науке». Спорить не приходится: к науке с таким вопросом обращаться нельзя. Для науки действительность кладет навсегда конец возможности. Но следует ли из этого, что его вообще не полагается ставить? И что сам Киргегард не поставил его – если не explicite, то implicite? Когда он предлагал нам забыть о змее-искусителе, не ответил ли он этим на вопрос, который он теперь возбраняет ставить? И ответил от имени науки, которая естественно в библейском повествовании о змее принуждена признать ни на что не нужную и притом чисто внешнюю, ребяческую фантастику. Отклоняя змея, Киргегард, очевидно, поколебался пред лицом каких-то разумных, эмансипировавшихся от Бога – а то и даже несотворенных, вечных истин. А меж тем тут, именно тут больше чем когда-нибудь следовало бы ему вспомнить загадочные слова: «блажен, кто не соблазнится обо мне», о которых он так часто сам нам напоминает. И в самом деле, какой соблазн для разумного мышления представляет из себя библейский змей! Но ведь не меньше соблазна и во всем повествовании Библии о первородном грехе. Падение первого человека, как оно изображено в Св. Писании, совершенно несовместимо с нашими представлениями о возможном и должном, ничуть не меньше, чем разговаривающий с человеком и искушающий его змей. Сколько бы нас ни убеждали в истинности библейского повествования – все убеждения должны разбиться о логику здравого смысла. Если все-таки в этом рассказе заключается «истина», то бесспорно ее никак не защитить такими доводами, какими ее подорвать можно. Так что если истина веры, как и истина знания, держится только возможностью разумной защиты, то та глава Книги Бытия, в которой рассказывается о падении первого человека, должна быть стерта со страниц Св. Писания. Не то что глупо спрашивать, что было бы, если бы Адам и Ева не поддались искушению змея и не сорвали бы запретных плодов, можно с уверенностью утверждать, что прародители наши никогда не поддавались искушению, что змей их никогда не искушал, и даже того больше – что плоды с дерева познания не вреднее и опаснее, а скорей были полезнее и нужнее, чем плоды от других деревьев Эдема. Словом, если полагаться на собственную догадливость и проницательность, то, придется принять, что грех начался с чего-то, что вовсе и не похоже на то, что нам об Адаме и Еве рассказывали, что он начался даже не с Адама, а, скажем, с Каина, убившего своего брата. Тут мы своими собственными глазами – oculis mentis – усматриваем и наличность греха, и наличность вины, и нет никакой надобности прибегать к таким совершенно недопустимым в философии фантастическим deus ex machina, как змей-соблазнитель и предатель. Соответственно этому и идея греха теряет тот фантастический характер, который ей придало библейское повествование, и вполне заслуживает почетное звание истины, ибо ее можно защищать такого же рода соображениями, какими на нее нападать можно.
Kierkegaard hesitates to accept the story of Genesis about the Fall of the first man without reservations and without making corrections. He takes exception to the Biblical serpent, he cannot grant that the ignorance of the first man revealed the truth to him and that knowledge of good and evil implies sin. And yet Kierkegaard is the one who told us that sin is the swoon of freedom; that the opposite of sin is not virtue, but freedom (or—as he also says—the opposite of sin is faith); that freedom is not, as is commonly thought, the possibility of choosing between good and evil, but possibility; and finally, that God signifies that all is possible. How could man, in spite of this, have exchanged freedom for sin, renounced the boundless possibilities set before him by God, and taken instead that limited possibility offered him by reason? Kierkegaard has no answer to this question—but he does ask it, although in a different form. "If I might express my wish, it would be that not one of my readers display his depth of thought by proposing the question: what would have happened if Adam had not sinned? At the very moment that reality takes hold, possibility moves aside as if it were nothing, which tempts all those who do not like to think. And why can this kind of science (perhaps it would be better to say, knowledge!) not conclude that it is holding man back and understand that even it has limitations! But when someone asks you a stupid question, beware of answering it—you will become just as stupid as th~questioner. What is ridiculous about this question is not so much the question itself as the fact that it is addressed to science." There can be no argument here; this question should not be addressed to science. For science, reality always puts an end to possibility. But, does it follow from this that, generally speaking, the question ought not to be raised at all? And that Kierkegaard himself did not raise it—if not explicite, then implicite? When he proposes that we forget about the serpent-tempter, was this not his answer to the question which he now forbids us to ask? And he answered in the name of science, which is naturally forced to admit that there is nothing necessary in the Biblical narrative of the serpent, and that it is, moreover, a purely external, childish fantasy. In rejecting the serpent, Kierkegaard evidently hesitated in the face of some rational truths, which are emancipated from God, and in fact uncreated and eternal. But, at the same time, it is here, right at this point, more than anywhere else, that we ought to recall the enigmatic words: "blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me," of which Kierkegaard himself reminds us so often. Indeed, what an offense the Biblical serpent offers for rational thinking! But then, the entire story told in the Bible about original sin is no less an offense. The Fall of Man, as described in the Scriptures, is completely incompatible with our notions of what is possible and what ought to be, no less incompatible than a serpent who holds a conversation with a man and tempts him. However much we may be convinced of the truthfulness of the Biblical story, every conviction must fall before the logic of common sense. If there is, nevertheless, some "truth" to be found in this story, it is indisputable that it cannot be defended by the same means with which it can be demolished. And so, if the truth of faith, like the truth of knowledge, is maintained only by the possibility of rational defense, then that chapter of Genesis in which the story of the Fall is told ought to be erased from the pages of Holy Scripture. Not that it would be stupid to ask what would have happened if Adam and Eve had not surrendered to the blandishments of the serpent and had not picked the forbidden fruit; it can be confidently asserted that our ancestors would never have given in to temptation, that the serpent would never have tempted them, and, what is even more, that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was not more harmful and dangerous, but instead more useful and necessary, than the fruit of the other trees in Eden. In short, if we rely upon our own insight and perspicacity, then we must assume that sin began with something that is quite dissimilar from what we have been told about Adam and Eve; that it did not even begin with Adam, but, let us say, with Cain, who murdered his brother. Here we see with our own eyes—oculis mentis—both the presence of sin and the presence of guilt, and there is no need whatever to resort to such a fantastic deus ex machina, considered totally inadmissible by philosophy, as the serpent tempter and betrayer. Consequently, even the idea of sin loses the fantastic character lent it by the Biblical narrative, and fully deserves the honorable title of truth, for it can be defended with considerations of the same sort that can be used to attack it. (Chapter IX: "Knowledge as Fall")
Søren Kierkegaard is the author of "In Vino Veritas (The Banquet)" (1845). In Alexander Blok's poem Neznakomka ("The Unknown Woman," 1906) tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits shout: In vino veritas!:
А рядом у соседних столиков
Лакеи сонные торчат,
И пьяницы с глазами кроликов
«In vino veritas!» кричат.
And nearby, at other tables,
waiters drowsily hover,
and tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits
shout: In vino veritas!
(VN's translation)
Blok's poem ends as follows:
В моей душе лежит сокровище,
И ключ поручен только мне!
Ты право, пьяное чудовище!
Я знаю: истина в вине.
A treasure lies in my soul,
and I alone have the keeping of its key.
Those drunken brutes are right:
indeed, – there is truth in wine...
Lev Shestov is the author of Potestas clavium. Vlast’ klyuchey (“Power of the Keys,” 1923). In Tysyacha i odna noch’ (“A Thousand and One Nights”), a Preface to Potestas clavium, Shestov says that mankind is plunged into a perpetual night – even in a thousand and one nights:
Человечество живёт не в свете, а во тьме, окутанное одною непрерывною ночью. Нет, не одной, и не двумя, и не десятью - а тысячью и одной ночью!
Mankind does not live in the light but in the bosom of darkness; it is plunged into a perpetual night. No! Not in one or two or ten but in a thousand and one nights! (4)
Part Three of Potestas clavium consists of three essays the first of which is entitled Memento mori. In his Commentary Kinbote describes a clockwork toy that Shade kept as a kind of memento mori and mentions the key:
By a stroke of luck I have seen it! One evening in May or June I dropped in to remind my friend about a collection of pamphlets, by his grandfather, an eccentric clergyman, that he had once said was stored in the basement. I found him gloomily waiting for some people (members of his department, I believe, and their wives) who were coming for a formal dinner. He willingly took me down into the basement but after rummaging among piles of dusty books and magazines, said he would try to find them some other time. It was then that I saw it on a shelf, between a candlestick and a handless alarm clock. He, thinking I might think it had belonged to his dead daughter, hastily explained it was as old as he. The boy was a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow was now all bent and broken. He said, brushing the dust off his sleeves, that he kept it as a kind of memento mori--he had had a strange fainting fit one day in his childhood while playing with that toy. We were interrupted by Sybil's voice calling from above; but never mind, now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key. (note to Line 143)
At the end of his poem Shade mentions some neighbor's gardener (according to Kinbote, it was his black gardener) who goes by trundling an empty barrow up the lane:
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly--
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess--goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. (ll. 996-999)
Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Shade’s murderer, Jakob Gradus is a son of Martin Gradus, a Protestant minister in Riga:
Jakob Gradus called himself variously Jack Degree or Jacques de Grey, or James de Gray, and also appears in police records as Ravus, Ravenstone, and d'Argus. Having a morbid affection for the ruddy Russia of the Soviet era, he contended that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for grape, vinograd, to which a Latin suffix had adhered, making in Vinogradus. His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business. Martin Gradus died in 1920, and his widow moved to Strasbourg where she soon died, too. (note to Line 17)
In Potestas clavium Shestov quotes Martin Luther (1483-1546), a leader of the Protestant Reformation who mentions fidei summus gradus (the highest degree of faith) in De servo arbitrio (“On the Bondage of the Will,” 1525), Luther’s reply to Erasmus of Rotterdam (the author De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, 1524):
Лютер опытом своей жизни был приведён к такому признанию, которое для нашего уха звучит, как кощунственный парадокс: "Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem, qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat, credere justum, qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur ulla ratione comprehendere, quomodo is Deus sit misericors et justus, qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide" (De servo arbitrio, Вейм. изд., т. XVIII, 633 стр.), т. е.: высшая степень веры - верить, что тот милосерд, кто столь немногих спасает и столь многих осуждает, что тот справедлив, кто, по своему решению, сделал нас преступными, так что, выражаясь словами Эразма, кажется, что он радуется мукам несчастных и скорей достоин ненависти, чем любви. Если бы своим разумом я мог бы понять, как такой Бог может быть справедливым и милосердным, не было бы нужды в вере. Я не могу здесь приводить дальнейших признаний Лютера, но тот, кто поймёт весь ужас человека, приведённого к таким признаниям, поймёт и смысл католического potestas clavium.
Luther's own experience forced him to that confession which resounds in our ears like a blasphemous paradox: Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem, qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat, credere justum, qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur possem ulla ratione comprehendere, quomodo si Deus sit misericors et justus qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide (De servo arbitrio, ed. Weimar, I, XVIII, p. 633). That is, "the highest degree of faith is to believe that He is merciful who saves so few and damns so many men, that He is righteous who by His own will has necessarily made us guilty so that, according to Erasmus, it seems that He rejoices in the suffering of the miserable and is more worthy of being hated than loved. If I could understand with my reason how such a God can be righteous and merciful, faith would not be necessary." I cannot here quote other confessions of Luther's, but he who has understood the horror that a man forced to such confessions must have felt will also understand the meaning of Catholicism's potestas clavium. (Part One, 4)
Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy begins with Shestov's essay Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky (instead of a Preface). In a letter of Oct. 31, 1838, to his brother Dostoevski twice repeats the word gradus (degree):
Философию не надо полагать простой математической задачей, где неизвестное - природа... Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает бога, следовательно, исполняет назначенье философии. Следовательно, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... Следовательно, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Philosophy should not be regarded as a mere equation where nature is the unknown quantity… Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God, and consequently does the philosopher’s work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than philosophical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!..
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
October 31, 1838, was Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday. Shade’s birthday, July 5, is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’s birthday (while Shade was born in 1898, Kinbote and Gradus were born in 1915). 1915 – 1898 = 17.