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Religions > Atheism |
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| Date: |
01 Feb 2005 09:49:06 PM |
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On Christianity, Freedom, Miracles, etc. |
Long article about the best novel ever written:
Ivan Karamazov's Mistake
------------------
Ralph C. Wood
Copyright (c) 2002 First Things 128 (December 2002): 29-36.
It is has become commonplace to regard Ivan Karamazov's "Legend of
the Grand Inquisitor" as a prescient parable glorifying human freedom
and defending it against the kind of totalitarian threats it would face
in the twentieth century. Fyodor Dostoevsky's angry atheist delivers
an uncanny prophecy of the omnicompetent, freedom-denying state that
would arise in his own native Russia. But concerning the liberty that
is the only cure for state-sponsored oppression, Ivan is terribly
wrong. The Christ of the Grand Inquisitor advocates an idea of freedom
that Dostoevsky considered an abomination. It is linked to Ivan's
critique of God for allowing innocent suffering. For Dostoevsky, the
problem of evil and the question of human liberty are profoundly
joined: our answer to one quandary determines our answer to the other.
Freedom and suffering are interstitial realities, as the Grand
Inquisitor understands, even if he understands them wrongly.
Western readers of The Brothers Karamazov have remained virtually blind
to Dostoevsky's critique of the Grand Inquisitor. The reason, I
believe, is that Ivan's vision of human freedom is so very near to
our own secular notion of liberty, and thus to our increasing
relegation of the Christian gospel to the private sphere of mere
preference. Though he was a student of Western Christianity and
culture, Dostoevsky remained fundamentally Russian in his conception of
God and the world, of good and evil, of the sacred and the secular. We
cannot properly understand his treatment of these matters, therefore,
until we grasp his Orthodox reading of them. Thus must we examine his
parable of the Grand Inquisitor vis-=E0-vis the Orthodox doctrine of
human freedom as being founded not on autonomous choice but on communal
dependence on God.
Ivan Karamazov is no straw atheist. He gives voice to the philosophical
problem of evil perhaps more clearly and cogently than any other
speaker or actor, any other philosopher or theologian, in the whole of
world literature. Yet he is also a very Russian atheist. He thinks with
his solar plexus, as D. H. Lawrence might have said. He is passionately
intellectual. Ivan does not pose the question of theodicy as a
philosophical conundrum, as it is often posed in the West. From Leibniz
through Hume, from Alvin Plantinga to J. L. Mackie, the problem of evil
has often been cast in bare intellectual terms: how to think through
the contradiction that stands between the goodness, omniscience, and
omnipotence of God, on the one hand, and the massive misery and
undeserved suffering that characterize God's world, on the other. In
J=2EB., his dramatic contemporizing of the Job story, Archibald MacLeish
puts the intellectual problem of evil tersely but accurately: "If God
is good He is not God. If God is God He is not good." If God is imbued
with the charity which He Himself enjoins His creatures to live by,
then He must lack the divine power to create and sustain a world in
which such charity obtains: He is not God. If, by contrast, God
possesses the sovereignty and strength to perform what He wills, then
this misery-riddled world must be proof that He is deficient in love
itself: He is not good. Ivan does not make his case against God's
goodness in this intellectualized fashion. He is not a philosophical
thinker who abstracts ideas from experience in order to test their
logical clarity and coherence. As Albert Camus observed, "Ivan really
lives his problems." They are matters, quite literally, of life and
death, of eternal life and eternal death, of ultimate bliss or final
misery. Ivan is willing to face the anguish and terror inherent not
only in thinking but also in living without God.
As one who knows the truths of the heart, Ivan also knows that reason
alone cannot fathom the deepest things. On the contrary, reason can be
put to nefarious uses: "Reason is a scoundrel," he confesses. Ivan is
willing, therefore, to live "even . . . against logic." Yet he is
unwilling to live as a mindless vitalist, embracing life without much
regard for its meaning and, even less, with a blithe disregard for its
injustice. So huge are the world's moral horrors, Ivan argues, that
they undermine any notion of divine order and purpose. Hence Ivan's
truly wrenching quandary: Can he love life without believing that it
has ultimate meaning-believing, instead, that it is godless and
absurd? Ivan is young and strong. He brims with intellectual curiosity
no less than bodily energy. He wants to travel to Europe and to learn
its science and its history. As a good romantic, Ivan cites
Schiller's celebrated line about the "sticky little leaves" whose
gummy unfolding in spring seems to signal the whole world's rebirth.
They remind Ivan of all that is precious in life, the glories of human
love and natural splendor, the inward movement of all things toward
life's energizing center.
There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet,
Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic.
Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little
leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear
to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you
believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me,
which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with
one's heart, out of old habit.
It is noteworthy that Ivan makes this confession to his young brother
Alyosha just after he has broken off relations with Katerina Ivanovna.
Ivan feels as free and light as the air. Living in this detached and
uncommitted-indeed, this almost angelic-state, Ivan makes
qualifications that are altogether as important as his affirmations.
Though he wants to drink life to the lees, he confesses that only "some
people" and only "some human deeds" are dear to him, and that he loves
them only "sometimes." Ivan deliberately denies the teaching of Father
Zosima, the head of an Orthodox monastery who also stands at the
religious center of the novel. Father Zosima insists that love cannot
be selective, that it must be at once universal and concrete, that we
must not love those who are conveniently remote so much as those who
are inconveniently near. Already, it is evident, the philosophical and
the religious arguments are linked. Ivan not only thinks but also lives
in autonomous and anti-communal terms. It is precisely the neighbor
whom we cannot love, he insists. The neighbor's objective and
objectionable otherness-his bad breath, his foolish face, his ill
manners-threaten Ivan's sovereign selfhood. Of such a neighbor,
Ivan complains like an early Jean-Paul Sartre that "he is another and
not me." Despite his eager embrace of the world, therefore, Ivan wants
to remain a solitary and transcendent judge over it, a godlike
withholder no less than a gracious giver of praise. Others must satisfy
his own criteria before he will embrace them. And because God does not
satisfy the requirements of Ivan's logic, he will not believe in God.
Yet Ivan's logic is not sophomoric. He makes a strenuous case against
God's goodness. He refuses, for example, to cite the many natural
calamities-typhoons and tornadoes, floods and droughts, fires and
earthquakes and disease-that seem to disclose a ham-fisted Creator.
Ivan knows that such cosmic evils might be attributed to a natural
process that is divinely ordered. Like Job, he might discover that,
while the natural order seems inimical to human happiness, its
operations might have their own purposes, not revealing any divine
hostility toward human well-being. But Ivan is not vexed chiefly with
natural evils. He cares about moral evils, about the crimes that we
human creatures commit. The standard explanation of such moral evils is
that they are the unfortunate consequence of human freedom. God's
uncoerced creatures, so the argument runs, are capable of grossly
misusing their liberty. If God were to prevent evil human actions, His
world would no longer be free.
Ivan subjects the standard free-will defense of the divine goodness
to devastating critique. At best, he says, the free perversion of human
will explains only the suffering of adults, the grown-ups who are
accountable for the evils that they both cause and suffer. They have
eaten the apple of knowledge, says Ivan. Because they have followed the
demonic temptation to become "as gods," they deserve their
self-wrought misery. What this standard theodicy cannot account for,
Ivan maintains, is the agony of children whose wills are still
innocent. That their suffering results from human cruelty more than
natural mishap makes it all the more horrible. As Ivan notices, animals
rarely torment their prey. Only our human kind derives erotic pleasure
from its savagery, becoming virtual voluptuaries of cruelty. In a
passage that would have made even the Marquis de Sade tremble, Ivan
declares the awful allurement of unprotected innocence. "It is
precisely the defenselessness of these creatures that tempts the
torturers, the angelic trustfulness of the child, who has nowhere to
turn and no one to turn to-that is what enflames the vile blood of
the torturer."
Ivan offers searing examples of such wanton and motiveless malignity.
Indeed, he creates a virtual phantasmagoria of suffering from actual
instances of human barbarity that he has read about in Russian
newspapers: Turkish soldiers cutting babies from their mother's wombs
and throwing them in the air in order to impale them on their bayonets;
enlightened parents stuffing their five-year-old daughter's mouth
with excrement and locking her in a freezing privy all night for having
wet the bed, while they themselves sleep soundly; Genevan Christians
teaching a naive peasant to bless the good God even as the poor dolt is
beheaded for thefts and murders that his ostensibly Christian society
caused him to commit; a Russian general, offended at an
eight-year-old boy for accidentally hurting the paw of the
officer's dog, inciting his wolfhounds to tear the child to pieces; a
lady and gentleman flogging their eight-year-old daughter with a
birch-rod until she collapses while crying for mercy, "Papa, papa,
dear papa."
Such evils cannot be justified, Ivan argues, either by religious
arguments based on history's beginning or by secular arguments that
look to its end. The Edenic exercise of free will is not worth the
tears of even one little girl shivering all night in a privy and crying
out from her excrement-filled mouth to "dear, kind God" for
protection. Yet neither will Ivan accept the Hegelian-Marxist thesis
that the harmonious final outcome of history sublates its present
evils. The notion that such savagery reveals the necessary consequences
of human freedom or that it contributes to history's ultimate result
is, to Ivan, a moral and religious outrage. Neither is he any more
satisfied with the conventional doctrine of hell, which holds that the
monsters of torment will themselves be eternally tormented. Hellish
punishment for heinous malefactors would not restore their victims,
Ivan reminds us. The impaled babies would not be brought back to life
nor would their mothers be consoled, the dismembered boy would not live
out his years, the weeping girls would not be comforted. Ivan rejects
all such theodicies because they belittle innocent suffering and thus
commit unforgivable sacrilege against innocent sufferers. With a
dramatic metaphor drawn again from Schiller, he refuses to offer his
hosanna for such a world: he returns his ticket to such a life.
Ivan's brief against belief is intellectually unanswerable.
Dostoevsky makes no attempt to provide such an answer anywhere in the
course of the novel. He concedes that there is no logical justification
for the suffering of innocents. Yet this is hardly to say that there
are no theological answers to Ivan. It is rather to say that they will
be found, if at all, elsewhere than in abstract argument; they will be
located in the realm of religion and politics and the everyday
requirements of true freedom. In seeking to embody such answers in
living form, Dostoevsky offers the figures of Zosima and Alyosha as his
religious counters to Ivan's atheist revolt. The most notable fact
about the monastic elder and his young disciple is that, unlike Ivan,
they are not Euclidean men. They believe that, in the most important
matters, parallel lines do indeed meet. Things counter can converge
because the deepest truths are not univocal but analogical and
paradoxical. Theirs is not a three-dimensional block universe but
rather a layered cosmos containing multiple orders of being. For Zosima
and Alyosha, the material and immaterial worlds are never distant and
remote from each other, as in much of Western thought. The created and
uncreated realms are deeply intertwined, each participating in the life
of the other.
Ivan remains opaque to this interstitial cosmos that calls for
interstitial discernment. Dostoevsky describes it as proniknovenie, an
"intuitive seeing through" or a "spiritual penetration." Such
theological sight is the product not of any special intelligence but of
the iconic imagination. The icons of Eastern Orthodoxy are produced by
a theology of presence rather than one of representation. God's own
splendor is said to radiate through the icon, confronting worshipers
with the experience of Uncreated Light. The icon is not an image that
one looks at in order to discern an earthly image of something holy, in
an attempt to portray the invisible in visible terms. Nor is it an
expression of the artist's own subjective experience of the sacred.
Rather the icon looks out at the beholder. It seeks to open up the
eternal realm so that its light might shine forth. Icons do not seek to
embody a discarnate world, but rather to reveal an earthly world that
has been rendered transparent by a spiritualization that embraces the
entire cosmos. Worshipers are themselves transformed by the invisible
light that emanates from the icon, penetrating to the depths of their
being and forming their true personhood. At Zosima's funeral, Alyosha
has such a transfiguring experience of this mystical touching of the
visible and invisible worlds. It prompts him to repeat the example of
his dead master in an iconic gesture of prostration:
Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness.
Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung
boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way
stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring,
enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church
gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the
flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence
of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the
mystery of the earth to be touched by the mystery of the stars. . . .
Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, he threw
himself to the earth. . . .
It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came
together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, "touching other
worlds." He wanted to forgive everyone for everything, and to ask
forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything, "as
others are asking for me," rang in his soul.
Ivan is blind to this iconic joining of the earthly and heavenly
realms, perhaps because he is also blind to the Orthodox understanding
of human personhood. After all, he is a man obsessed with Western
ideas. Yet Ivan is not a rationalist, as is often said, but rather a
thinker who wants to disjoin his thought from its rightful engagement
with God and the world. He lives a dichotomous life. Ivan's mind is
even more severely perverted than his will. He fails to discern, for
example, that the doctrine of immortality concerns not only the life
that is transfigured in the world to come, but also the life that is
meant to be transformed within this world. To use the language of St.
Paul found in 1 Corinthians 15 and that of John's Gospel contained in
the novel's epigraph, mortality is meant to put on immortality, the
dying seed to bring forth much fruit. To become immortal is to become a
unique and unrepeatable person who has been perfected in both loving
and being loved.
Ivan's contention that no one can truly love others as he loves
himself is linked, therefore, to his denial of immortality. Ivan holds,
as we have seen, that other persons stand like dense Euclidean clumps
to block the path of his own autonomy. So long as we are confined
within the realm of mere human possibility, Dostoevsky is agreed with
Ivan. He despised the soupy benevolence that pervaded much of
nineteenth-century European and American culture. "Those who love men
in general," he often said, "hate men in particular." Yet he also
insisted that Christ's kenosis -the divine self-emptying hymned
in Philippians 2-can accomplish what is humanly impossible: the
emptying of human egoism for the sake of true charity. Through this
kenotic love that Zosima and his disciple Alyosha both embody, one
actually becomes a person by becoming another self-not an Ego but a
Thou, a person who exists only in self-giving solidarity with Christ
and thereby with others.
When personhood is measured in this kenotic manner, Alyosha can be seen
as a credible character, rather than the ghostly and gossamer creature
he is often accused of being. Unlike Ivan, Alyosha does not clip
newspaper accounts of suffering children and then offer
anti-theological arguments about them; instead, he actually seeks out
the insulted and injured, identifying himself with them. He joins faith
with practice, thinking with doing, thus answering the problem of evil
with deeds rather than reasons-with his whole personhood, not with
his mind alone. Through his patient and long-suffering friendships
with children, Alyosha helps redeem the pathetic Ilyusha Snegirov, even
as he also helps to set the nihilistic Kolya Krassotkin on the path to
new life. Alyosha pulls these boys out of their misery only at great
cost to himself. Dostoevsky makes clear in the novel's final scene,
when the youths gather to cheer Alyosha as if he were their savior,
that he is a true icon of Christ, a man through whom the invisible
light of eternity brightly shines. Yet Alyosha deflects all praise away
from himself and toward Christ. As the only man who has suffered
absolutely everything, says Alyosha, Christ alone has the right to
forgive absolutely everything-even the tormentors of children. Yet
Alyosha's mere mention of the "only sinless One" so enrages Ivan that
he comes forth with his "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor."
Ivan's parable appears to be an assault on the character of Jesus,
when its real target is humanity itself. Though he professes to love
"some men," Ivan can no more give himself to other persons than he can
grant the existence of God. For Dostoevsky, the one follows from the
other: one cannot scorn the love of God and still love human beings.
Ivan ends as a misanthrope, I maintain, because he has a modern secular
conception of freedom that is incapable of fulfillment except by
monstrous supermen.
The plot of Ivan's legend is familiar enough, even if its meaning
remains quite obscure. The risen Christ returns to earth in
fifteenth-century Seville, where he immediately begins to perform
miracles. The people hail him as their liberator from the awful autos
da f=E9 that the Spanish Inquisition is carrying out. Jesus is quickly
arrested by the church authorities and imprisoned in a dimly lit
dungeon. There the ninety-year-old Cardinal Grand Inquisitor
relentlessly grills the silent Christ. This ancient church-ogre
accuses Jesus of having required men to live by the strength of their
strong wills, cruelly ignoring the fact that they are impotent
creatures who can live only for the sake of a swinish happiness. The
Inquisitor thus upbraids Christ for having rejected the Tempter's
wilderness offerings of bread and power and fame. These, he says, are
the satisfying substitutes that human beings crave. They do not want
the awful autonomy that Christ allegedly commanded:
Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it still more for
them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than
free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more
seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is
nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation
for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything
that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that
was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love
them at all. . . . You desired the free love of man, that he should
follow you freely, seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm
and ancient law, man had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free
heart, what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him
as a guide.
It is astonishing that so many readers have taken the Grand
Inquisitor's conception of freedom as if it were Dostoevsky's
own-and also as if it were true. Camus regarded it as an
unprecedented statement of the human cry for liberty against all
religious restraints. Camus can make such a claim only because,
together with Ivan, he embraces the thoroughly secular conception of
freedom that has largely prevailed in the modern West, from John Stuart
Mill to John Dewey and John Rawls. Ivan's Inquisitor belongs to their
lineage. Liberty, he declares, entails a brave and lonely autonomy, as
each individual determines for himself the difference between good and
evil. Jesus serves not as the savior who redeems corporate humanity
from sin, therefore, but as a moral example to guide solitary and
heroic individuals-having himself trod the same lonely path of
self-determination.
Michael Sandel has shown what is problematic about this notion of
freedom as consisting entirely of unfettered choices. Such choices are
prompted by nothing other than the individual subject and his private
conscience acting either on persuasive evidence or the arbitrary
assertion of will. Just as this modern secular self is not determined
by any larger aims or attachments that it has not chosen for itself,
neither does it have obligations to any larger communities, except
those it autonomously chooses to join. The one moral norm, it follows,
is the injunction to respect the dignity of others by not denying them
the freedom to exercise their own moral autonomy. Such an understanding
of human liberty, argues Sandel, opposes
any view that regards us as obligated to fulfill ends that we have not
chosen-ends given by nature or God, for example, or by our identities
as members of families, peoples, cultures, or traditions. Encumbered
identities such as these are at odds with the liberal conception of
[persons] as free and independent selves, unbound by prior moral ties,
capable of choosing our ends for ourselves. This is the conception that
finds expression in the ideal of the state as a neutral framework . . .
a framework of rights that refuses to choose among competing values and
ends. For the liberal self, what matters above all, what is most
essential to our personhood, is not the ends we choose but our capacity
to choose them.
Dostoevsky repeatedly attacked this modern secular notion of freedom
and personhood, dismissing it scornfully as "socialism." Astounded by
the Inquisitor's similar idea of liberty as absolute autonomy,
Alyosha cries out to Ivan: "And who will believe you about freedom? . .
.. Is that the way to understand it? It's a far cry from the Orthodox
idea." It's also a far cry from the Jewish and Catholic and classical
Protestant ideas of freedom. In all four traditions, we are not made
into free persons by becoming autonomous selves who have been immunized
from all obligations that we have not independently chosen. Our freedom
resides rather in becoming communal selves who freely embrace our
moral, religious, and political obligations. These responsibilities
come to us less by our own choosing than through a thickly webbed
network of shared friendships and familial ties, through political
practices and religious promises. In a very real sense, such
"encumbrances" choose us before we choose them. There is no mythical
free and autonomous self that exists apart from these ties. There are
only gladly or else miserably bound persons-namely, persons who find
their duties and encumbrances to be either gracious or onerous.
Alyosha's idea of freedom is communal because it is first of all
religious. Athanasius of Alexandria articulated it most clearly in the
fourth century: "God became man so that man may become God." The
central Orthodox doctrine is called theosis or theopoesis-the
divinizing or deifying of humanity. The Eastern Church does not call
for believers to imitate Jesus through the exercise of moral choice. It
summons them rather to participate in the life of Christ through the
transformative power of the liturgy and sacraments of the Church. To
become persons in the true sense is to become what the New Testament
calls "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). The modern
secular notion of freedom articulated by the Grand Inquisitor is the
very definition of slavery. As Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky
observes, the Eastern Church regards choice as the mark not of freedom
but of fallenness, as a debasement of true liberty, as a loss of the
divine likeness: "Our nature being overclouded with sin no longer knows
its true good . . . and so the human person is always faced with the
necessity of choice; it goes forward gropingly." To deliberate
autonomously in the face of alternatives, it follows, is not liberty
but servitude. True freedom, says Lossky, is revealed in the Christ who
freely renounces his own will in order to accomplish the will of his
Father. Alyosha is free in precisely this way. Jesus has not abandoned
him to his lonely conscience in order to let him solitarily determine
good and evil for himself. The self-emptying Christ has freed Alyosha
to empty his own ego, to live and act in joyful obedience to God, and
thus to be bound in unbreakable solidarity with his father and
brothers, with his friends and enemies, and (not least of all) with the
miserable children of his neighborhood.
Given the Grand Inquisitor's anti-Orthodox conception of freedom as
unencumbered self-determining choice, it is not surprising that he
should have contempt for the average run of men. He despises their
dependence, their animal desire for security and comfort. The
Inquisitor thus informs Jesus that the Catholic Church has been forced
to correct his impossible summons to autonomy. Rome understands, says
the Inquisitor, what Christ did not-that men must first be fed before
they can be made virtuous. "Make us your slaves," the Inquisitor's
masses cry out, "but feed us." Thus has the cynical church of the Grand
Inquisitor replaced Christ's purported call for unfettered autonomy
with its own sheepish substitutes: "miracle, mystery, and authority."
Yet even these sorry placebos will not finally suffice, the Inquisitor
insists, for the modern world will confront men with such scientific
wonders and terrors that the vast human horde will not be content even
with comfort and security. They will finally demand the antheap of
personal oblivion, in order that they might be relieved of their
freedom. They want only to live in childish self-indulgence:
Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and
confront them with such . . . insoluble mysteries, that some of them,
unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but
feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble
and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: "Yes, you were
right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to
you-save us from ourselves." . . . Yes, we will make them work, but
in the hours free from labor we will arrange their lives like a
children's game, with children's songs, choruses, and innocent
dancing.
Inverting the gospel entirely, the Grand Inquisitor declares that only
the Master Managers like himself will suffer. Yet these new secular
christs of the omnicompetent state will bear their torment heroically.
Knowing their totalitarian paternalism to be a gargantuan lie, they
nonetheless retain the courage to feed it to the gullible millions:
"For only we, we who keep the mystery, only we shall be unhappy. There
will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand
sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of
good and evil. Peacefully [these multiplied millions] will die;
peacefully will they expire in [Christ's] name, and beyond the grave
they will find only death. But we will keep the secret, and for their
own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward."
This final prophecy of the Grand Inquisitor is perhaps the most
frightening augury in the entirety of Dostoevsky's work. With amazing
prescience, he foresees the rise of the totalitarian state that has
dominated much of late-modern life, killing more people by violent
means than in all of the previous ages combined. This is the era of
blood, and ours is the culture of death. That Dostoevsky mistakenly
linked our calamity with the Catholic Church, and that he did not
foresee its first triumph in his own beloved Russia, hardly invalidates
his vision. On the contrary, Dostoevsky was right to prophesy that, if
we begin (as Ivan does) with absolute anti-communal freedom, we will
end (again as Ivan does) with absolute anti-communal slavery, whether
in its individualist or its totalitarian form. Were Dostoevsky living
at this hour, he might well ask whether the American reduction of
nearly every aspect of human existence, including religion itself, to
either entertainment or commodification constitutes a yet worse kind of
herd-existence than the one Ivan describes-a subtler and therefore
deadlier attempt to relieve humanity of its suffering and sin, and thus
of its real character and interest.
Given Ivan's horrifying vision of this grim and Christless future, it
is not surprising that Alyosha regards Ivan's "poem" as praising
Jesus rather than reviling him. Yet Alyosha does not commend the Christ
of the parable because he commands autonomous self-determination as
the answer to a totalizing politics of oppression. Rather, the Jesus of
Ivan's legend is to be praised because his silence indicates his
patient confidence that evil will eventually undo itself, and that Ivan
is to be embraced rather than condemned in his concern for the
suffering of innocents.
Ivan had in fact ended his parable by having the silent Savior gently
kiss the Inquisitor on "his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips."
Alyosha instantly recognizes that Ivan's imagination was groping for
the profoundest of all truths-that nothing other than God's
self-emptying love can answer bitter unbelief. To bring home the
point, Alyosha repeats Christ's act: he kisses the tormented Ivan.
It's another Russian iconic gesture of humility and submission, and
it calls for a recompensing kiss of humble recognition and
identification. Ivan will not grant it, for then he, too, would be
called to embrace the same kenotic suffering and joy that imbue
Alyosha's entire life. Instead, Ivan dismisses Alyosha's act as
mere plagiarism. Ivan must rid himself of this Christ-like gesture
that is the real answer to human agony. It is appropriate, therefore,
that the Inquisitor's final command to the truth-gesturing Christ
who kissed him is not Maranatha , but "Go and do not come again . . .
do not come at all . . . never, never!"
Alyosha, as Christ's earthly embodiment, will not depart. Instead, he
confronts Ivan with the moral and religious consequence of his atheism.
If God is dead, Alyosha famously declares, "everything is permitted."
We must not misread Alyosha here. He does not deny that men can be
moral without believing in God. He insists, instead, that such morality
has no ultimate basis, that freedom understood as self-construction
hovers over an abyss of nihilism, and thus that all godless peoples and
cultures await their inexorable plunge into the barbaric void. The
first epistle of John defines sin precisely as lawlessness. Ellis
Sandoz observes that John of Damascus, the eighth-century Greek
theologian, linked this definition of sin to the larger claim that
barbarism is the primal heresy: "Every man as independent and a law
unto himself after the dictates of his own will."
Dostoevsky regards individualist autonomy not only as barbaric but also
as satanic. Perhaps the chief of Ivan's demonic deceptions is the
widespread acceptance of the Inquisitor's argument that "miracle,
mystery, and authority" are pathetic necessities for weak-willed men.
Just as Ivan misreads freedom to mean unencumbered
self-determination, so does the Inquisitor pervert the meaning of
miracle, mystery, and authority. Nowhere in the novel does God perform
miracles by jumping in and out of His creation like a divine factotum
who accedes to human petition if it is sufficiently pious. It is
exactly such a sentimental and superstitious understanding of
miracles-namely, as God's arbitrary violation of the natural order
to heed clamant human request-that Alyosha is required to surrender.
Hoping that Zosima's corpse would be wondrously preserved, giving off
the sweet odor of sanctity, Alyosha is horrified when it putrefies
prematurely. The saint's rapidly rotting body demonstrates to Alyosha
that God is not a sacred Santa Claus who brings him whatever he wants.
In the "Cana in Galilee" chapter, Alyosha learns that miracles do not
precede and thus produce faith; rather, they follow faith as the
by-product of the transformed life. That Alyosha can kiss the earth
and bless the creation despite its rampant suffering, that he can live
as a monk in a sex-sodden world, that he can increase men's joy
amidst human misery as Christ increased it by turning water into
wedding wine-this, he learns, is the true miracle: the divine
possibility that overcomes human impossibility.
Like a brittle Enlightenment philosophe, perhaps a Diderot or a Comte,
the Inquisitor also slanders mystery. He reduces it to a cynical
mystification, to a new secular priestcraft, a political anesthetizing
of the masses with the morphine of heaven. "For only we, we . . . keep
the mystery," he boasts. For him, mystery can be hoarded as a weapon in
his arsenal of deceit, as a spiritual poison gas meant to blind true
vision and stifle true thought. For Alyosha and all other believers, by
contrast, the mysterion enlivens such vision and thought. It's a word
that can also be translated sacrament. The mystery of God is thus not a
riddle or a conundrum, not a brain-straining puzzle; it is the one
reality that prompts an endless delectation of mind no less than heart
and soul. "In the proper religious sense of the term," writes Orthodox
bishop Kallistos Ware, "'mystery' signifies not only hiddenness but
disclosure. . . . A mystery is . . . something revealed for our
understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it
leads into the depth or the darkness of God."
Perversely, if also consistently, Ivan has the Inquisitor voice a
skewed understanding of authority. He regards it as the tyrannical
power of the state or the church to suppress individual autonomy. For
him, authority can have only the negative meaning of raw coercive
force. For Alyosha, again in notable contrast to the Inquisitor, true
authority (both human and divine) invites free submission of the will
for the sake of the good-submission to the rightly constituted state,
to his elder Zosima, to the incarnate Christ, to the merciful God. Free
subjection of the will begins in penitence, as when Zosima confesses
that all men are sinners and that he is the worst. It ends in the
acceptance, even the embrace, of suffering.
Perhaps the novel's chief irony is that Ivan has turned rightful
religious concern for injured innocents into wrongful personal
justification of his own hatred and scorn. Claiming to care about the
world's innocent sufferers, Ivan cannot care for the creature who is
his own closest kin, his father. In a nightmare interview with the
Devil, Ivan is made to recognize his own moral culpability for his
father's death. He had poisoned Smerdyakov's mind with the demonic
gospel that God is dead and that all things are permitted. Acting out
what Ivan had intellectually advocated, Smerdyakov has killed old
Fyodor in a dreadful demonstration that, in a godless world, absolutely
nothing is forbidden. Since Satan is the primal deceiver, it is no
wonder that Ivan has been made into his agent. Dostoevsky maintains
that demonic perversions of mind are no mere intellectual failings:
they issue in demonic perversions of will. Philosophical deicide
results in existential parricide. The mental killing of God breaks the
deepest of human bonds. It is thus fitting that Ivan the perverted
intellectual should end in madness.
Yet Ivan's final insanity is not to be explained as psychosis alone.
In the Orthodox tradition, to deny the presence and reality of God is
to be subject to a psychopathic condition. Not sharing the Western
doctrine of original sin, the Orthodox hold that every person retains
an efficacious awareness of God, even after the Fall. "Just because it
is light," writes Vladimir Lossky, "grace, the source of revelation,
cannot remain within us unperceived. We are incapable of not being
aware of God, if our nature is in proper spiritual health.
Insensibility [to God] in the inner life is an abnormal condition."
Lossky adds, far more darkly, that total unawareness of God "would be
nothing other than hell, the final destruction of the person." It
follows that Zosima is not a golden-hearted humanist when he defines
hell as "the suffering of being unable to love." He is describing
Ivan's spiritual condition exactly. Ivan suffers the hellish
laceration of the soul that occurs when freedom is exercised
negatively-not to engender life but to bring death. "Death for a
person," declares Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, "means ceasing to
love and to be loved, ceasing to be unique and unrepeatable, whereas
life for the person means the survival of the uniqueness of its
hypostasis [personification], which is affirmed and maintained by
love."
To possess true freedom and personhood through love is, in
Dostoevsky's view, to suffer rightly. It is to accept responsibility,
not only for one's own sin, but also for the sins of others. All
theodicies fail if they do not recognize that only the embrace of
innocent suffering can answer the infliction of innocent suffering. One
who is willing to suffer for Christ's sake must be willing, moreover,
to suffer fools. Father Zosima exhibits such foolish suffering when,
early in the novel, he makes a low bow of humility before the cruel
buffoon who is old Fyodor Karamazov. It is an act utterly unlike the
abstentions practiced by Nietzsche's =DCbermensch . The Overman is
akin to a lion who has claws but refrains from using them. He doesn't
show mercy so much as he seeks to humiliate the weaklings of the world
with his contemptuous self-restraint. Though having the rightful
authority to condemn the despicable old lecher, Zosima gestures forth
his solidarity with Fyodor in bowing down before him. Unlike the
Overman, Zosima identifies himself with the wretched creature. He knows
that old Fyodor has become a buffoon, in large part, because everyone
regards him as a fool. In secret pride and contempt for others, he
fulfills their scornful judgment. Zosima refuses such judgment. He
humbles himself before the despicable Fyodor, discerning in him the
divine image and likeness: a person meant for agapeistic community
rather than buffoonish autonomy. For Dostoevsky, the gospel of
suffering in communal love is the only lasting answer to the perennial
problem of evil and thus to the perennial question of human freedom. It
is a gospel peculiar neither to East nor West because it is centered in
the common Christian ground of the Incarnation, Cross, and
Resurrection.
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Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at
Baylor University.
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BM
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| User: "Vivapadrepio" |
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| Title: Re: On Christianity, Freedom, Miracles, etc. |
01 Feb 2005 10:09:51 PM |
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From:
Date: 2/1/05 1:49 PM Pacific Standard Time
The Christ of the Grand Inquisitor advocates an idea of freedom
that Dostoevsky considered an abomination. It is linked to Ivan's
critique of God for allowing innocent suffering. For Dostoevsky, the
problem of evil and the question of human liberty ...
Prayer For Guidance From The Holy Spirit:
O God, may the Holy Spirit who proceeds from you enlighten our minds, and lead
us to perfect truth as Christ, your Son, promised. We ask in His name. Amen.
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Pray, hope, and don't worry.
Worry is useless.
God is merciful and will hear your prayer.
-- Padre Pio, Pietrelcina.
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