Category Archives: Classic Books

The Many gods of the Brothers Karamazov

Books, Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

In a way there are many gods in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. Is Fyodor Karamazov—the father of the 3, or perhaps 4, Karamazov brothers—God? He certainly is God-like. He is fickle, absurd, unreasonable, and demands adherents be faithful no matter what. Sounds a lot like God doesn’t it?  His former serf Gregory is faithful to him when faith has not been earned or deserved. As Dostoevsky explains about Fyodor Karamazov, “For some complex and subtle reasons, that he himself could not explain, he felt an urgent and pressing need to have someone loyal and trustworthy by him.” Again this sounds god-like. If he is a god, then, of course, his 3 or 4 sons, are all sons of God.

 

Because of the absolute loyalty,  the father liked his youngest son, Alyosha who “touched his very heart, by being there, seeing everything, and condemning nothing.” Remember he is the one who judges no one. Alyosha gave him “something he had never had before—a complete absence of contempt for him…he treated him with invariable kindness—and a completely genuine and sincere affection which Karamazov little deserved.” Of course he treated everyone that way. He was a near saint. Or you could say he was God-like.

Elder   Zosima is certainly god-like. As is Alyosha. But so is Karamazov. He is an absurd god. But in many respect the god of the bible is also absurd. The God of the Bible is the god who lets a small child freeze to death in a shed in a Russian winter. Ivan could not accept such a god.

Dmitri (also known as Mitya) is a god to Katerina. She bows down to him, as Elder Zosima bowed down to Fyodor Karamazov and Dmitri to Grushenka. In fact, Grushenka had father and son “conquered and lying at her feet.” Again a bit God-like.

Dmitri also treats Alyosha like a god. He confesses to Alyosha:

“I’ll make a clean breast of everything, for there must be someone who knows the whole truth. I’ve already told it to the angel in heaven and now I’ll tell it to the angel on earth. Because you are the angel on earth Alyosha.”

 

What are we to make of so many gods on this religious quest?

 

 

God’s Fools

Books, Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the book The Brothers Karamazov, the monastery was where Alyosha, one of the three sons of the patriarch Fyodor Karamazov, was learning how to find light and love with the assistance of his mentor, the elder, Zosima, a near Saint. The elder lives in a small room in the monastery that was far from grandiose. It is not the Vatican. Nor the lavish home of American televangelists. As Dostoevsky described it, “The whole cell was rather small and drab-looking. It has only the most indispensable furniture, and even that was poor and crude.”

It is interesting that we learn a lot in a chapter of the novel titled, “The Old Buffoon.”  The elder Karamazov as invariably he does, acts like a buffoon.  And he is exactly that.  In fact, he introduced himself to Elder Zosima that way, and then acted the part with gusto. He refers to himself as “one of God’s fools,” and even says there may be an unholy spirit in me too, but it must be one of minor rank—if it were more important it would surely have chosen better quarters.”

Miusov also acted the part of the fool. As Dostoevsky said of Miusov, “He rated his own powers of judgment rather highly, a weakness which was excusable in him, since he was already past fifty, an age at which an intelligent, cultured man of the world of independent means acquires an exaggerated opinion of his own judgment, sometimes despite himself.” I guess I am lucky, not being a man of means nor cultured.

The three sons are each fools but each in their own way.

Is elder Zosima an old fool for living so simply? In the novel when elder Karamazov plays the buffoon to such an extent that his son Alyosha can’t stand to see his father acting so in front of his mentor Zosima. But the elder Zosima, echoing Christ with Mary Magdalene, throws himself at the feet of the Fyodor Karamazov the father. According to Rakitin, “That’s the way it always is with God’s fools: they’re liable to cross themselves at the sight of a tavern and then hurl stones at a church.”

But Zosima impressively treats the fool like a nobleman. There are many of God’s fools in the novel, sometimes in disguise.  Some of the fools are very intelligent. Wise men are harder to find. Isn’t it always like that?

The way to light and Love

Books, Classic Books, Fellow Feeing, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

In the novel The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, also called Alexei is the youngest son and least like the father. He is the most likeable of all the Karmazovs, and I might even say, the most God-like of the brothers Karamazov. He did that by being free of resentment. He was filled instead with compassion and fellow feeling that left no room for resentment. Unlike his father and his brothers, He “never held a grudge when someone offended him.” Instead he had fierce, frantic modesty, and chastity.” He was “in no sense a fanatic…he was not even a mystic.” As Dostoevsky said, “he refused to sit in judgement of others.” Or like Bob Dylan said, “he knows too much to argue or to judge.” Some of us, (I am looking in a mirror now) could learn a lot from Alyosha.

 

What was his secret?  It wasn’t dogma. Or following rules. He had no need of either.  As Dostoevsky said, “he was just a boy who very early in life had come to love his fellow men.”  Simple but effective! As the author shows us in his novels, many men  claim to love their fellows but few are able to do that. Alyosha did go to a monastery but that was “simply because at one point that course had caught his imagination and he had become convinced that it was the ideal way to escape the darkness of the wicked world, a way that would lead him toward light and love.” This was his religious quest. He was as unencumbered by vows or rules as his Father was unencumbered by scruples. Near the end of the book Alyosha shows us that there is better way. But really the whole novel leads us there. I will get to that later in my posts on this book. I must meander there. There are no shortcuts to truth.

 

This is the genuine way of religion. This is the true faith of the religious quest. Religion without dogma. What a blessing that could be. Alyosha shows us the way by example.

 

The Quest of the Abandoned for an Absent God

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Dostoevsky shows us in his magnificent novel, The Brothers Karamazov that the religious quest in the modern age is the quest to deal with abandonment by God. At least according to Ivan, the atheist son, when God leaves a child to suffer that is something he cannot accept. Even if suffering leads to discovery of God, a some suggest,  that is not good enough, for it is not worth the price.

 

The father Karamazov is successful in business ventures because he is “unencumbered by scruples.” Later Ivan accuses God of the same crime. He creates a world which many of us feel is a great success, but it contains suffering children so God considers that their suffering is worth the price. To Ivan it is not worth the price. The less unencumbered one is by scruples the more successful one will be. No one is more successful than God. But children suffer! He thinks there is something terribly wrong with such a world. It is not good enough and if that is the best God can do,  God is not Great as Christopher Hitchens said.

 

 

The Brothers Karamazov: Abandoned by God

Books, Classic Books, existentialism, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the book The Brothers Karamazov the brothers have a most unusual father. The father feels no responsibility to the sons and virtually abandons them all to their own devices. In the first sentence of the novel, we learn that the father has died under “tragic and mysterious” circumstances so I am not giving much away when I suggest that the most likely suspects are his sons. And it could be anyone of them, even though only Dmitri is charged with his murder.

 

The father had 3 “legitimate” sons and one other son who works for the father as a servant.  We never learn for sure whether he is actually a son or not. In that first paragraph we also learn that the father is “wretched and depraved but also muddle-headed in a way that allows him to pull off all sorts of shady little financial deals and not much else.”

 

The problem between the father and at least one of the sons, Dmitri, is that both love the same woman. And they compete for her violently. Here is how the prosecutor put it in his summation to the jury: “it was an amazing and fatal coincidence that these two hearts should have been set afire simultaneously.” And this set off “a month of hopeless passion.”  And no one could be more passionate than the Karamazovs for it was that passion that set off “the idea of parricide.”  This is such a powerful idea that, as defense counsel said, “the idea of it shocks and impresses us so much that the inadequate proof seems adequate and the questionable facts cease to appear questionable.” The idea is like a magic elixir that can transform a substance into something foreign. The very idea of it can make the false true and the true false.

 

However, as dangerous as that may be, there is more. Dmitri’s brother Ivan so different from him, is the atheist brother who argues that if God does not exist “all is permitted.” In fact, it could be said that the very idea of a dead God is a magic elixir that could mean all is permitted. That is where his religion ended.  Yet as the  defense lawyer explains to the jury, Dmitri’s father was not a real father for he effectively abandoned his children, therefore it would not be a monstrous thing for a son to murder such a father. It would be understandable. The consequence to Dmitri as his legal counsel explains, is that “my client grew up under no one’s protection but God’s, which means that he grew up as wild animals.” That seems like a horrible indictment of God, but it also gives license to Dmitri. For as we all know, if our parents disappear, we are given permission, in practice to do anything. The same with an absent God. All is really permitted. This is a lesson we also learned at the funeral of the very young Ilyusha who has an absent mother, not in fact, but in reality, for she has lost her reason. His mother was as bad a mother as Dmitri’s father was a bad father..

 

Being abandoned by a parent is as devastating as being abandoned by God. And that is the crux of the enigma of the religious quest in this novel. Abandonment by God is central to the whole idea of the death of God which gripped philosophers starting in the 19th century.

That shocking idea was born in the writings of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and then carried on by the existentialists.

Re-Reading the Brothers Karamazov

2024 Trip to South West United States, Books, Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

 

 

A couple of years ago I started two projects. One was to re-read at least one great classic book  each year. As a result I have re-read Albert Camus’s book The Rebel, Joseph  Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I also started a project I call Religious Quest in the Modern Age based on a course taught by University of Winnipeg Professor Carl Ridd in the 1970s. I heard a short version of it in 1972 on television. In it he covered some of the same books. Teh idea of such a quest, has  an inspiration to me for 50 years! Some of the books I am reading overlap both of these projects. This is one of them.

I just recently re-read  one of the greatest novels I have ever read. It is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is a brilliant novel that is infused with a powerful religious quest by the main characters. All of them in very different ways. That makes it perfect for both projects.

The book is 936 pages long (with an introductory article) and very complicated. Often, I had to re-read lengthy passages to make sure I had caught on to what is going on. That makes for very slow reading. But it is very enjoyable reading. I feared It might take me half of our 3- month holiday to wade my way through it, making many of the books  dragged out to Arizona  unnecessary. I feared I would not get to them. But that was all fine. I could not have enjoyed  my reading more. It actually took me slightly less than a month to read even with the back and forth and making notes.

I originally read The Brothers Karamazov after or just after my first year of Law School in 1972. I decided that since I had such an all-consuming year trying to learn law and had married a lovely and wealthy young lady, Christiane Marie Jeanne Calvez, the year before, and she had a fantastic $600 in her account, that I should take advantage of this to take a summer off. I reached the daring conclusion that I should take the summer off instead of working and read Russian novels instead.  This probably struck her as insane, but she did not object even though we could have used the money. My bad.

That summer I read 3 of Dostoevsky’s long novels and it was an incredible experience. I recall intense dreams filled with startling Russian characters. And I loved it. And Christiane put up with it. She has frankly put up with a lot! I had worked for 5 years of University in which I studied intensely and figured I should take a lengthy break to avoid burn-out. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It was magnificent.

I know my wife wished I had learned more practical things like carpentry or plumbing, but I was focused on adventures of the mind. This year in 2024 it was a wonderful thing to re-experience. That is what re-reading classics is all about.

When I re-read the book in the winter of 2024 while in Arizona, I found it was everything I remembered and more. More than 50 years later I came to the book a very different person then I was the first time, a young man filled with piss and vinegar with a lot to learn. Now I am an old man mostly “vebrukt,” (broken) but unfortunately still with a lot to learn

And now I decided to re-read the greatest of those Russian novels. Perhaps even the greatest of all novels.  And once again, it was an astonishing experience. The novel is that good and I recommend everyone read it.  Do it now before it’s too late.

 

Group Thinks v. Long Thinks

Classic Books, Critical thinking, Fellow Feeing, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck encounters a number of deep moral dilemmas. The biggest of course is whether or not he should help Jim a slave escape from his “rightful owner” a woman who had never done him any harm. Huck “knows” what he should do. His conscience tells him that. He should not help a slave to escape. That would be wrong. But Huck stops and makes “a long think.” He must think critically.

 

Huck is also challenged by religion. He was taught that ever since he was born. Religion, together with the notion of white supremacy, is the ideology of his life. He “knows” it is right yet is challenged about it. Both of these are ideologies. They are both born from group think. We believe what we are taught by our team.

When Huck was having difficulties falling into the group think, Miss Watson would take him into the closet and pray with him.

“But nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for hooks there or four times., but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why. And couldn’t make it out no way. ”

 

As a result, Huck did what he should do.  He “set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think.” He thought about it critically with all his faculties. His reasoning would not be considered very sophisticated. As he said,

“I said to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork?  Why can’t the widow her snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, I says to myself, there ain’t nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it and she said, the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant—I must help other people, and do everything I could for others, and look out for them all the time and never think about myself…I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn’t see no advantage about it—except for the other people, so I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it anymore, but just let it go.”

 

Ironically this is exactly what Huck later did. He followed her advice when it came to helping Jim. He neglected in the extreme what was good for himself—namely avoiding hell, but helped Jim anyway. And this is really what religion is all about. It is not about praying for fishhooks. It is about felling empathy for others, like Huck did to Jim. In Huck’s case it was his critically thinking, not his religious ideology that led him to do the right thing. His religious ideology taught him to do the wrong thing, namely worry about eternal heaven at the cost of his friend’s freedom. His ideology misfired. He said he would listen to this ideology but could not do it. He rejected the group think and did the right thing, thanks to a long think.

A long think combined with fellow feeling is a most powerful force!

I think that is what the religious quest in the modern age is all about.

Shouldn’t we all make more long thinks?

 

Confronting Truth and finding spiritual freedom

Classic Books, Fellow Feeing, Freedom, Rebel

 

Authorities have known for a long time, at least since the time of Plato, that the rebellion of poets and artists is dangerous to established authority and power. Their alternative reality is also one that is deviant and defiant. The members of the Republic of the Imagination are always prepared to dissent. That makes them uncompliant to power that wants to dominate. That makes them subversive and hostile to arbitrary authority. Not all authority.

 

One can only belong to such a subversive group if one has not only the courage of one’s convictions, but as Nietzsche said, “the courage to attack one’s convictions.” No truths are too sacred to be attacked or challenged. Even those we hold most dear. There should be no barriers to pursuing truth. One should be free to challenge all conventional wisdom. Even the truths of patriots are open to question. The country cannot demand absolute obedience or obeisance. Great literature is always ready, willing, and able to attack any sacred cows. That is why, as Nafisi said, “If we need fiction today, it is not because we need to escape from reality; it is because we need to return to it with eyes that are refreshed, or as Tolstoy would have it, “clean-washed.”

We must recognize that there are more freedoms than one. Nowadays the idea of freedom has been besmirched. In Canada we recently had the freedom convoy in our nation’s capital. The members of that convoy basically demanded the freedom to do whatever they wanted. They really recognized no limits on freedom, which of course, means they advocated for anarchy which is not freedom at all. It is an illusory freedom that they urge upon us. It is not the freedom to light out for the territory of Huck Finn.

Once again, Azar Nafisi made this point eloquently:

“But of course, there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious, you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying.  The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty, unsexy little ways, every day.  That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

 This is the freedom of Huck Finn. He was willing to sacrifice not just his life, but put himself in peril of eternal damnation, to save his friend, a black slave. That was the freedom he wanted. And he would do anything to achieve it. It was not a selfish freedom; it was real freedom. It was not the freedom of the convoy for whom freedom was all about me.

In its essence this is the freedom to think. Even if it’s a “long think.” The freedom to think for oneself, not chained to the conventional wisdom. It takes courage to be free. And no one had more courage than Huck Finn. After, all he was willing to risk eternal damnation. This is the freedom of Huck Finn!

 That is what a spiritual declaration of independence is all about.

We need a Spiritual Declaration of Independence

Classic Books, Freedom, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

The original American dream was a dream of freedom. Sadly, that dream is often for sale or forsaken.  Many Americans have given up on that dream. They are willing to turn their lives over to a strongman, no matter how foul. They have traded their freedom for the perceived belief that only a strong man can save them from the carnage. Instead of freedom these paltry Americans (just like their equally paltry Canadian cousins) want security or wealth or fame or grimy tax breaks.

 

The members of the fictional world, epitomized by Huck Finn who would not give up his freedom for anything, are the real heroes of the American and Canadian dreams. As Azar Nafisi said,

“We must remember that, despite the prevailing attitude today that arrogantly defines success as money, the real heroes of this nation’s fictional landscape are vagrants, marginal, and subversive, from Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener whose mantra is “I would prefer not to,” the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Zora Neal Hurston’s Janie, Bellows Herzog, Philip Roth’s Sabbath   or Omar Little of The Wire, who reminds us of the importance of a code of honor. All seek integrity and listen to their hearts’ dictates, cautioning us against our willingness to betray the American dream when it is, as Fitzgerald put it, besmirched with the “foul dust that floats in the wake” of our dreams.”

 

That is why Nafisi said “we must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time.”

 

Like young but brave Huck Finn, all must be able to enjoy “a freedom to turn their back on society and what is expected of them, and to forge their own lonely path.”

Like Huck we must be free to abandon conventional wisdom or morality and “light out for the territory.” If Huck can do it, we can do it. The American dream, which really is also the Canadian dream, may be besmirched but it is not dead—yet.

 I would go so far as to say that is a religious quest in the modern age.

Books Matter in the Republic of the Imagination:

Classic Books, Freedom, Rebel

 

Perhaps people living under totalitarian regimes know better than the rest of us that books matter. In such countries people are not allowed to read any book they desire to read. They can only read the approved books. Those are the books that align well with the interests of those in power. If they want to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn they may not be able to do so. Even in Canada and the United States some people want to control the books that the rest of us read. Such people don’t believe in freedom of expression or the freedom to read. They usually have a “good cause” to justify their intrusions into our reading lives.  I am not saying all restrictions are unjustified intrusions. I am only saying we must be vigilant to ensure that only the very rare books justify such an intrusion.

That is why we learn that books really do matter. As Azar Nafisi said,

 

“…books matter, that they open up a window into a more meaningful life, that they enable us to tolerate complexity and nuance and to empathize with people whose lives and conditions are utterly different form our own.”

 

In unfree states, or in states on the road to unfreedom, such as perhaps the United States is headed, some people want to prevent others from reading anything contrary to the truths they hold dear. In Iran that means no deviance from the form of Islam the regime has approved. In the southern US that means no deviance from the approved belief among the powerful that the US is not a racist country. In some parts of the US, like Florida, among conservatives, that means no books that foster a view of gender and sexuality that fails to conform to the conventional wisdom of evangelical Christians. At least the children should not be allowed to read such books. They do not want others to have fellow feeling for those living lives different from their own.

Huck Finn refused to give obeisance to the conventional wisdom about race. He was the consummate rebel from the conventional wisdom. Nafisi put it well:

Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most memorable of those humble citizens of the imaginary America who stand up to forces great and terrible, but Huck refuses to return home, thus foreshadowing the destinies and shaping the choices of so many other fictional American characters who either leave home, never return, or long to do so. Those homeless protagonists of American fiction become the true guardians of what is best in American individualism, never identifying happiness with wealth or power. Perhaps in no other fiction, in fact, is materialism so frowned upon, or defined as the root of so many evils—an ironic but salutary reminder for a country so blatantly devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power.

 

Only brave rebels like Huck Finn can resist the lure of that materialism. They make the mistake Bob Dylan warned about namely, “don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” Like Huck Finn who preferred the freedom of life on a raft to the comfortable but “smothery” home.

The members of the Republic of the Imagination are the writers, musicians and artists that are rebels who say no to the smothering ideology of the conventional wisdom. As Azar Nafisi said,

“All writers are strangers, or pariahs, as Hannah Arendt put it. They look at the world through the eyes of the outsider” but only the American writers turn this attribute into a national characteristic…we need to reflect on this constant restlessness, this unending questioning, this battle between the desire for prosperity and success and the urge to walk away from it all, to be wary of complacency—in short to perform the miracle of the small vagabond Huck, who followed his heart as he floated on a raft down the Mississippi.

 

That was why Huck decide to “light out for the territory” rather than be smothered in comfort. That is why Huck is a charter member of the Republic of the Imagination. But we can all join.

 Books matter in the republic of the Imagination; none more so than the classics like Huckleberry Finn.