A Tale of Two Authors (and two books)

So I said I would do this, and now feel largely unqualified – but such is life sometimes I suppose.

What did people even argue about before they could fight about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?  As a Christian, one almost feels obligated to choose the latter. Also, War and Peace certainly lacks the cool monks of Brothers K (how’s that for literary criticism).  But David Bently Hart has risen to the challenge and explained why we should actually prefer Tolstoy.  You can read his entire article here.  I will reference it along the way.

First, this is primarily a discussion of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov.  The only other book I’ve read by either is Crime and Punishment – a book I enjoyed quite a bit actually. Also, it should be noted that while most seem to agree that The Brothers K is the best of Dostoevsky, it is not so simple with Tolstoy as I believe quite a few (including my mom) would hold that Anna Karenina is the true standard by which Tolstoy must be judged.

With those 400 disclaimers in place, I carry onward.

Before we get to Hart’s eloquence, let us pause to recall how awesome The Brothers K is.  Each of the brothers is fantastic. I have never encountered anyone in a novel like Alyosha. Ivan’s encounter with the Devil just rocks. The family dynamic is very well done. The philosophy and theology is very much present, but not over bearing. The Inquisitor holds up well – even if it’s the only part of the novel the secular world discusses. Also, perhaps most importantly for me, at the end of The Brothers K it almost feels like you have been on a spiritual journey.  It’s more that just a novel.

What’s so hilarious about that is it’s exactly what War and Peace so obviously tries to do: be more than a novel.  I am used to extended narrator monologues but Tolstoy takes it to a whole ‘nother level with War and Peace.  It’s like “Dude, I get it.  Free will is not your bag.  Let’s move on”.  You feel like you’ve gone on a longer journey with Brothers K even though War and Peace is significantly longer.

But let us give Tolstoy some credit, via Hart:

But, if we look too closely, we will inevitably come to see that, however brilliantly Dostoevsky has fused together an ensemble of psychological convulsions and habits of temperament in each of these characters, the result of that fusion is in every case a creature that could never exist outside of the novel. One cannot enter into these characters; when one attempts to do so, they dissolve back into multiplicity. Not one of them is as plainly, poignantly, unexceptionally alive as, say, Pierre in War and Peace.

Yes! A point for Leo here.  Tolstoy’s characters are just outrageously real.  All of them are people you feel like you could meet or could imagine meeting.  I just don’t get that sense in The Brothers K.  There is something lacking here; things are a bit too tidy; everyone is too easily classifiable – not so with Tolstoy.

Furthermore, Tolstoy full realizes so many characters, and without much, if any, redundancy. It’s like any of at least ten characters could be a main character in any other novel.  It’s quite impressive I’d say.

Also, the detail and epic sweep in Tolstoy are amazing.  It’s not just that I move from a battle in Austria to a dinner party in Moscow; it’s that each are done so well, and in such detail.  The social is not marginalized for the political or the war; everything is very well balanced.  In the Brothers K, the confines of the drama are far narrower, and it lacks the range of Tolstoy. For example, Tolstoy’s take on war is very interesting and it’s a subject almost completely absent from the Brothers K.

Finally, Hart meets the Christian issue head-on (long quote to follow):

Among converts to Orthodoxy, for instance, as well as among many cradle Orthodox of a particularly rigorist kind, Dostoevsky is especially honored for having held firmly to Chalcedonian orthodoxy and having introduced the greater world to the figure of Father Zosima, from whom all the light of Eastern Christian contemplative spirituality shines out; and, more generally, among Christians of many confessions, Dostoevsky is revered as a prophet, the great Christian anti-Nietzsche, the voice of ancient Christian truth crying out in the spiritual desert of the modern West.

Tolstoy, by contrast, was practically a liberal Protestant, who thought of Jesus principally as a divinely inspired teacher of moral truth; he was not only indifferent to, but scornful of dogmatic tradition; he was even excommunicated, for goodness’ sake.

Fair enough, I suppose. I would observe, however, that there are all kinds of orthodoxy and all kinds of heresy. It is true that Dostoevsky personally assented—despite occasional episodes of doubt—to the creeds of the ancient church, and that he believed deeply in the mystical and sacramental traditions of the Orthodox church, and that in general his vision of things was shaped by traditional Christian understandings of sin and redemption.

That said, it is also true that his Chalcedonian orthodoxy was often almost inextricably confused with a dark, semipagan mysticism of the “Russian Christ” and of Russian blood and soil, and that he nursed slightly deranged fantasies of an Eastern Christian crusade to recapture Constantinople by violence, and that his virulent and contemptible anti-Semitism was anything but an accidental feature of his moral philosophy.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, despite his creedal heterodoxy, at least believed that, say, the sermon on the mount should be taken quite literally, and that Christ’s injunction to love our enemies and Paul’s claim that, in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek (and so forth) meant that Christians really ought not to kill Turks or hate Jews. If we were really to make conformity to Christian teaching our chief criterion of comparison between the two men, I would still hesitate to concede Dostoevsky the advantage.

That is a very good point.  It seems that great men who we happen to agree with are often given the benefit of the doubt in their personal lives. Tolstoy may have inhabited the life that Dostoevsky often defended.

After all is said and done I have to say I am among those who still prefer The Brothers K.  Hart makes some good points, and I have my own reasons for exalting War and Peace, but it just doesn’t connect with me like The Brothers K.  I feel like that is a piss poor reason, but there you have it.

 

 

 

Dabbling in Conspiracy

I try not to go down this path.  A lot of times if you are in a very tiny minority, it really just means you are wrong (e.g. No, the other Orthodox are not heretics, No, you are not the Pope, No, you shouldn’t be burning Bibles, etc.).  So, I freely admit that I’m going out a bit on a limb here, so please take it with a grain of salt.

I think this piece by Yves Smith is worthwhile reading.  It talks about media generally, and it’s reaction to investment banks and Wall Street in particular.  The movie she mentions is really interesting.  I started watching it once, but couldn’t make it through it was freaking me out so much.  I’ve excerpted a portion of the article below; you can read the rest if you like.

I couldn’t tell immediately, but one of my friends remarked in 2000 that the reporting was increasingly reminiscent of what she had grown up with in communist Poland. The state of the US media became evident to me when I lived in Australia during the run-up and the first two years of the Gulf War. I would regularly e-mail people in the States about stories I thought were important and I suspected might not be getting much play in the US. My correspondents were media junkies. 85% of the time, a story that had gotten widespread coverage in Australia appeared not to have been released in the US. And the other 15%, it didn’t get much attention (for instance, buried in the middle of the first section of the New York Times). And remember, Australia was an ally and sent troops to the Iraq.

Douthat and Gay Marriage

Ross Douthat is one of my favorite columnists.  I followed him avidly while he was at The Atlanitc (less so at The Times), and his book is probably the best take I’ve seen on a possible future for the Republican Party.  That said, I take some issue with him on the below.

According to this article, Ross made some odd statements on gay marriage.

Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public.

Then comes Ross’s quote:

“The secular arguments against gay marriage, when they aren’t just based on bigotry or custom, tend to be abstract in ways that don’t find purchase in American political discourse. I say, ‘Institutional support for reproduction,’ you say, ‘I love my boyfriend and I want to marry him.’ Who wins that debate? You win that debate.”

Now, I am very much willing to give Ross the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t help but be at least somewhat concerned by these statements.  If Ross doesn’t feel comfortable defending traditional marriage in public he should either do more research, or change his mind.  My gosh man, you’re a columnist at The New York Times!  You need to be able to defend your positions, and that includes under questions from a hostile crowd.  Now maybe he just don’t have information, but Ross seems to suggest that he in fact does know the arguments but stating them is just a futile endeavor.  Wow, are things that bad?  Somebody get me a Yuengling.

Darkness, Cursing, and Realism

EDIT:  Don’t judge a book by it’s cover… or until you finish it, I guess   Many of my issues are resolved by a solid twist at the end of the book.  I saw something coming, but it went in a different direction then I anticipated and this new perspective raised the level of the overall work considerably in my eyes.   I still can’t give it an unmitigated recommendation, but I must retract much of the below.

Due to eye issues, much of my “reading” these days takes the form of audio books.  This inferior medium of presentation has allowed me to keep the Metro rides interesting, and helped keep me at least somewhat connected to the literary world.  Recently, I completed both War and Peace and the Brothers Karamazov.  I hope to produce a rather extensive post comparing the two at a later date, but for now I’m going to compare them both to the book I am currently listening to: Shutter Island.

After Tolstoy I wanted something completely different from classic literature – and I definitely got it.  Shutter Island is a thoroughly modern mystery/thriller with all the pacing, dialogue, and plot twists that one would expect from that genre.  It pulls you right along, throwing in just enough depth to keep you (at least somewhat) invested in the characters and themes the author wishes to deal with.  In short, it’s pretty good pop fiction.

There is something that I find increasingly off-putting though: the immense darkness pervading the book.  The main character is burdened by atrocities in the past; the setting is grim; the Cold War is presented as an entirely debilitating time period.  But perhaps the tone is most pronounced in the language.  I don’t just mean light swearing, but full-throated cursing of the most unreproducible magnitude.  It doesn’t overrun the book, but is common and crude enough to even make me mildly uncomfortable at times.

The funny thing is, I feel like the darkness and the language are designed to make the book more realistic.  However, I have the opposite reaction; it takes me out of the story.  I think this is largely because, at least at some points, it just seems out of place.  I mean Tolstoy burns down the whole city of Moscow, and Dostoyevsky portrays patricide and convicts an innocent man, but there seems to be far more hope running through those books than this one.  Is the unrelenting negativity in Shutter Island really appropriate, or even, dare we say, realistic?  Did many people come home after WWII and really wonder if it was all a waste?  Really?  Were most wives (even troubled ones) in the 1950’s really unrelenting faucets of profanity?  Really?

The old books seem more real.  The characters are better fleshed out and their actions are more understandable.  Tolstoy has complicated characters which often defy simple classification.  The themes are dealt with in a more nuanced fashion, and clichés are not treated as profound insights.  They give us insights into individuals and societies.  Hope and despair are balanced, just as they are in life.

All the “swearing” and “grit” in the world can’t overcome a flat out better writer.

The Blue Pill

“…a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern  people think) a form  of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian  is meant to do.”          – CS Lewis

One of the blogs I read is The American Scene: a collection of individual bloggers that sometimes have interesting things to say about politics and life.  James Poulos, an occasional contributor to the site, recently wrote a post about geeks and love.  In it, he essentially asserts that geeks are so fascinated by fantasies of theoretical romantic possibilities (e.g. relationships with aliens) that they are bored with stories of love between human people.  You know, stories that could actually happen.

Freddie, a frequent commenter on the site, offers a corrective which make the geeks look even worse.

I would say that part of it is not just that geeks are bored by love but that they have internalized an idea of intermediated love. The dime-store way of putting this would be to say that the Internet has conditioned them to see love, or the promise of it, anyway, as something that they can access only through the use of an electronic self— they see themselves as having little real world value but great virtual value, and so the only part of them that they see as being worthy of loving is the part which is least like them. Even if that’s too crass, I think there is in the heart of geekdom a deep, unhappy relationship with the real self and the real life it leads. It’s cliche, but sci-fi is escapism that escapes the furthest.

Ouch.

I would like to offer a third possibility.  I think that in some sense most people recognize that they are not entirely fulfilled by earthly things.  There is something about life which is not quite complete; something seems off; something seems to be missing.  The geeks feel this absence as well, and are thus not entirely satisfied with reality.  Maybe this is what Freddie sees as a “deep, unhappy relationship with the real self and the real life it leads”. Perhaps, for some geeks, they embark on a misguided path to cure this through “the virtual self”.   They launch a quest to find a “virtual eschaton” in love and friendship on the internet or in World of Warcraft.  Basically, they are searching for a more perfect form of love that does not exist outside of God.  But they quest ever onward, not realizing, or accepting, this point.

However, should we really be surprised by all this?  Since reality cannot provide fulfillment, and Heaven has been rejected, is it any wonder there are those who choose the blue pil?

Saved in Childbearing

[S]he will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control. (1 Tim 2:15)

This Pauline passage, referring to the post-lapsarian condition of Eve and all women, used to bother me.  Not that I consider myself a feminist – anyway, not in the late 20th-century usage of the term – but that in the literal sense, one might think a biological processes is the door to heaven for half of the human race.  Theologically problematic, no?  Then in what sense could it be true?

I have been reflecting on the spirituality of Christian motherhood as of late due to my own recent entrance into that state of life.  What has struck me the most is that more than anything, pregnancy, childbirth, and nurturing are tremendous opportunities for self-sacrifice.  I say opportunitites because one could of course still act selfishly: lazing about, complaining through the inconveniences of pregnancy, or putting your child’s many needs on hold for your own wants. (And not that I claim to have always seized these opportunities!  My husband can tell you.)

It may be irresponsible of me to write this without the consultation of the Tradition, but I offer these merely as my own spiritual reflections that may perhaps benefit another.  I think that what we see in Genesis is an opportunity for the spiritual antidote to Eve’s self-centered act in Eden.  By God’s grace, she – and we, her heirs – can make a different choice, the choice of selfless love.  Yet this opportunity is unique to women, I think because men and women have different types of selfish tendencies.  Man’s antidote is thus different – though related, because it takes two to beget and raise children.  But I digress.  While most women have children at some point, what about the childless?  I think Genesis still speaks in the spiritual sense of childbearing: a woman can be a “spiritual mother” to others in a nurturing, caring selflessness unique to femininity.  All, men and women, must seek to live a life of selflessness, of emptying oneself so as to be full of Christ, to be saved.

Is Healthcare a basic human right?

As the debate about healthcare reform rages on, I came across an interesting Op-Ed on politicsdaily.com written by the Most Reverend Donald Wuerl, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington. While there are many points in the Archbishop’s Op-Ed that are up for debate, one assertion in particular stuck out to me: “healthcare is a basic human right”.

For some reason, it seems as though when people discuss healthcare, oftentimes only the needs and desires of the patient are considered. This is not surprising, since, as the Archbishop points out, medical care often involves life and death. However, there is another side to the equation that we must not overlook.

Those who claim that healthcare is a basic human right must also claim that a patient has a right to the time, talents, money and hard work of the healthcare provider. This implies that a doctor or nurse has no say in whether or not to treat a patient, how much time to spend on that patient, and no right to consider the financial and emotional cost involved. If we claim that humans have a fundamental right to receive medical care, we turn medical practitioners into slaves, mandating that they always be “on call” to serve our needs and desires.

As Christians, we believe that God’s greatest gift to mankind is the gift of free will. We believe, as our Lord taught, that God does not compel anyone to follow Him, but calls us to service, as a shepherd does his sheep. If we hold this dogma near and dear to us, how can we then claim ownership over the time and energy of another, even that of a doctor or nurse?

The Judas Kiss

For those not familiar with the Russian Orthodox liturgy, there are prayers in preparation for receiving Eucharist.  These prayers are designed to confess one’s own sinfulness and acknowledge our inadequacy for receiving the body and blood of Christ.  One section sentence fragment runs “…neither like Judas will I give thee a kiss, but like the thief will I confess thee, remember me O Lord in thy kingdom”.  It puzzled me why this was included in the prayers and what it means.  Ostensibly, Judas greeted Christ as a close friend and gave him a kiss.  In his heart we all know that he had nothing but treachery.

We adorn our church with images of Christ and holy men and women.   It is customary for us to greet Christ and these saints symbolically by kissing the images.   I find myself reflecting on the past week as I too kiss the images.  Ostensibly with nothing buy affection for Christ, but in my heart I know that I have willfully disobeyed God’s commandments throughout the week.  I find myself in the same woeful predicament as Judas.

Judas’  ultimate sin was not in betraying Christ, but rather despairing of God’s mercy.   Had he repented, he would have remained a holy apostle to this day.

So, despair of my own duplicity is not the solution.  Jesus says “ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened up to you.”  If we ask for forgiveness we will receive it.  If we seek holiness, we will find it, if we desire to repent, Christ will open the door to our hearts and we will discover Christ living there.

The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

Is Socrates statement correct?  Socrates seems to suggest that he must have the freedom to examine his own actions, or life would not be worth living.  Thus, when that option is taken away from him he drinks poison (hemlock) to his own death.

Socrates statement seems to be obviously false, however.  I find there is a lot of merit to examining ones life, world, etc.; hence, the title of this blog.  However, that doesn’t mean that one has to examine one’s life in order for it to have value.  Does one need to question ones actions to find value in friends and family?  Also, what about those who are mentally handicapped and incapable of seriously examining their own lives?  It seems obvious that their life is still worth living.

In fact, if Socrates is truly only interested in examining his own life, then why not accept exile rather then death (as the government offered him)?  He would undoubtedly still have time to lead an examined life in exile.  Perhaps he strongly desires the opportunity to teach others, to engage in a “philosopher’s evangelism” of some sorts.  Perhaps this is the thing he can’t truly live without.   Thus, if he cannot “spread the faith” so to speak, he would rather take the poison. It is that important to him

Obviously, I don’t know what exactly was going through his head, but I do reject the plain meaning of the statement.