Lately in The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers has been accused of murdering their father. His interrogation by the local authorities takes chapters and chapters, but buried in the paragraphs of dialogue are revealing gems about this particular brother's character, and how Dostoyevsky understands him in context of the story.

This particular brother says at one point, "No, not penitent, don't write that. I'm not much good myself, I'm not very beautiful, so I had no right to consider him [his father] repulsive. That's what I mean. Write that down, if you like."

Later, the authorities insist that they must strip him naked and search all his clothes. Since his clothes are blood-stained, they appropriate his clothes as evidence and give him someone else's, which fit him badly. When he returns to the interrogation room, he asks, "Well, what now? Are you going to flog me? That's all that's left for you."

Together those two pieces of insight were turning points for me in understanding this character's function. He's been a profligate, a wastrel, a sensualist, a womanizer, and a thief so far in the story. Before he's arrested, he spends the whole evening partying it up with a bunch of complete strangers and the woman he wants to seduce.

Yet I think that Dostoyevsky uses this brother's sins, together with this dialogue, as clear echoes of Christ's work. Christ, too, ate with tax collectors and sinners; Christ, though completely perfect, took our sins upon Himself in such a degree that He had committed our sins Himself. They were His; He had done them.

So it's not inappropriate for this brother, who's such a despicable person, to be surrounded by Christlike imagery at his interrogation--to be stripped, condescended to, given other clothes, and finally to feel as though he should be flogged. I haven't read far enough yet to see what punishment he does receive, but for now I'm marvelling again, as I did in Crime and Punishment, at the way Dostoyevsky so beautifully paints the complete identification of Savior with sinners.

A humbling portrait of what redemption costs.

Recently I've managed to make it into the heart of The Brothers Karamazov--at least if you define "heart" in terms of number of pages, and intensity of action. One of the brothers may have just murdered someone accidentally. We'll see.

Long before that happened, during spring break I was reading Father Zossima's very, very, very lengthy deathbed discourse. I must confess to having struggled through it, though some of his ideas were fascinating, and some of the passages were beautiful. Take these, for example:

"Nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don't understand that life is heaven."

And:

"We are each responsible to all for all, it's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once."

Beautiful and seductive. I'm tempted myself to write as though nature is perfect--the perfect mirror for God's character, the perfect conveyor of truth about the human condition--but it's not. It's under the curse just the way human beings are. (And anyway, I find the binary between nature and humans problematic. God doesn't seem to think of nature and humans as separate. When nature was created, so were people; when humans disobey, all of nature gets cursed, too, and when Christ returns, He displays power over the entire created order, human and otherwise.)

This point, though, resonated with me as being in dialogue with my earlier questions about suffering:

"The Creator, just as on the first days of creation, looks upon Job and again He praises His creation. And Job praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was ordained."

I can begin to understand, if only dimly, how God's glory becomes more majestic in the world when human beings--rational but deeply flawed--demonstrate such an operation of His grace that they praise and worship Him even when they are in pain or grieving. That shows His worthiness, I think, in some way that nothing else could.

On Saturday, the last day of spring break, I finally got around to hanging pictures above the china cabinet. Not really pictures: most of them are maps of SR's from old books, and the one in the middle is a watercolour my mother painted.

It snowed overnight for the second time this week. And last March, we were grilling outside and eating on the patio on St. Patrick's...!

We started our seedlings indoors yesterday. They're in the basement. Six artichoke seeds, five tomato varieties (two of each), three sweet pepper varieties (four of each), jalapeno and anaheim peppers (two of each), and three onion varieties (six of each). I can't stop myself from checking on them, as though something will have magically changed in the last twenty-four hours.

More Dostoyevsky. So far, Alexey has just been running around the town, trying to keep his father and his oldest brother, Dimitri, from killing each other--and yet he seems to pack an awful lot of contemplation and long conversations in between the family intrigues.

For example, a sample of his dinner conversation with the middle brother, Ivan, who's a flaming agnostic:

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men--but though all that may come to pass, I don't accept it. I won't accept it" (279-280).

Why is Ivan so set against believing that God will work out a final redemption for all suffering?

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature--that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance--and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth" (291).

Ivan tells horrific stories for about ten pages of child abuse in order to lead up to this point. In other words, he asks the basic questions about why God allows evil and suffering in the world, and he asks these questions on emotional and ethical grounds. He confronts Alexey, an Orthodox novice who believes fully in God, with the problem of pain: how can God lead up to a final resolution when that final resolution will be built upon the most terrible human suffering, the suffering of innocent people? How can any justice pay back that suffering?

I haven't yet read Alexey's response, and I suspect that Dostoyevsky is going to put his (naive) character through a lot before the novel itself responds to these questions. Of course, in Calvinist terms, the innocent child really isn't innocent--he or she is a sinner and suffers the wages of sin just like everyone else.

Is that the logical conclusion? Abuse and sickness, abandonment and loneliness, these are simply the facts of living in a world where we have all chosen to sin? Can we then demand a resolution to the world that could pay back abuse and torment, when we have by our sinful natures deserved far greater torments at the hands of the angry God?

I struggle with these questions. To update them, what justice could pay back the elderly people left to drown in their beds during Hurricane Katrina? What justice could pay back the creation that has been so badly stewarded by humankind? What justice could heal aborted babies? If God prizes suffering, as He sometimes seems to in a world so full of pain, in what sense is suffering precious to Him?

I've read Job recently. I've recently listened again to Rut Etheredge's sermons on Christ our Cornerstone and God's hard doctrines and hard providences. But I'm also thinking about the recent suicides and deaths-by-sickness of friends' parents, and the news that another friend has been diagnosed with a chronic, potentially fatal illness.

With Ivan, I believe that God will someday renew the creation and bring a harmony between Heaven and earth. But I'm not sure that he asks the right question in his last quote--or that the questions I just asked are the right ones, either. God Himself has also suffered, suffered the ultimate. How does that give an answer?

I decided to start reading The Brothers Karamazov this past week. Accordingly, on Tuesday I went up to the Slavic Languages floor in the library and found the back corner where they squirrel away all their translations of Russian authors. Of course they had lots of editions of The Brothers, so I settled on a lovely old volume published by The Modern Library, trans. Constance Garrett, that's so old that it doesn't have a publishing date in it. It was originally a paperback, so it has the comfortable size of a pocket edition, but it's been given a library hardback binding, which gives it a good heft. The pages inside are of that lovely silk-smooth paper, paper that feels more like fabric than paper, that you never find in mass-market books anymore.

My philosophy with this book has to be totally different than with most books I read for fun. Usually I blaze through books because I want to know what happens (this is why I read books more than once). However, when I took a class on Middlemarch my first year here, the professor assigned us to journal as we read the novel. I had read Middlemarch before and enjoyed it, but writing my way through it helped me appreciate the narrative style, the slow unfolding of plot and philosophy alongside one another, much more thoroughly. 

Ever since I read War and Peace in highschool, I've felt some animosity toward anything written by a Russian. I loved Crime and Punishment, but War and Peace came after and was huger, more boring (dare I say it), and more daunting. So I haven't been back to the Russians since. But I thought I'd try The Brothers since it's by Dostoyevsky, and I thought I'd try the journalling method since my problem with War and Peace was arguably that I read it far too fast. 

So far, writing through The Brothers has been good. Dostoyevsky's narrator is an enigmatically engaging character in the story, and though I know I probably won't ever meet the narrator in the story (since this is a 19th-century novel, not some crazy 21st-century avante-garde thing), I'm fascinated by what he withholds. 

I'm also fascinated by Dostoyevsky's attitude toward faith. He's definitely not a Calvinist, but I found this beautiful quote last night:

“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don’t fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged…. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.” 

(Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 57-58)

A gorgeous quote for your Thursday morning:

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind…. I know Him because He first knew me and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters.

This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort—the sort of comfort that energises… not enervates—in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love, and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me. There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow-men do not see (and am I glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose…. (J.I. Packer, Knowing God)

Recently I realized a gap in my poetical education (one of many): Rainer Maria Rilke. My grandparents gave me his Letters to a Young Poet, but I've never actually read any of his poetry. So a couple of weeks ago, I checked out the Duino Elegies and his Book of Hours from the library, and since then I've been making my way through the Elegies.

Now, Rilke's philosophy is deeply flawed: his poetry works in a world without God, that celebrates its godlessness. He both mourns and delights in human transience; the fact that we die is both a source of deep pain and an ultimate glory to him. For these reasons Rilke sees humanity caught between "the Angel," a symbol for transcendence, and nature, to which we are much more akin, which is more sympathetic to us. Similarly, following from that, Rilke adopts many of the Romantic tropes that idealize nature and idealize childhood. Childhood is the closest humanity can get to nature, to a sense of oneness with the world, before we die.

Having said that, I've found parts of his Elegies very beautiful. This selection from the "Eighth Elegy" is a case in point:

Eighth Elegy

Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Martyn Crucefix

With all its eyes, Cration looks on the Open.

Only ours seems to have been turned backwards

and they appear to lay traps all round it

as if to prevent its going free….

And look at the half-certainties

of the bird that knows both states almost

from hatching—as if it were the soul

of an Etruscan, released from the dead

onlky to be received into another space

that has for its lid a reclining figure.

And how bewildered is any creature

that is womb-born and yet has to fly.

As if frightened of itself, it must hurtle

through the air the way a crack goes

through a tea-cup—so a bat’s track

streaks through the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

we face all this, never see beyond it!

It spills from us. We arrange it.

It falls to pieces. We arrange again.

We ourselves fall to pieces.

Who has twisted us this way round,

so no matter what we do we are always

in the position of one leaving? Just as,

on the last possible hill from which he can

glimpse his whole valley one final time,

he turns, stops there, he lingers—

so we live on, forever bidding goodbye.

Here I think Rilke gets exactly right that sense we have as humans of never being at rest. No matter how we try to organize the world--whether that's consciously and philosophically, through thought and art, or practically, through everyday vocations, we're always trying to impose our control on a world that is always disintegrating around us. Because of that we can never feel quite at home here, must always exist in the face of the fact that we will someday have to say good-bye to the world and enter death.

Of course, at this point a Christian would make the redemptive move. We are not merely transient animals; we belong to God, and we have the promise of eternal life in a perfected world where spirit and matter are beautifully united by Christ. Sometimes, though, I think I appreciate that truth more by resting for awhile in the mindset of a person without that hope.