Ivan Karamazov’s Mistake

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djeter

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I come to my philosophy through the literary. I dabble in the former, picked up an introductory text to Kant the other day and my eyes glazed over on the sixth page. Ah well.

But for every failure to comprehend I find some stunning successes. Like this article on Ivan Karamazov (with whom I have a special bond) by Ralph C. Wood. He also quotes Michael Sandel the Harvard professor who did the Justice series on PBS (a must see).

Great stuff with a perfect summary of the secular liberal vs the Catholic mindset:

"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

[A]ny 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.
This is a wonderful article which I have chopped up into reading selections and bolded here and there for web reading:

payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/10/15/reading-selections-from-%e2%80%9civan-karamazov%e2%80%99s-mistake%e2%80%9d-by-ralph-c-wood/

The original was in First Things back in 2004, and the full article is here if you want to print it out and read it normally:

bearspace.baylor.edu/Ralph_Wood/www/Dostoevsky%20and%20Orthodoxy/ivan%20karamazov’s%20mistake.pdf

Isn’t that a fabulous picture though. Looked Russian to me. Looked like Father Zosima (the character who is the head of an Orthodox monastery who also stands at the religious center of the novel) had been there…

dj

PS Pray for my Yankees.
 
“Ivan’s brief against belief is intellectually unanswerable.”

I disagree because his mistake was to reject God on the ground that the price is too high. He failed to realise that the power to love, create and give joy entails the power to hate, destroy and produce misery. In this world there is no limit to the amount of suffering caused by evil but it would be a greater evil not to create the world. Christ died to show us that injustice does not outlast this life. Innocent victims will always bear the scars of the wounds inflicted on them but like our Saviour they will be glorified in heaven because they too have been sacrificed for us…
 
tonyrey said:
“Ivan’s brief against belief is intellectually unanswerable.”

I disagree because his mistake was to reject God on the ground that the price is too high. He failed to realise that the power to love, create and give joy entails the power to hate, destroy and produce misery. In this world there is no limit to the amount of suffering caused by evil but it would be a greater evil not to create the world. Christ died to show us that injustice does not outlast this life. Innocent victims will always bear the scars of the wounds inflicted on them but like our Saviour they will be glorified in heaven because they too have been sacrificed for us…
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I think you have to see that sentence in full context:

"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."

Your point is, of course, well taken but I think you jumped the gun because Doestoevsky has “embodied such answers in living form,” namely his creations of Fr. Zosima and Alyosha Karamazov.

And Ivan has many mistakes:


  • *]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.
    *]He fails to see that one cannot scorn the love of God and still love human beings. So he confirms himself as a misanthrope.
    *]He misunderstands the true meaning of liberty. It does not “entail a brave and lonely autonomy, where each individual determines for himself the difference between good and evil.” It is rather to become communal selves, ecclesial Christians, who freely embrace our moral, religious, and political obligations. For the ecclesial Christian the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the Third Century St. Cyprian, the martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

    #3 is the battlefield where the modern secular state wages war against the Catholic imagination.

    Thanks for the comment.

    dj
 
djeter said:
I think you have to see that sentence in full context:

"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."

Your point is, of course, well taken but I think you jumped the gun because Doestoevsky has “embodied such answers in living form,” namely his creations of Fr. Zosima and Alyosha Karamazov.

And Ivan has many mistakes:


  • *]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.
    *]He fails to see that one cannot scorn the love of God and still love human beings. So he confirms himself as a misanthrope.
    *]He misunderstands the true meaning of liberty. It does not “entail a brave and lonely autonomy, where each individual determines for himself the difference between good and evil.” It is rather to become communal selves, ecclesial Christians, who freely embrace our moral, religious, and political obligations. For the ecclesial Christian the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the Third Century St. Cyprian, the martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

    #3 is the battlefield where the modern secular state wages war against the Catholic imagination.

    Thanks for the comment.

    dj
Click to expand...

  • Thanks for your excellent analysis of the novel. 🙂
 
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