D
djeter
Guest
http://payingattentiontothesky.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/dostoevsky51.jpg?w=450&h=543
Dostoevsky learned from experience something about the savage nature of human beings. Through observation of his fellow prisoners he saw that we are disordered creatures, subject to outbursts of irrational passions and destructive action. The more the individual personality was confined and controlled, the more subject it became to these frenetic explosions of willfulness.
Part of this turbulence could be defined as a desire of the individual will to express its own freedom. Human freedom had a compulsive need to demonstrate its own existence. Dostoevsky’s great biographer Joseph Frank puts the idea this way, “To fulfill this drive, men will sacrifice all other goods and values; and if they are unable to satisfy it in any way, the results can be disastrous.”
Dostoevsky himself proved this “disastrous” freedom by making a bad marriage in 1858 and giving in to his temptation for gambling, a vice that haunted him for his entire life but did produce his brilliant dissection of the addiction, The Gambler.
He also came to be afflicted with epilepsy. He distanced himself from his old friends as his political views became more and more conservative. He saw clearly that man does not above all need material well being in this world, but rather spiritual redemption. What Christ taught mankind, he now knew, was that salvation can come only through suffering. Man must be ready to share the sufferings of Christ in order to find salvation. In a world increasingly absorbed with progress and utopias and comfort, Dostoevsky shouts, “No! Christ lives and what He teaches us is that we must suffer.”
Such belief could be neither easy nor constant in the modern world. “I will tell you that I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt. I will remain so until the grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it. And yet God sends me sometimes instants when I am completely calm. At those instants I love and feel loved by others and it is at those instants that I have shaped for myself a Credo where everything is clear and sacred to me. This credo is very simple. Here it is: To believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and perfect than Christ. And I tell myself with a jealous love that not only is there nothing more but there can be nothing more. Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
David Allen White is a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and provides here an introduction to Dostoevsky and his relationship with the Catholic Church. Dostoevsky makes many Catholic readers uncomfortable. In many of his novels he rails against the Catholic Church. His knowledge of the Catholic Church, however, came largely from the French socialists who had such a profound influence on him in his youth.
More on all this here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2011/01/20/dostoevsky-and-the-catholic-church-david-allen-white/
If you look under categories you’ll see I have a number of essays and articles on Dostoevsky stored under “Understanding Dostoevksy.” He has been for me the most Catholic of writers and one who has helped me to understand my faith. Hope he does the same for you and this is a great article to kick off your understanding of him.
dj
Dostoevsky learned from experience something about the savage nature of human beings. Through observation of his fellow prisoners he saw that we are disordered creatures, subject to outbursts of irrational passions and destructive action. The more the individual personality was confined and controlled, the more subject it became to these frenetic explosions of willfulness.
Part of this turbulence could be defined as a desire of the individual will to express its own freedom. Human freedom had a compulsive need to demonstrate its own existence. Dostoevsky’s great biographer Joseph Frank puts the idea this way, “To fulfill this drive, men will sacrifice all other goods and values; and if they are unable to satisfy it in any way, the results can be disastrous.”
Dostoevsky himself proved this “disastrous” freedom by making a bad marriage in 1858 and giving in to his temptation for gambling, a vice that haunted him for his entire life but did produce his brilliant dissection of the addiction, The Gambler.
He also came to be afflicted with epilepsy. He distanced himself from his old friends as his political views became more and more conservative. He saw clearly that man does not above all need material well being in this world, but rather spiritual redemption. What Christ taught mankind, he now knew, was that salvation can come only through suffering. Man must be ready to share the sufferings of Christ in order to find salvation. In a world increasingly absorbed with progress and utopias and comfort, Dostoevsky shouts, “No! Christ lives and what He teaches us is that we must suffer.”
Such belief could be neither easy nor constant in the modern world. “I will tell you that I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt. I will remain so until the grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it. And yet God sends me sometimes instants when I am completely calm. At those instants I love and feel loved by others and it is at those instants that I have shaped for myself a Credo where everything is clear and sacred to me. This credo is very simple. Here it is: To believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and perfect than Christ. And I tell myself with a jealous love that not only is there nothing more but there can be nothing more. Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
David Allen White is a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and provides here an introduction to Dostoevsky and his relationship with the Catholic Church. Dostoevsky makes many Catholic readers uncomfortable. In many of his novels he rails against the Catholic Church. His knowledge of the Catholic Church, however, came largely from the French socialists who had such a profound influence on him in his youth.
More on all this here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2011/01/20/dostoevsky-and-the-catholic-church-david-allen-white/
If you look under categories you’ll see I have a number of essays and articles on Dostoevsky stored under “Understanding Dostoevksy.” He has been for me the most Catholic of writers and one who has helped me to understand my faith. Hope he does the same for you and this is a great article to kick off your understanding of him.
dj