Posts Tagged ‘Dostoyevsky’
On Dostoyevsky’s moralistic god
So I’ve just managed to get through Dostoyevsky’s The brothers Karamazov, for the first time, it seems, though I swear I’ve read it twice before. Life’s funny that way. But I’m not going to write here about the novel’s merits or otherwise, I want to focus on a meme, if that’s the right word, which I first noticed being spoken by a minor character, an intelligent boy named Kolya – “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted”. At other moments in the novel it’s associated with Ivan Karamazov, amongst others. It became a famous expression, firmly associated with Dostoyevsky’s philosophy – so much so that it came up in a very very different book I’ve been reading at the same time, – Determined, a book which presents a detailed argument against the philosophical concept of free will, by a Stanford University professor of neurophysiology, Robert Sapolsky:
Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipresent Someone doling out the consequences? As per Dostoyevsky, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.
R Sapolsky, Determined, pp 251-2
Sapolsky then goes on to cite anthropological evidence that moralising gods are a very recent phenomenon in human history. In fact I would argue that the first moralising god was also the first successful monotheistic one, created in the land of Canaan about 2600 years ago, the ‘Abrahamic’ god, essentially an amalgam of Yahweh and Elohim, the two most favoured gods of the region at that time. I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere. Here’s more of what Sapolsky has to say:
Hunter-gathers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99% of human history, do not invent moralising gods. Sure, they might demand a top-of-the-line sacrifice now and then, but they have no interest in whether humans are nice to each other.
Ibid, p 252
And this brings me to some thoughts I’ve had on the origins of religion. Clearly our development of religious thinking was a product of evolution. Other primates show signs of incipient ‘religious’ thinking. Dogs and cats don’t. With neurological development we began to notice stuff that required explanation. For example, ‘Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed’… Shakespeare’s personification of the sun might be a conceit, but it points to a history, or prehistory, of rather more real personifications. The wind plays gently or blows furiously, the sea provides us with food but sometimes rises up and washes our village away, one baby thrives, the next is stillborn, mild seasons are followed by endless driving snow which covers the land and its food, and so forth. Humans came to recognise that seemingly capricious forces were at work, and they attributed these forces to capricious but powerful entities. How to interact with them, to get them on side? In the same way we might deal with powerful, but unpredictable humans. Pander to them, give them stuff, offer them bribes, and call them sacrifices. Dedicate buildings to them, set aside some of our harvest for them, create dances and chants to honour or mollify them.
This idea of powerful living, quasi-human forces that people had to deal with to ensure their survival was, as I say, an advance of sorts. For we’d acquired enough brainpower to require explanations for seasonal and environmental unpredictabilities. Morality may have played a role of sorts too – these forces were perhaps punishing us for behaving badly, but not likely in an absolute sense. With many forces, or gods, having control of different aspects of the physical and mental realm – fire, water, fertility, war, love, the weather – and perhaps even arguing and fighting over their particular domains, morality would likely have been less of an issue than obeisance to whatever god most mattered to you at the time.
So morality in the more absolute sense – Good and Evil – seems to have been a product of monotheism. But not just monotheism. The first monotheism that we know about was attempted in Egypt by the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, a top-down decision to banish all gods apart from Aten, a god strongly identified with the Sun. As Amenhotep then defined himself as the priest of Aten, Akhenaten, it seems that this was an attempt to combine worldly and heavenly power within his own person (an approach copied by many later autocrats, and it seems likely that Amenhotep wasn’t the first to try it). It didn’t last, of course, but the Jewish attempt to create a monotheistic system about 700 years later was more successful, first because it wasn’t the work of one self-aggrandising individual, and second because it was all written down, together with an origin myth, a chosen people myth, and a set of good-and-evil commandments, amongst other propaganda. And note the very first commandment:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3).
which is built upon later in Exodus:
“For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14).
The first quote suggests monolateralism (one boss god and a handful of subordinates – other gods must be behind me) – while the second quote suggests monotheism (though for some reason the name Jealous didn’t catch on).
And meanwhile humans continued to evolve, socially, until something like modern science began to develop, and, very very recently in evolutionary terms, religious forces and explanations came to be questioned and, in some places, abandoned. And so it continues…
So, back to Dostoyevsky, and I do mean back. But not everywhere. Sapolsky has it that only 5% of United Staters identify as atheists. The 2021 census here in Australia found that 39% of native-born Australians ‘claim no religion’. That percentage has risen rapidly over the past few censuses. My own birthplace, Scotland, is now the least religious region of the UK. The first census in Australia, in the 1890s, which asked the same question on religion as is asked today, had over 90% of the population identifying as Christian.
Oh, yes, Dostoyevsky, I forgot. His reputation as a great philosophical novelist will fade, I think, as the Abrahamic moralistic god fades, in some places more quickly than others, obviously. It’s a long game. Dostoyevsky’s greatest strength, I think, is in creating characters of complexity – often tortured, suffering, self-harming complexity. He himself suffered from epilepsy, a condition that was stigmatised for centuries, as Sapolsky also relates in Determined. Which brings me to Smerdyakov, the character I feel most sympathy for….
But that’s another story.
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1880
Robert Sapolsky, Determined, 2023
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans & Christians, 2006
Dostoyevsky, Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor fantasy
cushy torture – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…’
I don’t tend to read novels these days, but I’ve recently joined a book group of friends who meet to discuss a selected Work of Literary Importance, and currently it’s Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve actually read the book twice before, but as many have said, when you read the same book decades apart, it really isn’t the same book.
And of course when you’re reading a book in translation, and written over 150 years ago, can you trust what you’re reading? Is it better to read a modern translation or, in this case, one closer to Dostoyevsky’s time? Imagine, say, translating Shakespeare into Russian. Impossible, right? But surely it’s been done, and why not? I’ve no doubt there are highly intelligent bilinguists who’ve managed to render the freshness of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language into dazzlingly fresh 400-year-old Russian, though my brain hurts just thinking about it.
Anyway, I’m currently reading Karamazov online in the good old Constance Garnett 1916 translation (the original was first published in 1880), and when I get to part two I’ll switch to David Magarshack’s 1958 translation, which I have on my shelves. And personally I find that Garnett’s translation does a fine job of capturing Dostoyevsky’s sometimes over-the-top intensity and self-mocking humour. It really rollicks along, in a grotesque sort of way.
I’m definitely getting more out of this third reading than from previous ones (or maybe I’ve just forgotten…) and I certainly feel that Ivan Karamazov is the novel’s central and most interesting character and obviously closest to Dostoyevsky himself. This is brought home in the conversation with Alyosha – actually largely a monologue – that precedes his fantasy of the Grand Inquisitor, which I’ll focus on in detail – or maybe not.
Actually I found the Grand Inquisitor story, which has of course become famous, something of an anti-climax, and a source of irritation, probably because my anti-Catholicism has hardened over the years. I was more impressed and moved by Ivan’s distress at the everyday injustices of Russian life, especially the treatment of children. In his rambling but passionate monologue on injustice and cruelty with precedes the Grand Inquisitor fable he comes closer to modern thinking – it seems to me – than in all the god talk that follows. Take this, for example:
Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering; degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me—hunger, for instance—my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher suffering—for an idea, for instance—he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea.
Living in the centre of a city, as I do, it’s impossible not to see physical suffering on a daily basis – as well as the inscrutable faces of a procession of people who may or may not be carrying a world of regret or frustration in their hearts. To think about it is often too overwhelming – better to confine yourself to your own business and its profits and losses. Which makes me think of what we owe to others, as the most socially constructed species on the planet, and what we’ve come to believe we owe to ourselves as fully-fledged members of the increasingly individualised WEIRD world (see the references).
But let’s get back to Ivan. Or Ivan/Dostoyevsky. He comes out with half-truths, half-buried insights, as people do in conversation:
… the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.
Dostoyevsky, it seems to me is very good at presenting people struggling for insight and often failing. What we get here, I think, is Ivan’s mixed feelings of irritation and envy for the ‘simple-minded’, however he conceives them. He seems often tormented by his own intellect, and the complexity of his feelings. Hence his sympathy, mixed with a degree of contempt, for Alyosha. He takes the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ (Matthew 22:39) as impossibly unreasonable, though makes something of an exception for children, channeling into the concern we all have for the powerless, vulnerable and innocent. To highlight the impossibility of Christ’s injunction he cites a host of historical cruelties by ‘Turks and Circassians’, though of course he could’ve cited the Mongols under Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane and others, the Christian slaughter of tens of thousands of Moslems and Jews in the Holy Land, the Catholic mass-murder of the fellow-Christian Cathars, and the Russian massacres in the east under Ivan the Terrible – etc etc. Then he tells another more modern story of a young man, brought up in squalor and horribly mistreated, who grows up to be a thief and finally a murderer. At the end he repents and is made much of as a redeemed soul, before being guillotined. What are we to make of this story, and Ivan’s attitude? It seems clear that he’s mocking, or expressing disgust for, our dehumanising of others, and then punishing them for their inhumane behaviour, while congratulating ourselves on their repentance. Could something be rotten in the state of Christianity?
Ivan next turns to the ill-treatment of the clearly innocent, from pack horses being beaten to death, to children:
You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain…
This sort of stuff is personal for me, I must say, as I left school at fifteen after being slapped across the face with full force by a sadistic headmaster, and have been plagued by revenge fantasies ever since. But this was nothing compared to the stories of child abuse and murder Ivan goes on to recount, stories, or rather, truths, which make him almost ashamed to love his own human life so much, when he observes the inhumanity around him. And although he’s friendly to and sometimes envious of Alyosha, he’s not easily taken in his brother’s ‘loving-kindness’ – “You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost!”
Ivan professes belief in ‘God’- clearly the ultra-male monolatrist-cum-monotheist one created in the land of Canaan around 2,600 years ago – but he understandably wonders how one could respect a god that permits such cruelty in the world, or, more to the point, creates creatures who commit such cruelties. And this appears to be the point of his talk with Alyosha, to whom he at one point says “I won’t give you up to your Zossima”. Ivan may only be pretending to believe in God in order to get Alyosha to listen and question. Even if all he can offer is torment and cynicism.
And yet, what Ivan expresses a hope and a hearing for makes perfect sense. An end to wanton cruelty, including the additional cruelty imposed upon the cruel. Hell’s torture imposed upon the damned, for example. All of this, thinking from a post-religious context, one that I inhabit, brings me to the issue of free will, crime and punishment, but that I’ll reserve for a future post.
So, after all this tortured talk, Ivan relates his fable of the Grand Inquisitor. It’s a clever idea. Jesus, the putative son of God, supposedly martyred for our sins 2000 years ago, turns up in 15th century Seville in the midst of a large-scale auto-da-fé and, though silent, is immediately recognised and adored by the crowd, especially after he starts tossing miracles about the place. He’s just performed the highlight of his show, raising a dead child from her coffin, when a 90-year-old Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, arrives on the scene, orders the Jesus to be arrested and imprisoned, and his men to get back to the business of burning heretics, Jews and other riffraff.
Later that evening, the Inquisitor pays a visit to God’s offspring in his cell. Turns out he (the Inquisitor) has a lot to say, and his speech is impressively voluminous for a ninety-year-old. The Jesus figure, meanwhile, remains as silent as a god. And the Inquisitor’s message, for all its verbosity, is pretty basic (and I suspect a modern translator would dispense with the ‘thou wast’ and ‘thou hast’ etc, as per the MEV Bible). He’s saying that, after many centuries of struggle, the Church (as it was then, before the Reformation put a spanner in the works) has effectively corrected the ‘I will make you free’ promise made somewhere in the gospels:
let me tell Thee that now, to‐day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing.
It’s the old argument of dictators everywhere, still used – in fact it’s the MAGA argument, if you can call it an argument. Leave everything to me/us and we will provide you with something much better than freedom. ‘Man was created a rebel and how can rebels be happy?’ says the nonagenarian.
Next, our Inquisitor goes on at length about the three ‘satanic’ temptations in the desert – in short, providing food to the people gratis, proclaiming/displaying absolute power, and dazzling the people into belief through miraculous displays. We’re treated to a lot of rhetoric here, to the effect that the Church, groaning under the weight of its own leadership, has taken upon itself the burden that Jesus rejected, providing sustenance, authority, and officially sanctioned miracles, and there’s no way they’re going to let any sons of deities come along and upset all that hard graft. Oh, and by the way, he admits in passing that they’ve done all this by working for the Other Side.
So the whole of the Inquisitor’s speech can be seen, perhaps, as an anti-Catholic tirade presented as a pro-Catholic tirade, as well as a withering description of human inhumanity and fecklessness. It goes a bit far, in my view, but then in my own reading and researches, at least recently, I tend to learn about exceptionally clever people – generally more clever than myself – doing exceptionally clever things, so I suppose that’s a different bias…
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1980. Translated by Constance Garnett, 1916
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, The world, a family history, 2022
on Dostoyevskian gobbledygook and clear thinking – do soi-disant great novels withstand the test of time?
This painting doesn’t represent the brothers to my mind…
I’m reading Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov for the third time, but in many respects every reading is for the first time. I’m sure that when I first read Great Literature as a young person who hated school I approached ‘The Greats’ with an appropriate sense of awe, assuming them to be the real masters to learn from, masters who wouldn’t give me homework to do, or belittle me in front of my peers etc etc. If they wrote odd or confronting things, who was I, a mere novice, to contradict them?
Decades later, it’s a different story (and if not, something’s gone very wrong!), and proof, to me at least, that rereading such texts is more than useful, if you can be bothered.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the novel:
Set in 19th-century Russia, The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality.
These days I have little interest in gods except from a historical-psychological perspective, but free will, or the lack thereof, and associated ethical issues interest me greatly. So here’s a passage from early in Dostoyevsky’s novel that may or may not be worth analysing:
I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling‐block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”
The Brothers Karamazov, from Part 1, Book 1 – the history of a family. Section V ‘Elders’
The ‘I’ that opens this passage is Dostoyevsky’s more or less reliable narrator. In this passage he’s more than simply unreliable, he’s pretty much nonsensical. What could he possibly mean, that ‘miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist’? Could the translator, Constance Garnett, be at fault here? Highly unlikely. Is it some kind of irony? Possibly this is intended. He describes unbelievers as a sub-category of ‘genuine realists’, though today all realists would be, by definition, unbelievers, or non-religious. Realists in this sense aren’t confronted by miracles as ‘irrefutable facts’, though they may be confronted by miraculous claims, which they would treat with skepticism. All this can be cleared up if we assume that the narrator firmly believes in miracles, which is a bit of a let-down but alerts us to how he will treat Alyosha’s credulity and pious passivity throughout the novel. The idea of a ‘miracle as an irrefutable fact’ makes me think of a brilliantly managed magician’s trick. You have no idea how she did it, you see the subject disappear before your eyes, but your realism tells you it’s very clever conjuring, not a miracle or an upending of the laws of nature. A magician who can’t make her audience gasp over the seemingly counter-to-reality quality of her tricks is unlikely to make a living thereby. But if you believe her tricks are truly miracles, you’re not a realist, though you may not want your pleasure spoiled by knowing her secrets.
Needless to say, the religious elements of this novel will grate on me more than they did in previous readings – I’m becoming less tolerant of that sort of stuff in my old age. Then again, I recall years ago, when I was doing Honours French at Adelaide University (later abandoned), and had decided to do my thesis on the writings of Stendhal, I read an essay in the form of a dialogue between two literary critics, comparing Stendhal’s novels to those of Tolstoy. Both critics chose to agree that Tolstoy was the greater writer because Stendhal’s work lacked a ‘religious dimension’, or words to that effect. It really really pissed me off. And I should add that, in referring to religion they were surely referring only to Christianity, which, apart from its violently rejected father, Judaism, is the only religion treated with literary credence in the WEIRD world.
As to standing up to the test of time, that’s probably an unfair test. Novels may hold up a mirror to their own time and culture, they can’t be expected to transcend them.
There will doubtless be more on this novel, from time to time, as I read on.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1881