Intersections with God

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

If someone were to ask me what this book was about, I would be hard pressed to give an answer.  How do you summarize a novel of four parts, twelve books about as many chapters as the Bible itself?  A book whose landscape incorporates the most complete psychology (a term barely invented at the time) of man, that Freud himself had to concede that the book was one of the top three novels ever written.  I won't bother here, but would like to tell you about what I've discovered and rediscovered reading this book recently about what it reveals about our relationship with God and what that says about ourselves.

To really appreciate a Dostoevsky novel, it helps to understand certain patterns that he employed in many of his novels.  Dostoevsky will first develop a character that typifies a common trait or personality found in all of us, find its foil character, and then thrust them into a confrontation in some outrageous, scandalous scene (think reality TV show, but with characters that actually have depth).  In this confrontation, a truth is revealed, a correct path will appear before them that will free them from their struggle but inevitably, their natures will out and it all comes crashing down.  Underlying the scene is a landscape often charged with societal, allegorical or religious connotations.  As the characters vie with each other, pulling and straining against their foil, the intersection point on the landscape often reveals a marked, sublime truth.  In the case of the Brothers Karamazov, the intersections often tread on holy and unholy ground and in the process reveal the face of God.

Dimitry vs. Ivan:
Dimitry (Mitya) is a troubled soul.  The  oldest of the Karamazov brothers, raised feral because the father was just too self absorbed to remember that he even had a boy, is the sensualist.  He is large, forceful and impetuous.  Never a plan, but always in action, he is violent and emotional.  Screaming one moment, crying the next.  Forever trapped in a cage of his own consequences, Mitya is forever in motion (usually drunk) and forever in a cycle of self destruction.  The landscape of Mitya's ruin would not surprisingly be the heart of a beautiful but treacherous woman.  "It's a hell of a situation, you know:  what the head brands as shameful may appear as sheer beauty to the heart."  "...God and the devil join battle, and the battlefield is the heart of man."  For Mitya, God and the devil cast him about.  Despite all his seeming strength and power, he his cast about, impotent by the deep emotions that rage within him.  He rides the cycle of elation, degradation, self-loathing, redemption and back to elation.  Yes, God, or at least Mitya's concept of god, torments him.  He is led to commit a despicable act by the implanted idea (Ivan's) that if there is no god, then every thing is permitted.  Although this nihilist philosophy attracts him, even confuses him, he is never fully converted to the idea.  Indeed, he is only attracted to it as a justification for his actions, to relieve his troubled heart.  In this, it fails.  It is not until he is fully trapped by the consequences of his actions, his ability to act literally taken away from him by being imprisoned, that he reaches his catharsis.  In the process of being arrested for murder, he drifts into a dream.  He sees a burnt village and all manner of unearned suffering.  A cold, starving baby cries, unanswered, unable to be soothed or helped.  "Why?"  The answer overwhelms him: We are all guilty.  We are responsible for everything and everyone.  As an aspen colony is a singular, interconnected root system, humanity is all tied together by invisible connections and interactions.  The good and evil we bring in echoes through the system and while we may not be directly responsible for the actions of others, we are all responsible for the evil that exists in the world.  Upon reaching this, Mitya is a changed man.  Although he has been falsely accused of murder, he feels a responsibility to pay the debt, "for someone has to pay."  And yet, this change within him has been brought from without.  "...[M]en like me must be struck down by life; they must be caught as in lasso and bound by an outside force.  Without that, I would have never risen by myself!"  Mitya's final fate is left in doubt in the end.  Although convicted, a realistic escape plan is hatched and the torment of his ability to act returns.  We draw from Mitya the feelings of desperation felt by all of us who struggle against our own natures. Mitya's vision of God is at best imperfect.  He never fully reconciles it, because he is never fully reconciled to himself.  Dostoevsky died before the second novel could be written and we are left to wonder how it all would have ended up.  Perhaps better that way, since I sometimes wonder about the same thing for myself.

Ivan's is a tormented mind.  The second of the brothers, raised with the same neglect as Dimitry, Ivan is best described as intelligent and detached.  Where for Dimitry the war was waged in the heart, for Ivan the war is waged in the mind.  Although Ivan is sincere in his investigation into God, he seems to attack the problem backwards.  He tries to understand Him by understanding the world that He has created and by understanding the opposite of Him.  He sees and is overwhelmed by the most degrading parts of humanity, the most vile parts of our natures; child abusers, mass murders, etc.  With all this bile, the only intelligent response is rebellion.  A simple answer would be; god's work is imperfect, ergo, there is no god, but this is not a satisfying answer to Ivan.  There must be more to the puzzle.  No, Ivan's response is that he rejects it.  He rejects it all.  If God lives and this is the world that He created, if we must forgive the most degraded among us, those that would maliciously hurt children, well, I want no part of that.  If the final resolution of this world is that the mother of the child who has been grotesquely tortured, maimed and killed must embrace and love the man who did it, well what kind of solution is that?
If Dimitry was a man of action, Ivan is a study in inaction.  His culpability in his father's murder is that he knew that it was going to happen and he stood aside and let it.  If Dimitry wanted to plunge head first into either heaven or hell, Ivan just wants to stand back and sneer at all the human drama and stupidity.  And yet, he is tormented.  He is unsatisfied.
Ivan reaches his catharsis in madness.  Rather than being confronted with God, he is confronted with His foil, the devil.  In a wonderful chapter near the end, Ivan is alone in his room he begins to hallucinate that the devil is there with him.  Not a stupid red guy with horns and tail, but an aging gentleman with some nice, if slightly out of fashion clothes.  Ivan knows that this is not real and tries to ignore and dismiss the unwanted visitor, but the devil keeps prattling on and on.  Invariably, Ivan begins to interact with his hallucination and is continually trying to get it to go away, prove that it's not real so that it will disappear.  But he can't.  Finally, infuriated, he throws a glass at the apparition.  Suddenly, a knock at the door, he's lying there unable to move, he's dreaming and there's the glass sitting next to him.  All a dream, but Ivan has been totally unhinged.
It is hard to be too critical of Ivan.  His attempt to understand the divine, the sublime through his gifted mind is sincere and heartfelt.  It is ultimately his aloofness that condemns him to this torture.  His inability to truly love others isolates and destroys him.  There is a message in there for all of us, though.  God cannot be reached through the mind.  The higher that you build the Tower of Babel, the more confounded the effort will become.  Ivan's final fate is also left unresolved and this is appropriate as well.  There can never be a conclusion that can fully satisfy the mind.

Alyosha vs. Rakitin:
By Dostoevsky's own early admission, Alyosha is the unlikely hero of the novel; the beautiful soul.  He is the third of the brothers and we meet him early as a novice in a monastery.  He is young, impressionistic and a little naive.  Hardly a hero.  To understand him, it is probably best to look at who his is not:  Rakitin.
Rakitin is Alyosha's foil.  He is also in the monastery, a divinity student, whose real aim is not to learn about god or any of that nonsense.  He is on the fast track to being a learned, career intellectual; a socialist revolutionary; a leader of men through the violent changes that would shortly come to Russia at the turn of the century.  Nothing amuses him more than a good scandal, or when a lofty person is brought down.  At the heart of all of it, is that Rakitin feels overwhelmingly superior to those around him and anytime that position is challenged he is deeply offended.  In short, Rakitin loves the notion that he loves all men, just not the ones that happen to be around him.  There is no catharsis within him.  No struggle, other than the continuous struggle against others to raise himself up.  Needless to say, he is cynical about god.  He sneers at the simple minded folk with their stupid, sentimental customs which bind them.

Alyosha can best be described as loving and honest.  People trust him, because he simply can always be trusted.  As mentioned before, he begins the novel as a simple novice in a monastery.  He isn't very independent minded and is impressionable, dutifully following everything that he learns from the Elder Zosima.  The elder dies, however, and in this Alyosha confronts his catharsis.  Not that he dies, but in the grotesque scene that occurs at his funeral.  For whatever reason, the local tradition holds that when a saint dies, his body will not decay like normal, but will be preserved and will even have healing powers.  Who knows where this stuff comes from and certainly no one has actually experienced such a phenomenon, but people do like to cling to some pretty ridiculous ideas sometimes.  Well, the body, lying unprepared begins, of course to stink.  Everyone is incensed.  This was no man of God, this is God's judgment, etc...  It's all rather disrespectful and ignorant, but sometimes people like a good scandal.  People like to see a person brought down, degraded.  This is all too much for young Alyosha.  His faith is shattered.  Probably not so much that the miracle didn't occur, but that God would allow this loving, Christlike man (and he really was that) to be so humiliated in the end.  Rakitin sees Alyosha lying on the ground, destroyed.  Rakitin seizes the moment, offers him some liquor and leads him to a lady of ill repute.  How fun to watch "the fall of the upright."  But Alyosha has a good heart, the woman is in pain herself and Alyosha's nature appeals to her, touches her.  He is kind to her, and that kindness, so long absent in her life, touches her, changes her, if only for a moment.  In this he has returned, not to some strange mystical faith of childhood, but in the real faith that matters in this life.  The faith that unites us "by a good and decent feeling, which made us...better people, probably than we would otherwise have been."  He returns to the monastery for the last time, to pay his last respects.  As he listens to the eulogy, a scriptural reading of the life of Christ; the first miracle, the wedding feast where the water is turned to wine, he drifts into sleep.  He imagines the scene, a simple miracle where Christ is among some simple people and all He does is want to bring a little joy to their lives.  That's all.  Nothing huge or profound.  Just be among people and help to bring them joy.  Suddenly the room expands and Alyosha is there himself, the elder Zosima as well, beckons him to join the party.  And then he wakes, but his heart is filled.  "'Someone visited my soul then,' he would later say, with firm faith in his works."

Sure, a simple dream, and I think most people would dismiss such a thing.  I have always been touched by this scene, however, because I've felt the same thing myself at one point in my life, many years ago.  I won't go into details, because, like this scene, the moment it escapes my lips, it's somehow degraded and sounds a bit simple minded, naive and stupid.  Be that as it may, I know what I felt those many years ago and though I've certainly been through my life alternatively a Dimitry, Ivan or even Rakitin, I know that I can always return to that moment when I felt like he did.  Further, when I have found that when I do good things for others, what Christianity teaches us that we should be, I reconnect with that moment and am always refreshed.  Living water from a well that never dries.