This theme is on powerful display in Notes from Underground -a brief and excellent entry in Dostoevsky’s corpus-which has arguably the greatest opening line in all of literature: “I am a sick man. Be clear-eyed about the dark side of man’s nature.Ī theme of so much of Dostoevsky’s work is that-the dream of the Enlightenment notwithstanding-dark forces are constantly at work in human life: irrationality, self-torment, addiction (Dostoevsky himself wrestled with gambling), cruelty, rage, and violence. My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” The Christian must be unafraid of the hard, difficult questions that arise in life in fact, questions can ultimately forge and strengthen faith.Ħ. All we can do is refuse to give up on them, be present to them, and embrace what is good, true, and beautiful in them.ĭostoevsky knew that faith does not mean stifling the life of the mind on the contrary, in the year of his death, he wrote, “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. Sometimes, all the explanation, discussion, and argumentation in the world won’t seem to get us anywhere with someone we love. Offer a kiss when only a kiss will speak.Īt the close of “The Grand Inquisitor,” Alyosha imitates the gesture of the silent Christ in the parable, offering a kiss to his anguished brother. Mercy can’t deaden what Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom.” We need both.Ĥ. So much could be said about this rich, complex story, but a basic lesson is this: the call to follow Christ is a call to spiritual adventure, not spiritual mediocrity. In “ The Grand Inquisitor ,” a masterpiece within Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Ivan imagines the Church as a humanist institution that soothes man and relieves him of the burden of freedom-even if it means arresting Christ upon his return. Embrace the freedom and adventure of faith. Dostoevsky offers a response through the faith of Ivan’s brother Alyosha-especially in the novel’s powerful, hopeful closing scene-but only after facing the problem head on and challenging us to do the same.ģ. If that’s the high price for admission, Ivan concludes, he respectfully returns his ticket. Dostoevsky prophetically saw, before Nietzsche articulated the same idea, that godlessness was opening up an abyss “beyond good and evil.”īut Dostoevsky, through Ivan, also makes one of the most powerful arguments against God’s existence there is: the suffering of innocent children. In The Brothers Karamazov, the young skeptic Ivan proposes an idea that has haunted readers ever since: without belief in God and immortality, “everything is permitted.” Man may still be good without God, but he no longer finds any ultimate ground for morality. Take God seriously-because without him, everything is permitted. In honor of his work, and as an invitation to explore his writings, here are 20 “rules for life”-one for each decade since his birth-inspired by the writings of Dostoevsky.ġ. He is rightly considered one of the greatest writers who ever lived. His stories-passionately energetic, psychologically perceptive, philosophically profound, religiously stirring-have influenced many giants in their own right, including Nietzsche, Freud, James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and René Girard. November 11, 2021, marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a giant of world literature and a Christian of profound faith.
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