READING

Here is a passage from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Book I, Chapter Five:

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.

In the realist, the miracles springs from faith. Taken literally, these words would inspire me to develop a novel based on a character such as a realist, an atheist or more exactly a pantheist, whose faith in the unity of the world, the one body of the universe as I call it, would put him on the way to a miracle, but it would be a difficult road, of course, one made of sacrifice and test. This reminds me of Stalker, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which the hero, who is more of a path finder than a stalker, guides two men across a dangerous “zone” and to a room where one’s wishes come true. “One has to have faith,” the hero says. But faith in what? If you have faith in yourself, can you accomplish a miracle? What is a miracle? The above passage, from The Brothers Karamazov, continues,

As soon as he [Alyosha] reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise."

Now I’d like to ask Dostoevsky, “What immortality are you talking about?” The immortality of what? Of me? What is so great about “me” that it should receive the gift of immortality from the hands of God, and what god are we talking about? A self-conscious god?

(continued) In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.

It never was heaven on earth, except in our creation myths, before Yahweh kicked out Adam and Eve from Eden. It’s getting late to set up heaven on earth. The world could be destroyed any minute thanks to the bomb makers, and our so-called leaders, and the obedient military men, and the Armageddonites! Maybe humans will simply end up eating each other in a dead world as somebody else imagined in a novel published recently. See Civilization Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already? by George Monbiot :

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot.

“…the schedules,” Monbiot writes, “are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more…” That is true here in Armenia ; the current government and the “opposition” parties all want more roads, more power plants, more of everything except more biodiversity, more trees, more clean air, etc. What about you? What do you really want? What do you really do to get what you really want? Let’s go back to the Karamazov Brothers, Book II, Chapter Two:

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

How not to think of G.W. Bush? Our (big) brother in lies…

(continued) The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.

…that is more easily offended than any other. My thoughts are dragged to a certain country... But don’t we all feel pleasure in taking offense? Yes? No? Why?

Do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root of it all.

I remember these words by Joseph Campbell about an hypothesis by Freud:

Sigmund Freud delivered a shock to many of this admirers when he proposed in his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian noble-specifically, of the household of the heretic pharaoh Ikhnaton, who reigned 1377-1358 B.C.-and that in the years directly following this pharaoh’s death, which had entailed the collapse both of this court and of his cult of monotheism, Moses departed from Egypt with a company of Semitic settlers in the Delta, upon whom he strove to impress Ikhnaton’s monotheistic belief. However, in the desert these people, who oppressed by his disciplines, slew him, and his place of leadership was taken by the Midianite priest of an Arabian volcano god, Yahweh. Yet his memory and teaching (in Freud’s words) “continued to work in the background, until it slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people and at last succeeded in transforming the god Yahweh into the Mosaic God, and in waking to a new life the religion that Moses has instituted centuries before but which had subsequently been forsaken.”

Freud’s theory has, of course, been attacked from every side, both with learning and without. However, according to his own by no means unlearned view, it furnishes the only plausible psychological explanation of the peculiarly compulsive character of biblical belief, whish is in striking contrast to the relaxed, poetic, and even playful approaches to mythology of the Greeks of the same period. Biblical religion, according to Freud, has the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figurations hides a repressed conviction of guilt, which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced. The screening myths are there to hide, not to reveal, a truth. (Occidental Mythology, 1964)

The truth on a murder, now that’s interesting stuff! In Book II, Chapter III of The Brothers Karamazov, I read,

…the elder had already noticed in the crowd two glowing eyes fixed upon him. An exhausted, consumptive-looking, though young peasant woman was gazing at him in silence. Her eyes besought him, but she seemed afraid to approach.

"What is it, my child?"

"Absolve my soul, Father," she articulated softly, and slowly sank on her knees and bowed down at his feet. "I have sinned, Father. I am afraid of my sin."

The elder sat down on the lower step. The woman crept closer to him, still on her knees.

"I am a widow these three years," she began in a half-whisper, with a sort of shudder. "I had a hard life with my husband. He was an old man. He used to beat me cruelly. He lay ill; I thought looking at him, if he were to get well, if he were to get up again, what then? And then the thought came to me-"

"Stay!" said the elder, and he put his ear close to her lips.

The woman went on in a low whisper, so that it was almost impossible to catch anything.
She had soon done.

What did the elder tell this poor woman?

There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love.

There is no sin, and all things are saved by love. Good! But what is love?

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Reading by reading_is_dangerous]

I’ll put up Amazon links to the books mentionned in this post, if anyone is interested.