Quotes from Brothers Karamazov

More passages from perhaps the best book I will ever read, Brothers Karamazov.

On false freedom:

Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners visits, carriages, rank, and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honour and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you is such a man free? I knew one “champion of freedom” who told me himself that, when he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so wretched at the privation that he almost went and betrayed his cause for the sake of getting tobacco again! And such a man says, “I am fighting for the cause of humanity.”

On jealousy and envy:

He was that sort of jealous man who, in the absence of the beloved woman, at once invents all sorts of awful fancies of what may be happening to her, and how she may be betraying him, but, when shaken, heartbroken, convinced of her faithlessness, he runs back to her, at the first glance at her face, her gay, laughing, affectionate face, he revives at once, lays aside all suspicion and with joyful shame abuses himself for his jealousy.

[...]

Jealousy! “Othello was not jealous, he was trustful,” observed Pushkin. And that remark alone is enough to show the deep insight of our great poet. Othello’s soul was shattered and his whole outlook clouded simply because his ideal was destroyed. But Othello did not begin hiding, spying, peeping. He was trustful, on the contrary. He had to be led up, pushed on, excited with great difficulty before he could entertain the idea of deceit. The truly jealous man is not like that. It is impossible to picture to oneself the shame and moral degradation to which the jealous man can descend without a qualm of conscience. And yet it’s not as though the jealous were all vulgar and base souls. On the contrary, a man of lofty feelings, whose love is pure and full of self-sacrifice, may yet hide under tables, bribe the vilest people, and be familiar with the lowest ignominy of spying and eavesdropping.

Brothers Karamazov on the Problem of Evil

Here are the passages from Brothers Karamazov that relate to the problem of evil. If you are a believer, you will shudder…

On the problem of evil and the existence of God:

“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God’! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I’ll leave off if you like.”

On theodicy:

Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for.

A powerful question:

Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

Brothers Karamazov passages

Some passages I liked from Brothers Karamazov:

On the difference between loving humanity and loving thy neighbor:

“It’s just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder. “He was a man getting on in years, and doubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’

Pastoral advice on how to view oneself and love sincerely:

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it-at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.

The Brothers Karamazov

It has been well over two months since I’ve reviewed a book. So much has transpired since then (getting engaged and so forth), but that does not mean good reading has not happened in spite of the many distractions. A good biography on Jackie Robinson restored my faith in baseball (a long with the comeback-nothing’s-gonna-stop-us now-Twins!). But the highlight of the last two months of reading has been moving slowly through Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

It should be said at the outset that I do not like novels. I have never had the patience to read them or the interest to explore their long drawn out plots that contain characters I don’t care to know, or the vague themes left open to interpretation at the end. But reading Dostoevsky’s masterpiece changed all that, or at least made the experience a pleasurable one. But after reading Brothers none of those issues, which do present themselves in some ways, detracted from its magnificent writing.

What I’ve learned is that novels are like paintings. They do not always make sense, nor do they have some discernible “message” that is self-evident to the viewer. Instead, like a painting, where the technique, application, lines, colors, and shapes coalesce into a whole that leaves the viewer to behold and admire the talent of the artist and wonder at the intent, reading Dostoevsky and what he is able to do with words left me with much of the same experience. You simply have to read it for yourself to get the full effect.

It would be impossible for me to “review” Dostoevsky’s novel, for such a task would be far too presumptuous. All I can do is hope to convey the wonder, the horror, the perplexity, and the joy of reading the book by sharing some of my favorite passages.

On miracles:

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 unrecognised 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.”

On self-deception:

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. 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.

On how to battle for faith in the face of doubt:

How- how can I get back my faith? But I only believed when I was a little child, mechanically, without thinking of anything. How, how is one to prove it? have come now to lay my soul before you and to ask you about it. If I let this chance slip, no one all my life will answer me. How can I prove it? How can I convince myself? Oh, how unhappy I am! I stand and look about me and see that scarcely anyone else cares; no one troubles his head about it, and I’m the only one who can’t stand it. It’s deadly- deadly!”

“No doubt. But there’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of it.”

“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”

I will post more in the coming days.

Preposterous Statements August/September, 2009

I am a fan of ‘The Common Man’ Dan Cole’s “progrum” on KFAN. He has this bit that collects preposterous statements from sports journalists and others over the year, and then sets them in a March Madness NCAA tournament bracket. Each day for the last couple of weeks he has a had a poll for each matchup you can vote on and the winner advances. (Listen to this to get a sample of what I am talking about).

To shamelessly copy this bit, I am in the process of collecting the most preposterous statements I read on blogs and newspapers, and at the end of the year I am going to form a bracket and devise a poll for YOU the readers to vote on. Here are the picks for July.

68. The issues of concern related to the TNIV remain. For the sake of the Gospel, we must hope and pray that we do not confront these same issues in the updated NIV. At the same time, we must avoid reckless talk.—Al Mohler

Doesn’t “reckless talk” include saying that the Gospel is at stake in TNIV debate? This is the kind of alarmism that made the whole controversy divisive in the first place.

69. He spoke both of the long list of public accomplishments that will likely gain Ted Kennedy recognition as the greatest Senator in American history—Jim Wallis

Oh please!

70. As many remarked over the course of this amazing weekend, Ted Kennedy was the classic American success story—Jim Wallis

Just like all those other extravegantly wealthy Ivy Leauge educated family dynasties from the East Coast. American as Apple Pie and Chevrolet!

71. But most of all, they are freaked by an amorphous feeling that they America they imagined they were living in–Sarah Palin’s fantasy America–is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals…to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.—Joe Klein

Joe seems to like the word “they.”

72. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!—Maureen Dowd

If you can imagine it, it must be true!

73. The Liberalism that controls the Democratic Party is more wicked than the world view that dominated the Nazis—Blue Collar Todd

So if Obama and Hitler were running against each other it would be better to have Hitler?

74. I suggest, in the finest American tradition, we protest this absurd and deplorable act [arresting Roman Polanski] by smashing our cuckoo clocks, pawning our Swiss watches, and banning Swiss cheese and chocolate.–Joan Z. Shore

That sounds like a fine American tradition to me!

One of My All Time Favorite Songs

Brett Favre’s Retirement Flowchart

Good stuff.

HT: Mac Bros.

Blog Break

I haven’t updated in a while. I am in the middle of some projects currently that have taken away from the time of reading and reviewing books (which seems to be the only thing I write about).

Hopefully, some content will be up in the next few weeks.

Pangaea

The Five Lust Langauges?

One of the staple books of marriage and pre-marriage counseling is Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages (5LL hereafter). It looks at the multi-faceted ways that people give and receive love in the form of (1) words of affirmation, (2) physical affection, (3) acts of service, (4) gift giving, and (5) quality time. The overarching point is that there are “different strokes for different folks” and that it forwards our relationships when we learn to love the other according to the “love language” they speak.

These ideas have helped countless couples sort out their differences and communicate their needs in a practical and understandable way. They can be custom tailored to anyone and encompass the myriad ways people interpret “quality time” or “acts of service.” They help resolve conflict by showing that we do not love others well when we simply love the other the way we like to be loved. Instead, we accommodate the other’s “love language” and love them in the way they understand, not how we understand. This, in turn, helps fill their “love bank” meaning that their needs are met, and when needs are met we can expect a flourishing of love that will come back on us. Even if it does not count as a bona fide psychological theory it still remains a very practical and commonsensical way to treat others a la the Golden Rule.

As I was going over some of these ideas recently I remembered a critique that I read a while back by David Powlison. When I read it, I thought it made a lot of sense and made some good corrective points. I read it again, and while it still makes some good corrective points, I think it makes a flawed conflation between “selfishnes” and “self-interest.”

Powlison’s general point is that 5LL is based on a sub-Christian type of love that Jesus ridicules in the Gospels; the reality that “even tax collectors, gentiles, and sinners love those who love them (Matt. 5:46; Luke 6:32). This “guiding principle” is “not necessarily bad,” says Powlison, but that “it doesn’t go very far, and it does go bad easily.” This is where things get murky. True, the “guiding principle” is “not necessarily bad,” but it seems bad because it goes bad easily.

Powlison’s main concern is that people’s felt needs are made into idols of self-service, and that we go wrong when we excuse bad behavior when our needs are not met. He writes,

It ingrains the perception that our lusts are in fact needs, empty places inside where others have disappointed us. The empty emotional tank construct is congenial to our fallen instincts, not transformative. It leaves what we instinctively want as an unquestionable good that must somehow be fulfilled. It not only leaves fundamental self-interest unchallenged, it plays to self-interest.

Instead, we should try to change our behavior by confronting our needs with the gospel, repenting of our evil desires, and trusting Christ for our sufficiency—not, what Powlison will derisively call, “lust languages.”

This where I think Powlison goes wrong. Of course, it is not easy to see since most of us believe that self-interest is a bad thing, and that putting to death our selfishness is how we move forward. But there is a fundamentally important distinction between “selfishness” and “self-interest” that greatly influences how we understand our social circle and human nature.

Powlison seems aware of this distinction when he tries to give Chapman the benefit of the doubt by stating Chapman is not advocating “naked self interest”—the kind of thing anyone would find deplorable—but instead tones it down to “civilized self-interest.” Naked self-interest is the kind of thing that Pimps and Ponzi schemes are made of. Civilized self-interest has more to do with an agreement that invites reciprocation. Powlison aptly explains, “5LL replaces naked self-interest with civilized self-interest. ‘I give, hoping to get’ is a step above ‘I only give if I’ve gotten,’ but it’s not all that different.”

Actually, it is very different.

Powlison takes quite a bit of time to chide Chapman for failing to pass “Human Nature 101” but he would do well to look after his own class work before he unloads both barrels. What he calls “civilized self-interest,” or self-interest in general, is part of the fabric of the human psyche. General self-interest is defined as the natural human capacity to look to interests that bring about human flourishing and personal livelihood. We are made with certain basic needs that our self-interest rightly propels us towards. We need food, water, clothing, and shelter to survive and thrive. We are not idolaters for wanting to avoid hunger, thirst, nakedness, and homelessness. We take the necessary actions to obtain the means to fulfill these needs in the most basic way.

Take another example from the field of economics. We live in a generally free society that has a generally free market. When we make a purchase we make a peaceful exchange according to our self-interest. The seller has the interest for profit and the buyer has the interest in some good or service. Ronald Nash helpfully summarizes this principle in this way,

The peaceful means of exchange may be summed up in the phrase, “If you do something good for me, then I’ll do something good for you.” When capitalism is understood correctly, it epitomizes the peaceful means of exchange. The reason people exchange in a real market is because they believe the exchange is good for them. They take advantage of an opportunity to obtain something they want more in exchange for something they desire less.

Nash goes on to critique socialism as being committed to a violent means of exchange.

But exchange can also take place by means of force and violence. In this violent means of exchange, the basic rule of thumb is: “Unless you do something good for me, I’ll do something bad to you.”

Powlison is rightly concerned about this mentality creeping into the 5LL scheme. But it does not have to be that way. Jesus’s rebuke to self-interested love is made against the self-rightous belief that self-interested love fulfills the intent behind the love commands in law of God. His teaching is concerned with a kind of love that goes above and beyond mere self-interest and seeks the good of those who do not deserve it.

We should all keep Jesus’s command in mind, espcecially in our marriages. But we should also recognize that most people do not approach their marriage partner in the courting process by looking for someone that would do absolutely nothing for them, or worse, even harm them. It is natural to seek out someone attractive, who has certain virtues, is faithful, seeks the good, and values companionship. No one goes into a relationship or a marriage without any self-interest at all. Instead marital relationships formed by the mutual promise to meet one another’s needs, and are cemented by the character of self-sacrifice the other makes to meet those needs. We can grant along with Powlison that obedience to Christ’s command will hold the marriage together during a time where needs go unfulfilled and selfishness rules. But we must acknowledge that it is a give and take relationship. It is not give-give-give and take-take-take. And the sentimental idea that it is a “give and give” relationship is mistaken since we expect that what is given ought to be received!

Therefore, if Powlison allows for a concept of self-interest as a divinely granted quality that concerns the preservation of human dignity we can avoid his ruthless and severe conflation. We can grant that Powlison rightly warns us of a mentality that conflates “civilized self-interest” with “naked self-interest,” and thus avoid the wretched excuses we can make for our abuse of others. But it will not do to castigate the fact that we are made with certain relational needs and the capacities to meet those needs in ourselves and others.