A community of readers

Commuter A: So, how was your Dostoyevsky?

Commuter B: Oh, it was great! Yeah! I've only just finished, and there's still so much to think about!

Commuter A: Oh! Like what...?

Commuter B: Well, it got me thinking a lot about the motivations for love, y'know, do we love because of passion, or sympathy, or empathy, or lust? Jealousy? What's a good reason to love someone? What's not? 

Commuter A: Hmmm, nice. 

Commuter B: Yeah, yeah, it was really thought provoking. And, y'know, just other stuff like, whether or not the death penalty's fair, what 'disability' actually means... What would it be like if Jesus turned up here, in Sydney, and hung out with people. 

Commuter A: Hmmm. Yeah! An interesting thought. I mean, would he just be like, "burn the heathen!” Or would he be like, "hey guys, calm down,” y'know? “Don't be so judgmental, I said ‘love one another’, not smack down!" Y'know?

Commuter B: Well, yeah! It is a pretty interesting thing to think about, cos, certainly in Jewish society, He just did a bit of both. Like some people, He said, were "white washed tombs", cos they looked good on the outside but had evil hearts. And other people, like, prostitutes, tax collectors people who their society hated, He was really kind and loving... 

Commuter A: Mmmm…

Commuter B: I think that's what I liked best about The Idiot, I don't agree with every aspect from, like, a 'religious' perspective, but I think Dostoyevsky did a good job of showing that Jesus looked into peoples’ hearts for the truth. He thought about what their whole lives had been like, what advantages and disadvantages they'd had. He was very forgiving. Is very forgiving! But He's not afraid of the truth, even when it means people mock him. So yeah, I thought, all in all, the book had a lot to say about who Jesus is...

Commuter A: Hmmm. Sounds interesting.

Commuter B: Yeah! Yeah.

Commuter A: Mmm...

Commuter B: Um, soooo, what're you thinking of reading next? Did you finish Fifty Shades?

Commuter A: Yeah, yeah. Goodness, what a book! It was pretty racy, like everyone said, but yeah, I finished it pretty quickly. So yeah, I dunno. What're you gonna read next?

Commuter B: Well, I was thinking of reading something a bit more contemporary next, y'know, mix it up a little. Would you like to read something with me? We could compare notes?

Commuter A: Yeah! Yeah, that sounds like fun. Mmm. 

Commuter B: Great! Hmmm... Welllll, the Australian Women's Writers have a yearly challenge to read books by female authors, I've been following them on Twitter, maybe we should sign up?

Commuter A: Oh great, yeah, sounds really good.

Obviously this is another fictional, perhaps idealised conversation between commuters - although it does reflect many I've had myself with new friends and old. One of the strengths of literature as far as I'm concerned is that it draw people into community, a community of ideas, which, especially when matched by a community of relationship and love, is a powerful, world changing mechanism of existence. 

So, now you've finished The Idiot - keep going! Read with me, read with us, and think about what you've read, ponder how the stories and words have made you feel, and share those impressions with the world around you. 

May the God of all truth, beauty and goodness accompany us to our libraries. 

Amen. 

If you would like to continue reading Jo’s writing she blogs at: http://heartbeatpoecy.blogspot.com.au

The Idiot on capital punishment

Gethsemane: the garden of tears. Who knows what terrors shook His tortured soul, what battles raged beneath His fleshly breast?

Ok so, it's pretty easy to be florid in description after spending time with Dostoyevsky, especially as his own gift for description is embodied in the The Idiot by the Prince; his powers of persuasion represented by this enigmatic character.

Dostoyevsky is clearly aware that fictional description and narrative can pierce through the fog of facts and figures, discussion, debate and opinion that surround controversial issues of daily life and reach the heart, our most vital decision-guiding organ. The Idiot is just one among many attempts for him to use this power at his fingertips to persuade his readers to join in acceptance or rejection of a particular act or viewpoint, and in The Idiot, an issue he singles out for especial care is capital punishment.

Readers cannot overlook the long discourses on death-by-guillotine; drawn into the dining room the reader sits with the three beautiful Epanchin daughters, or with a servant in the Epanchin foyer, the reader listens to Muishkin narrate with horror and fascination his observations of capital punishment and his claim that it is so different to murder because of the intense psychological suffering of the recipient. It is clear Muishkin believes capital punishment to be ethically wrong, he cannot reconcile it with his understanding of the biblical command not to murder.

“Whoever heard of a grown man crying from fear – not a child, but a man who never had cried before – a grown man of forty-five years. Imagine what must have been going on in that man's mind at such a moment; what dreadful convulsions his whole spirit must have endured; it is an outrage on the soul that's what it is. Because it is said “thou shalt not kill,” is he to be killed because he murdered someone else? No, it is not right, it's an impossible theory.” (Part One, Chapter Two).

Sadly, this blog is not the place to discuss the various theological, scriptural ramifications of this argument, and in fact, whatever one thinks of capital punishment, the emotional impact of the Prince's observations are clear.

And how much light do they shed on the suffering of our own Saviour who, exactly like the criminals Muishkin speaks of, knew the day and the hour of His death. Knew that it was coming.

Yes, He had cried before, unlike this “Le Gros” who broke down on the scaffold. Yes, He had already faced the terrors of life as a vulnerable human in a world that is spiritually, physically and relationally opposed to God.

But what torture He must have endured, that night in the garden, during his trials and floggings, knowing the awful climax that was yet to come. To quote the Prince/Dostoyevsky again,

“But in the case of execution, that last hope – having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die – is taken away from the wretch and certainty substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death – which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world.”

For our sake, He was led like a lamb to slaughter. But a painfully self-aware lamb, who knows exactly the reality of what is coming, knows the inevitable struggle the body will instigate in order to escape the threat of death. And yet, in facing this, the 'most dreadful anguish in the world', He persevered, suffered patiently and oh so lovingly, and was triumphant. 

The Idiot on Faith

I've been reading through 1 Thessalonians with my colleagues at work. It's been a great way to begin a year of evangelism and ministry as Paul and the Thessalonian church are such great examples of living faith. Paul is constantly encouraging the Thessalonians that he loves them and prays for them, and exhorts them to "rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thess 5:16-18). 

As a staff team, we were all challenged by this call to constant prayer, and, especially remembering the desperate circumstances the new Thessalonian believers found themselves in, reflected that we are only able to feel less urgent in prayer because we've closed our eyes to the dangers and needs all around us. It's easy to reflexively pray when in desperate circumstances, it has been often noted that even some atheists will pray in desperate need. 

Prayer is, quite rightly an indicator of the strength of our relationship with God, just as conversation and time spent together is an indicator in other relationships of how we value the person, and who we think they are. However, prayer in and of itself cannot be counted simply as a task to be crossed off a list of spiritual duties. Even though it is as useful to habitually pray as it is to be habitually polite, at some point, at the end of it all, prayer is the offering of our heart up to God, an expression of the very core of our being. In The Idiot, Dostoyevsky beautifully and brilliantly explores the inner qualities of prayer as an aspect of faith. My favourite passage about this is in Part Two, Chapter Four.

Muishkin and Rogozhin have re-entered Rogozhin's house after Nastasia Filipovna's birthday party. As the cross through the room, they observe a painting Rogozhin's father bought of Jesus just cut down from the cross. When Rogozhin asks the Prince's opinion of the picture, Muishkin remarks that "a man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture", and although Rogozhin agrees, neither elaborate as to why. However, it does raise a question from Rogozhin to the Prince, "do you believe in God?"

In good Jesus-like imitation, Muishkin almost answers Rogozhin with a question of his own, but instead, presents together four recent conversations. 

One conversation was with an atheist, who the Prince feels doesn't quite understand the heart of faith, and thus cannot truly reject it. Another conversation was in a pub about a peasant who prayed for forgiveness while in the act of murdering his friend. As Rogozhin summarises them, “one is an absolute unbeliever, the other is such a thorough-going believer that he murders his friend to the tune of a prayer!” 

Muishkin's third conversation is with a drunk who sells the Prince his cross at a cheater's price. Muishkin calls him a Judas, although reserves judgement on his 'betrayal'. And then finally, the Prince encounters a young mother whose baby has smiled at her for the first time. As the Prince watches she "suddenly crossed herself- oh, so devoutly! 'What is it my good woman?'" The Prince asks. Her reply? "Exactly as is a mother's joy when her baby smiles for the first time into her eyes, so is God's joy when one of His children turns and prays to Him for the first time, with all his heart!"

While the peasant is certainly obeying Paul's exhortation to 'pray continually', and thus reflects a true bending of his heart toward God, this isn't followed through with his actions! He murders his friend! And yet… and yet… we certainly cannot say that he is rejecting or ignoring God altogether...

Muishkin remarks of the young mother that her comment was "such a deep. Refined, truly religious thought - a thought in which the whole essence of Christianity was expressed in one flash - that is, the recognition of God as our Father, and of God's joy in men as His own children, which is the chief idea of Christ. She was a simple country-woman - a mother, it's true - and perhaps, who knows, she may have been the wife of the drunken soldier!”

His final reflection is that "the essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with reason, or atheism, or crime, or acts of any kind - it has nothing to do with these things and never had. There is something besides all this, something which the arguments of atheists can never touch."

Even though I must part ways with the Prince in saying that the essence of religion does have something to do with 'acts of any kind'. I feel Dostoyevsky has expressed here a truth my own heart echoes. 

There is an essence in my relationship with God that means separate to whatever act I am performing at the time, I am His beloved child. And thus, reason, action, philosophy, emotions can never touch the core relationship, the DNA link that identifies me, wherever I am, in whatever circumstances, as part of God's family. 

"Exactly as is a mother's joy when her baby smiles for the first time into her eyes, so is God's joy when one of His children turns and prays to Him for the first time, with all his heart!"

What literature can do, Part Two

Commuter B: Well, that conversation was almost too good to be true... Almost like it was scripted or something... Strange...

Anyway, anyway...

What am I going to do if she asks about the book next week?! How am I going to tell her that I kind of don't like it?

Well, not really. It's not like I dislike it totally, it's just that the Prince is getting on my nerves a bit at the moment... He's so “holier than thou” and it just annoys me!

I mean, obviously Jesus lived a life of moral purity, but that's not all there is to Him! If you're going to make a character like Jesus, do you really need to make him a foolish, naïve fop?!

After all, Jesus was a man of action!

And I don't mean in some macho, grunting, Bruce Willis kind of way. He cried, was gentle, cuddled children, cared for the sick. But He didn't just lurk around showing people examples of His handwriting and feeling pitiful love for women with passionate eyes!

The Prince falls so short as a JC mimic!

Jesus wasn't naïve. He wasn't so gentle that He never shouted at the appropriate people in the appropriate moment. He wasn't a doormat, He didn’t leave himself open to every abuse. He was self-controlled, strong, and, after all, didn't save because of His general-all-round-good-guy-ness but by His bloody death and impossible resurrection. If anyone read The Idiot and the Gospel of Mark side by side, they'd have to admit that the historical portrait of Jesus is not very well reflected by Dostoyevsky in the character and actions of Prince Muishkin.

So, I'm annoyed...

But when I can get past that, I can begin to see the usefulness of the character as a mirror to the failing morality of Russian society. Obviously the issues Dostoyevsky was critiquing at the time: use of capital punishment in 'modern' Europe, sexual mores becoming less and less like the Judeo-Christian ideal, even the ethics of ambition are all addressed in an interesting way by Muishkin's interactions with the flotsam and jetsam of 19th Century Russian society.

Dostoyevsky is obviously wanting to demonstrate a sharp contrast between the way Jesus re-incarnate would live and behave in their society, and the way its members actually acted...

But again, I come back to the aspect of the character that annoys me! Why does moral fortitude have to be presented alongside weakness?! Muishkin's physical and supposed mental frailty certainly don't make good moral character attractive do they!

Maybe that's what Dostoyevsky is doing...

As an inveterate gambler himself, maybe his strong concept of a high moral standard combined with a weak understanding of grace and mercy, generating a self-loathing that he projected outward in order to justify/save himself from his own loathing. Maybe he had to ridicule the standard in order not to feel the shame of failing it. He had to paint Muishkin as a 'failure' so that he could feel better about himself...

Or maybe that's too psychological a reading of the text...

Or maybe it's right but wrong in the sense that Dostoyevsky is clearly wanting to demonstrate the truth echoed in the Bible that God has chosen the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong. The Prince is an 'idiot', but he is the only person of wholly good character in the novel, and Dostoyevsky assumes that he will therefore be admired.

And, I've got to admit, it's pretty 21st Century of me to insist that my moral heroes also come in attractive and strong wrapping... We want our success to be as visible and measurable as possible, even if it's our moral success we want measured!

And so I love and dislike the frailty of Muishkin as a mimic of Jesus. The weakness and foolishness is true, but the naivety and mawkishness is not...

But how to explain that well...?!!